I ran a few calculations using a variance calculator to figure out how big a bankroll you’d need in order to be comfortable playing in a $500/$1,000 cash game with 250bb stacks, or a $250,000 tournament. In fact, the only players to whom that amount of money does mean absolutely nothing are usually the recreational players, who made massive amounts of money from outside poker and enjoy the game purely as a fun pastime. If you see a player playing in a cash game with $500/$1,000 blinds, it’s pretty likely that $1,000 means a lot less to them than it does to the average person but it’s also extremely unlikely that it means absolutely nothing. How big a bankroll do you need for high stakes poker?Īs is often the case, the truth is mostly somewhere in the middle. Unfortunately for anyone who’s invested a lot of mental energy in either of these two beliefs, neither is usually true. The casual assumption when a player is seen playing for massive stakes is usually one of two things – either they have so much money that the stakes are inconsequential for them, or they’re gambling for a substantial portion of their net worth. But these numbers can often be deceiving, and they can lead to a public perception of poker players that’s a long way from reality. Meanwhile, it seems like everyone and their grandmother are currently involved in some kind of $200/$400 heads-up challenge with half a million on the table.

At the end of May, Tom Dwan won a $3.1m pot, the biggest in televised poker history. In February, Patrik Antonius and Eric Persson played an almost $2m pot on the No Gamble, No Future show. The sums of money thrown around in high-stakes poker games these days are eye-watering.

Which casino games are high stakes