My Bankroll Plan

      I got a little change in my pocket goin' jing a ling a ling...  Georgia Satellites

 When I started reading books about poker, one of the first things I learned was the importance of having a dedicated poker bankroll. This means that winnings don't get spent: they go into the bankroll and that money is only ever used for poker play and nothing else. Not only does this help you to keep control of what you spend on poker, but it forces you to keep records of your wins and losses. It is because of these records that I know that I started keeping a poker bankroll in October of 2008.
   Unfortunately, I didn't adopt the second part of the equation, bankroll management, until much later. For a year and a half I continued to enter games that required me to buy in with a big chunk of my existing stake. The result was that, with the natural ups and downs of poker, my bankroll would go up for a while, then get busted down to zero again. To be fair, there weren't that many games available to me that offered a reasonably low buy-in. But in March 2010 a local pub started playing Texas Holdem Cash Tournaments for a $10 buy-in. From then on I adopted a bankroll management plan.
   Most poker experts suggest that you shouldn't buy in for more than 5% of your stake, and some go as low as 2%. I couldn't afford to do that so I adopted a complex sliding scale to govern my buy-in level, starting at 20% and reducing down to 2% as the size of my bankroll increased. This was less than ideal but was the best I could do as long as I was only playing in live games.
   I started playing online in February 2011. At this stage I could have reduced my maximum buy-in because there are so many low-cost games available online. However, I kept operating with a maximum buy-in level of around 20% until May of that year. That's when I stumbled upon an article by poker pro Chris Ferguson that reminded me of the importance of bankroll management. Ferguson's article outlined three simple rules that made a lot of sense to me. I adopted them immediately and have been following them ever since. Here they are:

      1. Never buy in to a ring game (cash game) or a sitngo for more than 5% of your bankroll.
      2. Never buy in to a multi-table tournament for more than 2% of your bankroll.
      3. In ring games, if your chip stack has reached 10% of your total bankroll, leave the game.

   I have added some minor modifications of my own to these rules. Firstly, I will buy in to a single table Satellite Tournament for up to 2%, and a multi table Satellite Tournament for up to 1%. I don't actually play in satellites because I think the odds against cashing are too high, but I added this just in case I change my mind one day. Secondly, I apply these rules to a single poker session, rather than a single game. So if my maximum buy-in was $50 and I wanted to play in a single Sitngo, I could buy in for up to $50. But if I intended to play in up to four Sitngos, then I'd buy in for up to $12.50.
   So that's my bankroll plan. The beauty of this sort of scheme is that if you have a losing streak, your maximum buy-in reduces along with the stake size. This means that it's very difficult to actually run out of money. You just keep dropping down to lower levels. You'd have to be a consistently bad player to actually go broke. That's good news.

   Read more at http://www.chrisferguson.com/article-4