Changes--Bankroll Management

I said in my previous post that I was making fixes or changes in a lot of areas.  One of those areas is bankroll management.  That change is part of the reason that I'm winning, but it's also the reason that I'm increasing my bankrolls very slowly.

I concentrated on live tournaments last year and that didn't go well.  I was playing without a bankroll, taking $50 from the family budget once or twice a month.  I seldom cashed, none were big cashes and I never had a bankroll of more than 5 buy-ins.  We all know how that story ends. A small bankroll equals little chance of success, and I lost money playing live in 2016.

Everything changed when we moved out of the hood.  We said goodbye to neighborhood gangs, constant noise and the bullet hole in our house.  We moved to a much quieter neighborhood.  Instead of playing on the kitchen table, I had my own office in a room where I could shut the door.

Having a quiet place to play and study makes a huge difference.  When you have ADD, limiting distractions is an absolute must.  I can do that now.  Given what a disaster live poker without a bankroll was and given that I now had an office, it made sense to concentrate on live poker.  I have done exactly that in 2017.  I have not played one live tournament this year and I'm not sure if I will. My mission in 2017 is to have decent bankrolls on multiple poker sites.

I started 2017 with $35 that had been sitting on Juicy Stakes Poker for two years.  I played $1.10 tournaments, the cheapest that I could find.  Even so, I only had 31 buy-ins, so I had to be really careful and stick with the $1.10 MTTs.  I made it work, slowly but surely grinding up my bankroll up to $175.  I need to keep grinding it up so that I have the 100 buy-ins necessary to play at $2.20 and beyond.  I have also been playing on Americas Cardroom, where I was also going to grind up a small bankroll, but that didn't go so well.  I lost it all.  Statistical variance happens.

I made the minimum deposit to keep playing on ACR, but just as with Juicy Stakes, I'm starting over with a very small ($25) bankroll.  There was a tournament running every night that was less than a dollar so, as ridiculous as it might seem, I started playing 11 cent tournaments on Americas Cardroom.  I played live poker with a very small bankroll and went down in flames.  If I have to grind up this one with a bunch of 20 or 40 cent cashes, that's what I'm going to do.   There is no room to maneuver without a bankroll of at least 100 buy-ins.

The bottom line is that I made a huge bankroll management mistake with live poker, and I'll never do that again.  I'm making very little money, but I am making money, with 4 winning months out of 5 and more than tripling what I started with on Juicy Stakes Poker.

There will be a lot more in future posts about all the changes that I'm making to put myself in a much better position in 2018.

As always, your questions and comments are welcome.