6/1/2010--Results, week of 5/23-5/29

HOURS:
Admin 0.50
Study 2.00
Playing 19.75
TOTAL HOURS, 22.25


PROFIT NUMBERS
Bankroll, beginning of week, $136.23
Bankroll, end of week, $170.90
PROFIT, $34.67


I'll deal with the bad part first. I'm not at all happy with my 22-hour work week. I certainly had an excuse--a medical issue in the family. Even so, I've had several weeks in a row where I haven't worked at it for even 40 hours, and that's just not acceptable.

There are poker players who make a lot of money playing part-time, college students in particular. But I'm not there yet. The first step is to build a bankroll, and mine is not yet big enough to win significant amounts of money, which means I am not winning enough to take any out of my bankroll.


A +$35 week is a big step in the right direction, but I can't let up. I have to hit this hard until I have enough of a bankroll to have a little breathing room. I look at my work week something like this:


Any week where I get 40 total poker hours is an OK week.
Any week where I get at least 40 play hours is a good week.
Any week where I play for at least 40 hours, and log 60 total hours, is a great week--and that should be my goal every week.


I look at it this way. I'm basically an entrepreneur trying to get my small business off the ground. Like anyone starting a small business, I should expect to put in a lot of hours to make the business successful.


Now, to the good news of the week. A $35 profit is great news. I finally got through my long breakeven stretch. I knew that mathematically, the statistical variance of that breakeven stretch was bound to end sooner or later. And a 25% increase in my bankroll is huge--I would be wealthy pretty quickly if I could keep that up!


The other reason that this is exciting is that my recently developed Simplified Mixed Game Bankroll Strategy (more details in a future post) allows me to move up $1 in tournament level every time I add a little over $50 to my bankroll. For example, if I am bankrolled to play no higher than $3 tournaments, adding just over $50 to my bankroll keeps my mathematical risk of ruin very low when moving up to $4 tournaments (with their proportionally larger prize pools).


So, even though I'm not happy with my hours, a $35 boost to my bankroll certainly makes this an overall successful week. I'll just have to see if I can get more hours in, and make even more money, this week.