An Exercise in Bankroll Management

If I had to point to one leak in my game, and believe me there are many, it would be my bankroll management. Like most people, I have always played poker as a hobby. Well, I’ve been playing for 3 years now and I can’t confidently tell you that I am a winning player. While know that I have skill in certain aspects of the game I know that there is a flip side to that coin. I’ve never tracked the money lost or won in my poker adventures. I’ve kept a rough track this year and I can say that I am break even at best, but that’s just not good enough for me. With that I’ve started a little challenge for myself last week and it’s really helped me focus on this aspect my game.

Everyone has heard of Sit-N-Go challenges where you start with X amount of money and move up to the next buy-in level once you reach X $. Okay, so not a new concept there. The problem is I’ve started one and never stuck with it. Some of the down falls I faced would be moving to play cash ring games, big MTT, rebuys, Stud, and so on. I never stuck with one particular game or kept track of my wins or losses when moving to a different game. I never saw how well or bad for that matter how I was doing at this so called “challenge”.

I’ve been really inspired by other poker bloggers lately. One thing I lost site of was the reason I started this site and that was to not only help others but to really start to focus on my game and plug my leaks! I have been hovering around my initial $25 deposit on Poker Stars and have told myself that I was going to build this up. I read about Trip Jax’s SNG challenge and modified his spreadsheet to fit my needs. I’ve been playing about a week now and hit a disaster this Wednesday, but before we get to that let me outline the rules I set for myself.

SNG Challenge Goals:

• Record and maintain spreadsheet
• Track all tournament ROI, ITM, Finishes, and Bankroll
• Play nothing but Turbo SNG’s on Poker Stars
• Play a minimum 25 tournaments a week (work is kind of crazy right now)
• Play a max of two tournaments at a time and work on improving Multi-Tabling
• Have 20 buy-ins before moving up to the next level (adjust once higher levels are reached if needed)
• Reach Level 3 by the beginning of 2008

Here is my spreadsheet

A reason I think that these SNG challenges are so popular is because it teaches one of the very first things you need to learn when you play poker and that’s bankroll management. A lesson I’ve never bothered to learn.

The first 4 days of the challenge went very well and I built my $26 bankroll to $40 and then disaster struck. I played 30 Sit-N-Gos in a row and didn’t cash in 20 tournaments. I went on super tilt and was down to my last $2. I took 2 days off and have finished 1st, 2nd, and 3rd in my last 3 tournaments. I’m still down -$9 from my initial start point but I’m even more focus on the task at hand now. At first I blamed my downswing on getting hands cracked when I was a large/medium favorite. I reviewed my hand histories and saw that there was a lot more to it than that which I’ll cover later.

For the next couple of months a lot of my focus will be on Bankroll management. I’ve started to do a lot of research that I hope to share with you in the future.

Insert catchy sign off message here <—Still working on this one

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