With a large percentage of poker players being regular everyday people, we don’t have limitless funds to use towards playing online poker. There are a small percentage of players that don’t need to really worry about a bankroll, but for 99% of us the reality is that you need to build up your bankroll over time. Before you even begin working on increasing your bankroll you should make sure that you understand it won’t come easy. Very few players are lucky enough to win a huge tournament which sets them up for years to come. Most of us need to work hard grinding the poker tables in order to build up a sizeable bankroll.

If you can only play online poker with a small starting bankroll that is completely fine. If you don’t want to go broke quickly though, then you need to follow these tips to build up your bankroll. Now let’s say that you can deposit $100 into your account to begin with. If you took the $100 and started playing small cash games you’re likely going to be broke within a few days if you’re lucky. A $100 bankroll isn’t going to be able to survive the ups and downs of cash games.

With a poker Star bankroll this small you need to focus your time towards playing in small tournaments. The big tournaments look like they offer great value, but the reality is only a small percentage of players actually make money. The tournaments that you want to focus on in the beginning are the 9 player sit and go tournaments, 10 player double up tournaments and 2 player heads-up tournaments.

If you think you’re playing style is geared towards playing heads-up poker and exploiting your opponents weaknesses then you should play the heads-up tournaments. In these tournaments it’s you against one other player and the winner takes all. If you prefer playing more patiently then your style is geared towards playing the 10 player double up tournaments. In these tournaments 10 players start playing on the same table and the top 5 players double their buy-in. You need to win a good percentage of the tournaments to make them worthwhile, but their fairly easy to win and you can also multi-table them.

For those of you that are feeling a bit luckier, you can play the 9 player sit and go tournaments where only the top 3 players win money. Only the top 3 players win money and in these tournaments you need to play out the entire tournament since first, second and third all receive different payouts. You’ll find that you finish on the bubble in these tournaments sometimes because of a bad beat or being card dead, but you can win a smaller percentage of these tournaments and make more then you would if you were playing one of the two options above.

You should start out playing free poker games or the $5 tournaments no matter what type of tournament you decide to play until you can get your bankroll up to $500. Once you reach $500 you can take a look at your stats and if you think you’re ready you should move up to the $10 tournaments. Make sure that you don’t play in tournaments with buy-ins that don’t fit into your bankroll as that’s the quickest way to go broke.