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I\’ve lost my bankroll a few times, learning some hard lessons in the process. God knows I\’ve questioned my own abilities and the validity of online poker numerous times. Loosing one\’s bankroll can happen to the best of poker players, below I will give you what I believe to be the most common reasons as to why this happens.

Going On Tilt

\”Tilt\” as a term in poker I believe originated from another game: pinball. Playing a pinball machine, if you shook the machine hard enough it would go on \”tilt\” whereas the game would go dead for the current round of play and you\’d loose your ball. In poker \”tilt\” refers to any time a player let\’s their emotions get the better of them thus causing them to make unsound decisions. Players go on tilt for a variety of reasons, usually it happens after they\’ve suffered a substantial loss during one or more poker hands. They get angry or frustrated or apathetic about their own play or the play of another person at the poker table. They begin to play hands they shouldn\’t, betting more than they should, trying to get some luck. Essentially playing the reverse of good sound strategy.

Being on tilt has a snowball effect whereas the more a player looses, the more they tilt, the more they loose. It takes a lot of strength to get back on track once one has tilted. More often than not players only end their tilt when they have depleted their chip stack. I\’ve pissed away a lot of chips after going on tilt. I\’ve had to learn to just step away from the computer, stop playing for a few hours, maybe a few days, however long it takes for me to get my head back together. Remember poker is about minimizing your mistakes and exploiting the mistakes of others. By playing on tilt you are basically setting yourself up to be robbed blind.

Poor Bankroll Management

Bankroll management is all about playing within your means or more specifically playing in amounts you can afford to loose. You can find plenty of BRM articles on the web that will suggest what amount of your total bankroll you should be playing with at any one time. A good example is to have at least 200-300x the big bets you want to play at. So if you want to play a .50-1.00 NL game that means your bankroll should be about $200-$300. That way you can withstand the occasional downswing and your overall bankroll will not be in too much jeopardy.

Fact is, and it took me awhile to learn this, no matter how good a poker player you are you will go through periods where you just can\’t win. Bad cards, bad beats, suck outs, being bluffed out of pots, cheats, you name it it can and will happen to you playing poker. It\’ll happen to you in strings of hands that will drive you to tilt. You have to be able to withstand those losses and continue playing at the level your at.

I lost my bankroll the second time purely by playing at limits I could not sustain. Even though I was a good enough poker player to play $5 SnGs ( I once won 3 in a row) I couldn\’t afford to loose that buy-in amount repeatedly on a downswing. Factor in tilt and my bankroll evaporated within two days after spending over a week building it up. The allure of making that much more money if you win at a higher level is not worth the price you\’ll pay if you don\’t.

Playing For Luck

Yes you just might hit the right card on the river to make your gut-shot straight draw pay off huge. Chances are you wont, so don\’t push half your stack in. Doesn\’t matter if you\’ve seen others do it, doesn\’t matter how many times you or someone else at your table has gotten lucky, the minute you play for luck is the minute you start losing at poker. Even if you\’ve enjoyed long strings of luck in the past, luck in itself is not something you can control and therefore nothing worth basing your game strategy on. Bad players love to get lucky because they lack the skills to actually play the game strategically. That is why they are always going all-in to produce coin flip situations. Though I don\’t play for luck I have on past occasion done so, usually when I\’m on tilt. Trust me, it doesn\’t pay off in the long run. The whole reason your playing poker in the first place should be because it\’s not a mere game of chance. Not that there isn\’t a factor of chance and/or luck in poker, just consider it some extra icing on the cake whereas the cake is your formidable skills at the game.

That\’s about it.  Of course you can loose your bankroll just by being an overall bad player. Hopefully you\’ve taken at least some time to learn the game\’s finer points and not just play 7-4(o) because you saw Gus Hansen do it on TV. Also there is a chance that…ONLINE POKER IS RIGGED! Hah hah, well not really…Or maybe…Sounds like my next topic.

 

I have to admit I am not an aggressive person by nature. I\’m a Beta Male who\’s had to learn to be more Alpha in order to move forward. In this respect poker is not that much different from life, where if you let people push you around they\’ll just keep pushing to your continued detriment. Most professional poker players will tell you that the ideal way to play poker is somewhere between tight-aggressive and loose-aggressive and I have to agree. However too much aggression can burn through your bankroll pretty fast. Players will eventually seek out ways to shut down your aggression by calling your bluffs and/or coming over the top of you when they feel they have the best hand.

I believe selective aggression is the best strategy. This depends on how good a read you have on other players. For example if you know a player is weak-tight and you feel that they missed the flop you can bet out strong to scare them away even if you missed the flop too. Another example is a playing against a loose-aggressive when you have a very strong (preferably the nut) hand. You can call them down feigning weakness and reraise them on the river to hopefully scoop up a large pot. When someone checks the flop they are doing either one of two things: seeking more cards to make their hand worth playing or setting a trap to draw more money into the pot because they believe they have the winning hand. When someone bets the flop they are either making a continuation bet to show strength (even if they don\’t have it), making a value bet to see if anyone else hit the flop, trying to scare other players off the hand or trying to feed the pot. When someone reraises you on the flop they are trying to show you that they believe they have your hand (or possible hand) beat, trying to call what they believe to be a bluff on your part or trying to bluff themselves. It\’s up to you to figure out what your opponents are up to.

Important too, especially in tournaments, is the ability to switch gears. Playing from super tight to full out aggression and back and forth. This keeps your opponents from getting a good read on you. This strategy is of course done within reason as you have to pick and choose the opportune moments to switch gears else you end up wasting valuable chips.

Certainly don\’t be weak. Don\’t let other players steal your chips by folding your hand every time they make a significant bet into you. Good poker players smell fear and weakness and will pounce on it like a grizzly bear on weekend campers. Even if you loose some hands by standing up for yourself you\’ll gain the advantage of letting other players know you are not a complete pushover to be toyed with.

I had often thought that the ability to \”get a good read\” on your fellow players at a poker table was a skill reserved to the select few Jedi masters like John Juanda. However I now believe it\’s a skill anyone can learn if they make the effort. Of course some are going to be better at it than others, but even a basic ability to read your opponents is enough to raise you above many amateur players. By \”reading your opponent\” I am of course talking about having an idea as to what kind of cards your opponents play across various positions at the poker table. For example you\’ve noticed that a particular player only bets out if they have a \”top ten\” hand or that another player will play A-x at any position. This is valuable information that can make you, or at least save you, a lot of money. It\’s particularly difficult to do for online poker as you rarely get the time you\’d like to get a good read on someone. But I feel confident in saying that at least at micro limits not enough players make any effort to figure out how other players play their cards and loose a lot of money to those who do. Mind you I am by no means anywhere near being an expert reader myself. I think it\’s a skill honed after many, many years of playing poker.
Call me an apprentice.

On the flip side you have to be aware of your own table image, how others perceive you. For example if you play consistently tight chances are when you bet out preflop with your K-K everyone will fold (well…except for that guy playing A-A, DOH!). Which means that you will not be getting max value for your strong hands, but then again you can always steal some pots if you think other players are fearing your hands. At the championship level of poker many players like Gus Hansen play almost any two cards with aggression making them near impossible to read, but that is a whole other level of play than your online .5-.10 NLHE game. All in all it\’s about being aware of your opponents play and also being aware of how your opponents perceive your play.

During the time I made my initial $20 deposit into $100 playing online poker I slowly but surely started to get a feel for other players and had a rough idea of what to look out for. I still don\’t do it enough, with my bad habit of playing a table and watching PokerTube at the same time, but I\’m trying to pay more and more attention each day.

Aside from the goal of 5X my initial deposit I saw my return to online poker as an opportunity to really learn more about the game, it\’s strategies and putting said strategies to good use.

The Power of Position

Playing the right cards in the right position has really been key to my success. Which means, for example,  I\’ll consider playing a Q-10(s) in late position if I can see the flop relatively cheap but in early to mid position I\’ll fold it. I dare say at times I\’ve played tables while watching TV or surfing the internet (not really paying attention to my opponents betting patterns) and made money simply by avoiding playing certain hands in certain positions. I\’m sure you\’ll find plenty of poker books that will outline for you what hands you should play and should not play in early, middle, and late position. A basic guideline can be found on the PartyPoker website here:

Preflop and Position Hand Strategy

Note that what action (or lack thereof) has come before you in the betting rounds can alter whether or not you should play or continue playing a particular hand in a particular position. You have K-10(s) in middle position with a big raise and a couple of calls before you, I\’d consider folding.

Now if you play good hands in the right position and also know roughly what kind of hands your opponents are capable of playing in their respective position well…You\’re on your way to being a good poker player.

A Fish in a Very Big Pond

With the popularity of poker exploding skywards after ever day accountant Chris Moneymaker went from a $40 satellite tournament to $2.5 million and a WSOP championship bracelet I like many others found myself playing online poker trying to weave my own rags to riches dream. I picked up a few poker books (Idiots Guide To Poker and Phil Hellmuth\’s Play Poker like the Pros), deposited $20 onto PartyPoker.com and started playing micro LHE. It didn\’t take long for me to loose my $20 stake. Thus began a couple of months of me rising and inevitably falling through the floor of many an online poker room. Every time I thought I had finally got a handle on the game and was on my way to being a big winner in poker I\’d sudden come crashing down like a duck full of birdshot. So I quit, deciding then that I just didn\’t have the ability to be among the game\’s constant winners.

Never Say Never

In recent times working my dead-end night job as a bartender I had the chance to overhear numerous poker related conversations from fellow employees who played the game successfully (by their account) online. I found myself inspired to try my hand at the game once again. After all I didn\’t need to be a Daniel Negraneau in order to be a successful poker player, I was sure that there were tens of thousands of mediocre poker players in the world making decent money at the game. I didn\’t have to be one of the greatest, just good enough to win consistently over time. I told myself that if I really applied myself to learning the game I could be a winner not a loser at poker.

 20 Bucks and Away We Go!

I found a poker site that I never joined before and could sign up for a 100% deposit bonus. I deposited $20 and started playing micro NLHE. I knew a little more about the game and it\’s various strategies this time around and so for the initial few days of my return to playing poker online I did well. Yay! I can win at poker! Then, like a curse I found myself suddenly losing again at an exponential rate. It was just like before: winning just enough to come crashing down hard. I was down to the last $4 of my deposit when I put on the brakes and decided to really analyze my play. I scoured through numerous poker books, read forum posts off of various poker websites, all in trying to gather the information I needed to improve my play. I began to learn just how many leaks my game had, and boy I had a lot!

Doing it Right on the Wrong Side of Town

Stopped playing garbage hands out of position, stopped believing that everyone was just trying to bluff me out of a pot, learned to mentally note what kind of hands people at the table generally played (PotStealer1226 A-x to the river, well OK then), stopped slow playing good hands, etc. Next you know my bankroll was climbing fast. Within days I had tripled my initial deposit! Not to say that I didn\’t still play poorly at times, but I did play good poker consistently over time.



The $100 Goal

My deposit bonus was $20. My goal was to make $80 or more by the time I had enough points to get my bonus. This was at .5-.10NLHE cash tables exclusively and that meant playing a lot of hands. Around the time I had hit the $70 mark in my bankroll I decided to try my hand at Sit-n-Gos. Which lead me to take some pretty drastic swings both in the + and in the -. I worked on my strategy and began playing a number of Double or Nothing SNGs which lead me right up to $80 total in my bankroll. With only about 25 points more needed to claim my bonus I split my time between cash tables and Double or Nothing SNGs.


Huston, We Got a Problem

Two bad beats on the bubble in a couple of Double or Nothin SNGs and I was steaming like a kettle. I\’m sure my downstairs neighbors could hear the long string of expletives I let loose after watching my chip stack disappear to some garbage hand played to the river (Hero: A-Ks, Villain: K-2o, Flop: 7K10, Turn: J, River: 2). I went on tilt and ended up losing two more SNGs and bottomed out at a cash table to boot. I made my $20 bonus but was down $35! Again those feelings of being cursed swept through my mind. I turned off the computer and decided to go out for a walk to calm down.



Carry On Wayward Son

I returned after a couple of hours having cooled off and back in control of my thoughts. Started up the poker software and logged in determined to make back some of my earlier losses. I knew that I didn\’t get as far as I did without knowing how to play the game with some success. I headed back to the cash tables and ended off the day back up to a total of $80 in my bankroll. The following day I decided to try my hand again at those Double or Nothing SNGs. Well, I managed to hit the money five times in a row! That along with some earnings from a few cash tables and I accomplished my goal of making $100 from my initial deposit of $20. I sit now with a total of 104.57 in my bankroll and ready to head towards my next goal of $250.

More insights into the ups and downs of my climb from $20 to $100 to come.