Short and sweet version:
how much of a bankroll do I need for 1/2 given this style: Personally will be selective w/ hands like tag w/ very few hands oop, once I learn tendencies of opponents, I will loosen range and fire bluffs in optimal areas where I've noticed a lot of folds i.e. lot of folds to reraises on flops, floating flops bluffing turns, overbetting rivers. (Also will use hand reading process from Ed Miller's "How to Read Hands" to pick optimal bluff spots). All rare big winners played sort of like this, and it worked very well against nitty/taggy conditions. Tags/nits play all day and just break even in these conditions.

Much love to those who take the time to read this! I need all the help I can get from you guys!

Story Time Version!

Hi 2+2 members. I am a rising senior with a plan to crush the 1/2 Tables at a Casino near my school. Issue is, unpaid internship and don't have money for sufficient bankroll. I've done my research and have been studying enormously (11 books & 300+ hours of off table study) and am now ready to play. My parents understand this and are willing to finance me. However, my dad wants mathematical basis for the number I provide him for a roll. I've tried to get him to go with 5k as is standard for the poker community but he initially has said no. The money itself is not an issue but I would like to have the best arguments ready for him when I speak again on it. My school has high level of job placement and I am not worried about being able to pay off 5k but now is the time where I need money most, due to the convenience of local casino, all cash game theory i've learned, and a school class I designed to exploit 1/2. Now is the time for me to learn/truly become a great cash player!

Background:
6 months of playing, Harrington follower at the time, since tournmant players at casino were soft and made mistakes tag style was effective and once I was very comfortable w/ Harrington, I cashed in 4/6 tournaments I played in March, including a win in sattelite for big tournament. However, when I decided to move to cash tables, everyone plays tag/nitty so ROI on that style went to 0 and all profits that I made 1k went to coolers at the table. When I went busto, I read a lot including 4 cash game specific books (Ed Miller: Prof. NLH, how to read hands, playing the player, and The Course, & James "splitsuit" Sweeney Dynamic Full Ring Poker book.)

I've looked at risk of ruin calculator but don't have enough inputs (no idea what my standard deviation is and my winrate would be a projection).

Strategy for my edge:
I've created an independent study approved by math department called "advanced poker mathematics" that me and two other good players will take design to pick apart and analyze piece by piece the 1/2 game at our local casino. Class will include data mining at the casino, with spreadsheets and creating hand histories from scratch and statistically analyzing them (like pokertracker software would) to identify villain tendencies and optimal bluff spots. Other math includes reading Billy Chen's "mathmatics of poker" learning gto, and incorporating other more mathy sophisticated concepts into game (although large portion will be exploitative 1/2 cash game strategy). We will also exploit nitty/tag conditions generally with optimal strategy mentioned above refining bet sizes to maximize +$EV.

Do you have an idea of your wr in these games and what is the sample size.

5k probably a good place to start, 4k or less definately possible but quite easy to go through super standard downswing that wipes out a significant percentage of it

I went essentially busto from playing only with 1k 5 buyin bank roll, I don't have a real sample size. I also played with an edgeless tag strategy and theory has advised me to modify given casino players playing styles. # would need to be a forecast. Anyone know where this 5k specific bankroll recommendation comes from and how it is derived? Very curious as to why everyone always says 5k there must be some underlying logic. If I could mathematically prove it, I could possibly get that size.

For 1-2, a SD of $120 an hour is a rough approximation to plug into a risk of ruin calculator until you have a sample size of your own to measure. How deep your casino typically plays and many other factors affect that number, but to start somewhere, I'd go with $120. You could plug in winrates of $1, $5 and $10 per hour just to see how that affects BR requirements. Even with your description of your current skill set, estimating your actual win or loss rate has too many variables, so generating your own sample size is all you can really do.
There is a separate thread for winrates, bankrolls and finances
http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/17...nances-771192/
with about 10,000 posts, it would be worth it to read through some of that and post your questions there.

If you had some online stats/history it'd be much easier to give you an answer with some meat on it. With what you have at the end of the day it's basically "I'm gambling but I think I can get the best of it".

That said, you can show him the "20-buyins" thread.

One commonly quoted rule of thumb is 20 buyins for a winning player to keep risk of ruin acceptably low. Many people argue for more, not just do to the math but for psychological reasons as well. Again, check out that thread for more on that.

Thanks all, I will be reading that thread religiously!

Floating, and over bet bluffing rivers at 1/2... I'd suggest a BR of 1million plus 6 mos. living expenses.

Play a few more sessions. Track your win/loss and hrs.

Busting a 4 K roll at 1/2, is super hard for winning player. But having very little experience you need to get experience. So play as often as you can. Ask for 1k. If you bust that then maybe you should wait till your financial sound.

Play for fun!!!!! Doubt you succeed jumping straight into grind mode. You have a huge learning curve to overcome. If your worried about winrate, and losing your roll. The ride won't be fun.

Good luck,

Live poker is super soft.

But how badly do you tilt

In all seriousness, cAmmAndo is trying to make the point that you aren't a winning player at 1/2. The evidence is that you went busto, in my years of playing I've never found a room where the players were TAG/Nitty and your plan to beat them is seriously flawed.

Your father should give you nothing. If he wants to loan you money based on your future earnings in real job, that's fine. He should have 0 expectation that you'll earn money in poker for now.

Many 2+2ers have gone through the phase where we thought we had the game completely figured out and it was only the fact that the other players were playing so badly prevented us from getting the winnings we deserved. The sooner you get over this phase, the better for your poker career.

Op you mentioned a lot of books including Miller's The Course. Reread his section on beating 1/2. It's playing stronger ranges than your opponents, value betting and not paying off when they show strength.

The way you beat 1/2 doesn't make for a very interesting thesis. Are there spots to bluff? Sure here and there vs fit or fold players but mostly it's about getting value and not bleeding money when they have it.

So hang on. You've gotten someone to agree to let you do an independent study on poker math, including choosing a number to begin your bankroll with, but nowhere in the OP or follow-up posts do I see the words "Kelly Criterion".

That's where you start. It's not perfect because you don't know how big your edge on the field is (if you even have one, which you might not), but it should definitely be one of the beginning points of your curriculum.

Also I would recommend adding No Limit Hold 'Em: Theory and Practice to your reading list.

Finally, just purely on a math level and not a poker level, if you've gotten a math department to let you do an independent study on poker, you probably should include Markov chains as part of the curriculum as well. Understanding those can give you a lot of insight into why having a large enough bankroll is important.

What department is this by the way, if you don't mind my asking? (EDIT: Feel free to PM me if you don't want to answer that in a public forum.)

tl;dr

OP cashed in 4/6 tourneys
OP busted 1k BR in cash games in 6 months
OP's dad is going to front him money for playing cash
OP knows he can beat the game despite lol-sample size

/grabs popcorn

I somewhat disagree with you here. Players who are very loose preflop are great bluffing targets even if they aren't strictly fit or fold. Even if these guys are willing to stack off with TPNK, that's not nearly enough to defend their starting ranges, especially if they aren't rebluffing ever (and they never are). Miller alludes to this in The Course, but if you're starting out playing 40% of your hands and you plan to continue 70% of the time on each street (which is what roughly you need to do to prevent a half-pot steal from being automatically profitable), you are planning to go three streets with almost 14% of the cards you are dealt! Essentially no one actually plays like that, which means there are one or more streets where the loose player is dumping too many hands and can be profitably bluffed. If that street is the flop, we call them fit or fold. But it's a mistake to assume that just because a player defends adequately (or close to it) on the flop that you need to give up attacking them later. Indeed, it's a much bigger mistake to defend on the flop and give up too much later because you turn your opponent's flop bluffs into de facto value bets (in the same way that calling preflop raises and folding too much on the flop is worse than just limp-folding too often).

I'd echo V's and Commando's comments.

I'm interested in how you plan to data mine at the casino? Almost all of the hands will have incomplete information (in hands that go to showdown you'll often only see the winning one tabled, and obviously a bunch of hands don't go to showdown so you have zero clue what people are playing), plus it's going to be quite a task to jot down every single HH / villain / etc., plus the sample size in the end will be so small that it will be fairly meaningless. No?

For example, at about the 2000 hour or so mark I lamented that I hadn't been keeping track of every single hand I played, so that I'd at least have some evidence as to whether playing it was profitable. I thought to myself, is playing 55 UTG in a 10 handed game really profitable? Geez, if only I had kept track of playing 55 UTG during my 2000 hours, surely I would know! But then I quickly did the math and realized that I probably would have flopped a set of 55 UTG about 4 times in those 2000 hours, therefore my whole conclusion of whether playing 55 UTG was profitable would be based on lol 4 results. Did I get coolered in one of those 4 hands? Did I get paid off in any of those 4 hands? Results would very drastically depending on what happened in just 4 hands.

GgoodluckG

6 months of playing, Harrington follower at the time, since tournmant players at casino were soft and made mistakes tag style was effective and once I was very comfortable w/ Harrington, I cashed in 4/6 tournaments I played in March, including a win in sattelite for big tournament. However, when I decided to move to cash tables, everyone plays tag/nitty so ROI on that style went to 0 and all profits that I made 1k went to coolers at the table. When I went busto, I read a lot including 4 cash game specific books (Ed Miller: Prof. NLH, how to read hands, playing the player, and The Course, & James "splitsuit" Sweeney Dynamic Full Ring Poker book.)

I'm confused, what sort of experience do you have playing NL cash games? It's unrealistic to think that you can just beat NL cash games with zero experience. Take the 4-5k and invest it, poker isn't as simple as you are making it. You can read all the books in the world but it doesn't mean you can beat live NL.

I don't think OP needs to worry about playing an unexploitable style here.

OP: $2k-$3k would be a sufficient roll if you had a reasonable expectation to win at 6-10bb/hour or so. You don't have the history to support a w/r like that, but it is certainly achievable. Continue studying when you start playing, stay hungry to improve. There is still money in poker as a side hustle, but its not EZ.

GL

Subbing. (? Is this going to be an ongoing log)

Putting $200 onto Bovada and 4 tabling 6max $5NL would make more sense. A lot more data that you could analyze. (I think 300 hands/hr instead of 30ish, and you'd have all the data and software that already exists for analysis.)

No, but his opponents do, because OP is planning to try to exploit them. The way I was using "you" here is needlessly confusing, but I'm saying that if your hypothetical 1/2 villain wants to play 40% of his preflop hands, he needs to be planning to pay off three streets with about 14% of his preflop hands or else he's offering us a profitable bluffing spot somewhere in the hand. In practice, I would expect substantially all villains to call three barrels with many fewer hands than that, so there should be very good bluffing spots in there. If he's not playing the flop fit-or-fold, then those bluffing spots are on the turn or the river and are likely to be even more profitable.

<Mod edit: Leveling is not allowed ITT, even when you'r pretty sure folks will know it's sarcasm.>

Grunch.

The main thing that I think you need to reconsider here is that if you are organizing a poker class for beating 1/2, and it's main focus is optimal bluffing spots and exploiting nitty table conditions, you're doing it wrong. The focus of the class should be value betting and exploiting the bottom 30% of the players in the player pool.

This. If you havn't read it yet this should be your number one priority (I think it should be every NL players #1 priority).

I also recommend Professional No-Limit HoldEm if you havn't read it yet. Take extensive notes on both while reading, then go play 50-100 hours, then reread/note on them again.

Read Limon's well, it has a ton of great gems on live games. Also Jared Tendler's mental game of poker.

Take notes on all of these and make your focus continuing to learn as you play. I have a google drive link on the front page of my phone that goes to a folder called "poker". In it I have a doc called "Theory Notes" a doc called "Player Notes" and a doc called "Hand Histories" (as well as excel spreadsheet/form for updating all stats at end of every session). The theory notes has all my notes from the books I've read and I read through it sometimes as I play and make connections to what is going on in the game. The "player notes" section I constantly update with player tendencies, it makes me stay focused and cements stronger reads. The "hand histories" is used to write down questionable/interesting hands that occur during a session to review later (could post on here if wanted).

Anyway my point is read the right things (books and people), and take good notes.

ok here u go

you are trying to run a sub 4 minute mile b4 you even know how to crawl. I promise you you will fail. In fact I am willing to wager $ on it.

learn how to beat the game and prove it
then start adding more sophisticated plays

I know you are a smart guy studied 300 hrs away from the table blah blah blah. I have seen countless dudes that are a ton smarter than I am fail over the years due to FPS etc. In the world of the gambool thee is NO substitute for experience.

I was heavily involved in extreme sports in my athletic days and we had a motto - never change more than 1 variable or you can be in for a world of hurt. One is controllable - but more than one and the issues become compounded and life or death stuff starts to happen

You have no proven track record and are talking about floating flops and overbet bluffing rivers etc...Do you see the similarities of the two things I am comparing??

this is a plan that is doomed