The 2+2 Forum Archives: Mark Blade recommends 8 buyins for the professional NL player?

Hi SamG,

Thanks for purchasing my book. Let me clarify a couple of things so you can better understand what I meant by the advice that you quote.

First, I agree with you that $8,000 as a bankroll for $5/$10 NL is inadequate if that was the entirety of the advice given. One crucial aspect to this bankroll advice if you read it carefully and in context of the entire chapter is the drop-down component to it. In this same paragraph from the book, I also mention that you must drop down when losing, just like I recommend for the limit player. So after losing roughly $2500 to $4000, you would no longer be playing at this high of a limit. And after losing another thousand or two after that, you would be dropping down again, etc. So this $8,000 is in no way meant to last a $5/$10 player all the way through a bad luck streak at that limit. Secondly, as you notice in the book, I make great emphasis about you needing to be a top expert to play this high. I should have clarified this better and defined this to say someone who has a tremendous disparity advantage over their opponents. The beauty of no-limit (at least as it’s generally played today) is that the comparative expert can sort of crush the typical game. Because of this, I intentionally wanted the expert NL player to play a sort of bankroll high-wire act and be regularly dropping down in limits when bad streaks hit. This would allow him to more often push the bankroll envelope on the high end to maximize profits while landing onto a subsequent series of safety nets while dropping down if need be. The reason for this more aggressive NL approach vs. my more conservative limit approach is that the expert NL player can more quickly work his way back up the stakes ladder after being forced to drop down.

So that all being said, let me tell you that I see a lot of room for misinterpretation and misunderstanding from someone who doesn’t have the benefit of reading the type of clarification that I just pointed out above. I assumed that everything in this very lengthy bankroll chapter would all be properly digested and incorporated into the reader’s understanding at that point. This may have been an unrealistic assumption to make for the majority of even savvy readers. Because of this fact, I did revise this for the next printing as you have suggested. In fact, this is the only matter of substance that was revised. (All other revisions were minor stylistic ones generally to reduce what some have considered to be some over-the-top bravado in my prose.) Also, even the first printing of my book directs people to my website for “book updates” and my revised more conservative approach to NL bankrolls has been on there for about a year now for anyone to read. It even appeared there before the first printing even came to market. The second printing, which is generally in the retail pipeline right now, contains this more conservative approach just so that people don’t mistakenly come to the wrong conclusion, which you unfortunately came to. Again, I admit that if I had been much more explicit in the first printing as I am in the second, you would have never felt led astray.

By the way, I agree with Mason’s post entirely and it is this difficulty in quantifying an ideal NL bankroll that makes it a very difficult subject matter to tackle as a generalized recommendation without going into an endless line of clarifications that would put most readers to sleep.

I hope you enjoy the rest of the book.

Best regards,
Mark Blade

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