The Bankroll Rule I Broke Once and Never Again

The night I nearly broke my own rule, after four years of not doing it, was a Tuesday. I sat down at NL100 with eleven buy-ins in the account — nineteen short of my own published floor, and I sat anyway, and by midnight I was down to four. That's the number that used to make me reach for my card, top up, and keep going. This time I closed the laptop instead, and I want to explain why that four-buy-in mark matters more than almost anything else I do at the table. (see Kelly criterion).

Poker bankroll management isn't a strategy topic, not really. It's a set of rules you write down when you're calm so you have something to obey when you're not.

Where the Line Actually Sits

I run a 30 buy-in floor for full ring cash games and 40 for six-max, because six-max variance runs hotter and I've felt that the hard way. Those numbers aren't sacred text — they're just the ones that survived contact with my own tilt. Below the floor I drop a stake, no negotiating with myself about a "sure thing" table read.

Furthermore, I keep a rule that no single session buy-in exceeds 5% of total bankroll, which is what turned that Tuesday four-buy-in moment into a stop-loss instead of a chase. I use a simple poker bankroll tracker, a spreadsheet with three columns: date, net result, and running total. It's not clever. It's just honest, and honesty is the entire point of online poker bankroll management once you strip the theory away.

None of this stops variance from happening. What it does is stop variance from deciding whether I still have a bankroll tomorrow. Those are different problems, and mixing them up is, in my opinion, the single most common way a decent player goes broke before their results catch up to their skill.

The Rebuild, Which I Do Not Enjoy Talking About

I broke this rule once, properly, back when I still believed discipline was something you had rather than something you practiced daily. I moved up two stakes off one good week, treated a small sample like proof, and lost eight buy-ins in eleven days. The rebuild took four months of smaller stakes, boring sessions, and a lot of staring at a spreadsheet that wasn't growing fast enough for my ego.

What I'd do differently: nothing about the strategy, honestly — the rebuild itself was correct. I just wish I hadn't needed it. If you're weighing when to actually move up in stakes after a good stretch, I wrote the fuller version of that decision, buy-in counts and all, over in my stakes-jump piece — that's a separate rule set from the one here.

Why Buy-In Counts Vary by Game

A poker bankroll rules chart that says "20 buy-ins for everything" is lying to you a little. Tournament variance and cash game variance aren't the same animal, and a bankroll built for one will get shredded by the other. For online poker bankroll management specifically, I run tighter numbers than most live-only players because online volume multiplies variance faster — you can see four months of live sessions in one online weekend. (see National Council on Problem Gambling).

That's worth sitting with for a second: more hands means the bad stretches show up sooner, and colder, than you expect. I don't think that makes online tougher than live, exactly. It just means the same poker bankroll rules need a bigger buffer to absorb the same amount of luck, packed into far less calendar time.

What Withdrawal Habits Do to the Number

I withdraw a fixed percentage of any month where the bankroll grows past a set ceiling, which keeps the account from ballooning into "house money" territory where I start playing looser without noticing. This is a habit, not a strategy, and it matters more than most starting-hand charts I ever studied.

In my experience, the players who go broke aren't usually the ones who play badly — they're the ones who never separated "poker money" from "everything I own." Isn't that the part nobody wants to hear? It's not the four-outer, it's the checking account.

A Table of the Numbers I Actually Use

There's a public version of this where I actually put a starting bankroll on the line and update it weekly for anyone to follow — that lives at the bankroll challenge log, separate from what I'm doing here. Below is the actual rule set, game by game, that I log against every week.

Is this the only way to run it? No. Is it the way that survived my own worst month? Yes, and that's the only endorsement I trust.

What I'd Do Differently

I'd have written the spreadsheet down in month one instead of month thirty-one. That's the whole lesson, and I still catch myself wanting to skip logging a session when it went badly, which tells you the habit isn't as automatic as I'd like to pretend.