Bankroll Management Tournament Poker

Getting The Best Profits From Online Tournaments?
Make Sure You Manage That Tournament Bankroll And Understand You ROI

Poker Bankroll Management (BRM) is one of the key pillars of being a successful poker player. It involves setting aside money you have designated for playing poker. Poker has a high degrees of variance. So, knowing and following proper BRM is imperative. Poker bankroll is the overall sum of money you are prepared to risk for playing poker. For example, if you earn $1,000 a month and you decide to put $200 each month for playing poker – That will be your poker bankroll. So, $200 is your poker bankroll, and the rest of $800 is safely stashed for your rent, daily expenses, savings, etc.

The large fields, and payout structures which are heavily weighted to the final table, make MTT play subject to big swings of fortune. A winning player with a healthy return on investment (ROI) could easily go for dozens of games without winning a significant cash prize.

For this reason good bankroll management is a critical success factor in Multi-Table Online Poker Tournament Strategy. This article will introduce some of the important factors in good MTT bankroll management.

The number of buy-ins required to profitably play poker pournaments is primarily affected my 2 factors. Firstly the ability to replenish your bankroll (for example a poker pro may rely on their bankroll while a recreational player who does not play poker for their primary income may be able to replace this more easily). Secondly the nature of your play and the amount of variance each style can expect will affect your bankroll requirements.

Poker Tournament Bankroll Management Factors - #1 - Pro or Recreational Player?

The consensus for online poker professionals who play MTTs is that you need a bankroll of 100 buy-ins for the level at which you play. To the player new to Multi Table Tournaments this can seem high. Looking at the nature of variance in the game can show why this is the case…

Say you are a very successful MTT player and enjoy a Return on Investment of 100% - that over time you expect to double the money you spend on entry fees. Now we look at a typical payout structure for a large multi player online poker tournament. 15% for 1st Place, 8% for second and 4% for 3rd going right down to 0.02% for 100th place. You will see that the payout is extremely skewed to the top few places.

Even if you have a skill advantage over the rest of the players there are so many chance factors that can prevent you getting to the final table. Even if you manage to get your chips in as a 70% favorite on 3 key hands throughout the tournament you would only have a 30% chance of still being ‘alive’ in the game – add an early coin-flip to this and we are already down to 15%... Now imagine how many key hands will take place in a large tournament where the final table players have seen 800+ hands each…

The key point here is that while on average a skilled player will make more final tables the real number of times this will happen in relatively small, thus a big bankroll is required to ride out the runs of games with no final tables.

Poker Tournament Bankroll Management Factors - #2 - Your Playing Style

Are you playing to win or playing to cash? Most people instinctively answer that they are playing to win – but is this true??

Think of the bubble – you have medium strength hand and the big stack pushes all in ahead of you. This might be a great chance to call with that pair of 9’s and double up as 58% favorite against his range, but folding will secure another 3 buy-ins for your bankroll… be honest with yourself – which do you usually choose??

If you genuinely play to win then fine – you will probably make more money over time. You will also experience greater variance and thus will need a bigger bankroll than an opponent who plays a more conservative style.

For the many players who choose to secure the money before gambling the opposite is true. Your bankroll requirement will be smaller in terms of buy-ins but your ROI expectations over a large sample will probably be lower.

To summarize the bankroll management section then serious or pro multi table tournament players should have at least 100 buy-ins for their chosen level. Recreational players and those who play with ‘cashing first’ in mind need less – the 40 to 60 buy-in range should suffice.

Planet Mark's Tip: I recommend having a 'bankroll builder', a smaller tournament which you can reply on to add a few buy-ins to your bankroll when the variance of the larger tournaments starts to bite. A great game for this is the 180 Player SNGs at Pokerstars... My 3-part guide here at SNG Planet explains more!

Poker Tournament Bankroll Management - ROI in Multi-Table Online Poker Tournaments

As already outlined there is huge variance in MTT play – the questions here are what ROI can you expect as a good player and what sample size would you need to be sure that your results are ‘real’. The following chart shows a summary of the current consensus of online MTT pros.

150%+ ROI – Fantastic! But not sustainable over an extended period of time.

100%+ ROI – Benchmark figure for the very bestMTT Players

70%+ ROI – Very Good results for winning MTT Players

40%+ ROI – Reasonable Results

Less than 30% ROI – Room for Improvement but at least positive!

So what about sample size? Since the swings in Multi-Table Online Tournaments are larger than almost any other form of poker we need to ensure that the sample size is sufficiently large to make our results a true reflection of ability. The answer of course is very high! 1000 games will give you a reasonable idea – ideally this number should be several thousand.

Poker Tournament Bankroll Management - Use Overlays And Bonuses To Boost Your Bankroll

Achieving you ROI goal can be significantly affected by external factors such as bonuses, promotions and tournament overlays.

Overlays happen when a tournament has a guaranteed prize pool which is higher than the number of buy-ins. This effectively means that the poker site is providing additional cash for the entrants to win. Some poker sites have more guaranteed / overlay tournaments than others. The smaller poker rooms often use guaranteed prize pools to attract players, again we refer you to our Best Poker Tournament Sitessection for further information on this.

US-Friendly Tournaments: US Readers can still enjoy online poker tournaments. BetOnline Poker is the biggest site still welcoming players from most states. They are fast approaching 8k concurrent players at peaks and offer a great selection of poker tournaments at different buyins. You can claim an cool free poker calculator + massive 200% match bonus at this cool site without a bonus code. Click here now to check out BetOnline Poker for yourself!!

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We've covered a variety of topics in this series on multi-table tournament strategy (MTTs), starting with a discussion of tournament structures, the importance of stack sizes, and chip accumulation vs. survival strategies, then moving through the early, middle, and late stages of MTTs and onward to the final table.

To conclude the series, let's talk a little about bankroll management and tournaments, an area that sometimes trips up even experienced poker players who aren't as mindful as they should be of how the variance of MTTs should affect what buy-in levels they choose.

Tournament bankroll management: Why have a bankroll?

It goes without saying — a 'poker bankroll' refers to money set aside for poker only, and should not overlap with living expenses or other funds designated for other uses.

Most poker players who are successful over the long term practice strict bankroll management in order (1) to ensure they can play their best at all times (and not be 'scared money' playing above their heads and worried about losing), and (2) to help lessen their 'risk of ruin' by avoiding getting involved in games that can threaten to deplete their entire bankroll and force them to quit altogether.

If you're only a casual poker tournament player, perhaps jumping in MTTs once in a while for fun as a way to break up the monotony of cash games, you needn't worry too specifically about tournament-specific bankroll management. But you shouldn't ignore it, either.

The only real bankroll concern the casual MTTer should have is not to play a tournament for which the buy-in is so high it will disturb your ability to play without worry of losing what you've paid. If you typically play a $1/$2 no-limit hold'em cash game where you might win or lose as much as a few hundred in a night, playing a $5,000 NLHE tournament is probably a bad idea, both because of the higher level of competition you're likely to encounter and the possibility that your fears of not cashing and losing that big buy-in will negatively affect your play.

Some pros suggest cash game players should never risk more than around 1/20th of their cash game bankroll when playing a tournament. In other words, if you have $5,000 set aside as your cash game bankroll, you really should limit yourself to playing tournaments with buy-ins of $250 and below. If you wish to play a higher buy-in tournament, you can consider selling action in order to lessen your risk.

You can adjust that 1/20th figure up or down depending on your own risk tolerance, but be cautious about risking too much on a single 'shot' at a high buy-in MTT. Only 10-15% of those playing tournaments tend to cash, and even if you're an above-average player in the field your chance of not cashing is going to be greater than your chance of making the money at all, let alone enjoying a big score.

For players who are more serious about playing tournaments — especially if you've chosen to specialize in MTTs to the exclusion of cash — you need to think specifically about your tournament bankroll and always be mindful of how a given tournament fits or doesn't fit into the requirements you've provided for yourself.

Tournament bankroll management: How is it different from cash games?

Cash game players set bankroll requirements based both on the stakes of the games they wish to play and game types.

Obviously higher-stakes cash games require a larger bankroll than do lower-stakes ones, but perhaps not so obviously certain game types require deeper bankrolls than others because of the increased variance or 'swings' they cause.

If you wish to play short-handed (6-max.) or heads-up cash games, you need a deeper bankroll than you would if you stick with full-ring games. Similarly, playing a game like pot-limit Omaha is going to require having a larger bankroll than playing NLHE at the same stakes, since PLO typically tends to cause wider swings.

Similar principles apply to bankroll management for multi-table tournaments. That said, those familiar with managing a cash game bankroll may miscalculate what it takes to maintain a sufficient MTT bankroll.

Someone who regularly plays $1/$2 NLHE cash game for which the typical buy-in is $200 might reasonably think a bankroll consisting of 30 buy-ins or $6,000 is plenty (although more conservative players may opt for an even deeper bankroll).

However for a multi-table tournament player who plays $200 MTTs, a bankroll of $6,000 is not going to be adequate. Given the variance of MTTs, even good players can occasionally go 30 tournaments without a cash, a possibility that is much more likely to occur than for a good cash game player to blow through that many buy-ins.

Tournament bankroll management: How many buy-ins do you need?

A typical recommendation for tournament players is to have at least 100 buy-ins in your bankroll for any tournament you play, although it should be said right off that is often a minimum recommendation. Even so, you can see that for a player of $200 MTTs, that means having a $20,000 bankroll at minimum to absorb the swings of MTTs — much higher than the bankroll of a cash game player whose buy-ins are the same $200.

The same advice goes to the online poker player who sticks with $5 multi-table tournaments, for which a $500 bankroll would represent a comfortable minimum. You can take shots at those $10 or $20 tournaments once in a while, but know that in order to move up to those buy-in levels permanently, you'll need a bigger roll.

Meanwhile, there are several other factors that can push that 100 buy-in suggestion even higher.

For one, if you're on the cautious side you may want to have at least 200 buy-ins or even as much as 500 buy-ins in your tournament bankroll. Also, if you mainly play large-field MTTs, you'll also likely want to have more buy-ins given the higher variance of those events when compared to smaller field tournaments.

Bankroll Management Tournament Poker Tournaments

How you approach tournaments — that is, your playing style — also matters when it comes to MTT bankroll management. While we've been recommending 'going for the win' in this series, many tournament players place a greater emphasis on simply cashing than focusing on trying to make final tables where they can play for real money. Such players tend not to win the big prizes up top, but may overall experience less variance and thus can get away with having smaller bankrolls. This is where many recreational MTTers end up, with bankrolls of 60 buy-ins (or even less) and cashing enough to stay in the game.

The more serious professional tournament players who do play for the win are going to need deeper bankrolls in order to handle those long stretches between final tables when they aren't cashing at all.

Tournament bankroll management: How does your ROI affect bankroll decisions?

Finally, if you keep good records (as you should) you can calculate your win rate in tournaments — commonly referred to as your return on investment or 'ROI' — and use that figure as another guide helping you decide how deep of a MTT bankroll you should have.

Bankroll Management Tournament Poker Odds

Your tournament ROI is calculated by dividing how much you profit in tournaments (your 'return') by the amount you spend on buy-ins (your 'investment'). Usually the result is then multiplied by 100 and shown as a percentage:

• (winnings - buy-ins) / buy-ins *100 = ROI%

While it's somewhat subjective to say what a 'good' ROI is for MTTs, obviously anything above zero percent marks you as a winning player. Having a 10-15 percent ROI is good, and anything from 25-30 percent ROI and above is going to be better than many MTTers. Meanwhile only the top pros tend to reach and sustain levels higher than those.

Having a relatively small ROI means needing a deeper bankroll so as to ensure you're able to stay in the game during those dry stretches, while having a consistently high ROI means you can get away with less.

One important word of caution, though — don't be overly affected by small sample sizes when looking at your tournament ROI. One big tournament win can inordinately skew a player's ROI, sometimes inspiring false confidence about the sustainability of such a rate.

Don't let a ROI percentage calculated from just 10 or 20 multi-table tournaments inspire wild adjustments to your MTT bankroll management strategy. In fact, some say you need at least 1,000 results for the sample size to be significant enough to be meaningful, so while you should keep track of your results, understand what they mean when you do.

Also in this series...

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