I’m not sure where this to post this thread. So if this is in the wrong location mods please move it.

So I’ve been playing internet poker for over 4 years now. When I first started I was a broke college student first honing my skills in freerolls and that is in fact how I going.

I was so short for money that I first started playing in the 9 man SNGs since I had no clue how to make money even in the micro cash games and the occasional shot in a $1 or smaller MTT. But SNGs were easy, just play tight and start shoving wider on the bubble.

I guess what I am trying to say is that for me bankroll management was easy when I had no extra money to splurge in poker because I needed to pay rent and stuff. Now I got all my college debts paid off I got a job and a whole lot of money in the bank. So even though I could easily afford to play in the mid stakes games I never got the traction in them. Maybe I just didn’t play enough games to get a good idea of how to beat them or maybe I was getting unlucky with variance.

So I withdrew 2/3 of my bankroll a couple of months before Black Friday. On an aside I guess that makes me lucky because that did save me around $1500.

I continued playing on PokerStars afterwards but, variance kicked in and I was much more susceptible to variance on PokerStars because most of my bankroll was on Full Tilt. So with the combination of tilt with the luxury of extra money I just moved up in stakes and lost more. I’m not sure how much I lost because my records were on OPR and Stars initiated the auto-opt out policy earlier this year, but now that I knew about it I opted back in. It’ll still take around 2 weeks for the info to be posted though. I believe I lost at least a $1000.

So I ended up self-excluding myself on Stars and I decided that in a year I might be ready to play again. But a month ago I got bored so I deposited $200 bucks online on PartyPoker. Well I got the same variance issues now and the same tiny bankroll with a huge bank account. So I’m trying to figure out how best to manage this hobby without going busto too often.

learn the game?
play 200BI rule and play small fields mtts small stakes if you are uncomfortable going broke

That's just it I'm too comfortable going broke. Because I can always deposit another $200 bucks. Oh and for your information I know how to play the game just fine, in fact I'm probably a better player than you. If you don't believe me check out my Fulltilt stats on OPR, I had the same username there.

As tl;dr as my first post was I got more to add. It might be that I am getting bored with life. Today I decided that I'd go back to playing SNGs because I don't need as big of a bankroll to play them and while I won some money in them I still feel kinda bored of SNGs. If the players were more difficult I wouldn't have this problem. But until low stakes SNGs start to get better players playing them the games are like 90% solved.

No, you're not. You need to drop your ego and change your attitude. Winning players don't have "variance issues". They understand that their bankroll will be susceptible to drawdown, especially if they are playing in games where they don't have a significant edge. They adjust accordingly by playing lower stakes and game selecting to ensure the games they are playing in are worth the screen space.

Bibiscus offered great advice when he suggested to learn the game. A bankroll is something winning players use as operating capital for poker, and nothing else. It looks like you are a recreational player who wants to deposit a few hundred at a time and play, which is fine. Until you define what your bankroll consists of and what games/stakes you can beat for a solid winrate, you have a budget, not a bankroll.

If you email Pokerstars they will send you an account audit with complete details about the games you played as well as profit/losses.

Well I have a hard time believing I'm a losing player after winning over 5 grand on Fulltilt with a good sample size. I know that's over a year ago now, but the games are easier on Party than they were on FullTilt anyways. Of course its hard to tell just how much of it is due to variance, bad play or whatever when I'm using a bankroll management policy like I am now.

2100 games is hardly a good sample size. None of that is hugely important anyhow since results are rarely a good metric to use when determining skill.

I was told anything over a 1000 is reasonable, but IDK too much about stats and stuff. Anyways how do you measure one's skills and abilities?

I don't think it's measurable. You just have to pay attention to how they play rather than their results (unless the sample is substantial). For example it would surprise me if you were actually better than bibiscus based on his solid strat posts. If he had a negative roi over 1000 mtt's it probably wouldn't mean much.

Great advice by Cborders itt.

yea +1 to cborders/big vach.

My last ~1k mtts and i know im better than you are OP. Variance in mtts is absolutely absurd, small samples don't really mean much at all. To get a really good idea on realistic expectation in mtts, you probably need 10k+ played

That might be true in a game with a small field size and very weak competition, such as micro stakes single table tournaments with a slow structure, but it's not true in games with varied structures and large fields. The mean prize is so far from the top prize in MTT's which makes the variance huge, even if the field is weak. Combine this with the fact that the state of games and your own game will have evolved somehow within the span of games necessary to provide any significant measure, and you can see how inaccurate a metric like results can be. Obviously if someone is beating a game over a five figure game sample with no one score skewing the sample, it'd be fine to assume that player is a winner at certain stakes.

In game, by observing their tendencies and the severity/frequency of the mistakes they make. On forums, by the quality of their strategy posts.

And as is usual in these threads, this has very quickly descended into a pointless, not to mention one-sided, dick-waving competition as OP fails to accept the answers doesn't want to hear.

OP, you're probably not the worst player in the world, and it's possible you might even have a positive expectation in online MTTs at <$10. But it's not likely that you are as good as you think you are, and it's also unlikely you're as good as the other posters ITT.

It seems you have also failed to understand what variance actually is. It's an inherent part of any event which involves chance. The game of poker thrives on it. If terrible players didn't bink the Sunday Million every once in a while then there wouldn't be thousands of randoms playing it every week in the hope that their luckbox is running hotter than everyone else's today.

Variance is the ups as well as the downs, but you're almost certainly attributing your big wins to your skill and your losses to an imaginary evil monster that you've labelled "variance", because it's a word you've heard bandied about on the forums. Actually any big wins you may have had will have been just as much a consequence of variance as the times you got it all in pre with AA for heaps and someone rivered a straight with 72o.

I really strongly recommend you re-read CBorders' first post ITT. It really is excellent. Then read his other posts. Then the posts by everyone else. Then the SSMTT FAQ.

And once you've done all that, start getting involved with some strat threads to train yourself to instinctualise the concepts you should be considering every time the action is on you at a table. The most important one is to disassociate yourself from the end results, and instead focus on making the best decisions, which are the ones that maximise your expectation.

Good luck.