Experienced card game players have a lot of tips and tricks they like to share with others. These include knowing how to read other players, guarding your cards, and controlling your facial expressions. While it cannot be denied that these are indeed crucial in card games, there is one playing hack that many tend to overlook: good bankroll management. Professional card game player Wayne Chiang says that this is an even bigger factor that determines your success compared to playing skills. After all, you can’t keep playing without a budget.
If you’d like to find out more about the importance of bankroll management, keep reading below:
What is bankroll management?
Bankroll management is the practice of managing your card-playing money, so you never lose more than what you can afford. In line with this is the understanding that despite having skill, card games come with uncertainty. While abilities play a part in determining your success, there are endless possibilities that can happen in a game.
Bankroll management requires discipline and self-control. It’s not just protecting your funds, but also knowing how much you should put at stake for every game and your skill level. For example, a beginner should hold back on spending a huge amount since they’re not assured they can earn it back.
With bankroll management defined, let’s move on to the reasons why it determines your success:
Why does it determine your card game success?
Card games normally require buy-ins (an upfront payment) to join. As such, having enough money to enter through bankroll management is important if you want to win at poker and other card games. Besides, you can’t make more money by winning if you can’t afford the buy-in in the first place. Additionally, no matter how skilled you are, there will still be days when playing abilities aren’t enough to guarantee a win. Thus, it’s important to have money set aside so you don’t suffer a complete loss.
To sum it up, having sufficient funds through good bankroll management ensures that you can enter card games, have money left in case you lose, and keep playing more card games in the future. Now that we’ve established this, here’s how to achieve good bankroll management:
How to practice good bankroll management
The first thing to do is to make sure that your bankroll is meant for card games only. This means that the money you aim to spend on games is not the same money for bills and necessities. If your bankroll eventually runs out, it won’t affect your daily life.
The next is to follow a money management technique typically used by investors called the Kelly Criterion. It is a math formula to know how much money should be allocated for each investment—in this case, each card game. Using this, players ensure that they won’t suffer a complete bankroll loss. There are Kelly calculators online but if you’d like to compute manually, the formula is f* = (bp-q)/b.
f* = the percentage of your bankroll to allocate
b = the odds received for what’s at stake
p = probability of winning
q = probability of losing
Finally, only play for the stakes you can afford. You may lose more times than you win when you’re a beginner, so avoid purchasing too many buy-ins. Once your skills improve, that’s the time to place more money down for card games.
Good bankroll management is just as crucial in card games as your skills. With discipline, you avoid spending more than you can afford to lose. If you liked this piece, check out our other lifestyle articles here at Social Toolbar.
Leave a Reply