I dont understand how individual session swings like the one youre talking about are happening if youre only buying in that deep. Unless I'm misunderstanding what youre trying to say.

OK nm... i get it now (though you still appear to be playing pretty deep by the end of your session)

EG yesterday I was in session for $1250. Ended up cashing out $2350.

Got aces cracked, made a couple of moves vs. folks I thought would fold to big aggression, etc.

Then when I caught hands I got paid off.

I know it's a small sample size and all but ever since I started keeping track of my sessions I've been crushing it:

Scroll lower. Show us your w/l session breakdown.

The small rebuy average is just cause I like to top off if I lose a big pot early.

True. A big challenge of live poker (less acute online) is that to estimate your winrate accurately, you need such a big sample that you will have hopefully improved quite a bit over that time.

Sounds reasonable. By the way, conceptually your bad luck affects your observations, not your theoretical winrate. Or to put it in classic stats term, your choice of a random sample affects your sample mean, not your population mean.

Now you need a SD to estimate. To my shame, i don't know what a typical SD is. Maybe 50bb/hr ($100/hr) in $1-2?

I like this calculator at evplusplus. I use "100 hands" to mean per hour even though obviously you could estimate based on 30 hands/hour if you want. It suggests you can attain a 1% ROR on 11.5 standard buy-ins, which seems low. At 75 bb/hr SD you need 26 BIs.

I'm actually tracking my results each hour to get a meaningful SD. I'd also encourage you to use random.org to simulate 1000 hours, then calculate cumulative totals in a spreadsheet. It's not weird at all to be stuck after 100 or 200 hours.

Looking at my HEM stats my SD (standard deviation I assume) is 120. So with my BR at 5k my risk of ruin is 17% assuming a $10/hr win rate.

To get to 1% ror i'd have to be at like $1300 BR

Without additional info i'd take that to be bb/hr. Therefore, for live poker you need to get the denominator into the same unit. (You may have already done this.) Assuming 33.3 hands / hr (a little on the high side), your $10/hr is 15 bb/100 hands. At 120 bb/hr SD and 25 BI i get 54% RoR.

If instead i do it in $ and hours (taking a "BB" to be $1 and "100 hands" to mean an hour), SD of $80/hour, i get 0.0000164% RoR but i'm sure that's wrong because the SD isn't linear.

My understanding of how to use the calculator is clearly very flawed because changing units, even with my false SD assumption, shouldn't change the RoR that much.

36 HOURS IS NOTHING IN LIVE POKER. THATS NOT EVEN 1k HANDS.

+1 for having Poker Journal though. Such a sick APP

I don't understand ROR. Is that over X# of hands? 10 years? Infinity?

A 1% ROR over 30 years is OK. But if it's 1% ROR per session, that means you bust every year if you play twice/week, lol.

I guess I should read the FAQs. I read some but wasn't looking for that.

It means you have a 1% chance of busting your roll without reloading. The other 99% of the time your roll will grow at your winrate and, thus, your ROR should become lower and lower over time.

Lol, OK thx. That makes sense. Seems obvious when you put it that way.

But if you take out winnings (for bills etc.) then you have 1% ror each time you "reset" I guess.

for standard deviation, the units are the same and there is no denominator. Its kind of counter intuitive because SD is not a fraction like, for example, winrate is. Its just written the same way as a fraction is, which makes people think it is one. Its technically kind of wrong to say "The SD is 80bb per 100 hands".. ppl just say it that way because its generally written that way. it should really be "The SD for groups of 100 hands is 80bb"

To convert the period (which is what youre doing) you take the new period/orig period =X. You multiply the dollar amount part times the square root of x.

So to convert 120bb/100 into $ per hour, first you convert to $ 120bb/100=240$/100.

then you devide the new period by the old period 33.3/100 =.333

then you take the square root of that =.577

then you multiply that by the orig $ amount $240*.577= 138.48

so a standard deviation of $240/100 hands is about $138.48/hour

Its good to have a general rule about liberating money from your roll. Something like "when my roll grows by $x, i will take y% of x out to spend"

Say we start with a bankroll of $5000. We have a RoR of 1%. So imagine we're starting a graph. The first point is +5000 and we track our bankroll from there.

What does this mean? That assuming we take no money out of our roll, and put no money in, there is a 1% chance that our graph will pass through zero.

That 1% includes the possibility of you busting the roll in your very first session. It also includes the possibility of running it up to $10K then going on a -10k downswing and busting it that way.

So yeah, if it was 1% at 5K when you start, provided your sd and wr don't change, its still going to be 1% if you run it up to 10K then take 5K out for hookers and blow.
Its interesting to note though that our real ror is actually higher than this 1% because when we win we're going to be taking money out of our roll. WHich is to say, the 1% ror we calculated says that 99% of the time, we are not going to pass through zero. But that 99% includes occassions where we're going to run our roll up to 15K then go on a $12k downswing.

Oh, I know. I just couldn't help but be happy at how well I started off. To give some balance to it I dropped 500 this weekend so that was that.

I have been playing professionally for the past 2 years. Up until 4/15/11, I played 99% of the time online. I have kept pretty nitty bankroll requirements since I went pro. Always keeping my poker bankroll and personal finances seperate.

At my local casino, 1-3NL is the main game and by far the most profitable. Many regulars are making $30 plus per hour. I have a small live sample to pull from, but I think $25-$30 per hour is realistic. I plan on moving up to 2-5 by the end of the summer, playing mainly during peak times only when the games and right. On to my questions....

How large of a poker bankroll should I have for 1-3NL? How many buy ins? I buy in for $300 max. I have always kept anywhere from 40-100 buy ins for each limit online. I think this is way to much for live poker. Just not sure what the right number is.

In my personal finances, how many months worth of expenses should I keep? I have been keeping anywhere from 3-6 months since I went pro. (Also keep in mind, my wife has a stable job)

Thanks

Johnny

4500-6k should be enough for a 1-3 (300 max buyin) game.

I'm admitedly a BR nit so I'd say 10k min for a $300 buyin game. The rake is usually brutal in those games so that may warrant a quicker move up on a thinner BR.

10k overrolllled for easy live games. if you dont feel comfortable beating the game on 3k then you shouldnt be playing

It's not that I don't feel comfortable with $3k poker bankroll being able to beat the game. It's the variance and swings of the game that make that too small of a bankroll for even the best player in that particular game.

I would rather be overrolled and try to thought of the money in play out of question.

I am thinking somewhere between 20 Buy Ins or $6k minimum roll to around 40BIs and a $12k max roll.

On top of this, what do you guys think I should have saved up in a seperate personal finances account? 3 months living expenses, 6 months?

Thanks

Johnny

yea this. 3k is enough unless you are just starting to play.

20 buy ins is the law i go by, never risking more than 5%. But like others said, you could comfortably beat it with less. You'd have to run like absolute ****e against the field of 1/2(1/3) and 2/5 players to go bust.

I don't know why people are saying 3k is enough. You could easily lose 2 BIs in a session running bad and then spew a little more from tilt. So if you can handle losing 20-30% of your BR in a single session then by all means go for it and may the run good be with you.

Theres some risk at $3000 but not sure what kind of money you want to contribute to your household if any. I personally prefer the $4500-$6000 range but your bankroll may also be replenishable from your wifes job. Either way good luck but I feel the extra roll is well worth the piece of mind.

4k-5k is minimal but sufficient and I would start taking shots at 2/5 when its juicy at 12k.

3k I think is not enough with just 10 full buyins thats certainly treading water. I mean how would you feel on a night you lose 3 buyins? Yeah... not good

I would think having 6 months of seperate savings account will be much more comfortable. If you are playing a high variance style where you are taking marginal adv and playing lag you really need 6 months

I play 1/2 now and am trying to grow my roll from a meager 1k that I started with and I am just over 2k, and I still feel uber uncomfortable and have been folding in marginal +ev spots because of it. It has hurt my overall profit IMO.