Money Management
One very important skill as a poker player is managing your money. It sounds easy, it should be easy but it is in fact very hard. Good money management can save you a whole lot of money and even though it doesn’t sound like a fun think to learn a lot about it is important. When I started playing poker I knew very little about poker and even less about money management. I learned the hard way after playing way over my own limits and losing my entire bankroll at more than one occasion. Even though these setbacks I came back determined to win money at one of the hardest games there is out there. I took my time climbing the levels, increasing the stakes. If I now would start my career all over I would never sit down at a couple of tables, well aware that I was playing with more than half my bankroll at stake. An advice might worth considering is splitting you’re bankroll so that you never have the whole thing at one site. If you get tilted it’s not always a good thing to just rebuy without taking a moment to think it through.
The confidence you get from playing at levels that are within your comfort zone is hard to find elsewhere. Losing a couple of buy-ins doesn’t hurt as much when it’s only a small part of you’re bankroll. The worse part of the money management is that you easily fall in love with your hard earned bankroll and doesn’t want to risk a part of it. It’s an easy thing to do, keep playing at the lower limits just because you might lose more if you play at a higher level. You learn extremely much about yourself and your poker skills just by losing everything you have earned at the tables. I don’t recommend but should it happen to you try and think on the bright side. Hopefully you have learned an important lesson that sooner or later had to be taught. And you get to play at the lowest limits feeling like a pro comparing to some of the other players playing at those stakes.
So having good money management is not an easy task since you have to balance between saving some and gambling some. I know that there are certain lists of how much you should have as a bankroll playing at a certain level. I used these at first but after a while I realised that the most important thing is that it feels good playing at a specific level. Maybe get some kind of comfort zone that does not budge just because you lose four buyins. And the most important thing to remember, money that isn’t lost is as good as money you win.