Managing Your Bankroll

This is a little primer on how to manage (and keep your bankroll). This works, however, only if you (as you ALWAYS should) keep your poker money seperate from your real (bills and such) money...which brings me to my FIRST piece of advice. Don't play with money you need for the mortgage that month.

Sounds basic, huh? Stick to it. As online poker players, many of us straddle a fine line between hobbyists and degenerate gamblers with a problem, and sometimes that little sentence at the end of the above paragraph is all that seperates the two.

Now for active bankroll management. First of all, you should have an account with a company like Neteller. Neteller is the gold standard of online depositories, and since most US banks will not allow direct transactions to online gaming sites, it's probably your best choice. It's payments are accepted pretty much everywhere, and if you avoid using the Instacash option, it's totally free.

On poker sites, and this is the meat and potatoes of bankroll management, the single most important piece of advice I can give is not to play games over your bankroll. What does that mean? It means you should have at least 10 (ten) buy-ins sitting in your account for your chosen game. If you play FR Limit Holdem, a good idea of a buy-in is about 25BB. So, if you're playing 2/4 LHE, a buy-in is $100, and you should have at least $1000 in your bankroll. Got it? This prevents variance from making you go busto just from a single bad day. This is also very dependent on how replaceable your bankroll actually is, or more to the point, how replaceable you WANT it to be. I made a decision a while ago that I wouldn't redeposit any more money online regardless of what happens, so, even though it's not, I treat my bankroll like it's my last dollars on earth, and conserve it accordingly.

For NL holdem, the same 10-buy-in rule applies. When I mention a buy-in in NL, I mean a full buy-in. So, if you're playing 1/2 NL, and a buy-in is $200, you need to have at least $2000 available in your 'roll.

Variance and your style plays a great deal into this information, If you play a LAGgier (higher variance) style with big swings, where you can both win and lose big in short amounts of time, you should increase the number of buy-ins you need. Also, you should increase your bankroll requirements for playing shorthanded...

I'm going to start a thread in my forum about managing bankroll, so your comments are welcome there!

The Benefits of Aggressive Play

Here we are, discussing something that's not-Poker Tracker-related. I want to discuss something that crosses over the world of both NL and Limit Holdem, and it's the concept of aggressive play.

Last year, when I wrote the auto-rate rules for PokerTracker, I did a TON of research on literally millions of datamined hands, from Stars, Party, and Full Tilt, and the one thing that I discovered was that how many hands a person plays literally doesn't have a damn thing to do with how often or how much they win at the tables. The single factor that determined whether or not a player was successful was whether or not they were aggressive.

By aggressive (you knew there had to be a PT mention), I mean having an aggression factor of more than 1.5 on ALL streets (betting or raising 1.5 times as much as they call). At first glance, you might think that this requires a lot of bluffing, and yes, you're right. Bluffing, and SEMI-bluffing.

When you examine my PokerTracker NL database, the one thing that stands out to me is my W$WSF (Won Money When Saw Flop). My figure there (playing $50 and $100 NL mostly, with some $200 and $400 NL mixed in) is an obnoxious 41.84%. This means that for every flop I see, I'm winning a pot nearly half the time. How? Easy. The key to aggressive play in Holdem is to (drumroll please)...Play your drawing hands like they were weaker made hands, but made hands nonetheless.

An example in NL...I'm in the CO with KsJs, and I open after 2 limpers for 5 xBB. One limper folds, and the BB calls, so three of us see a flop of 8s-Td-3s. Limper checks to me, so my action is...

Bet the pot. I'll vary this here between betting half-pot to betting full-pot based on my read of the opponent. If I have an opponent who is very aggressive, I'll make him think about raising with what could be a top-pair only hand, and I'll fire out a full-pot bet, meaning that if he chooses to raise, he's going to be risking a damn-good sized portion of his stack...To put it into numbers:

$100 NL:
At this point, there would be $17.50 in the pot. If I bet full pot, I'm firing $18 into the pot. Any raise he puts in has to be AT LEAST $36, or over a third of a normal stack, and that's just for a min-raise. A real raise would be for at least half-a-stack.

Looking at the multi-leveled thinking...What do you have? You have the second-nut-flush-draw (9 outs), you have two overcards (6 outs, potentially, assuming your opponent doesn't have a set or a pair with your shared overcard), and you have a backdoor straight draw (1.5 outs). You could have as many as 16.5 outs, giving you a 66% chance of hitting SOMETHING by the river. What does your opponent have? I don't know, and I don't care. All I care about is what he would raise me back with. Would he raise me back with AT (TPTK)? I hope so. Would he raise me with a set? Yes. Would he raise me with Axs? Possibly, but how many players are going to risk >half of their stack with just a naked flush draw?

See my point? If you're re-raised, you can re-assess the situation, but typically, you're beaten. If you have a good read on your opponent, this becomes second nature. More often than not, your opponent will fold to your show of aggression and you'll take down the pot.

In the above example, if your opponent is passive, bet half-to-three-quarters of the pot. Why? Because secretly, you WANT that call. Again, a raise usually means you're behind, but if he calls this "smaller bet," one that would be considered "weak" by your aggressive standards, all you're doing is building a pot for when you DO hit your draw. It also almost ensures that he'll check the turn to you, allowing you to see a free card to beat him.

In Limit Holdem, betting and/or raising with your strong draws allows players to get odds to continue to call your bets, AND it builds pots for when the draws come in.

To be more aggressive, start playing your draws more like made hands. You and your winrate will thank me for it.

PokerAce HUD and Custom Layouts

I'm working on a PAHud layout for NL Holdem that pretty much makes the other player's range DEAD obvious:

Click to enlarge...

Notice me in the 6-seat, with almost a double stack. Seriously though, this layout utilizes the "Combined Stats 1" stat in PokerAceHUD. I placed the stat bar over each player's name in the following format: VP$IP/PFR/CPFR/AF-T/Hands

VP$IP: Voluntarily Put $ In Pot
PFR: Pre-Flop Raise
CPFR: Call Pre-Flop Raise
AF-T: Aggression Factor-Total
Hands: Number of Hands in DB

Now, how do we use this information? Let's look at the player in the 1-seat. Remember when I told everyone to download PokerStove? Here's where it comes in useful. What does this stat line tell us? His VP$IP is 16%, which makes him pretty tight. Specifically, it tells us that he plays the top 16% of his hands (with respect to position, of course...a little more in LP, a little less in EP). His general range therefore is (using PokerStove's help): 22+, A8s+, KTs+, QTs+, JTs+, AT+, KJ+, QJ+

There is also more info there. You know you have hands you play, hands you raise, and hands you'll call a raise with to play. His PFR is 5%, so he's raising with the top 5% of hands: 99+, AJs+, KQs+, AK. However, he'll call raises to play 12% of his hands, which is essentially the entire rest of his range. So, if he's raising, he likely has a top 5% hand, but if he calls a raise, he either has one of his top 5% hands, or a hand in the top 12% range (his CPFR number).

So, what do we know?
He's in with 22+, A8s+, KTs+, QTs+, JTs+, AT+, KJ+, QJ+. (16%)
He raises with 99+, AJs+, KQs+, AK. (5%)
He's calling raises with 77+, A9s+, any two suited Broadway cards, AT+, KQ. (12%)

This is how PokerTracker and PAHud can help you be a bigger winner.