I thought there was a dedicated subforum for bankroll management but couldn’t find it.

I’ve just made the decision to quit my (stressful!) full-time job and replace it with a (stress-free!) part-time job, but to supplement the income with poker winnings.

I play Hold’em with blinds of $1-$2 but with a “spread-limit” of $2-$100: the most you can raise is $100 over the previous bet. (So if I bet $50 on the River, you can only raise to $150, and I can only reraise to $250, etc). Max buy-in is $300.

I want to get to a spot where I literally never have to worry about my cash “bankroll,” and every Friday I just put that week’s poker winnings into my family’s joint checking account. (Or, on weeks when I lose, the next week’s winnings will go to first replenish the cash bankroll and then the rest to checking.)

My two questions are:

Is this how most people do it? And,

If so, what should my starting cash bankroll be before I start depositing the money into the joint checking account be? I currently have $2100 in cash—my main concern is I never want to have to *withdraw* money from our joint account ever again.

Thanks.

No, why would most people do it like this? You just have some arbitrary mental block around taking cash out of the bank, and that mental block means you'll need more cash on hand.

The sort of roll you need to never withdraw really depends on your winrate in the game. If you're a solid winner, I think it would be very rare to lose more than 3k or so, and you'd need a monumentally bad run to lose 5k+ in a 1/2 spread limit game. If you're making $8 or $10 an hour (much smaller winrate), these sort of swings might happen. Regardless of your winrate, 1.5-2k swings are going to happen for sure.

I also think there's literally no reason you should avoid withdrawing money from your bank account if needed. This sort of attitude towards money and risk is not generally conducive to being a strong poker player. Sometimes in poker your number is gonna go down, there's no way around it.

Thanks for the response.

An issue I am facing is that my finances and my wife’s are intertwined. We have a “joint” account where we deposit our paychecks that we also use to pay the mortgage, groceries, daycare, etc, and I don’t want to have to withdraw any more money from that just for poker—I want to have enough cash on hand to just never have to worry about withdrawing again.

I *think* $3000 is enough? It’s what I’m up to now. The blinds are $1-$2 and Minnesota has a maximum raise size of $100…it limits the amount of your downswing! I’m gonna hope I’m good and start depositing the extra, and use $3000 as the baseline moving forward…I’ll see how it goes…

How are these connected...? You have a joint account so you can't withdraw money? What?

Sounds like maybe you should have a conversation with your wife about how poker works.

I tried this exact same thing playing online—I used to keep an amount that I assumed I’d never have to replenish from my bank account, and would only ever withdraw from.

I ended up, at one point, going on a big enough downswing that I had to do it anyway. (I have since erased it—but it was stressful!)

So don’t get hung up over this. What you might consider doing instead is what I do: keep an entirely separate bank account just for your bankroll money. That way once you put money in your joint account it never comes out, but you can just transfer money from your poker account to your joint account whenever you want. This, I think, accomplishes your (unstated) goal of never taking money out of your life roll for poker.