bankroll management question for home games

[grebe]

Hello all,

This is a couple questions/discussion for those that are currently playing mainly home games with a bankroll:

background: I have been playing serious now for about two years, and I keep a bankroll for the usual games I play that will start around $100 and work up to around $600-$700 before I would spend it. This has been fine, as the games were $20-$40 buyin stuff and who cares if you lost three buyins there? Well now, I am playing in a bigger game that is $100 buyins and there is continuously $3000 on the table at the end of the night. I play once a week and my roll right now is $1100.

-If there is the chance of me losing 300 in a night, and I play once a week, how big should my roll be for this game? BTW, this game plays very soft but much bigger than I am used to. I consider myself one of the better players there, but I am playing too tight and leaving money on the table (still winning though).

-once you hit your "X" number for your roll, what do you do with the rest? Keep building the roll, or enjoy your extra income?

-anything else I missed concerning home game bankrolls? BTW, I have no interest in hitting the "pro" rounders circuit or anything, just want to get better in the game, and make sure I can always play cards for free!

[DakotaKid]

There are several schools of thought for bankroll management.

First off, do you even need a bankroll? If you have other sources of income where blowing several hundred dollars won't keep you out of next week's game you pretty much just need enough to get you through a bad night.

If you want to never go bust based on your bankroll, there are some pretty basic statistical calculations you can use to approximate your required bankroll to some confidence (just do a google search). The trick here is that you will never be sure that you won't go broke, and all these calculations assume you never withdraw money from your bankroll. The other trick to this is that you need a pretty accurate guess to your win rate and your standard deviation. These numbers generally take a very long time to converge, especially in live games.

That said, the typical suggestions I've seen for no limit play is 20-30 buy-ins, and 300 big bets for limit games. More or less if you play a particularly high or low variance game.

[pfapfap]

Yeah, since I'm not playing at levels above my accepted loss from other income, I don't worry about managing a bankroll. I do, however, keep track of sessions, so I know how big my theoretical bankroll is.

[Rottersod]

I'd say that for a home game a BR of $1100 for a $100 buy in is sufficient as long as you only plan on maxing at 3 buyins per game. You''ll quickly find out if you have the chops for the game. The reason why I say that is that I can't imagine playing a home game regularly for less than $100 buy in. $100 seems to be the "magic" number for many home games and there should be a lot of money to be made if you are halfway decent player. If you are then use the winnings to build up a real BR - I'd recommend $5000 - and once you reach that you can take the rest and spend it so long as you don't plan on moving up in stakes. I like the $5000 BR for a $100 game because you won't be limited to 3 buyins anymore and can play aggressive poker knowing that you have a roll to fall back on.

As for your second question, I play poker to supplement my income and as it accumulates I spend it. My gf and I are able to enjoy the winnings and I have no interest in moving on to the highest games. I have a BR and anything above that is put into our joint account. We've done this for years and it has worked well. It took me a few years to build my bankroll up though and there were many times that I was spending the winnings and not adding to the BR. Maybe I had an epiphany or maybe not but a few years ago something clicked ahd I started taking my BR management much more seriously.

[grebe]

great food for thought, thanks for taking the time to post up.