Though I like to write, I never had any ambition to be a blogger. One of the things I struggle with is that there are so many passwords, web sites, blogs, etc. to keep track of that I'm struggling to not let all that eat up too much of my time. Now that I am self-employed as a poker player, ALL of my time is valuable.
I am keenly aware that time has what economists call an "opportunity cost". That is, the cost of anything that you choose to do (whether it's working, sleeping, watching TV, or spending time with your family) is that you lose the posssiblity of doing something else. So, for example, if I spend two hours reading blogs, those two hours are lost to the possibility of doing something else. In my case, those are two hours that I can't use to make money playing poker. Until I have a large enough bankroll to produce at least a minimal regular income and pay my taxes, that opportunity cost is a very big deal.
There always seems to be a new cool application, program, or web site that I must see or use or learn--and that is as true in poker as in anything else. I have mentioned Holdem Manager recently, and in the short time that I have been using the program, it has in fact become a suite of programs, including their purchase this month of Table Ninja (which automates and eases the process of playing many tables at once.) Even though I'm very careful about jumping on "the next big thing", I always seem to be two manuals behind in reading what I need to know. And of course, you don't exist if you're not on Facebook, which I have resisted so far, even as I hear the Facebook Borg coming up behind me saying, "Resistance is futile, you will be assimilated." Even my new bathroom scale must be programmed before it can be used, and it comes with a nine-page manual!
So, given the opportunity cost, why do I have a blog? There are two reasons, one primary and one peripheral. The peripheral reason is that I might get feedback from other poker players and learn something that will improve my game. I call this peripheral because I already get and give advice with some of the top players in the world on the twoplustwo.com poker forums.
The main reason that I'm doing this is that I have a lot of friends who want to be updated on how I'm doing. It's just easier to set up a blog than to call or E-mail a bunch of people about my next poker milestone. And since most of my friends aren't poker players, a lot of concepts such as bankroll management, expected value, or the importance of the poker-as-a-skill-game battle in US state courts and legislatures, will have to be explained. This isn't a blog on a poker site where I will be discussing what kind of implied odds I might need to draw to a flush on the river when I'm getting less than the required expressed odds of 4.11 to 1.
So, I'll mostly be on here telling people what's going on with my nascent career as a poker player, and explaining how it all works. And putting it all in writing helps me to think through what I'm doing and why, so it should be good for all of us.
Your posts, comments, questions, and corrections are always welcome.
Thanks for reading,
Poker Clif
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Monday, January 25, 2010
Short-term results mean nothing
Current bankroll: $167.36
I guess this is why you need to have a bankroll. Pretty much everything has gone wrong since my bankroll has hit $200. I am having all kinds of software issues--with Holdem Manager (my poker database program), and to a lesser extent with other programs. After a lot of back and forth with Holdem Manager technical support, I finally had to make an appointment with an HEM tech to remotely take over my computer and fix the problem.
These programs really aren't costing me a lot of money, in the sense that I'm losing. They are just taking way too much of my time, and limiting how many tables I can play. I aim for about 35 hours of playing time a week, about 5 hours studying, and a couple hours of administrative (mostly recordkeeping) hours each week. But this is going to be my third week in a row with a total of less than 30 hours.
Plus, 5 hours out of 40 is way too little study time. Many of the very successful (6- or 7-figure income) online pros spend as much as 50% of their time studying. I want to bump study hours to least 10% for me sometime soon, but that will have to wait until I have a bankroll that can generate at least a minimal decent income, with enough left for quarterly estimated tax payments.
That said, my bankroll is doing anything but going up lately. I have gone around 15 straight tournaments without cashing. Only a couple of them had more than 45 players, so this is extremely unusual. It's just been one of those times when everything goes wrong. I've been in first place in a 27-man tournament for over an hour, went completely card dead at the end, and wound up finishing out of the money. I had another tournament where within an hour I had aces twice against one opponent, and I lost both times (the second time knocked me out.)
And to top it off, I missed a full day of playing because Vanessa (our rescue kitten who would have been named Doyle if it was male) knocked over a glass of milk and fried my keyboard. The new Microsoft keyboard is OK, but I liked the Dell a lot better.
At times like this, all I can do is tell myself that the losing streak is statistical variance, and that it happens to everyone. All I can do is keep playing until it turns around. After all, it was just the opposite as I closed in on $200. In a span of 10 $2 tournaments, I had 3 cashes that were around $20 each. A poker player has to be even-tempered, not getting too worked up about the good days or the bad.
If you're going to be a professional poker player, you better have a long-term perspective. I am mildly interested in how well I do in a week, but really, I just want to come out ahead every month. If you like to focus on short-term results, DON'T PLAY POKER!
I guess this is why you need to have a bankroll. Pretty much everything has gone wrong since my bankroll has hit $200. I am having all kinds of software issues--with Holdem Manager (my poker database program), and to a lesser extent with other programs. After a lot of back and forth with Holdem Manager technical support, I finally had to make an appointment with an HEM tech to remotely take over my computer and fix the problem.
These programs really aren't costing me a lot of money, in the sense that I'm losing. They are just taking way too much of my time, and limiting how many tables I can play. I aim for about 35 hours of playing time a week, about 5 hours studying, and a couple hours of administrative (mostly recordkeeping) hours each week. But this is going to be my third week in a row with a total of less than 30 hours.
Plus, 5 hours out of 40 is way too little study time. Many of the very successful (6- or 7-figure income) online pros spend as much as 50% of their time studying. I want to bump study hours to least 10% for me sometime soon, but that will have to wait until I have a bankroll that can generate at least a minimal decent income, with enough left for quarterly estimated tax payments.
That said, my bankroll is doing anything but going up lately. I have gone around 15 straight tournaments without cashing. Only a couple of them had more than 45 players, so this is extremely unusual. It's just been one of those times when everything goes wrong. I've been in first place in a 27-man tournament for over an hour, went completely card dead at the end, and wound up finishing out of the money. I had another tournament where within an hour I had aces twice against one opponent, and I lost both times (the second time knocked me out.)
And to top it off, I missed a full day of playing because Vanessa (our rescue kitten who would have been named Doyle if it was male) knocked over a glass of milk and fried my keyboard. The new Microsoft keyboard is OK, but I liked the Dell a lot better.
At times like this, all I can do is tell myself that the losing streak is statistical variance, and that it happens to everyone. All I can do is keep playing until it turns around. After all, it was just the opposite as I closed in on $200. In a span of 10 $2 tournaments, I had 3 cashes that were around $20 each. A poker player has to be even-tempered, not getting too worked up about the good days or the bad.
If you're going to be a professional poker player, you better have a long-term perspective. I am mildly interested in how well I do in a week, but really, I just want to come out ahead every month. If you like to focus on short-term results, DON'T PLAY POKER!
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
Poker--How I got started (2 of 2)
We left things with my recuperation from an auto accident. After that happened, I went back to my second residence. I had a lease obligation there, and my job was in that city. That didn't last long. I worked with a cast for one day, and I was told to come back when the cast came off. The next thing I heard from my employer was that they were going out of business.
Soon I was back home full-time--no job, a spotty resume, and living in a city where the unemployment rate was 20%. My wife had a good job, but I had absolutely nothing going. We decided that I would become a full-time poker player as of 1/1/2009. We really didn't have anything to lose .
I knew that I could play, with a 14% ROI (return on investment) playing $10 online STTs (single table tournaments) on PokerStars in 2008. My wife's income could keep us going long enough for me to build my poker bankroll.
It didn't exactly work out that way. My wife's employer wound up in a merger, which cut her monthly income by close to 50%. It wasn't long before we were having conversations like this:
Her: "We need your poker money to play bills."
Me: "If I don't keep 50 buy-ins in my bankroll, I'll probably go broke at some point due to statistical variance". ("Statistical variance" is mathspeak for short-term bad luck, such as getting a bad run of cards--something that hits every player from time to time).
Of course, the stupid thing about this conversation is that it couldn't go anywhere--we were both right. I wound up regularly raiding my bankroll, which had me either playing $1 tournaments, or playing way underrolled at my current level, hoping that I could build it up before the inevitable happened. The inevitable happened.
What made this situation even more ridiculous is that the IRS had me pretty much locked in. Tax rules for "gamblers" are different than for any other kind of self-employment. To be treated as a professional for tax purposes, the guidelines say that gambling has to be your main source of income, and it has to take up the majority of your work hours.
I won't go into the tax minutia, but the bottom line is that if I found some other work and lost my "pro" status as a poker player, whatever money I did win would receive very unfavorable tax treatment. In poker parlance, I decided that I was pot-committed so I went all in, sticking with poker.
But believe it or not, there is good news. Another reason I decided to stick with poker is that my wife's income situation was temporary, and would, we hope, eventually get straightened out. It took almost a year, but now things are getting back to normal.
Now it's 2010 and this time I really do have some breathing room, a few months to rebuild a bankroll. My PokerStars bankroll at the end of 2009 was $46. We deposited another $100 get things going, making it $146. I've won enough playing $1 and $2 tournaments to run it up to $200. I will keep building my bankroll, and somewhere between $5 and $10 tournaments, depending on how many tables I play, I should be able to generate a small income and still have a little left to keep building my bankroll to play higher.
There is a new poker book out, entitled "Poker is an Easy Game". No comment.
Soon I was back home full-time--no job, a spotty resume, and living in a city where the unemployment rate was 20%. My wife had a good job, but I had absolutely nothing going. We decided that I would become a full-time poker player as of 1/1/2009. We really didn't have anything to lose .
I knew that I could play, with a 14% ROI (return on investment) playing $10 online STTs (single table tournaments) on PokerStars in 2008. My wife's income could keep us going long enough for me to build my poker bankroll.
It didn't exactly work out that way. My wife's employer wound up in a merger, which cut her monthly income by close to 50%. It wasn't long before we were having conversations like this:
Her: "We need your poker money to play bills."
Me: "If I don't keep 50 buy-ins in my bankroll, I'll probably go broke at some point due to statistical variance". ("Statistical variance" is mathspeak for short-term bad luck, such as getting a bad run of cards--something that hits every player from time to time).
Of course, the stupid thing about this conversation is that it couldn't go anywhere--we were both right. I wound up regularly raiding my bankroll, which had me either playing $1 tournaments, or playing way underrolled at my current level, hoping that I could build it up before the inevitable happened. The inevitable happened.
What made this situation even more ridiculous is that the IRS had me pretty much locked in. Tax rules for "gamblers" are different than for any other kind of self-employment. To be treated as a professional for tax purposes, the guidelines say that gambling has to be your main source of income, and it has to take up the majority of your work hours.
I won't go into the tax minutia, but the bottom line is that if I found some other work and lost my "pro" status as a poker player, whatever money I did win would receive very unfavorable tax treatment. In poker parlance, I decided that I was pot-committed so I went all in, sticking with poker.
But believe it or not, there is good news. Another reason I decided to stick with poker is that my wife's income situation was temporary, and would, we hope, eventually get straightened out. It took almost a year, but now things are getting back to normal.
Now it's 2010 and this time I really do have some breathing room, a few months to rebuild a bankroll. My PokerStars bankroll at the end of 2009 was $46. We deposited another $100 get things going, making it $146. I've won enough playing $1 and $2 tournaments to run it up to $200. I will keep building my bankroll, and somewhere between $5 and $10 tournaments, depending on how many tables I play, I should be able to generate a small income and still have a little left to keep building my bankroll to play higher.
There is a new poker book out, entitled "Poker is an Easy Game". No comment.
Monday, January 18, 2010
Poker--How I Got Started (1 of 2)
A poker player is something that I never expected to be. As an intelligent and logical person, I always thought that gambling, whether bingo or slot machines or lottery tickets, was a stupid waste of money. As a caring person, I have seen what addictions do to people (my job for 12 years involved workng with addicts). Although I never really thought about poker that much, if asked I probably would have considered poker, as a subset of gambling, to be just as dangerous as any other addiction.
To make a long story short, I couldn't manage to keep any kind of job or career going, and school was always a struggle as well. I eventually found out, at age 40, that I had Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), as well as an IQ of 144-154, depending on the test. My theory is that my intelligence and my ADD masked each other for a very long time. How else can I explain loving school, working hard at it (or at least trying to) and having a high school GPA of 2.6? I have also attended 3 colleges, with only two associate (community college) degrees to show for it.
So, I've spent several years cleaning up the messes I've made, including losing my driver's license because I never took care of some minor traffic tickets, and the whole thing snowballed into a very big and expensive mess.
Fast forward to 2007-2008. I was a college senior trying to finally finish my BA, and everything completely fell apart. Once again I had trouble with my college courses. My living situation (I had a second residence, with roommates, for school) fell apart. After finally getting my license back and getting a car, my brakes failed, I sailed across a state highway, and I was hit on the driver's-side door at 60 miles per hour.
While I was recuperating at home (main residence with my wife and cats) I couldn't do much, but I could sit in front of a computer and play online poker. I had dabbled a little bit with poker after watching the pros play on TV, and I immediately realized that it was a skill game, not gambling (more on that, including legal definitions, in a future post).
To make a long story short, I'm actually pretty good at it. On 1/1/2009, I became a full-time poker player.
To make a long story short, I couldn't manage to keep any kind of job or career going, and school was always a struggle as well. I eventually found out, at age 40, that I had Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), as well as an IQ of 144-154, depending on the test. My theory is that my intelligence and my ADD masked each other for a very long time. How else can I explain loving school, working hard at it (or at least trying to) and having a high school GPA of 2.6? I have also attended 3 colleges, with only two associate (community college) degrees to show for it.
So, I've spent several years cleaning up the messes I've made, including losing my driver's license because I never took care of some minor traffic tickets, and the whole thing snowballed into a very big and expensive mess.
Fast forward to 2007-2008. I was a college senior trying to finally finish my BA, and everything completely fell apart. Once again I had trouble with my college courses. My living situation (I had a second residence, with roommates, for school) fell apart. After finally getting my license back and getting a car, my brakes failed, I sailed across a state highway, and I was hit on the driver's-side door at 60 miles per hour.
While I was recuperating at home (main residence with my wife and cats) I couldn't do much, but I could sit in front of a computer and play online poker. I had dabbled a little bit with poker after watching the pros play on TV, and I immediately realized that it was a skill game, not gambling (more on that, including legal definitions, in a future post).
To make a long story short, I'm actually pretty good at it. On 1/1/2009, I became a full-time poker player.
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