#15 A good start for March

So far in March:

March 1, -$11.00
March 2, +$14.81
March 3, +$4.40
March 4, +$5.40
March 5, +$2.56

Things are definitely looking up.

When playing poker online, 7 days a week, every day is pretty much the same. In my last post I thought that I was writing on Saturday. This is actually Saturday. Oh well, I'm easily confused I guess. So Sunday is tomorrow, and I'll be working on my goal to get in at least 30 hours a week the rest of the month while I'm on my daytime schedule. Since I will have smaller blocks of time to work with, I'll spend more time on studying and administrative matters, and less on acutally playing poker.

By the end of the month I should be caught up with my recordkeeping and have done some good studying. In April I'll switch to my night schedule, getting up around noon and playing late at night, and it will be all about playing.

There are times when I can't believe the small amounts of money I'm playing for. In 2008 I was playing $10 tournaments, and now it's $1-$3 tournaments. But the situation is what it is, and I have to keep things in perspective. Winning small amounts builds my bankroll now, so that I can player higher later.

There was a tournament on March 4th where I had an interesting decison to make. I played a $3.40, 27-player tournament with the following payouts:

5th $6.60
4th $8.40
3rd $14.40
2nd $21.60
1st $30.00

We were down to 6 players and I had AJo (the "o" stands for offsuit, that is, two cards of different suits.) AJ, suited or not, is a very big hand against 5 opponents.

I raised, another player instantly reraised, and I knew that he had a big hand as well. So, either I folded, or we would probably wind up all in, with one of us getting knocked out one spot from the money. We wound up all-in, he showed TT, and I was on the wrong end of the classic "coin flip" that you see in televised poker, with the two overcards (me) having about a 45% chance to win against the underpair.

In this particular coin flip, I was actually a little weaker, with about a 43.5 chance to win. (I didn't memorize that number, I just ran it through the PokerStove software). I lost the hand, and missed the money. The thing is, even if I knew what he had before I went all in, it was probably still the right decision.

Poker players use a mathematical concept called Expected Value (EV). When deciding whether to make a play like this, "Is this the right play?" is the wrong question. The right question is, "Over a statistically valid number of trials, what is the decision that will make me the most money?".

In this case, the cards say, "fold", but the prize structure says, "all in!" In most poker tournaments, a large chunk of the prize pool goes to the top three finishers. It is better to take risks to get a few big cashes than to play it safe and win many small prizes.

With this payout structure, if I played 4 times and squeaked in for 5th place all 4 times, I would win $26.40, which would be a nice addition to my bankroll. But if I took more risks and cashed just once, for first place, I would win $30!

The poker saying for this is, "You play to win, not to cash." That's what I did, and even though I came away with nothing, it was still the right decision.