MARCH 27, 2014
Bankroll As A Boundary
Bankroll is one of the oldest ideas in the game and one of the most consistently misread. It is not a score. It is not a measure of how well someone is doing. It is a boundary drawn around a quantity of money so that the money can absorb a run of bad outcomes without the person having to absorb them.
A limit, not a target
The functional purpose is separation. Money inside the boundary is money that can lose without anything else changing: no bill goes unpaid, no plan is altered, no conversation has to happen. The moment that separation breaks down, the boundary stops existing regardless of what the number says, because every hand is now being played with something attached to it.
Players who understand this talk about bankroll in terms of what it lets them ignore. Players who do not talk about it in terms of what it lets them reach. The second framing turns the boundary into a ladder, and a ladder is climbed fastest by removing the safety it was built to provide.
Where the idea fails
The concept is sound and it fails constantly, for a reason that has nothing to do with arithmetic. A boundary only works while the person maintaining it agrees to maintain it, and the moment that most tests the agreement is the moment the person is least inclined to honour it. The rule is written by someone calm and enforced by someone who is not.
This is why bankroll discipline is usually described as a rule and functions as a habit. Rules can be reasoned away in the middle of a session. Habits are harder to argue with, because they were not built out of arguments in the first place.
None of which is advice about anyone's money. It is a description of what the idea is for, and of the gap between holding an idea and being governed by it, which is where most of the interesting material in this subject lives.