In the earliest days of the game of Texas Hold'em, gaming saloons and casinos opened up across the United States in frontier towns that dotted the landscape on the rough and tumble frontier.  As time passed, more and more gamblers emerged as professional Texas Hold'em poker players who participated in as many games as possible in poker tournaments and cash games across the West, marking the beginning of the very first professional poker players in America.  As the concept of the professional poker player became more and more common, skilled players began to put down their advice in books and other methods of communication, in an attempt to tutor a new generation of up and coming professional players.  While very few of these works survive to the modern day, they had in common a great many concepts with nearly every printed work on the subject of Texas Hold'em poker that has been produced since the early days of the sport.

Among these concepts that are so similar and universal is the golden rule of Texas Hold'em poker, that the player should always protect their bankroll.  Even in the rough-and-tumble frontier towns of the old West, players were wise enough to sock away money at the local banking institution, rather than risk losing it all in a bad play or a card game gone wrong.  In the modern day, this is fantastic advice, as the best way to prevent losing your bankroll is to insulate it from loss by storing it in your local banking establishment.  Without exposing it to risk, there is no chance that you can lose more than what you bring to the table.  This technique is pioneered and championed by all manner of professional poker players in the modern day just as it has been throughout history.  Experts indicate that users should wager no more than 1% to 2% of their bankroll at any given time, and that insulation of the bankroll from wagering should occur the majority of the time, if not all the time.

While you may have seen movies where players would dramatically push in their chips and announce that they are going all in, this is simply a dramatic and attention-getting theatrical stunt that requires suspension of disbelief by the audience in order to work and has no basis in reality.