Starting out with $100 - advice needed

[You're No Daisy]

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If you know how to play, split pot games like O8 and Stud8 offer high win rates relative to their variance, particularly when you play SNGs. Yes, suckouts happen, but very often it is just for half of the pot, and you can make a killing when you are the only one going for low when you are playing several people who think (J8)J or QQ85 are good hands, and who draw to lows that aren't close to the nuts.

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Let's say you're playing limit O/8 and you have a wrap around draw while holding AA23 on this board:

Flop: 4 5 K
Turn: 3
River: 4

...and someone calls your raises on all streets but a moron stays in with two pair and fills up on the river. You split the pot and either lose to the rake or make minimal profit. This occurs especially in Omaha 8/b which is a game of the nuts. Certainly there is the occassional scoop, but if you're here to tell me that split pot games are more profitable than NLHE, I can't buy into that line of thinking. Show me someone's PT Omaha stats that are over 2BB/100 over a sample size of 20,000 - 30,000 hands (besides Jethro [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img]). I think they'll be few and far between. Even in Stud/8 it's difficult to get to 4BB/100 at the micro limits, though I managed to do it over about 12,000 hands.

But then again...you never said split pot games were more profitable. You said you can make a killing against the donks that think cards like QQ85 or similar holdings give them the opportunity to play more hands. I'm not hating on SNGs. I play them occassionally and enjoy them. I just like cash games better and think they're more profitable. I have been successful in O/8 (pot limit) and Stud/8 SNGs, so I'll give you that. However, I think the split pot cash games at the micro-limits are a waste of time.

AC

[pzhon]

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Do you have a handy chart that shows all the calculations based on "accepted" numbers for ROI, SD, etc?


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There are a few worked examples in this post. However, you should not assume that those are your win rates. It's ok (but not ideal) to assume that those are your standard deviations.

A lot of threads in the BBV forum are about some huge breakeven or losing stretch someone had that should be quite rare if the player is a solid winner. Much of the time, the person has not first established that he is a solid winning player at that level, and he may not be beating that level at all. (E.g., the player says he was beating NL $25 on Party, then moved to NL $50, on PokerStars, then dropped down to NL $25, still on PokerStars.) It would be extremely unlucky for an expert like Jennifer Harman to have a losing year in LHE. It's not a surprise if a random player does.

Sadly, many people have been fooled by an upswing into thinking that they could turn pro, and played in games they couldn't beat, much less beat for enough to make a decent living. That doesn't end well.

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I am guessing that if SnG's offer a typical ROI and SD we should see a typical BR requirment. Or is that where the 100 buy-ins come from?


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I'm afraid that gives a bit too much credit to the group. The SD for 9 or 10 player SNGs is about 1.7 buy-ins, but the ROIs vary widely. As with many other groups, the bankroll requirements recommended by SNG players do not depend on the win rates, but they should. If your ROI is 30%, you only need 1/6 of the number of buy-ins as someone with a ROI of 5%. 30% is greater that the STT FAQ says is achievable in $6 turbos, but it is achievable when playing a few low stakes non-turbos at a time.

When an expert who has a 5% ROI while playing 16 high stakes SNGs at a time tells you his downswings, it doesn't mean you will see anything similar if you have a 20% ROI playing low stakes SNGs. He may play better and he may be making more money per hour on average, but you will tend to have smaller downswings (in buy-ins) than the expert by a factor of 4.

So, if the consensus is 100 buy-ins, that will be overly conservative for some people, and overly aggressive for others. Even for the same person, it is likely that it will be overly conservative in low stakes games, and overly aggressive in high stakes games.

Another source of bad bankroll advice is Chris Ferguson. He might be a great player, but he should have known better than to say you can play with 20 SNG buy-ins or 20 NL cash game buy-ins. The latter is much more conservative than the former, unless your SNG win rates are ridiculously high, or cash game win rates are quite low. A lot of low stakes players will want to have something like 15 buy-ins for NL and 50 for SNGs. However, because he is a poker celebrity, people will repeat his advice for years and cite his 1.5 year journey from $0 to $10k, while others have quietly gone from $50 to $10k in a few months while using better bankroll management.

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If I am a beginner or someone who has been playing for a few years without tracking my results I won't know my ROI or SD, correct? I would need hundreds of thousands of hands logged in PT to know for sure.

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If you are a beginner, you shouldn't assume you are a winner. It's better to assume that you are a losing player, and set a budget until you have some experience.

You never know your exact stats. You always have to make some estimates, and you should update your estimates periodically. Over time, your estimates will gradually get more accurate, but game conditions can deteriorate, or you can learn to play better.

Your standard deviation is less sensitive to your playing style than your win rate is, and you can get accurate estimates much more rapidly, after only a few thousand representative hands (say with representative stack sizes and table conditions).

Formulas like bankroll = comfort * (standard deviation^2)/ (win rate) are still useful in several ways, even without perfectly accurate estimates. For example, you might determine that you would need an extremely high win rate to be comfortable playing game X on your current bankroll, and if the required win rate is higher than what the experts say is achievable, you probably do not want to take a shot at that game.

It's natural to assume that your win rate will decrease as you move up to tougher games. Even if you don't know your win rate in the higher stakes game, you might be able to say that it's not right to move up even if your win rate does not drop. This actually happens often when marginal winners take a long time to accumulate 20 buy-ins for the next level or whatever they have heard is appropriate. Because their win rate is low, they need more buy-ins to move up even if their win rate does not drop.

You can use the risk of ruin formula ROR ~ e^(-2*comfort) ~ 1/7^comfort on pieces of your bankroll to measure the improbability of downswings based on assumptions of various win rates. Maybe you are so conservative that you want 25 buy-ins even in a soft game you think you can beat for a good rate. However, that doesn't mean you can safely ignore a 5 buy-in downswing, if that downswing will only happen 1/10 of the time if you are winning at the rate you hope, but will almost always happen if you are a losing player. Such a downswing is evidence that you have some leaks in your game.


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However, how do I handle wanting to take the occasional shot at a bigger game? Say the wife and kids are away for a weekend and I want stay up all night and play in a 2000 player, $10 MTT just for fun and maybe if I run well, a nice cash.

Do I need to replace/deposit that $10 directly and leave my roll alone? Guess I am asking, is it OK to "gamble" with some of my roll on the very rare occasion? And if so, how often and how much?

Hate to think that my roll is only for one type of game at one type of limit.

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You can use the same bankroll for all games where you have an advantage, and on all sites. You do not need to have a separate bankroll for each game, and you do not need to worry nearly as much about losing $50 on one site if you have $500 elsewhere. Bankroll management is based on the assumption that losing everything is a disaster, not an inconvenience. Shifting money between sites is only an inconvenience, and between games it's not even inconvenient.

When you take a shot at a game you are not sure you can beat, or for which you are not safely bankrolled, you should view this as a withdrawal from your bankroll. If you are slightly underbankrolled, it is only a partial withdrawal, but it takes some work to determine the equivalent withdrawal. It's safe to view it as an expense.

If you make regular withdrawals from your bankroll, you should view this as decreasing your win rate. If you withdraw all winnings (not recommended), you should require a much higher comfort level than if you leave most of your winnings in your bankroll. A solid NL $100 player might be quite safe starting with $1500, but not if he withdraws all winnings. A schedule such as withdrawing half of all winnings over $2000 will mean that the player will not be wiped out by the first 15 buy-in downswing, and will probably have hundreds of buy-ins by the time the first 20 or 25 buy-in downswing occurs.

[microcrusher]

Sorry to say, but you are way off base with your statements.

People don't just raise 20BB preflop and everyone calls and gets all in every hand. You must have no experience at these levels. I have thousands of hands at Stars and UB at these levels, and the play is bad, and there are some crazies that just shove, but that's great. Wait for a hand that's better than their range and call. Make sure you have 20 buyins, although I'd recommend more, and you can take some beats. When people say 'it's not poker' then what is it? You make decisions based on the players and the cards, how is that any different. Just because it's not how you want to play, don't say it's not poker. I built a free $10 deposit on UB to $450, 4 tabling 2NL until I got to about $100, then buying in short at 10NL (they have no 5NL). I ran around 9PTBB/100 for several thousand hands at 2NL. I had some bonus dollars, so that helped, but the bottom line is that 2NL is beatable, even with the rake. I'm working my way through 10NL, and I'll be jumping up shortly to 25NL.

On Stars, I followed some (bad advice similar to yours) and got my money down to $3. I've since turned that into about $120 playing their .01/.02, where the buying can go as high as $5. I would STRONGLY recommend that you start there more than anywhere. Deep stacks, bad players, plenty of opportunities to win, and the rake is better than a lot of other rooms (FT and UB). I'm running at 16PTBB/100 at that level. I moved up, took some beats, and dropped back down, but I have the stats to prove that it's beatable and safe.

Contrary to popular belief, there are some decent TAGS at the smallest of stakes, they just may not have the means to deposit 500 to start out at 25NL and instead got 10 bucks from a friend and are working their way up.

I took the advice up a buddy at played $ 5 SNGs with my original $100 deposit. It was gone in no time. One bad run and you are done with only 18 buyins playing SNGs (don't forget that .50 rake).

Playing HU with 2 buyins? That's irresponsible, and MTT's have too much variance to put 5 dollars into each of 20 MTTs.

Why would you give such poor advice?

Also, anyone that recommends split pot games or limit is crazy. You can get solid 5PTBB/100 winrates at the micros playing 6max in a 20/15 TAG style. Why play a game where only a few rare people can manage a winrate of >2 PTBB/100? If you did a poll of people's PT DB's, I'm sure there are way more people with winrates at NLHE > 5 than with split pot winrates >2.

Sorry - I didn't quote the original post I was referring to - the one from I Love Poker...

[You're No Daisy]

I agree 100% with this post...I play with this guy on UB and his winrate is solid. I have played split pot games on AP, UB, and Stars and my winrate is nowhere near what it is play NLHE. As far as the advice given by I-Love-Poker...it's the worst advice I've ever seen.

AC

[You're No Daisy]

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OK here is my expierence starting with $100, which I have done multiple times, and have great sucess many ways.

#1, I suggest you DONT play 2nl or 5nl, it is not even poker with 20xBB raise is standard, and every1 is all in. You will not learn anything from it, and it will only worsen your game.

#2) Wanna take a chance? Here is my #1, way of playing. I go to 50nl HU, and just win like no other, b/c most fish are at low stakes HU. I win about $300 and I go 3 table 50NL, and just build up from there. But it is risky starting out.

#3) S&G's, I would start out with $5 6-max S&G's where many fish come to play. Easy wins, and you can make $100 in a day playing that.

#4) Do some MTT. If you do like $1 rebuys or something, and keep it to $4 or $5 max per game, you can make a killing with one Top 3 finish.

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Possibly the worst post ever!

If you've had to use your strategy multiple times, how is it successful. Using your strategy multiple times suggests you've gone busto multiple times doing it. Isn't the whole point of bankroll management not to go bust???

AC

[evagaba]

Just chiming in to agree with the others. Beginners, Amatuers or Pros: Do not follow I Love Pokers bankroll plan. It is horid advice.