Poker Bankroll Building – is it worth the effort?
There’s a ton of online literature on poker bankroll building that will guide you on how to build a poker bankroll from scratch, increase your bankroll to allow you to play at higher limits and teach you how to avoid spewing your roll in a spell of monkey tilt. I could have gone down the same road in this article but instead I wanted to explore if the discipline of poker bankroll building is worth the effort.
Before I get started I thought I would give a short introduction to the blog I run. The Poker Bankroll Blog is an online poker article database with articles on every aspect of poker. I’ve written many of the articles myself, but also get contributions from guest authors who want to share their view on poker. My blog has been online for a couple of years now which has resulted in roughly 400 poker articles. I hope to hit 1000 when I reach my 5 year anniversary.
Enough about my blog, let’s return to poker bankroll building. In my opinion there are basically two primary upsides to dedicating your time and effort to building a poker bankroll. One is the satisfaction and sense of achievement of building something from scratch. Secondly, once you have proven to yourself that you have the discipline to maintain your bankroll and the capabilities to become a winning player at specific levels there a never ending series of challenges to be found in moving up in levels.
Usually when there’s an upside, there’s also a downside and in my opinion the biggest downside to any poker bankroll building project is the grind. In order to maximize your chance of success you need to grind it out at levels which are within proper bankroll management. In his famous 0-10000 dollar challenge, Chris Ferguson took 7 months to reach a bankroll of 6.5 dollars. There’s the slim chance you’ll build a bankroll with lightning speed like November 9 finalist John Racener. His mom gave him an initial deposit of 50 dollars which he turned into 30000 dollars in 6 months. He then decided to give the Poker Stars Sunday Million a try and won it in his first attempt. Now he finds himself on the final table of the World’s largest poker tournament with the chance of winning 9 million dollars. You might as well brace yourself for the long haul at the tables whether your building a double or nothing bankroll, a No limit cash game bankroll or a tournament bankroll.
In my eyes grinding is about as exiting as counting ants on an ant hill and the sheer boredom of playing the same tables for hours on end clearly outweighs the upsides. If you ask me poker bankroll building is definitely not worth the effort. Instead I deposit a few dollars once in a while on Poker Stars or Full Tilt and take a stab at some large MTTs. Once in a while I get lucky and have some decent deep runs. If you have the motivation and discipline to get started I wish you the best of luck and have a final piece of advice for you. Do yourself the favor of learning the basics of poker mathematics as soon as possible. Some time ago I wrote an article series about poker odds, poker probabilities and EV poker which you might want to check out.
Good luck at the tables
Mark
This entry was posted on Monday, August 16th, 2010 at 3:43 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
