Tournament poker bankroll management isn't 'keep 100 buy-ins'. It's a question about geometric growth under variance — what fraction of your bankroll you can risk per event without going broke and without growing slower than you should. The honest answer is fractional, calibrated to your edge, and almost always smaller than the conventional rule of thumb.
Most “bankroll management” advice for tournament poker is a heuristic — keep 100 buy-ins, keep 200, keep 50 if you’re rolling deeper into stakes. These numbers feel safe but they don’t come from anywhere. They aren’t calibrated to your edge, your variance, or your actual probability of ruin. They’re folklore.
The math underneath bankroll management is older than poker. It’s a question about how to grow capital under uncertainty: at what fraction of total bankroll should you risk a single bet so that long-run growth is maximised and the probability of ruin is acceptable? That question has a name — the Kelly criterion — and a closed-form answer for any wager whose distribution you can describe.
For tournament poker, the wager is one buy-in and the distribution is the realised payout structure of the event. Top-heavy MTT payouts (winner takes ~25%, ITM ~10–15% of the field) make tournament variance dramatically higher than cash-game variance at the same nominal ROI. A 20% ROI player in $100 cash games has tiny variance compared to a 20% ROI player in $100 1,000-runner MTTs — same edge, completely different bankroll requirement.
The right answer to “how many buy-ins” depends on three things you can actually measure:
Once those three are in place, the answer falls out: a Kelly-optimal stake size that maximises log-bankroll growth, plus a drawdown distribution that tells you the probability of bankrolls cratering before you compound back up.
The practical implication for serious tournament players: most bankroll plans are too aggressive at the top of stakes and too conservative at the bottom. The conventional 100-buy-in rule wildly under-protects a 5% ROI grinder taking shots at deep-stack mystery bounty events with 5,000-runner fields, and wildly over-protects a 25% ROI player in 100-runner soft regional turbos.
The platform that runs this site puts those numbers in front of you on your real history. The free tool below shows the variance picture; the paid tier sizes every event for you using your personal Kelly fraction.
The math from this page, applied to your real numbers.
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The Kelly criterion answers one question for a tournament poker player: what fraction of your bankroll should be in a single event so that your long-run geometric growth is maximised? The closed-form answer is g = μ − ½σ². For top-heavy MTTs, this means risking less per buy-in than most rules of thumb suggest — and selling action above a threshold markup whenever you can.
Tournament variance dwarfs cash-game variance at the same nominal ROI. Top-heavy MTT payouts mean a 1,000-runner event concentrates most of its EV in finishes that happen 1–2% of the time, so your realised year is shaped by a handful of deep runs that may or may not arrive. Most simulators get this wrong; here's what an honest variance picture looks like.
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Mystery bounty tournaments concentrate even more variance into the post-bubble field than standard MTTs. The bounty pool's lottery structure rewards survivors disproportionately, distorts ICM relative to standard payouts, and changes optimal bankroll sizing for any player who runs them seriously. Here's how the math actually works.