What is the Gambling Age?

Many people are interested in the question “what is the gambling age”. That’s simple – it’s 21. However, in addition to legal issues, the gambling age doesn’t have anything to do with the question whether you should gamble or not.

In case of gambling, or to be more specific, in case of Texas Hold’em poker, it doesn’t matter if you’re 21 or 58. It really doesn’t. What matters are:

· Your skills
· Your patience
· Your capability of noticing how other people play
· Your bankroll

So the question is – are you ready to play at all? Are you ready to learn the game, read some books, practise with free play for days and months? Are you ready to read a book about it, and then ten more? Are you ready to sit back for hours and watch others play the game while you’re just waiting for the hands to play with, to play only a small number of hands every hour? Are you ready to observe other people at your table while you keep folding your 92o’s and even 55’s? Are you ready to pay attention to people playing with crap-cards that you are folding and people who slow-play strong pocket pairs? Are you capable of making conclusions of what you see in the table? Are you? Are you really?

And finally, do you have the money you need to start playing? Of course, to try the game out, you can just deposit couple of bucks. But most of the people aren’t able to make it profitable with just couple of bucks in play. So you need to have a bankroll. Even the best players have bad hours, bad days and it’s not too uncommon to have bad weeks. To handle it all, you need to have the money. That’s even if you are a winning player.

How big bankroll am I talking about?

The size of your bankroll really depends on the buy-in of the tournaments or the size of the big blind in ring tables that you want to play in. In ring tables, you should have money for at least 100 big blinds. So if you’re going to play in $1/$2 tables, you need to have at least $200 on your poker account. And that’s if you are going to play in fixed limit tables. However, if you want to play NL (no limit) then your bankroll should be 200-300 big blinds, so $400-$600. If you are going to play tournaments, you should also have the buy-in fee for at least 100 fixed limit tournaments or 200-300 buy-in fees for no limit tournaments. Of course you can also play with smaller bankroll but the question is – are you here to play or to make money? I’m not saying you can’t make money with smaller bankrolls, you definitely can. But with smaller bankrolls everything’s more complicated.

So...do you really just want to know what the gambling age is?

Tom Corrier has been playing poker himself for some time now and even if he can't be considered a total pro, there are definitely some useful hints that you can take advantage of. You can read more from him at Gamblingdudes.com - Online Gambling Bonuses