22 Feb 2024 moving up stakes downswing bankroll variance Hello and welcome to new article. Today I'm going to speak about cash outs more precisely: When to do them How big should it be And why to do them of course. This article will be helpful to all kinds of players. Doesn't matter if you play tournaments or cash games or something else. I think it's just important to have a right cash out strategy early on in your career so you avoid the biggest mistakes in it. What is your goal? So the first question to ask yourself is why do you play poker and what is your goal with it. If you're planning to climb the stakes as quickly as possible, it's going to be very different your cash out strategy from the situation in which you are just playing to make money right now. If your goal or your dream is to climb the stakes and play higher games than you are playing right now, keep in mind that every cashout you make is going to damage your trip in poker and is going to slow down things a lot. So if your situation is this, you want to move up and play in bigger games, then keep in mind that you should be very conservative with your cash out strategy. Otherwise, if you are just playing at your stakes, let's say cash games NL50 and you're happy with that, and maybe you have another job and you're just okay to have poker as a profitable hobby and you're perfectly fine playing NL50, then you can be a bit more aggressive with your cash out strategy and you can cash out more frequently and also bigger amounts. Basically you can safely cash out all your profit after a certain amount of hands and that is perfectly fine. When to cash out? But how frequently should you cash out? You know I think that one big mistake poker players do is to try to split your poker career in time periods like month per month or year per year - doesn't matter like like you do with a regular job. In regular jobs you get salary every month and it's pretty natural to split your working period in months: January, February, March and so on. But poker is a bit different. In poker you don't get your salary every month, so i think it's a bit pointless to divide time in calendar months. What I would do is just to split my playing period in a certain amount of hands if I play cash games of certain number of tournaments if I play tournamens. I'm a cash game player, so I will make the example of cash games which comes to me more natural. But i'm sure if you play tournaments you can relate to that anyway and make the proper adjustments. So for a cash game player it's important to cash out not too frequently and intensively as you play because the risk that you would cash out too much before an eventual downswing hits is high - you simply may run out of bankroll for your normal stakes. If you cash out every 30k hands the results you are basing your cash outs on are heavily influenced by variance. So the risk is that if in this 30k hands you are running pretty good and you cash out on that on that good run, the next month or the next 30k hands (as you can say) you might end up in a downswing and you will have trouble resisting to that because you may have cashed out your upswing winnings as we said. So what i suggest is to Cash out every certain amount of hands, but this amount of hands shouldn't be too small. You shouldn't cash out every 30k hands. I think you should cash out every 100k hands the least. Better if you cash out, for example, every 200k hands. This way the results you are basing your cash out on are more reliable on what your actual winrate is and this way you avoid doing big mistakes like assuming you are winning this much but then you are not, and then the troubles come when you enter in a downswing and your bankroll cannot handle it. Set a certain goal of hands or number of tournaments (if you play tournaments) and after that distance make your cash out. How much to cash out Regarding how much should you cash out, as I said before, it depends a lot on which are your goals. If you're playing your usual stake and you're perfectly happy with it and you don't plan to move up, then it's perfectly fine if after certain period of hhands or tournaments you play you just cash out all the profit that there is. But if you have the goal to climb the stakes and all the income you have or if the only way you have to build your bankroll comes from your winnings at tables, then you should be way more conservative in your cash outs. It's pretty personal of course, there is no universal truth on that. But my suggestion is that if you're not happy with your stake and you're planning to climb to bigger games, you should not cash out more than 30% of your total winnings in this in this period of hands or tournaments you set for yourself. I know it sounds very few to cash out only 30% of your winnings in these periods of time. But keep in mind that the quicker you climb the stakes and the quicker you get to where you want to be, the better it will be for your money and your life in the long run because earnings in poker are kind of exponential. And the the earlier you get out from low stakes the better it is in general. So it's really important that you don't cash out too much And let's come to the why should you cash out. Why to cash out? Of course it's obvious: everybody likes to have money and spend money. But you may ask me: "Then I don't need to cash out at all. Why would I cash out ever if my plan is to climb the stakes ASAP?" It's a good question, and technically speaking, you could also end up not cashing out ever. And it may be a good strategical decision, but you know that it's important to keep yourself motivated. Even if you cash out a bit every 100k hands or few thousands tournaments, it's really important for your mood to keep yourself motivated to see that your efforts are being paid. No need to buy something very expensive. Just spend some money even for a little thing: even a night out that you just play with your poker money will be a good thing to give yourself some prize and motivation to keep grinding. This article is made from Improve your cash out strategy with these 3 tips | Poker Tips video by Vladimir «ABIVPlus».