Bankroll Management

For this stage in your poker development, it is going to be extra important to play within your bankroll because if you lose money playing higher stakes you can’t move down stakes to rebuild.  This does not mean playing higher stakes when you have lost money and are chasing losses. Using this strategy will result in frequently moving up and down stakes because losing ten buyins is part the standard variance of poker, even for a winning player.

You can learn more about bankroll management here, if you are interested in the math behind picking a bankroll size.

Tilt

Tilt is defined by Wikipedia as “a poker term for a state of mental or emotional confusion or frustration in which a player adopts a less than optimal strategy, usually resulting in the player becoming over-aggressive. This term is closely associated with steam and some consider the terms equivalent, but ‘steam’ typically carries more anger and intensity.”

This is the enemy of all poker players. There is no cure I can offer you. In my experience the only immediate cure for tilt is to take a break and stop playing. Being able to quit at any time is yet another reason why I prefer cash games. As you play more and adjust to dealing with large financial swings less stimuli will put you on tilt.

Educating yourself on the mental aspects of poker can also help you understand that understand that much of poker is out of your control and that as long as you are making the best play that it doesn’t matter what your opponent does or what cards come out. I learned a lot about this from Tommy Angelo’s book, The Elements of Poker. He also has a good video series at DeucesCracked. Everything else I learned came from reading poker forums and the experience that comes with playing millions of hands over several years. You can also browse through my blog posts from the mental game category.

Impatience

Learning a new skill takes time, especially when that is zero-sum game for significant sums of money. Don’t give up. This will be the reason 90% of people fail. If you don’t give up you can’t fail. You may not make it very far up in the ranks of the poker world, but there should be no way you can’t get to a point where you are making per hour than most workers with real jobs. It helps to have self-taught something in the past. I was a world class Scrabble player before getting into poker. Beyond the fact that poker and Scrabble are strategy games of mixed skill and luck, the fact that I had taught myself how to become an expert at something without a coach, mentor or class was invaluable when doing the same things in poker. Playing several thousand games of online Scrabble is not unlike grinding out 100,000 hands in a month. It can be repetitive when all the variables are the same, aggravating when the losing seems like it will never end and depressing when you realize that it is 4 in the morning and all you’ve done since you woke up is play. Sometimes, that’s just the way to the top.

Good luck at the tables! Add this page to your favorites, so you can come back for my next installment. What you have learned so far is enough to start grinding the microstakes.  My future steps will discuss when to move up, bonus whoring and other topics that you don’t need to know just yet.

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