Bankroll: $47.15
-$4.15
Wow, was yesterday ever a bad poker day! Even as I was typing this entry, I somehow got booted while writing this post. Fortunately, Blogspot has an autosave function that works once a minute, so I didn't lose much.
So, on with the post:
This was one of those days when I played reasonably well, and nothing went right. Up until today, when playing tournaments with a buy-in of less than $1, I had never failed to cash 4 times in a row. I had never lost more $1 in a day at those stakes--until today. I can hardly that I'm about to type the next line.
I lost over $4 in one day at nanostakes.
I went card dead for 30 minutes or more at a time, several times. I went all-in preflop with AK and lost to 43. Everything that could go wrong, did go wrong, and I can only think of one hand that I badly messed up. It was one of those wierd spots where I was either way ahead or way behind (I flopped bottom 2 pair on a dangerous board) and instead of committing to the hand or getting out, I kept making my standard 1/2 pot bet, hoping that my position would become clearer. That never happened, and I lost a lot of my stack on that hand.
Still, it was a tough spot, and I can't think of any spots that I seriously misplayed in any of the other tournaments. Sometimes it just happens like that. I played 6 tournaments with a buy-in of 10, 25, or 55 cents, and I lost them all, not even once getting close to a cash.
That never happens. I cash very regularly in these things, and when I don't cash, I'm usually close. I'm still up $6.83 this month at nanostakes even after yesterday's debacle. Variance being what it is, I can comfort myself with the thought that at some point I'll have a day that will be as amazingly good as yesterday was amazingly bad.
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
Sunday, February 20, 2011
What I did wrong in 2011
I'm finally caught up on everything. After spending a lot of time with a blizzard, income taxes, and software issues (especially Holdem Manager) I'm pretty much caught up on everything. And expect for a type of tournament that I rarely play anyway, Holdem Manager is handling my tournament results just fine.
As far as my records, before I get much farther into 2011, I'm seriously thinking about not keeping handwritten records at all, just putting everything on online spreadsheets, and formatting it so that I can get the information I need quickly and easily at tax time next year. If I set up the spreadsheet correctly, all of the numbers that I need for income tax purposes (number of net win tournaments, number of net loss tournaments, total of net wins, and total of net losses) will be right there at the bottom of the approriate columns.
The more I think about the IRS requiring handwritten records for "gamblers", the less sense it makes. At a time when some companies are almost entirely electronic (my doctor and his nurses type the results of my visit into a netbook, with nary a piece of paper in sight) it makes no sense that I have to do that, and I'm not going to.
Now that my rant is out of the way, on to the topic at hand.
I made some mistakes last year, and the biggest was bankroll management. I know, I made such a big deal out of proper bankroll management, and I still think that it's absolutely necessary to a poker career. But when I took a good look at all of last year's records, it's obvious that I fudged my BRM a bit. And fudging even a little, with something that important, can have very nasty consequences.
One of the premises of my Consolidated Bankroll Management Formula is that in the micro (under $5 buy-in) tournaments, I should have at least $50 buy-ins. When I cashed out $50 of my $100 bankroll, that put me close to the line, and I fell victim to a common conceit among poker players--I've been above $100 several times, it won't take me too long to grind it back up, right?
Wrong!
No one escapes variance, and I knew better. As Collin Moshman states in his seminal book, Sit 'n Go Strategy: Expert Advice for Beating One-Table Poker Tournaments, p. 238, if you start with a bankroll of 25 buy-ins,
"The downside is you must be willing to go broke, as even the strongest player is not immune from a 25 buy-in downstreak. . . "
Taking $50 out of my account didn't take me down to 25 buy-ins, but it certainly put me in dangerous territory, with under 50 buy-ins--because I wasn't actually playing $1 tournaments. I was playing tournaments with a buy-in of betwen $1.10 and $1.40. Being underrolled definitely affected my play, and led to a cascade of mistakes and bad choices.
So, here are my errors:
1. I was not playing with a big enough bankroll, and,
2. This affected how I was playing. When I started on a downswing, I wasn't thinking about the best tournament for my style, or when the best tournaments were running. I was playing scared, and thinking about which tournaments had the least risk (which also, of course, means the least reward). I was trying not to lose rather than trying to win.
3. I played too many high-variance tournaments. I was playing a lot of $1.10 tournaments with fields of over a thousand or more, which is a good long-term strategy to make a lot of money. I am a long-term thinker, but I should have abandoned that when I was trying to keep a bankroll. Fifty buy-ins is nowhere near enough to play high-variance tournaments.
With my Consolidated Bankroll Formula, the key word is "Consolidated." It was meant to leave me with a big enough bankroll to play a mix of small and large tournaments. When I started investing more and more of my playing time in the larger tournaments, my variance swung the wrong way, and I got what I deserved for my foolishnesss.
I didn't have the luxury of waiting for weeks or months between big MTT scores, and I should have switched to SNGs and other tournaments of one, or a few, tables. The cashes are a lot smaller, but also a lot more regular, and it's a good way to steadily build up a bankroll.
4. I didn't move down in buy-in. There are PokerStars tournaments for buy-ins of less than $1.10, in fact, about a month ago I won a couple dollars in a 10¢ MTT (Facebook Poker League). I should have been playing tournaments like that months ago.
I've learned from my mistakes, and I've changed my approach. I'm done with the large MTTs for now, except perhaps for the Facebook Poker League, where the softness of the field (horrible play) cancels out the variance of the tournament size, and makes it marginally good choice to play in my situation. As my bankroll grows, I'll start mixing a few non-Facebook League MTTs in. The biggest field that I've played against in the last two weeks is 90 players, and about half the tournamments that I've entered in the last few days had an entry fee of 25¢. It shouldn't take too many of those to boost my bankroll enough that I can breath a little easier.
In the twenty-seven 25¢ tournaments that I have played this year, with fields of 27, 45, or 90 players, I have an ROI (return on investment) of 94%. An ROI of 25% is normally considered outstanding with fields of that size. My total profit for those tournaments is $6.71.
So, I'll have to humble myself and play at the baby stakes for a while, but as I play more of these, and get an even better feel about how these tournaments run, it shouldn't take long to add a quick $20 to my bankroll, and return to playing some serious poker playing again.
As far as my records, before I get much farther into 2011, I'm seriously thinking about not keeping handwritten records at all, just putting everything on online spreadsheets, and formatting it so that I can get the information I need quickly and easily at tax time next year. If I set up the spreadsheet correctly, all of the numbers that I need for income tax purposes (number of net win tournaments, number of net loss tournaments, total of net wins, and total of net losses) will be right there at the bottom of the approriate columns.
The more I think about the IRS requiring handwritten records for "gamblers", the less sense it makes. At a time when some companies are almost entirely electronic (my doctor and his nurses type the results of my visit into a netbook, with nary a piece of paper in sight) it makes no sense that I have to do that, and I'm not going to.
Now that my rant is out of the way, on to the topic at hand.
I made some mistakes last year, and the biggest was bankroll management. I know, I made such a big deal out of proper bankroll management, and I still think that it's absolutely necessary to a poker career. But when I took a good look at all of last year's records, it's obvious that I fudged my BRM a bit. And fudging even a little, with something that important, can have very nasty consequences.
One of the premises of my Consolidated Bankroll Management Formula is that in the micro (under $5 buy-in) tournaments, I should have at least $50 buy-ins. When I cashed out $50 of my $100 bankroll, that put me close to the line, and I fell victim to a common conceit among poker players--I've been above $100 several times, it won't take me too long to grind it back up, right?
Wrong!
No one escapes variance, and I knew better. As Collin Moshman states in his seminal book, Sit 'n Go Strategy: Expert Advice for Beating One-Table Poker Tournaments, p. 238, if you start with a bankroll of 25 buy-ins,
"The downside is you must be willing to go broke, as even the strongest player is not immune from a 25 buy-in downstreak. . . "
Taking $50 out of my account didn't take me down to 25 buy-ins, but it certainly put me in dangerous territory, with under 50 buy-ins--because I wasn't actually playing $1 tournaments. I was playing tournaments with a buy-in of betwen $1.10 and $1.40. Being underrolled definitely affected my play, and led to a cascade of mistakes and bad choices.
So, here are my errors:
1. I was not playing with a big enough bankroll, and,
2. This affected how I was playing. When I started on a downswing, I wasn't thinking about the best tournament for my style, or when the best tournaments were running. I was playing scared, and thinking about which tournaments had the least risk (which also, of course, means the least reward). I was trying not to lose rather than trying to win.
3. I played too many high-variance tournaments. I was playing a lot of $1.10 tournaments with fields of over a thousand or more, which is a good long-term strategy to make a lot of money. I am a long-term thinker, but I should have abandoned that when I was trying to keep a bankroll. Fifty buy-ins is nowhere near enough to play high-variance tournaments.
With my Consolidated Bankroll Formula, the key word is "Consolidated." It was meant to leave me with a big enough bankroll to play a mix of small and large tournaments. When I started investing more and more of my playing time in the larger tournaments, my variance swung the wrong way, and I got what I deserved for my foolishnesss.
I didn't have the luxury of waiting for weeks or months between big MTT scores, and I should have switched to SNGs and other tournaments of one, or a few, tables. The cashes are a lot smaller, but also a lot more regular, and it's a good way to steadily build up a bankroll.
4. I didn't move down in buy-in. There are PokerStars tournaments for buy-ins of less than $1.10, in fact, about a month ago I won a couple dollars in a 10¢ MTT (Facebook Poker League). I should have been playing tournaments like that months ago.
I've learned from my mistakes, and I've changed my approach. I'm done with the large MTTs for now, except perhaps for the Facebook Poker League, where the softness of the field (horrible play) cancels out the variance of the tournament size, and makes it marginally good choice to play in my situation. As my bankroll grows, I'll start mixing a few non-Facebook League MTTs in. The biggest field that I've played against in the last two weeks is 90 players, and about half the tournamments that I've entered in the last few days had an entry fee of 25¢. It shouldn't take too many of those to boost my bankroll enough that I can breath a little easier.
In the twenty-seven 25¢ tournaments that I have played this year, with fields of 27, 45, or 90 players, I have an ROI (return on investment) of 94%. An ROI of 25% is normally considered outstanding with fields of that size. My total profit for those tournaments is $6.71.
So, I'll have to humble myself and play at the baby stakes for a while, but as I play more of these, and get an even better feel about how these tournaments run, it shouldn't take long to add a quick $20 to my bankroll, and return to playing some serious poker playing again.
Sunday, February 13, 2011
Things that I learned in 2010
My review of last year's poker activities and results will generate several blog posts in the near future. I guess I better start with the financial, and it wasn't good. It was about as close to a breakeven year as anyone could have. After playing over 1,400 tournaments, and paying around $4,000 in entry fees, I took a slight loss, down $67 for the year.
I'm both disappointed and embarrassed by that number. I'm disappointed because I really expected to make a few thousand dollars, build a bankroll so that I would be playing at at least the $10 level by the end of the year, and be well on my way to, in the not-too-distant future, making more money playing poker than I ever did doing anything else.
I'm embarrassed that I did so badly, and I'm embarrassed that I contributed almost nothing to the family finances. Fortunately my wife made enough money to get us through, along with my state retirement check. But it got really tight, and I didn't expect to put all that pressure on her.
That said, I learned a lot, and I'm convinced that this year will be a whole lot better. I'll tell you why I'm still optimistic in a future post, but for now, I'll note a couple things that I learned .
I keep records that are very complete, with much more information than even the Internal Revenue Service* would ever need to see. I keep track of my hours, in 15-minute increments, with every activity detailed. I keep track of what kind of tournament I played, when it started and ended, how I did, and what the buy-in was. When I study, I keep track of what I was studying, and for how long. The same with administrative time--whether I was updating my Poker Hours spreadsheet, writing a blog entry, or making new sets of flash cards to study, it's all noted.
That turned out to be one of the smartest things I did.
When I was scanning through all those records and getting my results for over 1,400 touraments together, I saw patterns. I saw what worked and what didn't. I realized that I can be much better at organizing my time. So, without further ado, here are a couple things that I learned (more to follow in future posts).
1. My sessions were way too short. There were too many days when something like the following happened: I would go to 2+2 to check on my poker forum posts (study time) for 15 minutes, then play a tournament that lasted 45 minutes, take a break, then work on my records for a little while. That kind of schedule hasn't worked out well. Too many breaks means too many opportunites to get sidetracked.
I need to make all of my sessions longer--whether the sessions are study, playing, or administration. I know myself and my Attention Deficit Disorder, and I know that every time I finish a tournament or a study session, it's way too easy for me to go to the bathroom, refill my drink, get a sandwhich, and turn on Fox News at the top of the hour to see what's going on.
Before I know if, I've wasted an hour. Then it's time to eat, there is another distraction after that, and before I know it, my 10-minute break has turned into two hours. I need to make all of my sessions longer, and tackle bigger projects. For example, instead of getting on 2+2 for 15 minutes to check for reaction to my posts, I should plan on being there for an hour or two. I could check my posts, then check the Beginner's Forum for players that need help with something. I could do that for an hour, and even extend that study time by opening a poker book or working with my flash cards. I need to be doing something for at least three hours before I even consider taking a break.
Of course, since I hit my study hard that day, I could take a large block of time the next day for tournaments or administration. This change in time management should help me be a lot more focused, get a lot more accomplished, and help me become a much better poker player.
2. I am a natural night person even more than I realized, and I shouldn't fight it. As mentioned in earlier posts, when I tried to put myself on a normal (first shift) working day, it didn't work well at all. I was depriving myself of sleep trying to force myself to get tired, so that I could be, in the words of Benjamin Franklin, "early to bed and early to rise."
But when I switched by to a more normal poker schedule (most of the live-game pros get up around noon and play all night), it fell right into place. I was setting my alarm for noon or 1 P.M., but more often than not, I was awake before the alarm went off. It was never that easy on a day schedule.
My wife and I agreed that I should stick to the night schedule at least for the next month or so. To be honest, my wife's reasons for wanting me on that schedule aren't just about poker. When I'm up all night, I have the ice and snow off her car before she has to leave for work at 5:30 A.M (I usually end my final session sometime between 2 and 4 A.M.)
There still is the problem with church. Sunday night church services used to be common in the United States, but that is no longer true. If I want to go to a service at my church, Sunday morning is my only option. Once the winter weather is over, I'll have to work out some kind of compromise where I got to church part of the time, but not every week. It's kind of a wierd situation. I'm not really one of those people who has to work instead of going to church on Sunday, but in a way I am.
The better I get and the higher the tournament buy-ins, the harder it will be to make church a priority. The big times to play on PokerStars (and other sites as well) are weekends, in particular, Saturday night (when the most players are online and the most tournaments are available) and Sunday afternoon (when the so-called Sunday Majors, tournaments with prize pools of up to a million dollars, are held). One of the Sunday Majors can last as long as 12 hours. Playing all night Saturday, and playing one or more of the Sunday Majors on Sunday afternoon (and possibly well into Sunday evening), would make morning church difficult to fit in.
But, as I said. there has to be a compromise somewhere. It might be going to church every other week, or maybe sticking to the night schedule for a month, then the church (day) schedule for a month. I don't plan to quit playing poker or quit going to church. Of course, taking more time for church will be a lot easier once the financial pressure has lessened.
* I try not to use abbreviations which would unfamiliar to people who do not live in the United States.
I'm both disappointed and embarrassed by that number. I'm disappointed because I really expected to make a few thousand dollars, build a bankroll so that I would be playing at at least the $10 level by the end of the year, and be well on my way to, in the not-too-distant future, making more money playing poker than I ever did doing anything else.
I'm embarrassed that I did so badly, and I'm embarrassed that I contributed almost nothing to the family finances. Fortunately my wife made enough money to get us through, along with my state retirement check. But it got really tight, and I didn't expect to put all that pressure on her.
That said, I learned a lot, and I'm convinced that this year will be a whole lot better. I'll tell you why I'm still optimistic in a future post, but for now, I'll note a couple things that I learned .
I keep records that are very complete, with much more information than even the Internal Revenue Service* would ever need to see. I keep track of my hours, in 15-minute increments, with every activity detailed. I keep track of what kind of tournament I played, when it started and ended, how I did, and what the buy-in was. When I study, I keep track of what I was studying, and for how long. The same with administrative time--whether I was updating my Poker Hours spreadsheet, writing a blog entry, or making new sets of flash cards to study, it's all noted.
That turned out to be one of the smartest things I did.
When I was scanning through all those records and getting my results for over 1,400 touraments together, I saw patterns. I saw what worked and what didn't. I realized that I can be much better at organizing my time. So, without further ado, here are a couple things that I learned (more to follow in future posts).
1. My sessions were way too short. There were too many days when something like the following happened: I would go to 2+2 to check on my poker forum posts (study time) for 15 minutes, then play a tournament that lasted 45 minutes, take a break, then work on my records for a little while. That kind of schedule hasn't worked out well. Too many breaks means too many opportunites to get sidetracked.
I need to make all of my sessions longer--whether the sessions are study, playing, or administration. I know myself and my Attention Deficit Disorder, and I know that every time I finish a tournament or a study session, it's way too easy for me to go to the bathroom, refill my drink, get a sandwhich, and turn on Fox News at the top of the hour to see what's going on.
Before I know if, I've wasted an hour. Then it's time to eat, there is another distraction after that, and before I know it, my 10-minute break has turned into two hours. I need to make all of my sessions longer, and tackle bigger projects. For example, instead of getting on 2+2 for 15 minutes to check for reaction to my posts, I should plan on being there for an hour or two. I could check my posts, then check the Beginner's Forum for players that need help with something. I could do that for an hour, and even extend that study time by opening a poker book or working with my flash cards. I need to be doing something for at least three hours before I even consider taking a break.
Of course, since I hit my study hard that day, I could take a large block of time the next day for tournaments or administration. This change in time management should help me be a lot more focused, get a lot more accomplished, and help me become a much better poker player.
2. I am a natural night person even more than I realized, and I shouldn't fight it. As mentioned in earlier posts, when I tried to put myself on a normal (first shift) working day, it didn't work well at all. I was depriving myself of sleep trying to force myself to get tired, so that I could be, in the words of Benjamin Franklin, "early to bed and early to rise."
But when I switched by to a more normal poker schedule (most of the live-game pros get up around noon and play all night), it fell right into place. I was setting my alarm for noon or 1 P.M., but more often than not, I was awake before the alarm went off. It was never that easy on a day schedule.
My wife and I agreed that I should stick to the night schedule at least for the next month or so. To be honest, my wife's reasons for wanting me on that schedule aren't just about poker. When I'm up all night, I have the ice and snow off her car before she has to leave for work at 5:30 A.M (I usually end my final session sometime between 2 and 4 A.M.)
There still is the problem with church. Sunday night church services used to be common in the United States, but that is no longer true. If I want to go to a service at my church, Sunday morning is my only option. Once the winter weather is over, I'll have to work out some kind of compromise where I got to church part of the time, but not every week. It's kind of a wierd situation. I'm not really one of those people who has to work instead of going to church on Sunday, but in a way I am.
The better I get and the higher the tournament buy-ins, the harder it will be to make church a priority. The big times to play on PokerStars (and other sites as well) are weekends, in particular, Saturday night (when the most players are online and the most tournaments are available) and Sunday afternoon (when the so-called Sunday Majors, tournaments with prize pools of up to a million dollars, are held). One of the Sunday Majors can last as long as 12 hours. Playing all night Saturday, and playing one or more of the Sunday Majors on Sunday afternoon (and possibly well into Sunday evening), would make morning church difficult to fit in.
But, as I said. there has to be a compromise somewhere. It might be going to church every other week, or maybe sticking to the night schedule for a month, then the church (day) schedule for a month. I don't plan to quit playing poker or quit going to church. Of course, taking more time for church will be a lot easier once the financial pressure has lessened.
* I try not to use abbreviations which would unfamiliar to people who do not live in the United States.
Wednesday, February 9, 2011
The problems and interruptions just keep coming
Well, when it rains (or in this case, snows) it pours. As far as doing any serious poker playing, the last two weeks have been pretty much a lost cause. I'm tired of having excuses for why things don't happen, but it's hard to fight an act of God.
The problems mentioned in my last blog entry never did get solved. My request to PokerStars was kicked up to a higher level of support, and they never got back to me. PokerStars is legendary for their great support, something like that has NEVER happened to me. It's not usual to write to support and get a response in less than an hour.
While I was trying to get a resolution of my file downloading issue from PokerStars, I was also writing to the Computer Technical Help forum on twoplustwo.com. The problem there was that no one could seem to grasp the simplicity of the problem. All I wanted to know from them was how to use a specific aspect of the Open Office program, that is, I wanted to know how to write an IF statement do to a simple boolean function, and put a amount in the Net Win column of a spreadsheet only if the results was > 0. There would also be a function in the Net Loss column to enter the number only if it was < 0. That was it. A simple problem, but I couldn't seem to get the syntax of the statement right.
Well, I got all kinds of ridiculous responses from smart people who couldn't seem to grasp the simplicity of the problem. I said in my post that I didn't need to use something like the example IF statement that had three paramaters, and someone actually wrote a nested statement (statements inside of statements, or to put it another way, an IF statement with several branches) that he somehow thought would do the job. All I wanted to was tohave the statement check IF the amount was above or below zero, and take the appropriate action. This isn't rocket science, and it isn't a new kind of problem--I was writing code that used IF statements in computer science classes in the 1980s--which was before my college even had a modem!
Anyway, I didn't get any help with anything, so I had to set up my own spreadsheet from scratch. I went through all of my paper records of anything I had done all year, from playing tournaments, to studying poker books, to deposits and withdrawls. I sifted through all of that and typed a spreadsheet entry for each of the approximatedly 1,400 touraments that I entered in 2010.
The spreadsheet calculated the net win or loss, then I manually moved all of the 920 net loss tournaments, one at a time, to one column, and all of the roughly (I don't remember the number offhand) 500 net win tournaments to a different column. Then I could get my totals, and I had everything to do my taxes.
I prepared and E-filed the taxes a few days ago, and got an E-mail yesterday stated that the return was rejected because of one item that they said I had wrong. I think I had it right, and in fact changing it will show $500 less income (so it's not like I was cheating on my taxes), and I decided not to fight it, and just change the number and get it done so that we can get that refund back.
But that's not all. Since my previous blog entry we got a 16-inch snow dump from the biggest blizzard of the season. Dealing with that took a lot of time. It's not like I had to go anywhere, but my wife works outside the home, and I had to get her clear (she works at a hospital, and many of her more rural coworkers had no chance of making it in that morning). I finally got her out, with the help of 4 guys in a pick-up truck who happened to come buy and help push when she got stuck in the intersection.
So with the spreasheet and related issues, and the snowstorm, I didn't play a hand of poker for 4 days, and I still haven't posted some of my January 2011 results. I'm starting to dig out from under everything, both literally and figuratively.
My next few posts will include several about the previous month and year. Not just dollars and cents, but what I learned, what worked and what didn't, and things that I did well and not so well. Also, this year I will start posting more about how the poker playing actually went on certain days.
I have avoided writing about individual days, because I've been training myself not to worry about that. As I've said in other posts, playing poker tournaments is like commissioned sales. There are very good days, days where nothing happens, and days when I actually lose money (just as a salesman might have a losing day when you consider travel and other expenses).
Poker players take this long-term view so seriously that one of the favorite poker sayings is, "You can't have results-oriented thinking". What they mean is that all the player can do is make the best possible decisions, and even when he does, he can make all the right plays and still lose. Unlike other complex games like chess, poker has many more variables.
Those variables could be of a bad run of cards, most of the good players sitting at his tournament table, or a host of other things, perhaps even a slow dealer than doesn't deal as many hands per hour as dealers at other tables. But over time, those variables even out (you get your share of good cards, good dealers, and weak opponents) and with continued good decisions, you will be a winning player. To state the issue mathematically, variance has less effect as you approach a statistically significant sample size.
So, when my wife would ask how I did that day, even if I won I really didn't like answering that question, which was no doubt frustrating for her. I was like the kid who, when asked what happened at school that day, responds with, "nothing."
Now my wife and I are trained to realize that daily results don't matter much, so I don't have to be paranoid about either of us slipping into the dreaded "results-oriented thinking". I can relax a little and actually talk about how my day went.
The problems mentioned in my last blog entry never did get solved. My request to PokerStars was kicked up to a higher level of support, and they never got back to me. PokerStars is legendary for their great support, something like that has NEVER happened to me. It's not usual to write to support and get a response in less than an hour.
While I was trying to get a resolution of my file downloading issue from PokerStars, I was also writing to the Computer Technical Help forum on twoplustwo.com. The problem there was that no one could seem to grasp the simplicity of the problem. All I wanted to know from them was how to use a specific aspect of the Open Office program, that is, I wanted to know how to write an IF statement do to a simple boolean function, and put a amount in the Net Win column of a spreadsheet only if the results was > 0. There would also be a function in the Net Loss column to enter the number only if it was < 0. That was it. A simple problem, but I couldn't seem to get the syntax of the statement right.
Well, I got all kinds of ridiculous responses from smart people who couldn't seem to grasp the simplicity of the problem. I said in my post that I didn't need to use something like the example IF statement that had three paramaters, and someone actually wrote a nested statement (statements inside of statements, or to put it another way, an IF statement with several branches) that he somehow thought would do the job. All I wanted to was tohave the statement check IF the amount was above or below zero, and take the appropriate action. This isn't rocket science, and it isn't a new kind of problem--I was writing code that used IF statements in computer science classes in the 1980s--which was before my college even had a modem!
Anyway, I didn't get any help with anything, so I had to set up my own spreadsheet from scratch. I went through all of my paper records of anything I had done all year, from playing tournaments, to studying poker books, to deposits and withdrawls. I sifted through all of that and typed a spreadsheet entry for each of the approximatedly 1,400 touraments that I entered in 2010.
The spreadsheet calculated the net win or loss, then I manually moved all of the 920 net loss tournaments, one at a time, to one column, and all of the roughly (I don't remember the number offhand) 500 net win tournaments to a different column. Then I could get my totals, and I had everything to do my taxes.
I prepared and E-filed the taxes a few days ago, and got an E-mail yesterday stated that the return was rejected because of one item that they said I had wrong. I think I had it right, and in fact changing it will show $500 less income (so it's not like I was cheating on my taxes), and I decided not to fight it, and just change the number and get it done so that we can get that refund back.
But that's not all. Since my previous blog entry we got a 16-inch snow dump from the biggest blizzard of the season. Dealing with that took a lot of time. It's not like I had to go anywhere, but my wife works outside the home, and I had to get her clear (she works at a hospital, and many of her more rural coworkers had no chance of making it in that morning). I finally got her out, with the help of 4 guys in a pick-up truck who happened to come buy and help push when she got stuck in the intersection.
So with the spreasheet and related issues, and the snowstorm, I didn't play a hand of poker for 4 days, and I still haven't posted some of my January 2011 results. I'm starting to dig out from under everything, both literally and figuratively.
My next few posts will include several about the previous month and year. Not just dollars and cents, but what I learned, what worked and what didn't, and things that I did well and not so well. Also, this year I will start posting more about how the poker playing actually went on certain days.
I have avoided writing about individual days, because I've been training myself not to worry about that. As I've said in other posts, playing poker tournaments is like commissioned sales. There are very good days, days where nothing happens, and days when I actually lose money (just as a salesman might have a losing day when you consider travel and other expenses).
Poker players take this long-term view so seriously that one of the favorite poker sayings is, "You can't have results-oriented thinking". What they mean is that all the player can do is make the best possible decisions, and even when he does, he can make all the right plays and still lose. Unlike other complex games like chess, poker has many more variables.
Those variables could be of a bad run of cards, most of the good players sitting at his tournament table, or a host of other things, perhaps even a slow dealer than doesn't deal as many hands per hour as dealers at other tables. But over time, those variables even out (you get your share of good cards, good dealers, and weak opponents) and with continued good decisions, you will be a winning player. To state the issue mathematically, variance has less effect as you approach a statistically significant sample size.
So, when my wife would ask how I did that day, even if I won I really didn't like answering that question, which was no doubt frustrating for her. I was like the kid who, when asked what happened at school that day, responds with, "nothing."
Now my wife and I are trained to realize that daily results don't matter much, so I don't have to be paranoid about either of us slipping into the dreaded "results-oriented thinking". I can relax a little and actually talk about how my day went.
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