Accept the ups and downs for what they are.

Is poker a very simple game made complex by so called “experts”. Or is it a game of skill? Or is it both?

Are the best players just continually lucky in the big hands that matter?

Whichever way you look at it poker is a game that contains an element of luck. And because of that you will experience both good and bad luck at the tables. It is inevitable. You can’t play poker for more than a few hands without experiencing these twin fortunes.

At it’s most basic poker is a game of simple maths. By understanding some very simple concepts you will more often than not get your money into the middle with a positive expectation.

If you hold two hearts in your hand and the three card flop comes with two hearts and a club then you have a roughly 3.5/1 chance of making your flush draw by the river. If you are going to try and make this draw then you need to make sure that there is four times your contribution to the pot already committed by other players to make it a consistently profitable play.

This is basic maths and along with a few other concepts is all you need to be successful at building a bankroll.

Do you like Derren Brown? Have you heard of him? If not here is his homepage .

One of my favourite “illusion” pieces of Derren’s is the coin flip trick. In this trick he flips a coin ten times into a large glass bowl and each time the coin lands on heads as predicted.

It’s all caught on continuous tape so there is no trickery involved. It actually happened.

Now the odds of this happening are huge. Flipping a coin into a bowl and getting it to land on heads (or tails) flip after flip for ten consecutive flips is going to require a lot of luck.

So how did he do it?

After the tape was played showing the sequence of ten consecutive heads Derren explains how it was done.

What you saw was the tape of ten consecutive successful coin flips. What you didn’t see was the fact that he had to film nearly all day long to get this successful sequence on tape.

Dropped on the editing floor were hours and hours of tape filled with all the unsuccessful sequences. Even getting to eight or nine successful flips several times before flipping a tail and ending the sequence.

The point of all of this was to demonstrate that as human beings we are very susceptible to believing what we see. If we see something happen we tend to look at the event in isolation and not as part of the bigger picture.

If we see someone able to pull off a stunt like this in isolation then we tend to assume that there is trickery involved or some other “magical” solution.

If you started at eight o’clock in the morning and started flipping a coin into a bowl at some point during the day you would make your run of ten successful same side flips. The odds against doing it are big but you would eventually make it. It could happen after just a couple of tries, or you could be there all day long trying.

Bankroll building means getting your money into the pot when you have a positive expectation. If you keep putting your money into a pot that is giving you 3.5/1 odds and there are four units to be won then over a period of time you will gradually come out a winner.

Notice the word "gradually". This is not done over a short period of time. There is too much luck involved to make it a short term gain.

The poker player who gets a rush of cards and makes massive gains in their bankroll is at the "ten flips in a row" point. However this point is just a small part of their entire day. It is how they cope with all the smaller points of the day that decide how they will grow their bankroll over a longer period of time.

These stretches of one or two "flips" are the important ones. These are the times when an early decision to fold will save one or two bets. A decision to re raise and eliminate players with your aces will give you a higher chance of winning the hand.

Over a long period of time all of these small decisions will define your poker bankroll building efforts. Building a bankroll means accepting that you will have ups and downs. The ten flips in a row are nice to have but they are not the mainstay of your bankroll building efforts. It is how you deal with the barren patches that decide how quickly your bankroll will grow.