Tweet your bankroll

July 20, 2011, Posted by Pokerfarm

Being smart and disciplined with your bankroll is what separates a professional player from a degenerate. Even if you have a large skill edge on your opponents, if you're sloppy with how you manage your money, you'll soon be busto, subject to the ravages of variance.

Every professional poker player has some kind of bankroll management system, whether it’s simple mental accounting based around the number of buy-ins or big blinds a player has, or a complex set-up of automated hand tracking and sophisticated analysis software.

There's a new trend among high-stakes players to use the social messaging application Twitter as an innovative bankroll management aid.

Todd Brunson, for instance, recently tweeted the following: "Look who I just ran into.. I told him the wsop killed me and I was cash short......" with a link to a picture of Full Tilt Poker founder Howard Lederer. He continued: "He asked how much I had on tilt and I told him 150k.. He said come with me. We went to his car and he opened his trunk and paid me!!!!!!"

Howie lend us a few bucks old buddy old pal

Here, the younger Brunson smartly uses Twitter to keep track of both his bankroll and its liquidity. The wisdom of Lederer’s bankroll management strategy - keeping it in cash in the back of his truck - is a little less clear, but after the FTP fiasco it’s not a surpise that Howard is no expert when it comes to keeping money in a safe place. Other poker news sources were quick to seize on the story and speculate on what it might mean for Full Tilt’s future; they should be congratulated for not letting the fact that Brunson’s messages are clearly a joke and completely made up detract from a good news story.

Professional player Jean-Robert “JRB” Bellande uses Twitter to manage his bankroll in a slightly different way, as is clear from a recent tweet: “Just did the accounting with My share after make-up $14350. Wheeeee! Lol”. Here, Bellande uses Twitter to analyse the effect of staking on his tournament success (in this case, his 65th-place, $108k WSOP main event cash). Bellande, no stranger to staking or make-up, is famous for his wildly-fluctuating bankroll, and was one of the first professional players to use Twitter to attempt to control it.

The usefulness of this strategy becomes clear as you read his other tweets: “Loooool. Poker Farm forgot to include my buy-ins from ept Madrid in my make-up. 108k makeup. My share $4800. Wheeee.” is a great example of JRB’s ability to maintain precise, up-to-the-minute statistics on his bankroll as new information emerges, all thanks to Twitter. The messaging website even allows JRB to gain valuable legal and financial advice that he might otherwise have to shell out big bucks for: “ Actually after taxes, you now owe 34,500, great run though!”, for example, tweeted by “lazycash”, offers insightful advice on what the future might hold for Bellande after his large tournament windfall.

JRB - I ain't bitter I'm on Twitter

It remains to be seen whether or not Twitter will catch on with other high-stakes players as a method of managing ones bankroll. There was a rumour that poker pro Chino Rheem wanted to use the application to keep track of the amount of money he owed to fellow players, but that he fell foul of the 140 character limit.