Bankroll Building Nicely

Profit over last 14 months.

So Andy was asking about the bankroll after I mentioned I had played the London Masters earlier in the month. So I had a little fiddle with Poker Tracker and came up with the picture you see above.

The total profit over 14 months is £5,189 or £350 a month, playing an average of 20 tournaments a month.

The graph really shows where my on-line game changed and my results improved and I have to say that was very much down to Poker Tracker.

There is a great 3 month stretch of just breaking even or even losing money. It was at that point that I looked at my results objectively in PT and realised that I needed to change my game. The problem? Too many low stakes games!

Looking at my results I could see that I was making money playing £10 and £20 STT and then blowing it on £1, £2, £5 and £10 MTT that generally had loads of entrants and were playing very loose. I was also haemorrhaging money on the late night £5 and £3 STT when I wanted a "quick fix".

So I resolved to only play higher (relatively that is) buy in games, so only £20+ MTT and£10+ STT. That gave me an instant result as the graph shows. Of course there were still problems. After a few more months I could see that I was still not making good profits on the STT, I was making a profit, but nothing like the MTT profits. So I have now stopped playing STT regularly and only play them for the "quick fix". Of course that is still losing me money so I have recently made the effort to not play for the sake of it.

If I am tired, distracted, ill, drunk or only playing because I am bored... then I no longer play. This has dramatically cut down on the number of games I play but not (so far) my profits. Discipline. This discipline does mean that I don't actually play as much as I would like to but it does give me longer between games to mull over what I did right and what I did wrong.

Live I dont get as much time again to play and similarly I have set out to play only higher buy in games diverting cash from the on-line roll over to the cash roll. At the moment I show as having winnings of around £2800 but once I take off the not so well recorded losses I estimate that to be a more realistic profit of around £800.

Of course I don't actually keep a running £5k bankroll! I have cashed a lot of it out to buy toys. :) Those kind internet benefactors have kitted me out with a 42" plasma HD TV a lovely Sonos multi room audio system and more practically (and to keep the wife happy) a new hoover.

Yes, I know, Get It Quietly.