[pzhon]

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I recommend replacing this FAQ entry with one which explains more of the rational bankroll considerations, and which uses a consensus estimate of a solid win rate at each level to determine the number of buy-ins needed for a solid winner to have a fixed risk of ruin.

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Having gone through the worst downswing of my life recently, I can say that the often quoted 20 buy-ins as an adequate bankroll is a load of [censored]. If you multi-table, you need at least AT LEAST 40. That assumes that you are a winning player and don't move down.

Just my opinion.

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Multitabling hardly affects your risk of ruin beyond the extent that it affects your win rate and standard deviation. You also don't need a larger bankroll to play on a site which deals hands faster, unless this affects your win rate/100 or standard deviation/100. You get the same downswings faster, not larger downswings.

Bankrolls are not supposed to protect you from the worst downswing you could ever encounter. They are supposed to give you a low risk of ruin. If your win rate is healthy, 20 buy-ins will give you an extremely low risk of ruin even if you can't move down. E.g., if your win rate is 16 big blinds/100, and standard deviation is 80 big blinds/100, then your risk of ruin is about 1% when you have 9.2 buy-ins, and 0.1% at 13.8 buy-ins.

If you are willing to move down, you can decrease your risk of ruin even further. If you have 10 buy-ins at your current level, but will drop down to half of the stakes when you drop to 5 buy-ins, then you need to lose about 15 buy-ins to bust out.

If 20 buy-in drops were common, then this would indicate that you need a larger bankroll, and the mathematics would reflect this. However, anecdotal evidence is close to worthless. There are a lot of people, which means that some people will have hit rare occurences. Further, experienced winning players may report large downswings in tougher games than the ones covered by that FAQ entry, and it is hard to tell the difference between the story of a solid winner, and the story of a break-even or losing player who blames variance for a lack of skills. Large (10+ buy-in) downswings are not common for solid winners in soft games. Solid winners in microstakes games don't need anything close to 20 buy-ins to have a microscopic risk of ruin.

The FAQ's suggestion that you should have $100 to play for pennies is particularly absurd and misleading. It's not the end of the world if the FAQ says 2+2=3. However, if you are going to have a serious FAQ, it should be close to correct, and this entry is not.