One of the most important and least funny or exiting parts of playing winning poker online is bankroll management. Bankroll Management is all about how you handle your money and is many way similar to keeping you household budget in order. It is all about making sure that you are not playing games you can not afford to play but also about making sure you are not playing for too small stakes. You might wonder why bankroll management is important, isn’t the important thing that you can afford the buy in when you sit down at the table. After that you will either win or loose money and since you are such a darn good player you will win. Unfortunately skill is not the only factor at play while playing poker. Luck will also play a role, especially in single hands and single sessions. Bankroll management is about managing and reducing this risk. The outcome of each single hand has a lot to do with luck. A skillful player can however all but eliminate the affect of luck over time by playing good solid poker. However if you do not manage your bankroll correctly than the short time luck based swings will affect your bankroll too much and you might loose all your money in your bankroll before luck can even out over time. Bankroll management is in other words all about making sure that your skill is allowed to do its magic

Now that you have a basic idea about what bankroll management is and why it is important we can move on to how much money you need to have to play at a certain level. The answer to this question will vary depending on the answer to a number of questions such as how big risks you want to take, if you play limit or No limit poker and whether you play cash games or tournaments. We strongly recommend that you read more about bankroll management after reading this article as this is only the introduction to a complex topic.

If you are an aggressive risk willing player you might be willing to risk a larger portion of your total bankroll every time you sit down at a table. We do however still not recommend that you buy in at a table where the maximum buy in is more than 5% of your total bankroll or to but it another way, that you can afford less than 20 max buy ins. If you play no limit poker you should never buy in for less than the table maximum, this allows you to make as much as possible of your cards when you get the nuts. A more conservative player might want to limit each buy in to as little as 1% of their total bankroll.

If you are a tournament player we recommend never buying in to tournaments that cost more than 2% of your bankroll for single table tournaments and 0.5% for Multi table tournaments. There might be situation to disregard this and put more on the line if you can find a tournament that offer very good value for money.