Bankroll Management Calculator

Most players go broke because of math, not skill

Here is an uncomfortable truth: a winning poker player can go broke. Not because they suddenly forgot how to play, but because they sat down at a stake their bankroll could not support and hit a normal downswing. "Normal" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. A 10 buy-in downswing feels catastrophic if your entire bankroll is 15 buy-ins. The same downswing barely registers if you have 50 buy-ins behind you.

Bankroll management is the least exciting topic in poker and probably the most important. Nobody goes on a podcast to talk about how they moved down from NL50 to NL25 after a bad month. But the players who are still playing five years from now are the ones who made that boring decision when the numbers called for it.

The calculator above tells you what stakes your bankroll supports based on how much risk you are willing to accept. Conservative players want 50 buy-ins for cash games. Standard players work with 30. Aggressive players push it to 20. None of these numbers are arbitrary. They come from variance calculations that estimate how likely you are to go bust given a certain winrate and standard deviation. At 20 buy-ins with a modest winrate, your risk of ruin might be above 10%. At 50 buy-ins, it drops below 1%.

For crypto poker players specifically, there is an extra wrinkle: the value of your bankroll fluctuates with the market. If you keep your roll in Bitcoin and BTC drops 20%, you just lost 20% of your buy-ins without playing a single hand. Some players keep their poker bankroll in USDT or another stablecoin to avoid this. Others accept the crypto volatility as part of the deal. Neither approach is wrong, but you should pick one deliberately rather than discovering the problem during a downswing when BTC and your poker results both tank in the same week.

The move-up and move-down rules are where discipline gets tested. The calculator gives you specific numbers: "Move to NL50 when you reach $X, drop to NL10 if you fall to $Y." Writing those numbers down and actually following them is harder than it sounds. After a good week at NL25, the temptation to take a shot at NL50 early is strong. The problem is that shot-taking from a short bankroll is how you end up rebuilding from NL5. Take the shot when the math says it is time, not when you feel hot.

Tournament players need even more buy-ins than cash players. MTTs have enormous variance because you can play perfectly for hours and still bust outside the money. A 100 buy-in bankroll for tournaments sounds excessive until you realize that a 40 buy-in downswing in MTTs is not unusual. It is just Tuesday. If you split your time between cash and tournaments, keep separate mental budgets for each and do not let a bad tournament run drain the cash game bankroll.

The growth projection section is there to keep things in perspective. If your winrate and volume say you will earn $500 per month at your current stake, you can calculate exactly how long until you can move up. It might be three months. It might be eight. Knowing that number removes the emotional guesswork and turns the grind into a plan with a timeline. Boring? Yes. Effective? Also yes.