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The Bankroll Challenge: Gamble With Just $100

Here's a gambling experiment. Your bank roll consist of just $100 and that's all you can use for the rest of your gambling life. You can grow it, but only from the profits of gambling games. How would you do it?

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The $100 Bank Roll Challenge– Reinvent the Way You Gamble

Let’s play a game. It’ll involve gambling of course. Imagine that your whole bankroll was $100….and it had to last you your whole gambling life-time. Any monies you win, you can add to the bankroll, but no other funds can be used to grow it. So, you can’t add money to this bankroll from, say, your salary or a gift from your distant aunt. So, how would you grow it? And how quickly would you lose it? We’ll call it the “bankroll challenge”.

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You Could Just Gamble Like You Normally Do

Well, considering that you’re probably just a recreational gambler, then there’s not a lot else you could do. The problem here is that you’re up against the casino’s built-in advantage, otherwise known as the house edge. Over time, this ensures that your bankroll will dwindle down to nothing. Yes, you may have some wins along the way, and other wagers might break even. But the end result will always see you lose it all. That’s just how casino games are designed. They’re a business and they’re in the business of making a profit. Their profit has to come from the customer’s loss. You might well go to casinos to win the jackpot, but more often than not, the casino will win from you.

So, we can see that by playing your normal method in your bankroll challenge, your $100 will be gone before the day is done. But, thankfully, there are other options.

You Could Become an Advantage Gambler

The thing is that not all gamblers lose all the time. In fact, there are some who are able to win more of the time than lose. They may even make some good profits along the way. They understand the mathematical edge when they play. These guys are known as in the casino world as “advantage gamblers” or as “sharps” in the world of sports betting. So just how do you get the mathematical edge whenever you gamble? Well, it’s not quite so straightforwards. For a start, with many games, you simply can’t.

An example would be if you hit up the casino’s jackpot slots machines. Only if you happen upon a progressive slot with a massive prize, then you could be playing within the realm of positive expectation. But the problem here is that even though you might have a positive expectation on the progressive jackpot, you only have maybe a 10% probability of actually hitting that jackpot. But there are casino games where you can alter the edge. These include blackjack, poker, sports betting, and video poker. Let’s dive deeper…

The Concept Called “Risk of Ruin”

Now, keep in mind that even if you do happen to have the mathematical edge, the other player, your opponent, or the sports bookmaker, can still ensure that you’re broke. For example, in the 2016 election, Trump was the underdog. And by a large margin. For Clinton, it seemed to be a shoo-in, but keep in mind that she was only the 70/30 favorite. Now, if you’d bet your whole bankroll on a Clinton win, then you would of lost your shirt. According to our initial rules, no more gambling for you! The risk of losing that bet was a 30% probability.

Bank Roll Challenge: Stick To Low Bets

Of course, if you were to bet a lower amount per bet in your bankroll challenge then you’d have a lower risk of ruin. It would also take longer to go broke. Not just because of the smaller amounts being wagered, but also because you’ll probably have some wins along the way. But this also works in reverse as well. So, if you were to bet too larger a percentage of your bankroll when you have the mathematical edge, you still are taking a risk of going broke. Let’s look at an example.

High Stakes Are Not For You

So…you’re a Texas Hold’em player and you sit yourself down at a table where the buy-in is set at $100. Now since you might have to bet very high, you run the risk of total ruin at any time. Gulp! Yes, you could be difficult and simply refuse to go all in. Not very sportsman-like, but it’s a possibility. But you’ll not be able to take advantage of the mathematical edge if your unwilling or unable to make the correct plays for each and every hand.

Balance the Size of Your Bet Versus the Size of Your Bank Roll

This sounds like common sense. But as we all know, though it might be called “common sense”, it’s actually far from common. Your casino bankroll is simply defined by the jackpot games you’re playing. Just make sure to bet the smallest percentage of your bankroll for each bet. Now, we all know that gambling is mostly about random events, so it’s quite possible that you could experience a losing streak. Keep in mind that your mathematical expectation should always be long term, but you can’t play into the long run if you’re all outta cash and broke. Now if you’re a card counter, the risk that you’ll end the day in ruin is 40%, if you only have 200 betting units to your name.

This will improve and drop to 20% if you have 400 betting units, and then it’ll drop to just 1% if you have 1,000 betting units.

Bank Roll Challenge: Smaller Betting Units

So, as you only have $100, you’ll need to divide this into one of those numbers of betting units or bets. Be prepared, cause you bet are going to start getting increasingly small. For example, a 40% chance of losing everything will have you playing with 50 cents bets for each hand. If you’re OK with the risk of a 20% chance of ruin, then you’ll have to play with 25 cents per hand. Finally, if you want to drop the probability of going broke and never gambling again in your life to just 1%, then you’ll have to gamble with 10 cents per hand.

But here’s the rub. You’ll never find bricks and mortar casino that’ll accept such low bets for playing blackjack. The table minimums are normally between $5 to $10. Yes, even with best online casinos with jackpots you’d be fine as they accept tiny bets. But then again, you can’t count cards playing online. So maybe we should admit that blackjack isn’t the game for a player with just $100 to their name. Your bankroll challenge would never get off the ground. OK…but how about poker?

What About Poker? Can’t You Play Poker for Really Low Stakes?

So years ago, the professional poker play, Chris Ferguson, set himself a task very similar to this bankroll challenge: to turn $0 into $10,000 at the poker table. And he was able to do it! So, if you take a seat with a total bankroll of $100, then surely you could do this feat as well. As you all well know, poker has a pretty high risk of ruin. To avoid this fate, you’ll need to keep your bets low with regard to your bankroll. This means that you’ll need to seek out very low stakes games. Once you’ve won enough, then you can move up to playing with bigger stakes. Sounds easy enough!

Bank Roll Challenge: Find Free-Rolls

This is how Ferguson managed to do it. He began by only playing in what is known as “freerolls”. These are poker tournaments with no buy-ins, but where you can take home a cash prize. Actually, you could ensure that your bankroll lasted forever by just playing these competitions. Once he’d built up a usable bankroll, he started to play very aggressively and would spend up to 5% of the total bankroll per wager. Ferguson stuck with a rule that he would never spend more than 2% of his bankroll on a multi-table tournament. This would translate to your spending per hand having a cap of $2 if you had a bankroll of $100.

Once again, you’ll struggle to find any poker games with such low bets. So you’ll need to search the internet for sites that offer “micro-stakes”. Once you’ve found one, then you’ll have to play in a disciplined manner. You’ll also need to find a game of poker with a positive expectation. Provided that you play perfect strategy, then you’ll see your bankroll starting to grow. It will not be a quick process. Maybe you’ll have $1,000 after three months of playing. Of course, once you touch that sum then you can start betting bigger. Maybe you’ll reach $10,000 within the next three months.

This Only Works If You Have the Edge

Please keep in mind that this whole bankroll challenge is pointless unless you have a mathematical edge. If you can’t count cards properly, then you’ll be quickly on the road to ruin. The same goes for playing poker. You need to be a really good player (like in the top 5% of the world!). In other words, if you’re not an elite player, then expect to go broke sooner rather than later. Playing other negative expectation games, like slot machines, roulette, and craps, has nothing to do with us here.

Conclusion: The $100 Bank Roll Challenge

So that was the $100 bankroll challenge. How do you think you would do? Could you even last one evening having to keep to the rules? Maybe you should try it, even just the one time. For the sake of seeing just how much discipline you have. Set aside $100 for your bankroll. Only make small bets, and only then when you have a mathematical edge. By keeping your betting limits low, then you’ll have a much better chance of winning this competition. And if you go broke, then see how long you can last without going back to the casino.