How many Buyins is your HU SNG bankroll?

[prodonkey]

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jesus do you understand aggressive bankrolling? i saw a long mathematical post explaining why if you have a half decent winrate and are prepared to move down, a 7.5 buy in bankroll is optimal. the ignorance and misplaced condescention of that post just tilted me a little. hell i think the bankroll post is stickyed. not all of us are nits terrified of busto/ lower limits.

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An optimal bankroll amount can be answered mathematically using the Kelly criterion . This says that if your win-rate is p and your odds on the wager is v-to-1 , then we should risk :

f=[p*(v+1) - p]/v where v in this case is 1/1.05 or about 0.95

So this tells us that there is no fixed optimal number since we're dealing with a variable win rate . However , your optimal bankroll can be determined if we know your long term win rate and the odds received on the wager . For instance , if p =58% and v~ 0.95 , then we should be willing to risk

f=[0.58*(1.95) -1 ]/0.95
f= 13.7% or about 13% of our bankroll on the wager . Many players use half-Kelly or about 13.7%/2 = 6.8% to avoid fluctuations in their bankroll while at the same time maintaining a strong growth rate .

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I think your risk of ruin using that is HUGE. My win rate is 59%, so 1/2 kelly would give me 8%.. I should be playing sngs for 8% of my roll?? So give me a hypothetical 3k roll.. I should be playing 200's heads up, that's like 15 buy ins.

[jay_shark]

If you're willing to move down in stakes ; if you have a bad run or you're not playing your A game , then your risk of busting using this approach is very low .

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_criterion

If you're using 15 buy-ins with a 59% win-rate , your risk of going broke without changing stakes is [0.41/0.59]^15 ~ 0.004255 which is less than 1 percent . Since we play with a rake , this number should be a bit higher than that but probably close to 1 % .

[TNixon]

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Anyone who plays with 10bi at any level is an idiot.

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Anybody who makes this claim blindly without at least attempting to understand the issues at hand has no business at all calling anybody else an idiot.

Poker is about making +EV decisions. Waiting until you have 20 or 30 buyins can be a *massively* -EV decision. Why would you choose to pass up on so much potential value at a point when your bankroll is almost certainly easily replaceable?

[daveT]

The 10BI for the less math inclined.

At 200, lose 3 BIs, drop, lose 3 BIs, drop, then 14 BIs = 20 BIs total.

300= 23 BI roll

etc.

[chesterboy]

I'm just curious, are any of you guys that use these 10 bi methods sticking around in bigger games, or are you just perpetually near busto every few days?

I'm a cash player mainly, so I already have a nice bankroll for $100 HUSNG, and could never imagine risking my bankroll in this way.

Maybe you guys should consider having a portion of your bankroll that you protect and grow, and then use anything over that for this aggressive moving up. IE keep 1k for $30's and get aggressive above that. If at somepoint you manage to get up to 5k, just play the 50's and get crazy when you get up to 6k. But if you should drop to 5k just go back to 50's.

The benefit of this is not only will you grow a chunk of money and keep it, you will also raise your overall hourly rate by raising the lowest limit that you play.

From a cash player perspective, a 100 buyin bankroll sounds nice. I like only risking 1% of my roll on a game.

[jay_shark]

100 buy-ins is often recommended for mtt's not heads up sng's .

For many players , 20 buy-ins is more than enough if you beat the game convincingly . However , as you move up in limits , your edge will decrease and the number of buy-ins will have to increase as well .

So for the $100 buy-in player with a 55% win-rate , he may need something like x>=ln0.01/[ln0.45-ln0.55] ; x>=22.94 buy-ins (excluding the rake) . If we include the rake , he may require something like 25-30 buy-ins .

Again , if you're willing to move up or down in limits , then 25 buy-ins may suffice for a player with a 55% win-rate and a risk of ruin of 1 % .

[TNixon]

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I'm just curious, are any of you guys that use these 10 bi methods sticking around in bigger games, or are you just perpetually near busto every few days?

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After the dozens, if not hundreds, of posts that have been made on this topic, it honestly surprises me that so many people still just automatically assume playing 10 buyins just automatically means a very high risk of ruin.

If I have $300 with a 10/7 BI rule (step up at 10, back down at 7), I don't go busto if I have a 10BI downswing. Moving up and down at the appropriate times means I would basically have to have a 25 BI downswing to go bust (and that's only because I would rather redeposit than play $2s. If I play through $2s, that adds another 10BI pad). Dropping 25 is certainly possible, but the risk is pretty small, and the potential upside is huge. Also, waiting for 20 or 30 buyins really doesn't buy you that much more safety. Simulator runs show that over 1k games, you can be trading as much as doubling your final bankroll on average, for less than 1% added to your survival rate (that's already pretty high anyway, due to the extra stepdown padding). So instead of going bust 1.5 times in 100, you go bust .7 times in 100, but with a *much* lower average ending point.

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From a cash player perspective, a 100 buyin bankroll sounds nice.

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This is pretty nitty by most people's standards (including quite a few people who pay their bills through poker), unless you don't think your skill level is high enough to be a winner at the next level.

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I like only risking 1% of my roll on a game.

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But this trumps anybody else's view of nittiness.

I can tell you with 100% assuredness that by waiting for 20 or 30 buyins to advance through a HUSNG level, you are passing up a TON of potential value if you're going to be a winner at that level, and a smaller amount of value if you still need an adjustment/learning period.

I can also tell you that playing 10 buyins has you moving up and down in levels on a fairly regular basis, and that it's nowhere near being "perpetually near busto every few days".

But only you can decide where your comfort level is, and that factor will outweigh any amount of statistics.

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But if you should drop to 5k just go back to 50's.

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When I hit 5k, the only reason I can imagine continuing to play $50s is if it's too tough to find opponents on a regular basis at anything higher. So far, I haven't had too much trouble with my shots at $100s filling up, so I don't imagine that will be an issue.

[chesterboy]

Yeah I understand that moving down makes it highly unlikely you will go broke. But it also makes it extremely likely you will be spending a fair amount of your time playing really low limits. All I was suggesting is combining that with a more conservative long term bankroll building plan, that would allow you to play higher stakes on average long term.

[TNixon]

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Yeah I understand that moving down makes it highly unlikely you will go broke. But it also makes it extremely likely you will be spending a fair amount of your time playing really low limits.

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That statement simply does not follow. You're *more* likely (if you're a winning player) to spend more time playing *higher* limits than you would with a more conservative bankroll plan.

That's the exact reason that you lose so much value playing conservatively. Even if I do drop a number of buyins, at some point, the level that I "drop" to by playing aggressively and losing a few, is the level that you started with and stuck at.

[daveT]

It's one of those things, that if you explain it to someone fifteen times and they still don't understand, then they aren't going to understand if you explain it fifteen more times.

This thread seems a little off for some reason.....