Bankroll Management
In order to be successful when playing poker, one must be sure to employ proper bankroll management. Your bankroll is the money you have set aside with which to play poker. If you have a certain amount of money you can add to your bankroll from your income each month, great, you may do so if necessary, but set a specific number that you can afford to lose every month and never go over that amount. Use your poker bankroll wisely when playing.
The mistake all too many gamblers make is to take any money they have to play with, and put it all in play. If you’re doing this, you have probably already found that you will often lose most or all of that money every month. Learning to manage your bankroll properly will help to prolong the money you can play with, and may very well even lead to success in the long run. One of the key components of proper bankroll management is knowing when to leave a table. The longer you sit at a table, the better your chances of falling into a losing streak.
When you sit down at a table, you should have some idea of how much you are willing to lose, as well as how long you intend to sit at that table. Players will often find themselves stuck at a poker table, seemingly unable to get up and walk away. This is in fact why you don’t see any clocks on the walls in the poker room in any casino. In ring games, the house makes its money from the rake, rather than from lost bets. So every time you place a bet, the house makes more money because a certain percentage of the pot goes toward the rake with every hand. The longer each player sits at a table, the more money the house makes. It’s just that simple. So set yourself a time limit and have the discipline to walk away when the time comes.
It may not sound like it, but this is indeed a form of bankroll management. Even if you find yourself on a table full of fish, you might want to extend your time on the table, and it may very well earn you even more money than you’ve already won. Or you could fall into a losing streak and not only lose your winnings, but lose your original stack as well due to dumb luck. It is a horrible feeling to experience this situation. One that every poker player is bound to experience at some point, but if you can manage to stick to your time limit, and even to have the discipline to walk away from a table before that time limit is up if you find yourself up by a certain percentage, you can avoid this unfortunate situation more often.
You will almost never notice when you have made the right choice to walk away while you’re still ahead. The question of how much more you COULD have won had you stayed will loom in the back of your mind. However, you will ALWAYS feel the sting of losing what you had already won because you didn’t walk away. I promise you, the nagging feeling of wondering what you could have won is much more pleasant that the disappointment of knowing what you won, then lost because of your own lack of discipline.