Was reading Cardplayer this morning while making breakfast. There is an interesting Q&A piece with Dan Harrington (of Harrington on Hold’em fame) in this month’s mag. In the article, H mentions that one needs roughly 1000x the big bet to play “comfortably” at any given level of poker.
1000x?!? Wow, that’s sure different from the conventional wisdom. Most traditional sources say that your bankroll needs to be 250-300x the big bet to play at any given level. That’s what I’ve been assuming for a long time now, and it’s what has basically led me to play at the $1/2 level. While okay from a pure mathematical point of view (i.e., to allow your ‘roll to handle the swing variances of the game), I’m now not so sure 250-300x is enough to damp out the psychological swings.
Case in point is my run of awful luck/bad play over the weekend. My bank roll can clearly handle a 10% hit (like it did), but my psyche evidently can’t. I felt like I’d taken a Mike Tyson uppercut to my solar plexus by the time Sunday night rolled around. Would this feeling have been lessened if I had had a larger bank roll? Would the loss have remained in my more normal comfort zone? Answer: Probably. One thousand times $2 would have meant a $2000 minimum bankroll. My Sunday $100 loss would have only been 5%, which, while painful, certainly wouldn’t have been as devastating. Maybe Harrington is on to something…
In any case, I’m going to drop down to lower levels for a while and nurse my bank roll back up. By default I’ll now be playing at the 1000x level, and I’ll let you know how painful it is or isn’t…
All-in for now…
-Bug
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