Table of Contents
The most important poker decisions you make revolve around game selection. That’s right. It’s not about whether you should raise or call with king-jack suited.
Many nascent poker careers have been derailed by poor game selection. Several factors come into play.
Why We Play
First, what are you trying to get from the game? There are lots of valid reasons to play. If you’re just there for fun and can afford to lose the buy-in, go ahead and play. Lots of folks are there to kill time, flop sets, and hang around with their friends. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that as long as they can afford to lose the money.
Others play poker as a hobby in which they strive to improve their skills. They’re willing to invest thousands of dollars in software, coaching, travel expenses, and buy-ins because they want to improve. They approach poker the way I’ve seen golfers and participants in other competitive activities do. These poker players are serious about winning, and see the money as a way of keeping score.
Still others are professional poker players. They supplement their income or depend entirely on poker to pay the bills. Some pros have poker-related side gigs such as coaching, vlogging, or even running poker websites.
Bankroll
The first commandment of poker is, “If you can’t afford to lose it, you can’t afford to bet it.” That goes for everyone, from the fun player to the most talented pro. If you’re losing money that you need to pay your bills, please get professional help from Gamblers Anonymous or other such organizations. Consider self-exclusion, which is approaching casino personnel and asking them to ban you. Just remember that this can be irrevocable.
When it comes to bankroll, there are two kinds of people. They have either:
- Replenishable bankroll
- Professional bankroll
Replenishable Bankroll
If you have a replenishable bankroll, this means you have a job, pension, or other income stream. You can use some of this income to recharge your poker bankroll when needed. If this is you, then the only savings you need for poker are enough to fund your next session or trip.
Calculate how much money you can afford to lose in a year and then plan on paying that much for poker that year. If your poker bankroll runs dry. Stop playing poker until you save enough money for your next session or trip. You can add your winnings to your poker bankroll, so that it lasts longer, or you can play for bigger stakes. Or you can spend your winnings. It’s entirely up to you. As Doyle Brunson once said, one of the greatest feelings in the world is going out and spending poker winnings.
Professional Bankroll
A professional bankroll is the same thing as the cash treasury owned by a business. You depend on poker to pay your bills. You might be a semipro player; you have another income stream but depend on poker to fill out your income. You need to fund travel expenses, coaching, software, etc. from your professional bankroll.
How much should you have in your professional bankroll?
There is a lot of variance in poker. You must be able to withstand losing sessions, losing months, and even losing years. Your bankroll isn’t the only thing that must withstand the pressure of the inevitable losses. Your mental game must also be resilient. Entire books have been written just about maintaining a resilient mental game, especially when facing adversity.
There seem to be as many opinions about cash bankroll requirements as there are poker coaches and authors. They all have one thing in common – they are a multiple of your buy-ins. So you must stay within the stakes that your bankroll can handle.
Most of the advice in this area converges around 40 buy-ins if you play cash games. Since you buy in for at least 100 big blinds, you divide your bankroll by 4,000 to know what the big blind should be. If you have $100,000 in your bankroll, you divide that by 4,000 to arrive at a big blind limit of $25. Since it’s more common to find a 10-20 game in Vegas and other areas, that is the game you should play.
Games at those stakes tend to have tougher, more aggressive action than lower-stakes games. So you may want to increase your bankroll requirement somewhat for those stakes.
If you play tournaments, the advice seems to converge at 100 average buy-ins. This buy-in requirement is higher than in cash games because tournaments have more variance. Final tables and especially final-three appearances and championships are where you make your profit. Those don’t come around very often.
Another factor that affects tournament variance and therefore bankroll requirements is the field sizes of your tournaments. You’ll get those final three runs much more often in your local weekly tournament that gets a couple hundred entries than you will at, say, WSOP bracelet events that get thousands of entries.
So it stands to reason that if all you ever play are live and online events that get thousands of entries, you need a higher bankroll requirement. You might need as many as 200 average entries.
You could suffer a bad downswing. If your downswing has reduced your bankroll enough to make it too small to safely play at your stakes, move down in stakes. There’s no shame in it. It’s a better fate than bankrupting your bankroll.
Taking Shots
Shot-taking is fine if done in moderation. Shot-taking means playing at higher stakes than your bankroll normally supports. You can test your skills and your mental resilience. In fact you should try it if you feel you are bankrolled and ready for the next higher stakes in your games.
Don’t shot-take if you can’t afford to lose multiple bullets at the higher stakes. Don’t shot-take if losing the buy-ins would reduce your bankroll enough to force you to move down in stakes.
Cash or Tournaments
Cash games and tournaments each have their own advantages and drawbacks.
In cash games you can enter and leave at your convenience, as long as your poker room is spreading the game you want to play. In tournaments you have to play within the schedule of the tournament. You can only enter a tournament from the start of play until the end of late registration. You must stay until you are eliminated.
Cash games appeal to folks who have limited free time because they have a job or other commitments. A cash buy-in doesn’t commit you to the occasional long days or even multiple long days like tournaments can. It’s entirely up to you if you want to put in a 14-hour day playing poker if you play cash.
Phil Hellmuth stated this year that for the first time in decades he will no longer play the WSOP Main Event. This is because he is 60 years old and can no longer withstand its grueling schedule. Cash games allow older players and others to stop playing when they have reached the limits of their endurance in a session.
Some see the lower variance of cash games as an advantage. A player skilled enough to be profitable and cover the rakes will usually come out of a session as a winner. They don’t get “stuck” all the time. Even a casual player often has winning sessions. You usually leave tournaments empty-handed, even after multiple buy-ins.
Tournaments appeal to folks who don’t mind the long days that tournaments can demand. These folks are comfortable with working within the casino’s tournament schedule.
The higher variance of tournaments appeals to folks who relish the thrill of a deep run, and the big prizes that can result. These folks love appearing in Pokernews and the websites of the tournament festivals they play.
Good tournament players typically cash only about 15% of their entries. This can result in long downswings that can result in dozens of lost buy-ins without a win. For them this risk is an acceptable cost of doing business for an enterprise that can provide occasional huge thrills, notoriety, and prizes.
Satellites
Satellites are tournaments in which you win a seat to a tournament with a bigger buy-in – often a main event. These days some venues are awarding cash prizes to the winners in the amount of the cost of a seat, in lieu of a ticket to a seat. Those venues call the tournaments “satellites,” but they are actually just survivor tournaments.
The decision whether to play satellites breaks down into the bankroll type you have, whether it’s a replenishable bankroll or a professional bankroll.
Those with a replenishable bankroll can find satellites an attractive way to play in tournaments they otherwise can’t afford. For example, many if not most players in the WSOP Main Event won their seats in satellites. Even those who can afford the seats on offer like the way it can be a cheaper alternative.
Those with a professional bankroll are advised by writers and coaches to only play satellites into tournaments with buy-ins that do not exceed the limits of their professional bankrolls. The exception to this is that these players intend to sell any seats they win, or to pocket the cash winnings if applicable. Turning these satellites into cash in this manner is known as playing “satellites for value.”
I believe satellites in live brick-and-mortar settings are low-hanging fruit in the poker world. Most players don’t properly tailor their poker strategy to account for the differences in strategy needs. Most still don’t adjust for the situation properly, or they do it too late or early in the tournament. In the landmark type satellites that have recently started popping up, most players haven’t made the proper adjustments.
Long story short, if you study the available literature on satellites, live events can be a gold mine for you. Dara O’Kearney and Bernard Lee have excellent books on the topic. Most live satellite players these days still haven’t seen these books, and their satellite play is abominable.
Live or Online
If it’s hard for you to make it to a live casino, online sites such as Americas Cardroom offer an attractive option. There are online sites that are US-facing. A common misconception is that playing online is illegal in the US. It’s not, except in Washington state. What’s illegal is for your bank to process the transactions. There are workarounds for this. The online sites offer offshore banking solutions to get around these restrictions. They usually charge large fees for this.
Another option is to use cryptocurrency. It’s perfectly legal for your bank to transfer funds between themselves and cryptocurrency sites like Coinbase. The cryptocurrency sites transact the online gaming operators because the transactions are encrypted and impossible for prying IRS or regulatory eyes to examine.
One big benefit of online play is that you can get volume. Online action is faster than live action. And you can multitable in online games. With multitabling, you can get orders of magnitude more action per hour than in live games.
Volume has two benefits:
- You get more practice per hour of play than in live games.
- Variance decreases with volume.
One thing to consider is that the online games are tougher than their live counterparts. The regulars are much more practiced than those in live games. Also, the soft skills you practice in live poker are removed online. You can’t make live reads or talk to opponents to learn about them. Online poker is all numbers. It tests your technical competence in the game more than live poker does.
The rule of thumb is that the toughness of an online game is roughly equivalent to the toughness of a live game with a buy-in of 50 to 100 times that of the online game. 5NL online has roughly the same level of toughness as $1/$2 or $2/$5 live. A low stakes $16.50 tournament online has roughly the same level of toughness as a low stakes tournament of, say, a $1,000 tournament live.
Weak Vs Tough Games
The old saying, “If you can’t spot the mark at your table, you’re it” is as valid today as ever. If you enter tournaments or cash games on Americas Cardroom during the American work day, you will find even the low stakes games to be tough.
These games seem to be populated with tough, multitabling Brazilians and Europeans who have obviously been studying and even getting coaching. If you enter during the evening or on weekends, the action is softer, with mostly casual American players.
These tough online games are a good way to sharpen your technical skill. But they’re not very profitable. You could use a strategy of targeting the tough games for practice, but also targeting the soft games for profit.
If you’re playing live, it may take a little while to identify a game as tough or soft. Watch for errors such as open limping and needlessly showing cards. Watch for the frequency of 3-betting versus cold calling. More 3-betting is a tougher game. More cold-calling is a softer game.
Good Vs Bad Seats
Sometimes you find yourself in a bad seat. If the player to your immediate left is 3-betting a lot or just being an aggressive menace, you’re in a bad seat. You don’t know how he’ll respond to your actions. You would rather have this player on your right.
The opposite holds true for nits. You like having a nit on your left because he won’t defend against your actions as often as he should. You don’t like having a nit on your right, because there’s insufficient opportunity to exploit his weak play.
Some players seem to like targeting the player on their immediate right. He’ll cold call and 3-bet you at a higher frequency than he does to the other players at the table. This is a bad seat for the same reasons as with the aggressive menace.
In live cash play you can request a seat change or table change if you find yourself in a bad seat. In online cash play, you can simply leave that table and go to another one. Make a note to yourself as to which table it was, so that you don’t inadvertently sit right back down in the same seat. After a couple hours, you’ll probably be okay to sit back at that table.
In a tournament there’s nothing you can do about your table and seat assignment, in either live or online play. If you’re in a bad seat, you’ll just have to adjust your gameplan to account for it, and avoid going on tilt. Hopefully you or the annoying player will get a table change soon.
Conclusion
Much of the advice given above requires you to be brutally honest with yourself, especially when it comes to evaluating your own skill. Try not to get yourself in over your head.
Know why you play. If you play just for fun, that’s great. The main thing is to only use fun money, and stop when it stops being fun.
If you’re a serious amateur or an aspiring pro, use wise game selection overall, and seat selection in cash games. Stay within your bankroll, but take affordable shots once in awhile.
Best of luck to you!
