Intertops Bankroll Challenge!

Everything Burns…

We left off the last post with the lesson, “Don’t be like the Joker!” So how did we get there? We were talking about  Bankroll Management, Right? Where am I going with this and why am I hurting you by showing mountains of cash being burned for no reason! Am I nuts?! Am I a pyro!? Am I a comic book nerd and just really love that movie? lol (even though that scene is almost too painful too watch!) While that last sentence is true, it’s much more about the simple message of “not burning money” and how we can apply it to our poker games and to our life. Maybe I am a little bit nuts, but it works for me! Lemme explain how I’m going to apply both this (and the advice I mentioned in the last post)  to what I’m going to be doing in the next few months of my poker journey. Maybe then it will start sounding sane, lol At the very least, I hope you can try and learn from my mistakes!

Mindset…

It may seem like a stretch to some, but to me personally, that scene with the Joker burning all the money is a great analogy for poker and Bankroll Management. Besides the obvious connection to stop burning through money, it’s about the delusional mindset the Joker has driving him. Now I’m not saying all poker players are Bat shit crazy like he is( see what I did there?!lol) What I am saying is that in HIS mind, he thinks he %100 right about what he’s doing. That for sure applies to poker players! How many players do you know that think they are Fedor Holz, when you know they are more like Jaime Gold?! While it is very important to believe in yourself, you have to check your ego and check the score board aka your bankroll. There’s no shame it it, we have literally ALL been there! No one started playing poker having already mastered the game, even Fedor! lol(although I think he’s prob gotten their the fastest!) There have been plenty of times I let my competitive nature and ambition cloud my judgement, leading to poor decisions on and off the tables. Gotta completely leave that self delusional Ego out of it!

Challenge yourself…

Ok so your saying “I know poker players are a little crazy Tim, I’m one of them, now what’s your point!?”  The point is you have to take a very difficult look at yourself and figure out if you’re being delusional about your abilities as a player.  It means asking yourself, What am I doing wrong and how do I fix it!? It means No re-buying to get revenge against the player who gave me a bad beat. No playing all night just to “get unstuck”. No playing beyond my means. For me it means going back to the “drawing board”. For me it means starting back at the bottom and proving to myself I can grind it up. For me it means an Intertops Bankroll Challenge!;)

If you search through the Internet or the MANY poker books out there, you will see A LOT of different views on proper bankroll. Bank roll guidelines vary widely, I’ve seen recommendations go from 20 to 80 buy-ins cash games (including 6-max) and 50 to 500 buy-ins for tournaments!!!  There are a lot of factors that come into play, so it’s up to you to figure out your own best fit for what you’re trying to accomplish. I personally like to keep things simply( and possibly a lil OCD lol) so I’ve planned to use a 2/20/200 theme for my challenge. All the number have specific multiple meanings, so I will get into the really interesting details of the theme in the next post.  For now, here’s quick rundown. For the Intertops challenge specifically, I’ll be attempting to run up 2k all the way to 20k! So while that will be my main online goal, my Live poker goal will be taking the 20k and using strict bankroll management to turn it into 200k!  This could prove to be a lot more difficult than I think, but at least I will learn a lot through the process, and that’s really the ultimate goal here for me.

If you can’t wait for next weeks post to get the rest of the plan, come check me out on Twitch and Youtube, where I’ll be streaming the Intertops Challenge starting tomorrow! It should be quite the adventure and I look forward to sharing the journey with everyone.

Run Good!

Tim