#228 - Chris Ferguson and the Art of Bankroll Maintenance, Part I

FERGUSON AND HISTORY

What constitutes an important day in Chris Ferguson’s poker career?

By anyone’s definition, May 18, 2000, would be an important day. That’s the day on which he won the World Championship. May 2, 2000, would also qualify as important; that’s the day Chris won his first bracelet. You could also include the dates of all Chris’s five World Series wins and both his World Series Circuit championships.

Other dates are important for more personal reasons. How about March 26, 1993, which was the date of Chris Ferguson’s first tournament poker cash, according to the Hendon Mob Database? (It was a $500 Pai Gow tournament at the Normandie Casino.) Or his first World Series of Poker final table, a fifth place finish in razz, on April 29, 1995?

In a career as storied as Ferguson’s, we would still have to include March 11, 1994. That was the date of his first tournament poker win, $300 buy-in lowball, again at the Normandie. There were just 67 players in this 14 ½ year-old event, but you can’t say Chris didn’t EARN that first victory. He prevailed over a final table that included Paul “Eskimo” Clark, John Bonetti, and Tom McEvoy. That trio had already won 7 bracelets and, with Ferguson included, would win a total of FIFTEEN by 2007.

Yet what is memorable for Chris is not necessarily what everyone else deems “historic.” One of his most memorable hands, at least of the last two years, cost him two dollars. In April 2006, he decided to conduct an experiment in bankroll management and playing motivation and emptied his Full Tilt Poker account. Starting from zero, he would attempt to work his account up to $10,000.

With a balance of $0.00, he could accumulate a bankroll initially only by playing freerolls, which had 1,800 players and paid 18 spots. (Full Tilt’s freerolls, which now pay $100 in prizes, then paid just $40.)

Playing about 10 hours a week, divided among freerolls and some play-money games to promote the site, it took him a month to win $2. “I bought in for the minimum on the smallest game on Full Tilt. I got all-in with pocket tens against ace-queen. I lost the two dollars before the blinds came around. Some players remember hands that won or lost them hundreds of thousands of dollars or big tournaments. I remember that hand that cost me two dollars because it took me a month to make that two dollars. It was back to the freerolls.”

Because of the 16 month struggle to build a bankroll from nothing, Tuesday, August 14, 2007, would certainly qualify as a memorable day in Chris’s poker career. His bankroll on Full Tilt had grown to over $9,500 and he was playing to take down a milestone.

THE GOOF

Chris Ferguson is careful, methodical, and deliberate in everything he does. He places a premium on doing things the right way. For instance, it took him 6 months to pick out his most recent new car – a 2000 Acura that now has nearly 90,000 miles. When I first met Chris in early 2006, he was looking at luxury condos on the Las Vegas Strip. His efforts were doomed from the start: any place he considered buying was long gone by the time he was ready to make an offer. That’s just the way he does things.

That is why it was ironic that he started playing on August 14 in a 3:30 PM (PST) turbo satellite for that evening’s FTOPS Omaha Eight-or-Better event due to a mistake. An error. A goof.

STRAUS VS. FERGUSON

Jack Straus, whose rally in the 1982 Main Event from 500 chips to the Championship inspired the expression “a chip and a chair,” is the patron saint of plungers. Al Alvarez, in his classic THE BIGGEST GAME IN TOWN recounted the legend of how Straus built a bankroll. “In 1970, a terrible run at poker in Las Vegas reduced him to his last $40. Instead of quitting, he took the $40 to the blackjack table and bet it all on a single hand. He won, and continued to bet all the money in front of him until he had turned the $40 into $500. He took the $500 back to the poker game and ran it up to $4,000, returned to the blackjack table and transformed the $4,000 into $10,000. He finally bet the whole sum on the Kansas City Chiefs in the Super Bowl and won $20,000. In less than twenty-four hours, he went from near bankruptcy to relative affluence …. Each time he bet, he bet all the money he had, from the first $40 to the final $10,000.”

That is how most poker players operate. When finances are bad, they take drastic measures. If it works – WHEN it works, because poker players, who are otherwise the most pessimistic people on earth, inexplicably become blindly optimistic when desperate – they painlessly get back into action. If it fails? There is always someone to borrow from and a big score is just around the corner.

That has never been Chris Ferguson’s way. From the time he piled in a car with college friends to play marathon stud games on the Strip, his goal has been self-sufficiency. Back in those days he wanted to earn his expenses plus at least one dollar more. It was important to him not just to be talented at poker, not just to know he COULD win, but to prove it every time.

It was never, strictly speaking, about the money. Initially, Chris needed to prove he could make it on his own, with just his poker skill. (He succeeded in winning more than his expenses on more than 90% of those college trips to Las Vegas.) After obtaining his Ph.D. in 1999, winning the World Championship in 2000, and trading securities and investing wisely, poker became the focus of his life. But his financial needs, generally modest, were covered. “I don’t play poker for money, but I’m glad other people do.”

If money is poker’s measurement of success, Ferguson didn’t want to fail by losing it. All professional poker players learn to distance themselves to some degree from financial outcomes, focusing on playing properly regardless of the short-term result. Chris refined this by incorporating bankroll management as an element of playing skill. Let some other player claim (perhaps truthfully) that he was unconcerned about being broke because he lost all his money making the right plays. Ferguson would manage his bankroll so even his losses, which are inevitable in the course of correct play, would not significantly affect his bankroll – his “scorecard.”

Chris Ferguson established the following rules for managing his bankroll. These rules should be committed to memory by all poker players.

1. Never buy into a cash game or SnG with more than 5% of your bankroll.

2. Never buy into a MTT with more than 2% of your bankroll.

3. If at any time in a no-limit or pot-limit game the money on the table represents more than 10% of your bankroll, leave the game when the blinds come to you.

Because he started at zero, he made an exception for the lowest limits. He could buy into any cash game for $2.50 or less and any tournament that cost $1. This exception made sense, even though it put his entire bankroll into play. To play even those small limits required a bankroll of at least $50. If he made a few dollars in a freeroll and lost it all, he would back to playing freerolls, which is exactly where he would be if he refrained from putting up $1 or $2.50 until he had $50. And if he succeeded with those few dollars, he could escape the freerolls for good and get on with the business of preserving – and building – a bankroll.

A corollary to Rule #2 limits players in taking shots at big tournaments through satellites. Chris believes if your bankroll can’t support entering a tournament, it can’t support entering a satellite for that tournament. A satellite is a cheap way to get into a big tournament ONLY AFTER YOU WIN IT. When you enter, it is a contingent undertaking and even if you succeed – compared with entering a tournament or SnG with the same buy-in as the satellite – you have reduced, not increased, your bankroll. In addition, and this should be obvious, you don’t always win satellites. If you win 1 out of 4 $50 + $5 satellites to get into a $200 + $16 tournament, you are spending the same as the full buy-in. So if you can’t afford the buy-in, you can’t afford the satellites.

It was this provision that tripped Chris up on August 14. On July 16, he signed up for what he thought was a $7 + $.70 Omaha EOB tournament. He thought it was a cash tournament but didn’t realize until it started that it was a super-satellite for the FTOPS Omaha EOB event. To play in that $200 + $16 event required that he have a bankroll of $10,800. (Technically, if he was in the main tournament, he would need a REMAINING bankroll of $10,584 because $216 of his bankroll would be represented by his buy-in.) At the time, he was almost eight thousand dollars short of that amount.

But he made it through the super-satellite, which won him entry into the $50 + $5 turbo satellite that started at 3:30 PM on August 14, 2 ½ hours before the event. Between July 16 and August 14, Chris had played more and was enjoying phenomenal results. When he started playing on August 14, his bankroll was above $9,500. He would try to win his way into the Omaha event through the satellite but he could only count any winnings as part of his bankroll if he got his bankroll up to $10,584 before he was done with the tournament.

So at 3:30 PM, Ferguson began playing the satellite into the Omaha EOB FTOPS event. He hoped to make it into the main tournament, win enough in cash games to pass the $10,000 milestone, win enough to pass $10,584 to legitimize his entry into the Omaha event, and of course try to win the Omaha event. It was going to be long and busy afternoon and evening.