Poker Gaming Styles
Sit and go's and Multi-table tournaments
For sit and go tournaments (often referred to as SnG's), a rule of thumb is to have at least 25 buying in your bankroll before going for one of these tournaments. Multi-table tournaments (MTT's) with fields as high as 5,000 players are exceedingly volatile investments. A very good player is very likely to only cash in about 15% of these large tournaments, however if you do cash, the online poker winnings could be gigantic. MTT entries are supposed to be few and far between if you even play them at all. If you were really serious about playing MTTs frequently for long term profit, I think a bankroll in the range of 60-100 buying sounds reasonable.
Limit vs. no-limit cash games
In limit cash games, the general consensus seems to be that you should have a bankroll of about 300 big bets. So if your bankroll is $150, then a good game to play would be .25/.50. No limit cash games are much more unstable, so when you do have a bad run of variance, you'll need more of a cushion. A typical no limit cash game player should have about 20 maximum buying in his/her roll. The max buying is more often than not 100 times the big blind, so that works out to 2,000 big blinds if you want to think of it that way. So if your bankroll is $500 a good limit to play would be .10/.25. I realize that sounds like peanuts, but no limit cash games can get bloody very quickly.
Various Styles of play
The numbers given so far are only guidelines, as your style of play will affect these numbers greatly. If you are a winning, solid conservative player, you may be able to lower your threshold of 300x big bets in limit down to 200x since your variance should be more stable. Note that this will put you in a high risk / high return game. On the other hand if you are a hyper-aggressive type player, you may need to up it to 500x to handle persons bigger swings. Additionally, if you play poker for a living, you may want to up it to 500x just to take things conservatively in order to make sure you can easily pay bills even after a losing streak. Again, the opposite of that position would be if you are willing to construct more risky play in the hopes of building your bankroll quickly, or if you can easily afford to lose your entire bankroll without a sweat. In these cases you can consider dropping your threshold down to 200 xs for limit cash games as an example. However you slice it, figure out your metric and stick to it. You do not want to suddenly change these necessities because you think you are doing very well or you need to 'make up' some losses. Any changes should come slowly so that you can account for variance.
Changing Levels
After you have established you’re metric, changing levels should be a no brainer. Once your bankroll can support higher limits, move up. If you have taken some losses, then don't be too proud to move down. Moving down in limits happens to the very best players; don't let it affect your play. Chances are that in the long run, even with a big cushion in your bankroll, you will probably even go bust at some point. Most specialized poker players have a story about going bust; just don't let it happen to you unexpectedly. You would contain to be some sort of superman to go from 1¢/2¢ up to $30/$60 without having to go down in levels at some point.
