[Heisenb3rg]

This question is highly dependent on your limit, the game make up , your style and skill.

Back when I was playing 1/2 and 2/4 I considered a 50BB a large short term swing.
The game was composed of probabily 1/3 super passives 1/3 partially passive and a random TAG.
I folded my BB way more often and played much tighter post-flop.

With my style at 5/10 where an average game (with good selction is) a retarded LAG, a fairly passive player, a mediocore LAG, and 2 agressive TAG's
combined with my much looser style 50-100BB is a common (4-6 hours 3-4 tabling) day for me.

The more agressive your games and the less edge you have the more bankroll you need. People throw out numbers a lot, but a lot of these are pretty adhoc guesses based off random standard deviations that they think is accurate to their average game.. Within a few hundred BB they're pretty decent.

Probabily at a game like 5/10+ you'd want 800+ BB
At 1/2 and 2/4 with good game selection you'd want 500BB+.

How I try to figure out if I'm winning is I review a t&#$W*load of hands after my session and compare my play to my opponents, if I see them making a bajillion more mistakes than me, I assume im winning enough to beat the rake.

Basically, the variance is a bitch, and will never let you truly know your win-rate, so really the best way to know if you're winning is become very comfortable with poker theory, and analyze your play after sessions. Knowing the right decison after 3-5 minutes of thought is much easier than 5 after 5 seconds of thought.

But if you drop something like 1500BB at the small stakes, theres a 99.9% chance you got problems [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]