So about a month ago I've made a decision to chase my dream and become a poker pro.

This requires a relocation since there's not casinos where I live.

The plan is to move to Barcelona for 3-4 months and grind 1$/3$ (it's their smallest game) and move up from there, if i'm profitable.

I'm very confident in my skills and I believe I can beat 1/3 for a start.
What bankroll is necessary to play at those stakes? Currently waitering my way to a decent bankroll.

Any insights or comments are welcome!

Well, when you say you believe you can beat 1/3, what empirical evidence do you have that you can beat 1/3 at enough of a rate to cover all your expenses? Once we know that, we can then calculate exactly what sort of bankroll you need in order that this time next year you're not walking down the Ramblas trying to steal my wallet

The best answer to this question is that if you don’t know the answer you’re not ready.

If you have to say “if you’re profitable,” then you’re definitely not ready

Let’s say you’re considering a move to Barcelona to continue work as a waiter there. How much do you have to make there in base salary plus variable amounts of tips?

15k€.

So, waitstaff to pay the bills, poker to increase bankroll and move up in stakes? Is that right?

you could make it work with 15k. 40 buyins + 3k living expenses at 1k per month. probably better to level up grinding micros online though.

10K minimum imo

oh, you should definitely get a part time job as a waiter in Barcelona as well. Then if you are running bad you can try to get more hours at work, or if you are crushing it scale back a bit and put in more time at the tables. In the mean time try to pick up some extra shifts.

-1


If u wanna play pro poker it’s hard enough on its own I wouldn’t try to juggle a 2nd job that will take away from your time

Have you been to Barcelona? 3 month rent in a non-expensive neighborhood for a furnished studio already puts you in the 1500-2000€ range, that’s $1700-$2265. Your other monthly expenses won’t stop, you still need to pay for your phone and other stuff and without the waiting job, your health insurance is probably gone too (yes, in Europe you get health insurance in the service industry). Even if you don’t have a car and the costs associated with that, you need a monthly pass for public transportation that costs another $200ish for 3 months.

So unless you plan on eating PB&Js 3 times a day and drink tap water, $1k (=883€) won’t get you very far.

So regarding the living expenses. I'm saving "living expenses" money + poker bankroll.
The reason I'm confident I can beat 1/3 (not dollars btw, euros, my bad), is that I beat almost any home game I go to where I live. Every time I visit Europe on holiday I play poker and win money at the local casinos. A month ago I had 6 sessions in Barcelona, profiting on 5 of them, broke even once (1 short session in London, profitable as well).

This isn't some kind of a lucky streak, Just calculated play.

By waitering I ment that this is what I'm doing now to save enough money, I don't plan on having a day job in Barcelona.
I've been there 3 times and fell in love with the city, I know my way around mostly.

According to my research, living expenses will be around 1200-1300 euros a month.
I plan on playing 6 hours sessions 5-6 days a week. Which means 130~ hours a month.

So to break even monthly I need to make 9-10 euros an hour, which is 3-4BB/hour winrate, seems doable to me.

I was thinking on saving 50buy ins + living expenses but that would take me about a year to make. Maybe I'm saving too much? what's a decent number of starting buy ins?

Really appreciate all the responses!

Moved out of Beginners Questions for a fresh set of eyes from players actually playing live poker.

Barcelona threads:
HERE and HERE

So what if you won 5/6 sessions? That's an irrelevant sample size. It is troublesome that you think this is even worth mentioning. How many hours have you tracked and what were your results?

It's very doable, but you haven't proven you can make that much. Also, if you only make enough to pay you bills and don't grow your bankroll you are mathematically guaranteed to go broke eventually although in practice you might be lucky enough for it to never happen in your lifetime. You need to make enough money to grow your bankroll.

Also, 130 hours is not enough. Early on you need to be working hard to move up in stakes and achieve financial security. I know starting business owners who work 80 hours a week. I'm not saying you need to work THAT much, but you should think of playing poker like a business and work hard to make sure you succeed.

It depends on your expenses, win-rate and variance in the games you're playing. You don't need to separate your bankroll and living expenses. You have one source of money that you use for poker and pay all of you bills. You factor this into your RoR calc by subtracting your expenses from your monthly win-rate.

And then merged into our bankrolls thread. General rule of thumb for live is 20BIs plus six months living expenses. Will you be a foreigner in Spain? If so, add a "what if I get mugged leaving the casino" buffer on to that, as I have heard that foreigners seen to win have a high chance of that in Barcelona.

Thank you for the constructive feedback.

It's not just the 5 sessions, I have a near 1 year log of weekly home games with my friends which I crush. But enough of that.

I'll deffinetly reconsider my session lengths.

About getting mugged, I have heard of that but I guess I was lucky enough to never get mugged there. If anyone here is from Barcelona I'd love to hear some tips to stay safe on that regard.

Sorry my sample size is relatively small. I live in Israel, I don't have casinos to go grind, so it's all home games.

I went pro roughly 18 months ago with 10k bankroll and 20k life roll but this was in Tampa FL and starting in 1/2 games. Playing 5/T now.

Anyway...bankroll requirements depend on your winrate and risk tolerance. If playing with a small roll will stress you out and cause suboptimal play, which it probably will, you need a larger roll. If busting will cause major problems like, say, homelessness, compared to say having to work part time, you need a larger roll.

A few basic guidelines, assuming you win at 10BB/HR which is a huge assumption but generally where you need to be to start moving up in stakes

1) 15BI minimum bankroll, 20+BI recommended. If you buy in 300 this means 4500 / 6000, if you buy in 600 this means 9000 / 12000, etc. You could play with less but I would strongly caution against it. I've experienced 2000+BB downswings twice and a 3000BB downswing once since I started and I'm winning over 10BB/HR in every game I play.

2) Don't tilt, ever. Easier said than done of course and for many people this is impossible, but you can figure out the signs for when you're tilted and leave the game. Tilt removes your edge or worse you start punting stacks. One punted stack (say 600) is 20 hours of solid work down the drain, and if you're truly tilted you can punt off weeks of work. Don't respond to needling comments, don't educate the fish, generally don't talk about poker period regardless of how good or horrible some line is. Your goal for mental game is to get where you can get it in with the nuts, lose your stack to a 1 outer, laugh and fist bump the guy who stacked you.

3) Consider taking shots at 2/5 when you have 10BI for 2/5 AND have established you're crushing 1/3. If you get above 15BI, stay at 2/5. If you drop below 10, go back to 1/3. You need to get out of rake trap games ASAP. The rake at 1/2 and 1/3 is usually horrendous but I have no clue what it is in Barcelona.

4) Have a separate life roll of one year's cost of living + emergency expenses. Personally I'd have been wiped out by a concurrent downswing and hospital stay if I didn't have a life roll. How much you need in Barcelona I have no idea, but I imagine cost of living is quite high. Making it grinding 1/3 will be difficult even if you're crushing it. You'll want to move up in stakes before your life roll runs out if possible. Otherwise it will be very hard to build a roll and meet expenses simultaneously.

These are just my personal recommendations from someone who's gone pro under similar circumstances.

Good luck to you.

I played in Barcelona for a weekend last month.

In order to not get robbed you either leave your money on deposit (I am assuming they, like every other casino, offer this but I did not partake) or you simply get a cab from one of the two cab ranks outside the casino.

That said, the games in Barcelona were way below my expectations and the room is terribly run. Actually its run ok, but there just aren't enough tables and dealers for demand. The 1/3 games were nitty and not helped by the fact that they only had 2-3 tables running at a maximum even though there was a waitlist 40 people deep. This was on a completely normal weekend without any tournament series being in town. The staff would open 2/5 or 5/T games instead. This predictably means that the solid grinders stay alive and wait around for a seat (for hours) whereas the fish that did put their name down on the list have either gone home, gone drinking or already lost their money in other casino games by the time their name gets called. Also, they have this European trend of ending the games at certain times (4:30am) even if there are people around wanting to continue to play. This limits the time you can put in. And on another note, I was angle shot/slowrolled more in the weekend I was in Barcelona than I have been in the last 2 years in my regular games.

None of the above is bitterness. I won money the weekend I was there but also recognise that I had an above average card distribution and that was the reason why.

At what levels were the (2)2000 bb and 3000 bb downswing?

Wondering how some of you rationalize your bankrolls. I normally treat every session as having some set amount of "buyins" to play with. Whether a buyin means 20BB or 200BB. I do this to manipulate my actual bankroll to help me decide what games to play in. Do I want 40 buyins half stacked? 20 buyins full stacked? 10 buyins deep stacked?

To split my roll across the games I want to play I sometimes just look at the total BB's I have for a given limit. So for instance i have 500BB's for NL200. This gives me either 10 shots playing half stacked or 5 shots playing full stacked. I'm not entirely sure this is the best way to approach things, it's just something I derived so that if my roll takes a hit I can adjust my max buyin for whatever limit I'm at. If I want to always feel safe knowing I have 10 buyins in the bank then I can simply buyin for less if I lose, and continue buying in shorter and shorter so that I always have 10 bullets.

Any thoughts on this approach? Or should i just consider a buyin to always equal 100BB's and then make sure I have enough buyins to play competently without playing scared money.

There's actually a whole thread for this stuff, so I'd look up the official bankrolls, winrates, and finances thread.

Overall, you want to look at BB, but there are some caveats. Playing short stack increases variance. It just seems like it doesn't because things happen in smaller increments, but you're basically always playing for your stack usually before the final card, and the decrease in FE means you're not really pulling many post flop bluffs or getting implied odds on draws. Furthermore, since rake eats away at a larger portion in smaller pots, you're kinda taking a decent WR hit by short stacking. Conversely, when playing deep, you can take advantage of implied odds more, you can bluff, and of course, you can lose more when you run like crap. So overall, it does take a bigger BR to play deeper, but not necessarily twice as much. If your threshold is 10 BI, then treat 1,000 bigs as what you want for buying in short and medium. If you're buying in deep, you might feel better with 1,500 bb. It sounds like you have a job though, so I think you can take some liberties and play with even less. If you don't have a job, then don't play poker at all with such a small BR.

One ~2000BB downswing at 1/2, one ~2000BB and one ~3000BB downswing at 2/5

@benstiller69

Don't buy in short. I understand the urge when "shot taking" as you have more "bullets" but your edge with said bullets is much smaller. This especially applies in higher stakes games since stacks are typically deeper and pots go less multiway, amplifying one's edge.

If you have no edge this advice doesn't apply obviously.

I'm on an insane 2/5 heater! $96/hr. over 107 hours. Even fish can win big. The game is alive and well.



PS: I fully expect this winrate to drop over the next few months.

For someone considering moving from online 20nl to $1/$2 live that doesn't have a 30 buy in bankroll for it but has income from a job is there a lower minimum suggestion?

I'd hate to put a 5 buy in roll aside and go lose 3 of it in my first night or something like that. That can happen even playing as perfect as possible poker as we all know running in to coolers, second best hands, hidden monsters by some maniac playing 84s etc.

How do players start out when it is a part time thing and have a full time income source?

I’m in a similar spot. My plan is to take 3bi shots as needed, any winnings going to stash and any losses I must save up another full 3bi (or just take from life roll immediately depending). Once I run up to 10 bis total I go from there and just start playing more and more hours. If run down to about 3 bi, rinse and repeat.

So far I haven’t acted on my plan, but I have it all written down