Alright, so I was thinking about how realistic it would be for a new player to build a bankroll from scratch, and want to share my opinions.

Here is my example:

New player starts playing .5/.10 with a $200 bankroll, and plans to move up to .10/.25 when bankroll reaches $500. Assuming that player crushes the games at a clip of 10bb/100 it would still take 300 hours of grinding just to reach .10/.25. Multitabling would help, but I think most new players won't have the patience to grind it up for so many hours for such small results. Particularly as putting in this many hours in a short time frame would likely require the aspiring new player to stop working and play full time.

Combine this with the fact that most players are going to take a long time just to get to the point where they are winning at 10bb/100 at .5/.10 and we can see why people have such a hard time building a bankroll.

The more realistic way someone can build a bankroll (and I imagine this is how most of us built our bankrolls), is by going on a sick heater where they win dozens of buy ins over the course of a month or so, or by hitting a big score in a MTT.

Considering this, should the prescription for building a bankroll suggest new players to shot take super aggressively? I think so. The standard recommended bankrolls that get thrown around (20bi, 50bi, etc) are probably way too conservative to have any realistic chance of success for most people. A new player would likely have much more success studying hard, and shot taking hard with the goal being to spin up a bankroll from a reasonable amount of money from their life bankroll.

I've been having these thoughts as I am no longer working a normal job, and have been grinding .10/.25 daily. I found that even winning at 10bb/100 is really difficult to support myself financially, even living in Asia where my personal expenses are relatively low.