[tyler_cracker]

aaron,

very nice, well-written post. this covers a gap in the Micros literature and we are proud to have it.

three major factors in my upbringing have given me at least a little competence in life money management: college education, middle-class family life, cheap/tight/hard-working father. i am always shocked to encounter people who don't understand very simple things about money:

- if you buy that TV, you will not be able to afford rent next month.

- buying that car means taking a loan with worse interest than your credit card.

- lending a bunch of money you cannot afford to a person just as broke as you is not smart.

there are *a lot* of people who struggle with these concepts. poker seems to draw out many of them. OOT (if you'll pardon the example) is filled with threads about problems that could have been solved by appreciating the truthiness of sentences like the ones above.


anyway, to respond to the specific questions at the end of your post:

my attitude towards poker and my bankroll has been a lot like what you described. i have no extra professional income to speak of, so my bankroll exists to support my ability to play poker.

my poker career began with a 2/4 game at Binion's during a vacation in 2004. i invested a few hundred in pocket money (this was when i still had a Real job) in the 3/6 games at Bay101 and Lucky Chances. a few months later i quit my job and moved to South Lake Tahoe to ski at Kirkwood, read WLLH and SSH, and play 3/6 at Harvey's. i moved to vegas in may 2005.

my bankroll has taken me through 4/8 to 6/12, down to 2/4, up to 8/16, and back to 4/8. it has bought me countless dinners, several plane tickets, a few boat dives, and tires for my car.

there were a couple months when i first moved to vegas where i was relying on my bankroll for rent and bills and food. i thought of myself as "playing professionally" and i was shocked at how much it made me hate poker. losing sessions were painfully frustrating, and winning sessions felt like merely making up ground. i was glad when this period ended.

the closest i have been to busto was 150bb for 2/4, the smallest live game available. i was pretty sure that i was crushing live 2/4 (lol), so after going through various emotional stages (frustration, anger, numbness, resignation), i just hoped that it would turn around. eventually it did.

interesting that all my answers have to do with emotional and psychological aspects of bankroll. macguyv's post above me also does this. try as we might, poker players are human and humans are results-oriented. while we always train to divorce ourselves from the results of any given hand, that our value raises will work "in the long run", the bankroll *is* the long run. it's hard to watch your bankroll shrink and think, "i am making good decisions. i am a winning poker player." all of us take pride in our bankroll as proof that we have accomplished something.

i waited overnight to post this in hopes that i would come up with a good conclusion in the morning, but, uh...