Chris Ferguson - BRM for a pro?

[allthatremains]

Chris (Jesus) Fergusons' guide is to take a maximum of 5% to a SNG or cash game and only 2% to a MTT.

At first glance this seems like a conservative guide, but I wonder if it's conservative enough. This was HIS guide to keep from going bust.

Is it conservative enough for a winning player who has nowhere near the experience/skill that Chris has?

I am a winning player, but I will only risk 1% on a SNG or cash game, and 1/2 of 1% on a MTT. I'm pretty sure I would have gone bust a couple of times following his guide.

Am I limiting my winnings by being too conservative?

[bison bore eye]

I think 5% can be a little high at times and prefare somewhere around 2-3%.

It also depends on what ur bank roll is and if you are pro or playing for fun.

Please post more info

[pnut24]

surely the whole point of Chris' and others % of bankroll is that technically you can't bust your bankroll??

if your only sitting down with 5% of your roll no matter what your bankroll size, then thats all you lose? if you get felted 10 times in a row and are still buying in at the same level in $ then your no longer buying in at 5% of your roll but much higher.

i see the 5% as a stake that you should be able to lose through variance, as will happen even if your a winning player, without it effecting you psychologically

i appreciate that changing buy in level after every game, up as well as down, to buy in as an absolute value of % bankroll is also overly nittish (is that a real word???)

the whole point is that you move down if your losing so your taking less of a hit if your on a cooler and not to move up to fast just because your on a heater



only my thoughts - i don't follow these rules BRM is always going to be my undoing of hard work!

wasn't the 5% rule just so he had fixed boundaries for the $10000 challenge? did he say that's the rule he plays by for his own game selection?

[frob23]

The amount of a bankroll you have and put into play is up to you. Aside from the simple rules (e.g. 20 buy-ins) you can actually calculate your risk of ruin. That is, you can get a rough idea of the chance that you will go broke from a really bad swing of variance based on your win-rate.

http://www.poker-tools-online.com/riskofruin.html

That is a decent tool for doing it (and it works with the numbers https://www.checkyourbets.com produces -- which is where I log). So you punch in your win-rate ($/hr on that but you can use BB/100 on some others) and then your standard-deviation. You then put in the bankroll you have set aside exclusively for poker (assuming you never want to add to it). And it will spit out a number that tell you how likely it is you will go broke based on those numbers.

You should probably shoot for a number under 5% if you're never looking to refill. If your risk of ruin is higher than that, you need to increase your bankroll and/or drop the limits you're playing at. Personally, I am happy with my current RoR. It's at 1.43% even with as horrible as I run at $10NL and that being most of what I have been playing.

You want a large number of sessions to really have a solid idea of your win-rate and standard-deviation. So don't base this on 10 sessions or anything but some idea is better than none. I would want a couple hundred hours of play and maybe 20k+ hands before I started to believe these numbers. And the more you have, the more reliable they are likely to be.