Note: This is an excerpt from the first part of the ‘$16 / Hour SNG Blueprint’ and is reproduced with permission. You can learn how to build your bankroll using SNG tournaments at SNG Planet by clicking here.
‘Poker Bankroll Management’ is kind of dull, we know it, you know it, everyone knows it… but get this, those who do not use it are very unlikely indeed to ever be consistent winners in poker. Yep, it is that simple, use it or eventually you lose.
The reason is ‘Variance’ which describes the natural swings in the game due to the chance fall of cards. We are not going into the chance vs skill debate in too much depth here. It should be enough to say that the result of one bubble ‘coin flip’ (for example a pair of Queens vs Ace-King’) can make the difference between being $50 down or $50 up at the end of a session of SNGs. Add to this runs of missing the flop and you can see that it would make little sense to have too much money riding on a small set of games.
Pro SNG players often ensure that they have 100+ buy-ins for the level they are playing at. While we are not going to be that strict, we do recommend starting with at least 20 buy-ins – and ensuring that you could replace this should variance deplete your cash. It seems impossible to many newer players for a ‘proven winner’ to hit a 30 or 50 SNG buy-in downswing – trust me, it is far more common than you think.
Return On Investment is known as ‘ROI’ and is how we measure our success in SNG tournaments. If you are playing the $5+50c games and have a 20% ROI then your profit is $1.10 per game. When you play many tables you give up some ROI in exchange for a bigger hourly rate.
While playing SNG tournaments to build up your bankroll, volume of games is key. The more games you play the faster you can build up the incremental profits which increase your ‘roll. There is a trade-off here though, as you play more games you lose out on ‘reads’ of some opponents, and also have less time to make good post flop decisions. What ends up happening is that you trade off between lower profits per game, and bigger overall winnings due to the larger number of tables.
Let us take a simple example we’ll make the game cost $10 for simplicity with a 20% return, and take 10% from the ROI for each table added to account for faster decisions, less reads on opponents and requirement to fold some marginally profitable hands to focus on other games, each game will take 40 minutes – so we get the hourly rate by multiplying the profit per game by 1.5
1 Table – $2 Per Game – 1.5 Games / Hour = $3 per hour
2 Tables – $1.80 Per Game – 3 Games / Hour = $5.40 per hour
3 Tables – $1.62 Per Game – 4.5 Games / Hour = $7.29 per hour
4 Tables – $1.46 Per Game – 6 Games / Hour = $8.76 per hour
5 Tables – $1.31 Per Game – 7.5 Games / Hour = $8.85 per hour
6 Tables – $1.18 Per Game – 9 Games / Hour = $10.61 per hour
7 Tables – $1.06 Per Game – 10.5 Games / Hour = $11.13 per hour
8 Tables – $0.95 Per Game – 12 Game / Hour = $11.40 per hour
Remember, this is just an illustration to explain the relationship between ROI and Multi-tabling. My personal belief is that the effect per table diminishes over time (once you have got used to 4 the jump to 6 and then 8 is actually comparatively small). We probably started too high with 20% too – though choose a soft site and play during the evenings and weekends and this might well be reasonable!
If you’re ready to use this bankroll management strategy for sit and go’s, check out this list of the best sit and go poker sites or read more about bankroll management.
Related Posts
- SNGs Introduction – Why SNGs Are Great For Building A Bankroll - July 13, 2010
- Who Will Win the WSOP Tournament of Champions? - July 2, 2010
- Three Girls Who are Actually Good at Poker - June 21, 2010
Written by Bill Nye on July 17th, 2010