Play poker with criteria: variance and bankroll management

by DashFlat Poker DashFlatPoker

Discipline is the fundamental quality of any winning poker player. When you start playing poker for real money, the first rule to learn is bankroll management. In poker, every player is just a banker, an entrepreneur of himself. The most important thing to learn from the start is to invest your money correctly.

 

What is Bankroll?

 

The term 'bankroll' refers to the amount of money you decide to invest solely for playing poker.

 

Bankroll management

 

Each game variant in poker has a particular bankroll management. For example, in sit and go it is recommended to calculate around 100-150 buy-in (entry fee) to tackle a certain level. In a cash game match, the buy-ins that will be needed to play a certain level will be lower, this is because the swings (bankroll fluctuations) will be smaller. In fact, in the cash game the random component has less influence than in the tournament mode and the skill is more rewarded in the long run. My advice is not to play with more than 5% of your bankroll on a table. In general, if you are starting out, the ideal would be to invest a maximum of 2 or 3% of your bankroll for a single game. If you are an experienced player you can go up to 5%.

 

Being disciplined also means not letting single days, going very well, or very badly, lead us to play higher levels to try to win faster. Only when your bankroll allows it, and therefore your skills at the table have improved, will you be able to start playing higher limits. Or on the contrary, going back to playing a lower level, leveling down, after a negative period, is definitely a wise choice!

 

Poker is not just about playing spectacular hands or making tough calls. The winning poker player is the one who makes fewer mistakes when sitting at the table. In cash games as well as other variants of poker, you can play perfectly for hours, win a lot and then lose your entire stack in one hand with a risky bluff or silly call. There are many players who have great skills, but their downside is making too many mistakes.

 

The variance

 

Even if you play perfect strategy, there are times when it is possible to run into a losing streak. On the other hand there will be times when you will feel invincible. In the short term it can happen that we lose several consecutive shots in which we are clearly favorites, mistakenly attributing the blame to bad luck.

After playing a few hands it will happen many times that the win percentages you expect to get are not respected, while if you analyze a much larger sample of hands you will see how little by little the percentages are approaching those expected.

 

This is all due to the concept of variance that you have surely heard many times before. The variance is linked to the uncertainty, that is to the deviation of the actual value from the expected one. There is a mathematical concept that perfectly summarizes the definition of variance: The Gauss curve. The Gaussian is a fairly advanced mathematical concept, but one that has significant implications for the real world. When we have to judge an event we can describe it with the distribution of its possible values. If I flip a coin, the heads value has a probability of 0.5 and the tails have the same probability. The sum of the possible values ​​gives unity (i.e. certainty, either comes heads or comes out

 

cross!). Things get complicated when I have many possible values, even infinite. If the number of measurements is very large, at the infinite limit, the curve we will obtain is precisely the Gauss curve. The more samples we will analyze, the more the curve will be shaped like a bell. All this connected to poker means for example that if we go all in preflop 10 times with a cup of aces against a pair 55 we will find ourselves playing an 80% -20% hit, in which however the variance will affect a lot (because the sample taken in consideration is small) and it will probably happen that we get very far away from a situation where we will win 8 times and lose 2 times. On the other hand, if AA vs 55 preflop we will play it 1000 times the final result will probably be a near perfect statistic: the margin of error is very low as the number of cases taken into consideration is large and the statistics will be very close to reality. We will win about 80% of the time and we will lose about 20% of the time, thus explaining the bell shape of the Gauss curve. If the cases taken into consideration are infinite or in any case high, most of the results of the attempts will fall into the average value that corresponds to the center of the curve. So the next time your aces blow up, don't worry. In the long run for every hand like this you lose you will win another 4! If the cases taken into consideration are infinite or in any case high, most of the results of the attempts will fall into the average value that corresponds to the center of the curve. So the next time your aces pop, don't worry. In the long run for every hand like this you lose you will win another 4! If the cases taken into consideration are infinite or in any case high, most of the results of the attempts will fall into the average value that corresponds to the center of the curve. So the next time your aces blow up, don't worry. In the long run for every hand like this you lose you will win another 4!

Read also: Online poker strategy: how to beat a maniac

 

Bad beat and tilt

 

When playing cash games, pay attention to TILT. In poker, tilt is the situation in which the player finds himself playing under stress and therefore not in a logical and relaxed way. It usually occurs after a bad beat. By bad-beat we mean a hand lost against the statistic, a bad play by an opponent that changes into a win. Bad beats are part of poker, so you need to find a way to deal with them. If you have been very unlucky and are nervous about some bad hands, stop playing! Even if you don't think this will affect you, I assure you that it will be very difficult to play your A-game, your best Poker. Leave the table and take a break! Do something else and return to the table when you are more relaxed. Your poker balance will benefit with play online poker games!

Sponsor Ads

• Ad Space Available - Rent it Now!

Created on Jan 4th 2021 07:08. Viewed 305 times.

Comments