Harrington's Bankroll Management

I dont know if I am missing something here, I will have to reread it tonight but does Harrington suggest that in order to move up you must have 50% BB than you had at the preious point?

For instance if you buy in for 200 you can play 10NL. In order to move up you need 30BB at 25NL for 750. This sounds fine and reasonable but this almost makes it impossible to move up for people who start at low stakes.

For instance if instead of buying in for 200 you deposited 100 and played 5NL. To get to 10NL you need 300 and to play 25NL you need 1125?

My question is it seems a little odd to me that it is so much depending on what you started with. These numbers just keep getting further and further obviously and I was wondering if anyone else had a different interpretation or if I am kind of missing the point. I understand you should have more BB to move up due to increased skill level but to keep increasing this seems a bit much to me.

Id say 25 buy-ins is fine for any level you want to play, however if u hit a downswing right away u have to be able to move down if you are down to ~17-18 buy-ins. If you do not think you can move down ever then you should probably start with more buy-ins.

I think it was 50% more buy-ins than you had for the previous level, not BB (big blinds).

But yes, if you start with $100 and play $5NL (standard 20 buy-ins), then to go the next level $10NL you should have 30 buy-ins for that new level, or $300.


That's how I remember it. Pretty conservative, especially as it gets quite exponential if you continue doing so up the ranks but I think his reasoning is that variance is going to bite you and you need some buffer in the early stages while you adjust to the new level.

Right thats what I meant, this just seems so conservative and dependant on where you started. To gradually move up 5 levels you need over 100 buy ins at that level? That seems absurd especially if you consider that if you buy in at a high level to begin with you need less? I would think someone who has worked their BR up would probably be better off moving up that the person who just deposited more.

What's wrong with having 100 buy-ins? Seems about right to me...

At smaller levels I dont think that it is as important (if you only have 5 bucks and want to enter a 1 dollar sit and go, go for it), but in mid stakes 25-50 seems right. When you get into really high stakes, I would say between 50-100, because (1) the level of play is higher and (2) you stand to lose alot more faster...

I was just wondering if I was misintrepreting it wrong. It seems the escalation is huge. Lets say you are tearing through every level, by this strategy if you start at the 5NL games you need to get a BR of over $700,000 to play 10/20 but if you started with 20K at 5/10 you only need 60K to move up to 10/20. I realize this is an extreme case but was wondering if anyone knew if this is what he meant?