Playing Real Money Poker with a Small Bankroll
You’ve finally made the leap – you’re playing poker for real money and trying to slowly build up a bankroll. There’s only one problem: your bankroll is tiny. Maybe you made a small deposit, or maybe you won a couple freerolls and are playing off of that money. Either way, you probably feel like you’re walking a tightrope.
But don’t worry – it’s perfectly possible to play with a very small bankroll and still be a successful real money poker player. It might take some time to grow your money before you’re ready for high stakes games, but it’s certainly possible to do it. In fact, many very successful professional players started with a small bankroll and never looked back.
There are two different ways of looking at your situation, depending on your future plans. Some players have no problem with this, and would be happy making another small deposit should they lose their current bankroll. Others will go to any lengths to avoid losing their bankroll, because they have no plans on ever depositing again. Which of these two categories you belong to will influence how you should treat your current bankroll.
If you’re okay with losing your bankroll and depositing money into your account again, you can afford to take more chances with your real money bankroll. This is because the amount of money in your online poker room account is a little misleading; your bankroll is somewhat larger, since you have money sitting in reserve, ready to be used for poker. This gives you the chance to play in promising looking tournaments and slightly larger games than your account balance would seem to suggest. This isn’t a license to go crazy, of course; chances are, your actual total bankroll still isn’t huge (or else you likely would have put more money in your account to begin with), and you won’t have enough money online at any given time to play in any high stakes cash games. However, the advantage to having money in reserve is the freedom to take shots in tournaments or somewhat larger cash games, hoping to have a good day and instantly building an online bankroll suitable for playing at higher stakes.
If you would prefer not to have to deposit again, you’ll have to treat your online poker room balance as the entirety of your bankroll, and use proper management guidelines for a bankroll of that size. In most poker rooms, if you only have a few dollars in your account, you may not be able to play even the lowest available limits while adhering to the guidelines set out on our bankroll management page. If this is the case, you have two options. You can always play more freerolls in an attempt to continuing building a safe bankroll for the lowest limit on your favorite site. You also have the option to try to play the lowest limit available on the site (or the room’s cheapest tournaments) in an attempt to start growing your bankroll right now. This makes the most sense if you have a somewhat reasonable bankroll for the room’s lowest limit; for instance, a very good limit hold’em player with 100 big blinds for a low limit game has a relatively small chance of going broke, though their risk of ruin is still much higher than when playing with a properly sized bankroll.
With a very small real money bankroll, your course of action should depend a lot on how much risk you’re willing to take, and whether or not you’re okay with depositing more money into your online poker account should you lose. No matter how you choose to use your small bankroll, however, we strongly recommend switching to proper bankroll management techniques as soon as possible. Bankroll management is a critical skill for all poker players, and the sooner you can start taking it seriously, the better.
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