A New Rule for Bankroll Considerations

I've had a bad time with limit HE on Pacific Poker. As I mentioned the middle of last week, I'd run up a $300 investment to near $1500. I'm back to that $300 after a week of play.

The pattern is a bit too familiar. I build a bankroll by a good run of cards (on Pacific, this usually means "avoiding having the crazy draw you never expected come and get you", as much like the Bay 101 games in San Jose, the players on Pacific love to play two random cards, hit two pair and go nuts. Or, they'll just hold out for that second pair, or that set, and see the river, hoping. If you get these people to pay off the best hand for a bunch of bets trying, you're doing well. But, when they catch, it's bad news.

So, once I'd built this modest bankroll of $1500 at $5/$10, I slapped down $600 at the $10/$20, which is almost as loose. I lost that in a matter of an evening, because the cards turned. I've reanalyzed the hands carefully, and there are places I could have saved a bet or two, but that accounts for about $80 of the $600. (I posted about one of the more marginal situations I played.)

After losing the $600, I dropped back to $5/$10, and more of the same ate the rest.

My thought here returns to something Steven suggested, which is that I am playing on just too short a bankroll on Pacific. The games are very high variance, and I have to account for that, along with the fact that I loathe to rebuy onto an online site. Of course, I have plenty of bankroll sitting in bank accounts, but the idea of having to "give money back" to the online site bothers me, even if I'm still thousands of dollars up from that site. Therefore, I think I've come a New Year's Resolution:

Once I've finished the tally of my end-of-year bankroll, I am going to keep closer tabs. (Often, I take my session log in short hand, which needs later conversion into my double-entry accounting system, GnuCash.) I'm going to always know, at my fingertips, my overall bankroll level. When I reach the level of 400 BB's for a particular limit game, I will always be willing to play at that level if the game seems good. In those situations, I will only drop down in limits if it seems the lower limit game is more profitable, not because of the balance level on a particular online site. The only thing that will force me to drop limits is if the overall bankroll falls to 300 BB's in the next typical limit down. However, once I again reach 300 BB's in the higher limit, I will be immediately willing to move up again, if I've played at that particular limit before.

In other words, I'll need 400 BBs handy to move up to a limit I've never tried, but 300 BBs to move back to a limit I have been successful at previously. And, I do the levels over the whole bankroll, not against a particular sites balance (which has been my real problem). I think this way, I won't do what Steven once suggested was my biggest problem: I allowed the card-luck to decide what limit I play, and thus fail to give myself enough opportunity to get lucky at the higher limits. Having analyzed my play and bankroll fluctuations carefully, I suspect he might be correct. Here goes.