Cash Game Bankroll Management

For example, if you have 10 full buyins when playing a cash game of $200 table and losing 4 buyins, your bankroll will decrease from $2000 to $1200. Because your bankroll is small, you will feel that you lose a lot, so you will have to play tight with the fear of losing more and playing “scared poker”. This is not accurate for a 1/2 cash game, 1000 buy ins would be a very large bankroll. To be very safe, aim for around 100 buy ins for cash games. Just remember that the lower # of buy ins you have the higher your chance of going broke (assuming stakes do not change), no matter how good of.

• Live Poker Bankroll Management
• Cash Game Bankroll Management
• Heads Up Cash Game Bankroll Management
• Live Poker Cash Game Bankroll Management

Big Idea: Bankroll management is just as important, if not more important than your lineup construction.

Bankroll management is like the foundation of your house. It must be rock solid or the whole structure is going to come crashing down. Proper bankroll management is going to allow you to stay in the game and grow your bankroll incrementally.

Live Poker Bankroll Management

Too many DFS players neglect bankroll management as a skill that they need to improve upon or master. Everyone is focused on projections or lineup construction and very little focus is put on bankroll management. It is fairly safe to assume that DFS’s best players are the ones who are best at bankroll management. They have a plan and stick to it each night. The good news is that I am going to lead you through a very simple process to streamline bankroll management. The difficult part is going to be sticking to the plan each night, even on nights that you lovveee your lineup.

Before we begin talking about specific strategies, it is important to note that when I say bankroll, I am talking about your DFS bankroll, not your life savings or family’s bread money. It is important to have money set aside specifically for DFS.

Now that we got that out of the way. The simplest way to approach BM is the 80/20/10 rule. This means that you play no more than 10% of your bankroll (I suggest closer to 5%). The next step is to divide up your bankroll for the day into cash games (80%) and tournaments (20%). You need to play with the percentages so that it suits your game, but that is a good general rule of thumb to use when starting out.

Ex. $1,000 Bankroll (80/20/10)
-$100 Daily: $80 Cash and $20 Tournaments

Ex. $1,000 Bankroll (85/15/5)
-$50 Daily: $42 Cash and $8 Tournaments

So this will give us roughly 80-90% of our day’s bankroll to play in cash games. You will need this number when we get to the next lesson on game selection.

Advanced Theory: I would highly suggest the use of a bankroll tracker to monitor and analyze your play. RotoGrinders has a free Bankroll Tracker that you can link to your FanDuel or DraftKings account. The other option is Rototracker, which is free up to 250 entries analyzed and then you have to get a monthly subscription if you have over 250 entries. Both do basically the same thing, which is give you a breakdown of not just money won and money lost, but they breakdown by sport, cash vs GPP, entry size, buy-in level, and ROI%. Rototracker takes it a step further with even deeper possibilities like day of the week, opponents, and even different slates.

So you have to be asking – why I do I need all of this data? I just want to play! It all goes back to the reason you purchased this course. You want to become a profitable MLBDFS player. Correct?

Cash Game Bankroll Management

What all of this data allows you to do is to analyze your own play and find out specifically where your strengths are. Being a profitable player is all about finding an edge and exploiting that edge. If you know exactly what type of games, slates, and buy-in levels you are most successful at, you are going to have a huge edge over the rest of the field. Obviously, this takes hard work and time to analyze this data, but you have to be willing to do what it takes to win.

Lesson One Recap

Heads Up Cash Game Bankroll Management

Live Poker Cash Game Bankroll Management

1. Bankroll Management is key to long term success in DFS.
2. Follow the 80/20/10 rule or develop your own to suit your game.
3. Stick to the plan!
4. Religiously track and analyze your results.