I have never done my bankroll in it total. The way I stake makes it pretty difficult to be honest although I have had occasions where my staking has gone down to levels which can make expenses hard to meet. As I mentioned earlier in the thread I do have some other income sources but it is fairly rare that they are anything approaching a living wage on a monthly basis but I suppose if neccesary i could step that up to raise a new bankroll. My bankroll as it stands at the moment isn't anywhere near as big as it has been in the past but that is more to do with lifestyle leaks in the past few years. Strangely, despite my bankroll fluctuating a fair bit over the years, my betting income has always been fairly constant. That probably answers the monthly wage question. I am not that disciplined about separating bankroll and life money and they tend to intermingle which means that my bankroll and bets only really grow when i earn over a certain amount. Realistically that has meant it hasn't grown in size in any menaningful fashion for a few years now but on the flip side I have been able to maintain a lifestyle that involves a fair bit of travel. One thing that I have learnt over the years is that I am the kind of person that fits their lifestyle to the amount of money they are earning....that means that when I have been winning very good money I hae also spent it. The best post I have ever read on here was from Dubai here:
http://blondepoker.com/forum/index.php?topic=50836.msg1336253#msg1336253 and whilst I have never won and done as much money as I imagine Dave has it rings a lot of bells right down to the spending a massive amount of my bankroll one night in Stringfellows and not even enjoying it that much.
The biggest bets, wins and losses all came in a about a three or four year period from 2000-2005. I won £42k when the Patriots beat the Panthers in the Superbowl. At the time I placed the bet I was running bookmaking for a sportsbook in Antigua called WWTS which was one of the biggest US facing online sportsbooks at the time. i had been hired to turn around their bookmaking and had increased the margin from low 4%'s to 5.6% that year and, coupled with an increase in turnover, we were having the best year that company ever had ($25m gross profit I think) and I was on target for a max bonus which was about a years salary so I was punting fairly big with the backup of very good salary and the certainty of a very decent bonus coming at the end of the year. I was getting a couple fo quid betting on Betfair at the time too and after a couple of weeks of the NFL season I priced up the Superbowl futures and thought New England should have been 4/1 shots and was amazed that they were available at, I think, 14/1 so had a monkey straight away and basically just kept topping it up until my total bet was aboutn £4k at just over 10/1 average. In December of that year I had a fairly bad run and dropped a fair bit but worse was to come when just after Xmas the CEO of the firm asked me to go to lunch with him and told me that despite making $10m more than they had the previous year they had decided I wasn't the man to take them forward and they were not renewing my contract. I would be paid the statutory part of my bonus but not the discretionary element which was about 30% of it. All of a sudden this ante post bet took on a new importance. I had just met the girl that is now my wife at the time and this was all a fairly devastating blow for me at the time given that she was a Jamaican national and had basically no chance of a long term visa to the UK at the time. I asked her if she would be willing to come to the UK and she said she was willing to give up her job (a fairly decent one) but how would we be able to do it? Eventually we decided that the best thing all around was going to be for her to fulfil her long standing ambition to go to college and she would do it in the UK and we would get her a visa that way but the flipside to that is that a three year university course for a non UK national is expensive......in fact it costs about £40k just for fees over a three year period....where would I be able to find money like that with no job and only the prospect of my bonus to give me money to live on while I tried to find a job?
As you can imagine that ante post voucher took on an even bigger importance at that point. At this point New England were 7/2 favourites and looked like world beaters but every game was just about the most tense experience of my life if I am honest. Eventually they reached the Superbowl and, at the time, I had a dodgy DirecTV sat and just as I sat down to watch the game the NFL decided in their wisdom that this might be a good time to block all the illegal signals so with the game kicking off I had to head out and try and find a place to watch the game and by the time Lisa's friend had given me the keys to her place and we settled down to watch Vinateri miss a 31 yard field goal to give New England the lead. It was possibly the tensest game i have ever watched but eventually the Pats won with by a field goal. My wife, largely oblivious to the importance of the occasion, fell asleep at some point in the first quarter and only awoke when i was celebrating to ask if we could go home now!!!!
Anyway that was a ridiculously long answer to a fairly simple question but that was my biggest ever win and not only in financial terms.
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