Bankroll management: How I've been building mine

Sure, poker is gambling. But it’s a far cry from playing roulette or a slot machine. It’s a skill game. So my thing is, if I can’t have a regular expectation of winning, why on earth am I playing?
That notion led me to separate my poker bankroll from my personal finances waaaaay back when my game was in its formative stages in university. Even then, I wanted to make certain I was a winning player. The best way to do that, in my mind, was to keep all the poker winnings separate – squirreled away in a rubber band like Mike McD in Rounders. I worried that if I were to reach into my bank account to pay for every tournament I wished to enter, I would likely lose track of things, and my hobby could end up being a slow drain on my finances without proper oversight.
THE BEGINNING
My initial investment was a $5 bill, slapped down on a table at the University of Regina’s School of Journalism during a friendly sit-n-go tournament one evening. I won, as I recall, or at the very least I cashed for a nominal sum.
I built up the roll playing $5 and $10 home-game tourneys with my buddies. When I made the leap to online play in 2005, I had enough for a $50 buy-in.
In those early days, I registered to a series of poker sites via a third-party website, with the goal of clearing bonuses to earn prizes. The way it worked was, if you deposited $50 and played a certain number of raked hands, you’d win a prize from the third-party promoter. That’s how I got my poker chip sets, and bunch of poker books and DVDs, my poker table-top, and even a 32-gig iPod.
As I was collecting prizes by putting in the time on each poker site, I was also padding my bankroll - $50 here, $150 there. I had the most success back in the day on Absolute Poker. I generally played limit cash games to clear the bonuses, but then as now, single-table sit-n-go’s were my bread and butter. It seems to me that back in 2005, there were a lot more donkeys at the virtual tables. At any rate, I ran my $50 up to $800 on Absolute, and I used that money to cover about 20 per cent of the cost of my wife’s engagement ring. I love that I can point to that ring and tell her that poker helped pay for it.
THE DOWNSWING
I do have one uber-tilt story from this period. I built up a nice bankroll at Mansion Poker, back when it was a relatively small site. I think I was at around $400 on that site when I decided to take a crack at the $2-$4 no-limit cash game and went on a heater. I was up to $2,000 at one point, and was thinking this could be a real nice secondary income for me.
I still remember the pivotal hand. Towards the end of a winning session, a new player sat down at our table. We were playing short-handed, and I was planning to play a couple more free hands before the big blind reached me and then pack it in for the night. I ended up playing a three-way pot holding AhTc. The flop was a glorious KQJ – but with two hearts. The new player and I checked the flop, the player on the button fired a big bet, and the newbie stunned me by check-raising all-in with the remainder of his $400 stack. I obviously called with the nuts . . . he showed 9h7h . . . a heart hit the turn . . . I had a redraw to the nut flush . . . and missed it.
I re-bought at that point, thinking I had a great shot at getting my money back from this donkey. He took another $400 from me, nearly halving my bankroll. That exchange set me off on mega-monkey-tilt, and I lost my entire Mansion roll. The blow was softened somewhat because my initial investment had only been $50, but I was still quite devastated. Since then, I’ve largely stuck to tournaments, with only an occasional cash game backslide.
THE UPSWING
A happier story was that of my biggest score to date. In 2008, a friend in the local poker community hooked me up with a free seat in a $220 super-satellite prior to an annual tournament series. The event drew 596 players, and paid out 30 prize packages worth $4,000 (entries into a $3,000 and a $1,000 tourney later in the week). I managed to run just good enough and play just well enough to finish in the money. Since I wasn’t able to stick around for the weekend tourneys, the casino was nice enough to pay me out in cash. I used that money to pay off my car, which had a couple more years’ worth of payments, and to finance my honeymoon. It’s a great memory, and I’ll try to track down the column I wrote at the time and post it to this blog.
SETTLING IN
Online, after more or less exhausting the third-party thing, I settled at PokerStars. A big part of the reason was, it was easy to deposit funds. Canadian banks were (and I believe they still are) leery about allowing VISA deposits to poker sites – I remember spending hours trying to find a loophole to get some cash on Ultimate Bet, which I’d heard had the best tourney structures.
PokerStars offered an e-cheque direct deposit option, which worked for me. Plus, the player base was huge, and the sit-n-go structures were better than what Full Tilt and Party Poker had to offer.
I mainly played $5 and $10 single-table SNGs on Stars for a couple years with great success, before finally nutting up a year and a half ago and moving up in stakes. If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you know that my bankroll ballooned from $500 to $6,000 at that point.
This is the first time I’ve managed to build up my bankroll to a reasonable level without spending it. According to sharkscope.com, my total profit from tournaments on Stars is exactly $6,774 at the moment. Obviously I’ve spent a bit of it. But I’m focused on protecting it and investing it wisely.
I'm not raking in Ivey-like sums by any means, but all in all, poker is a fun and profitable hobby for me.