CORDIAL MINUET ENSEMBLE

Asminthe

Member

Registered: 2014-11-21

Posts: 44

Bankroll Management For Gambling Beginners!

Many of you may be coming from non-gambling backgrounds, and even more have probably only gambled very casually in the past. In the interest of helping people have the best experience possible while trying this cool new game, I want to share the single biggest piece of advice most people who don't have serious experience with these sorts of games never get: Manage your bankroll!

The reason that proper bankroll management is important to everyone is that games like this have variance. No matter how good you are, sometimes the other person will win, and this means that up is not the only direction that your pile of money will go. Even if you're confident that you have a 90% chance of being profitable each time you sit down to play, it is still possible to have a long consecutive run of losses (there is no guarantee that they will be evenly distributed throughout your sessions and can clump up in ways that can be devastating). If you manage your bankroll responsibly, you can significantly reduce the chance that bad runs will ruin your ability to continue playing the game (or cause even worse financial problems). I'm going to be grossly oversimplifying here and making many assumptions so that the basic ideas should work for as many people as possible, but if you want a detailed analysis, see The Mathematics of Poker Chapter 22: Staying in Action: Risk of Ruin, by Bill Chen and Jerrod Ankenman, as well as the following chapters on uncertainty and rational game selection.

So now you might be asking questions like "What is a bankroll?" and "How does one go about managing a bankroll?" and "Do I still have some spring rolls in the freezer?". I'm glad you asked! It's really a pretty easy process, but the discipline required sometimes makes it easy to mess up, especially because the emotional rollercoasters associated with gambling are very good at eroding discipline in an instant. Keep in mind that the real difficulty is not in any of the individual steps, but in forcing yourself to obey them at all times.

1) Decide how much money is your 'Cordial Minuet' money, and set that money aside (or deposit it into the game, or whatever). This is your bankroll, and it grows as you win games and shrinks as you lose games.
2) Never play a game where it's possible to have more than 5% of your bankroll at risk at a time.
3) Do not take all of your profits out of your bankroll, allow it to grow over time when you are successful.

For example, let's say you decide that $20 is all you're willing to risk losing to this game and you deposit it. The highest stakes you should play are $1. If, after your first game, you have lost the $1 you put up on the game, you should now avoid buying into any games for more than 95 cents, and so on. If you correctly shrink the size of the games you are playing relative to the size of your shrinking bankroll, it makes it very difficult for you to actually lose the entire thing in a game like this that allows for arbitrary stakes as low as 1 cent per game. Likewise, if you only move up in stakes when your bankroll has grown proportionally, you'll be much less likely to be playing far outside of your skill level and will have a much lower chance of ruining your ability to continue playing in the future by losing too much money at once.

If you want to be serious about the game, the very first thing you should do is make the decision to be incredibly strict about your bankroll and do your best to never have to add to it from outside sources of income. If you plan to use your winnings to supplement your income, decide on a percentage of your winnings to move to your general funds and use the rest to allow your bankroll to grow, as the strategy of attempting to maintain a constant bankroll and removing all winnings from it leads to a 100% risk of ruin over the long term.

If, on the other hand, you're mostly playing casually, have plenty of outside income, and have more fun losing larger amounts than winning tiny amounts, what you might want to do is consider your bankroll to be a weekly or monthly thing that mostly helps to cap your losses over the short term. At the beginning of the next month or week you can deposit again if you need to and start your bankroll over.  The important thing is that you're honest with yourself about how much you're willing to lose over any given period and force yourself to be disciplined enough to not deviate from the plan. Exercising proper bankroll management over each of these time periods will allow you to have more fun on the same amount of money instead of blowing your gambling budget too quickly and having to wait until next month in order to play responsibly.

I hope some of you find this helpful!

Last edited by Asminthe (2014-11-24 18:18:02)

crow

Member

Registered: 2014-11-24

Posts: 3

Re: Bankroll Management For Gambling Beginners!

Thanks for this.

a_fiendish_thingy

Member

Registered: 2014-11-21

Posts: 15

Re: Bankroll Management For Gambling Beginners!

This is fantastic. This should be Stickied so that new players can always see it and read it, I would hate for someone to get in a financial bind due to this really really interesting game.

Dan_Dan84

Member

Registered: 2015-02-14

Posts: 106

Re: Bankroll Management For Gambling Beginners!

Thank you so much for this. I'm sure that there will be lots of people coming to play this game who don't know much about gambling and betting. I know that when the article about CM on RPS came out a few months ago, one commenter mentioned that his concern is that this game will suck in people who would otherwise never go near an online gambling game (e.g. me) but would try out this game due to the reputation of the developer. The commenter's concern was that it could trigger destructive gambling behaviour (which he seemed to have firsthand experience with) in people who would otherwise never experience such a thing.

While this explanation about bankroll is certainly no guarantee that someone could mismanage their resources (as the OP pointed out, it's not so much following the steps that's difficult, but rather sticking to them through the highs and lows triggered by gambling), hopefully it will help newbies like me enjoy this really interesting game for a long time without worrying about running out of money.

Thanks again!