So I've been playing poker recreational for the last few years. I haven't really kept money separate for poker because I usually can buy into a tournament if I really want to play it. Over the past few months I've been paying attention to my profits and I want to start building a bankroll. I have about $2000 to use for poker. The lowest MTT tournament around me is $40. Do you think it's enough to start grinding these tournaments. The next biggest buy in is $55. I planned on sticking with the $40 buy in until I have 100 buy ins at the next level. Does this seem reasonable?

You talking about live or internet games?

Internet games you'd have to be pretty confident to play with 50BI. You're basically gonna need to run hot, immediately. What happens if you drop 10 buy-ins and you're on $1600? You still playing $40 games? How big are the player fields in these $40-$55 games? Do you have any skill edge here?

$2k is a sexy little bankroll for anything up to $11s online I'd say, depends if you're looking to play seriously or the money really doesn't matter.

A good rule of thumb is NEVER buy in to a tournament with more than 1% of your bankroll.

TLDR: $2k isn't enough for $40 internet multi table tournaments.

It's for live games. I wouldn't be playing 40 dollar buy ins online because there are a lot more options. I'm limited to what I can play live. $40 is the minimum. Typically 40-60 players. I don't have my results tracked but I find myself at the final table pretty often. I feel I have an edge in these tournaments. I plan on investing more later, but in small increments. Anytime I have some extra cash I plan on buying in with money not included in my bankroll.

That's totally ok. If you play one 40$ mtt at a time it takes ages for you to go broke. Also that low player number gives you a super low variance compared to anything online.

If 40$ is the minimum there is nothing you can do anyway. 40$ live should be like 1-4$ online so I guess the edge is there too.

GL

start doing a spreadsheet to track your results!

Here's a trick to lower your variance even more. Buy your own action.

Say you start with 2000$. For this to work a cushion is good so maybe let's say you have 1500$ and 500$ as a cushion.

Now you play 40$ with 1500$. Lose first game, down to 1460$. Now you take 20$ out of the cushion and put it into the roll again to cover 50% of the losses.
now we play again with 1480$; win something and net 100$ (1580$ whole roll), now we take 50% of the winnings out. So 1480 roll+50 win = 1530$ roll + 50$ for your cushion. So instead of a 1460 to 1580 swing you will get a 1480 to 1530 swing in this example.