The Freedom Of "No Bankroll" Poker

Before taking my first steps on this journey, I made a big deal about my bankroll and my bankroll management strategy. I wanted to make sure I was doing the "right" thing in the "right" way and as such drew up a bankroll chart and put strict rules in place as to which stakes to play at and on how many tables to play on according to how much I held in my PKR account.

Come February, just as everything fell apart, I concluded that sticking to these rules so rigidly was just too restrictive as it meant being far too preoccupied with keeping score rather than just playing "A" game poker. I put these observations up on the PKR forum (I know, what's wrong with 2+2 eh?) and it was a fella calling himself Dunbar who really struck the right chord when he wrote that a bankroll is actually "the money you have to play poker." This really hit home to me the fact that a "bankroll" is really spare money you have from any source that can be used and accessed to play poker and NOT "however much you currently have in your online poker account(s)."

As a semi-serious player who plays just 5-6K hands on average per month this idea really liberated me and now, as long as I have a reasonable amount of buy-ins ready to hand, I just don't consider myself as having a proper bankroll in the traditional sense anymore. To me, I now just have an unfixed amount of money which I can use to play poker with. Of course it's still important to keep track of profit and losses but THE most important thing, as ever and always, remains that I sit at the table with my "A" game firmly in place. As long as I do this I think I am doing the "right" thing.