12/26/2010 Results for week of 12/19-12-25

HOURS
Administrative   2.00
Study                      3.00
Play                       31.75
                                -------
Total Hours      36.75

I guess it was unrealistic to expect to get 40 hours in on the week that included Christmas, so in general I'm reasonably happy with my hours.

Administrative is whatever it takes to keep my records up to date, and that's going to vary from week to week.  Sometimes I daily update the spreadsheet with my hours, and other times I will wait and then update several days to catch up.

That depends partly on how the large MTTs go.  If I give myself a block of time to play large tournaments and I'm knocked out early, then I can use some of that time either to play small tournaments, or to catch up on the administrative work.

I'm happy with the play hours. I always want to get a minimum of 30 hours a week playing time.

I am not at all happy with my study time.  I haven't been working on the memorization flash cards much lately.  And whatever I'm studying, my hours should never be less than 10% of my time,.  One of my long-term goals is to have studying be 25% of my time.  For some of the top players, it's 50%.  Next year I will be tracking my study hours by the month, to make sure it's always at least 10% of my time.

PROFIT AND LOSS
Beginning bankroll, 12/19  $49.08
Ending bankroll, 12/25       $54.40
                                                       ---------
Profit                                          +$5.32

What a wild week!  I was up more than $20 at one point, then I finished on the 24th and 25th by cashing in only 2 of the last 12 tournaments.  Since about half of those 12 tournaments were just one or two tables (which meant that I had to only be in the top 1/3 or 1/4 of the field to cash), that's a very poor way to end the week.

But poker can be like that.  To be a poker player you have to have a strong stomach to ride that roller coaster, and you have to understand what the word random really means.  If a coin flip is random, most people thing that if you flip a coin 20 times, you will get approximately 10 heads and 10 tails.   That could happen, but you could also get 3 heads and 7 tails, or 10 heads and 0 tails.

There is a luck factor (in math terms, statistical varience) in poker.  Sometimes you will get great cards, and sometimes bad cards.  Sometimes your opponent is playing his "A game" and sometimes he isn't.  So poker "luck", like the coin flip, is about the long-term (in mathspeak, a large enough sample size).  Just like if you flop a coin a thousand times the results should be fairly close to half heads and half tails, poker luck evens out over time as well, and the runs of good cards and bad cards eventually cancel each other out.

As few hands as I play compared to some players who play 24 or more tables at a time, what happens to me over the course of a week is not a large enough sample size to measure anything.  That's why next year I'm going to track my results in larger increments, possibly going by my last 30, 60, and 90 days along with the weekly update.

So, my big start and bad finish last week, given the small sample size, could have been about me, it could have been about luck, or it could have been a combination of both.  I do think that I have been pressing a little bit the last couple days.  The big time for poker players is between Christmas and New Years Day, with a lot of online players off work and on their computers.  I think that I was trying a little too hard to make something big happen.  My results have been frustrating, and I'm falling into the trap of tying to turn it around quickly.

That's a pretty stupid thing to do, especiallly since in one of my recent posts a fellow member of the 2+2 forums mentioned that just two large tournament cashes were a large percentage of his profits for the year.  I have to stop thinking like a SNG player who steadily grinds small but consistent profits every week.  I need to fully commit to the ups and downs of being a multitable tournament specialist, which over the course of a year will make poker a  much more profitable enterprise.