POCKET ACES

A Poker Session and Bankroll Approach

I haven't quite figured out yet how to maximize poker profits. I am quite able to parcel out my session money and divide the wins up and appropriating a little more than half back to the bankroll and the remainder into my spending money. I call this my umbrella plan, because the extra 3 percent that goes back to the bankroll tends to help with items such as tipping the dealer or cocktail person and getting a bite to eat during a session break.

But even though the umbrella plan covers expenses and allows me to have a flowing bankroll, I'm still not sure if the money I'm putting back couldn't amount to more. Also, I'm not always sure when I should rack my chips and call it a session win. I certainly don't want to leave while I'm on a roll but there's no way to tell when that could come to a terrorizing end, which could happen in just two or three confrontations.

It reminds me of the baseball betting dilemma. As a once avid baseball handicapper, I could have three or four days worth of losses, sometimes even losing all my wagers. But the big wins and losses distributed themselves evenly by the end of the season and those wagers that went my way produced a profit at the end of the season. And for me, the season always ended at the All-Star break.

It was after the break one year when I got into a discussion with the great gaming theorist Huey Mahl about optimizing bets. Huey was a proponent of the Kelly Criterion that suggested if a player were to be involved in a positive expectancy game, that person could ensure his bankroll would always have something in it. Plus, as the wins gathered momentum, the bankroll would increase as would the amounts of the wager.

Applying Kelly to baseball was a sticky matter, and for years Huey tried to figure how to make it work when simultaneous wagers had to be made. Eventually he used his mathematical expertise to develop his formula, which I believe he published in one or more of his newsletters before his death.

In theory, Kelly seems like the miracle cure to maximizing profits but it doesn't guarantee anything because, just as we poker players understand long periods of little success at the tables, so it is with sports bettors.

I don't think a strict interpretation of the Criterion would make it in the heat of poker battle. Even using the formula that states winning one big bet an hour is acceptable, I can't see putting that into a mathematical formula.

However, I do believe most poker players have the beginnings of a Kelly-type application already.

Let's take Josh, for example, a theoretical poker player with a better-than-average grasp of the game. Josh dreams up a poker plan that includes a bankroll of $5,000. He decides to use that to play $2-4 hold'em. He wants to spend three months in Las Vegas and play poker at least three times a week, or 36 sessions. To accomplish that, Josh divides the $5,000 into 36 mini bankrolls, which is roughly $140 per session to start.

If we use the timeworn one-big-bet-an-hour rate of win, Josh plans to put in about 3 1/2 hours each session. If all goes well, he should win about $14, which means he has increased his session bankroll by 10 percent.

Now he takes his $140 plus a bit more than half his win (say $9) and puts it back into his bankroll. Now he has $5,009 and he has to recalculate how much he can take to the tables. Granted, at this point there's little difference. But, there will be times when Josh goes way over that mark. One day he gets lucky and pockets $80. Now his session money can increase. Conversely, if he has a poor day and ends up losing, his percentage will decrease. Several really bad days in a row won't put him out of business and several really good days in a row will give him a substantial leg up on a profitable summer.

All this depends on Josh's skill as well as his relationship with Lady Luck. But it does demonstrate a possible approach to creating a better bankroll that can either provide a steady stream of money or help a good player move up to higher stakes.

Of course it's simplified, but why not? If you plan to make money playing poker, you need a plan. And if you don't have a plan, you likely don't have a chance. Only a fool would put a disproportionate share of a bankroll at risk in any one or two attempts to win.

So if you don't already have a plan in the works and on paper and aren't already following through with it, give the Guberman-Mahl-Kelly a shot. Let me know how it plays out.