The only way to make money at poker is through your opponents’ mistakes. Consequently if you make fewer mistakes than your opponents then you will make money, in the long term at least. In fact, poker is a game based entirely on mistakes. You must make as few as possible and exploit those of your opponents (not exploiting an opponents mistake is, in itself, a mistake). Theoretically, there is no such thing as a ‘good’ play as such. There is the correct play and then there are various degrees of mistakes.

 Statistically speaking even if you are a very good poker player, with a huge bankroll, there is a chance that you will eventually run so bad that you will go broke. Unfortunately we can’t eliminate that probability completely but we can reduce it. Common practise is to have a bankroll of 300 big bets if your game is limit hold’em.

When I started learning about poker I was less than impressed that there was a section called “bankroll management”. I wanted to play poker, have fun and win. It sounded like a letter from my bank manager telling me to concern myself more seriously with my financial affairs. Unfortunately bankroll management is very important because if you lose all your money you won’t be able to play poker anymore.

It is not a comfortable thought, but every poker player might one day have to deal with the possibility of losing their entire bankroll. There are a number of ways that this might happen, but essentially it will boil down to one of the following:

1. You are not good enough to beat the game and so losing your bankroll is merely the result of the long term taking hold.
2. You have the ability to beat the game but play while on tilt, losing large amounts of money while not playing your best.
3. You can beat the game, but have poor bankroll management skills and so go broke during a downswing.
4. You have good bankroll management, but have a downswing so severe that you lose it all anyway.

Zoom in Zoom out....I recently tried out that Google earth thing. In case you don’t know what it is, it’s a piece of software that you can download that lets you look at any place on earth from any height using satellite images. Its actually really impressive and lots of fun. I found it incredible to look at England from space then zooming in bit by bit… I was finally looking at a close up image of my street. It reminded me why I like statistics so much. Perspective. Statistics allows us to zoom in and zoom out on things. I’ll show you what I mean by looking at limit holdem earn rates.

1.  Winnie the Winner and Larry the Looser
2.  The Very Next Hand
3.  One Hundred
4.  …then Two Hundred
5.  2k OK
6.  100k and a Million
7.  Perspective