Browse > Home / Poker Strategy / Have respect for your money

Have respect for your money


As your poker career develops and your bankroll grows, you will move up limit after limit. As you reach the higher limits money becomes less and less important. You will start thinking about big blinds rather than dollars.

I remember when I started playing online poker; I would drive past the car wash looking at the prices in my old Honda thinking, “what idiot would pay $15 to have their car washed when they can do it themselves for free?” I now visit that same car wash every 2 weeks in my Porsche and even give the teenage kid who vacuums the inside a $15 tip.

I’ve also been known to carry around large sums of money as if they are nothing. When my friends notice the wad of cash when I pull it out to pay for something, they go mad. Of course it seems like no big deal to me to carry round a few thousand, but to them it’s a huge deal. They feel I’m stupid for bringing it out in case I lose it or I get robbed but too be honest, it wouldn’t be a big enough amount of money to bother me much. A bad session of poker would lose me several times that amount of money, but to them it would complete ruin their life if they were to lose that much money at a stupid game like poker.

A poker pro can lose an amount of money in one session that a regular man earns in several months or even a year, if you watch a few hands of poker at Full Tilt Poker, you will see players such as Gus Hansen losing hundreds of thousands of dollars in just one hand.

Also the poker players are the ones with the warped mind, not the other way round. Not many people can think about money the way poker players do, just remember when you first started poker about how you thought about money. You may still feel the same way but there is no doubt, once you start playing high stakes that vision of money goes straight out the window. There are only so many times you can get excited about winning a couple thousand dollars in couple of minutes before it becomes second nature, the same as losing that amount. That is why poker players need to respect money, otherwise it just becomes unimportant and you will find your poker game suffers as you have no incentive to play, as money is near to meaningless.