Money Management 101

By Kristy Gazes

GREED GETS YOU INTO TROUBLE. I’ll never forget, a couple of years ago, when I first started playing No-Limit tournaments, I went to the Commerce Casino, and there was a tournament starting that had a million-dollar guarantee. I walked into the room, and all you heard was, “Million, million, million.” Everyone was saying the word “million.” Money like that can make people act irrationally. It can make people enter more tournaments than they can really afford to enter, or play cash games with higher limits than they can really afford to play. If you want to be a financially successful poker player, you need to control your greed, you need to control your ego, and you need to have a system.

I play poker for a living, and I have a system that I’ve been using for over 12 years. I play at a certain limit, and if I lose three sessions in a row, I go down to the next level underneath. So if I’ve been playing $40/$80, I’ll go down and play $30/$60. And I have to win three sessions in that game to get back up to $40/$80. And I’ve gotten all the way down to $3/$6, or even $2/$4, from as high as $200/$400, but it’s a system that works. Some of it’s a silly superstition thing; if you’re running bad, you want to play smaller. But also, it prevents you from really going on tilt, it teaches you discipline, and it also improves your all-around game because you end up playing with a wide range of players, from new players to pros.

It’s really important to be organized and keep records. People kid themselves. Have you ever talked to anyone who admits that they lose online? Only about six percent of all players come out ahead online, so you’ve got 94 percent of the people lying. You have to keep records, because then you can see your hourly win rate, you can see what games you’re winning at, what games you’re losing at, and you can improve your game by tracking these things. If more people kept track and kept organized, they would be much more successful at gambling—but at the same time, it goes against the whole grain of gambling and the gambler’s mentality to approach it that way.

One key to money management, for me, is having a completely separate bankroll for poker, which you don’t touch for anything else. I even have a separate bankroll for tournaments. With live play, I like to have a bankroll way above the usual amount required to play a certain limit. People say for $40/$80, you need to have a $50,000-to-$60,000 bankroll. I think you should actually have double that amount to play that limit. You also need to be careful playing tournaments and be aware of how much you can afford in terms of entry fees. If you want to play all the big ones, it costs over $250,000 a year. There’s such a short-term luck factor involved with tournaments that if you’re playing too many, you’re always running the risk of going broke.

The biggest problem I see among poker players in cash games is that, pardon the expression, they eat little and s— big. In other words, when they sit down at a session and they win, they quit right away instead of playing for a while, and that’s when you should play longer. And when they’re stuck, they play for two days.

In tournaments, there’s a problem in terms of people taking shots. People play the little tournaments, the nooners, the online tournaments, and they build up their money slowly until they have enough to get into a five-dime WPT event. And then, boom, all their money’s gone. Rather than trying to satellite in, they just take a shot. Taking shots is why most people go broke.

Ego is another major problem that gets people into trouble. People aren’t willing to step down to smaller games, because they’re afraid someone will see them. But you can’t worry about keeping up with the Joneses. If the game is good and you feel good, keep playing. But if you feel intimidated or overmatched, get up. You can always go back the next day. Don’t ever sit in a game where you’re on scared money. If you have to play $5/$10 forever, then that’s what you have to do.

Money management isn’t sexy, but it’s essential to be successful at poker. I know a guy—one of the best players I know—he gets together $50,000, $60,000, $100,000 all the time playing $30/$60, and then he’ll hop into the $300/$600 game and just lose it all in one shot. That’s crazy. It’s a marathon, not a sprint. Don’t let the greed get you.

Kristy Gazes is considered one of the top mixed-game players in the world and recently established herself as a top tournament player as well by winning the FullTiltPoker.net Championship at Wynn Las Vegas in July.