- How many buy-ins are considered the minimum to play a game safely?
As WinnersCircle say, this depends on a lot of different factors. One of them is, if your plan is to play the same game all the time, and the bankroll needs to ensure, you dont go "broke" and have to stop playing. That could be the situation, where you play live cash games in your local casino, and the cheapest game is $1/$3. Then you need to have enough bankroll to ensure, you can play though a streak of bad luck in this particular game.
In
online poker however it usually makes more sense to think about bankroll management as guidelines for, when you are allowed to move up, and when you have to move down. Or alternatively find some more money from outside poker and add it to your bankroll. And in this situation you can get away with more aggressive bankroll management. For this latter situation my personal guideline numbers are:
* Cash games 30 BIs
* STTs 50 BIs
* MTTs 100 BIs
There is no deep science behind those numbers other than the fact, variance is highest in MTTs and lowest in cash games. If you want to use different numbers, thats fine. The most important is to set up some rules for yourself and then follow then. Example: You have a $932 bankroll and play a mixture of $5 - $15 STTs. If you drop below $750, you stop playing $15 games and only play $5-10 games. If you have a winning session and increase your bankroll to $1045, you can start to add a few $20 games the next session, and maybe you stop with $5 games for now.
- Do the limits change when they are in a bad tide or are they going strong?
Kind of relates to the above. But its definitely also a good idea to be more conservative, if you are going through a period of bad luck. It helps confidence and protects, whats left of your bankroll. So in this example, maybe you focus mainly on $5 SnGs, if you have $600 left, and its still not going well.
- Do they divide the bankroll between different formats (cash, MTT, sit and go)?
Short answer is no. In this example, where you are a STT player but want to play some MTTs during the weekend, it makes no sense to have a separate bankroll for that. If you have $932, you just use the MTT guidelines and play no higher than $8.8 or $7.5 games, depending on what the site offers. However if you want to move to a completely different game like cash games, the main concern is not bankroll but to find out, if you can actually win in this new game.
So even if your $932 bankroll is theoretically big enough to play 25NL, you probably want to start at a lower limit like 10NL and play the first 50.000
hands there just to see, how it goes, and if you are actually winning. This is perhaps the most important aspect of bankroll management, which is strangely almost always ignored: You cant have a bankroll, if you are not a winning player, so you need to build a track record to prove that to yourself. Otherwise you need to think in terms of a poker budget not a bankroll.
