Results for week 5/20-5/26

Results for week of 5/20-5/26
-$26.50  Poker profit or loss
      1.12  Rakeback
      1.00  Bonus
  ---------
-$24.38


It had to happen sooner or later.  In a previous post, I went into short-term thinking mode and said that I hoped to string some $100 months together soon.  I have been cashing in double-or-nothing tournaments about 75% of the time, and that's not sustainable. Breakeven is about 55%, and cashing at a 65%  rate is considered very good.  On 3/23, reality, in the guise of an inevitable downswing, hit me hard.  I played quite a bit on 3/23 and lost $19.78., which accounts for most of my weekly loss.

I'm still up for the month, and unless something really bad happens in the next few days, I'll be up at the end of the month.  I just have to keep grinding.  That's what poker players do.

My lack of posts--ADD strikes again.

I try to be dillegent about posting.  I read somewhere that if blogs aren't updated at least once a day, they won't have many followers.  Evidently readers expect something new and exciting every time they check it out. 

Since my blog is aimed at family and friends, I don't worry about how many followers I have. But it does help me when I post more often.  Posting is a type of studying, in that I often have to really think about a topic or do some math so that I can be accurate and make myself clear to my readers.

So, you may ask, why don't I post more often? I'm always coming up with ideas for new posts.  I've fought against ADD for a long time, and I've made a lot of progress, dropping many bad habits and adding some good ones.  Even so, I made a stupid mistake, a mistake so basic that I should have known better.  When I've had ideas for new posts, I didn't write the ideas them down.

Doh!

I started a list, and I have five ideas so far.  You should start seeing posts at least every other day.  If I start backsliding, feel free to call me on it.

A poker VIP program in action

With the variety, types and variants of games available on a poker site, it can sometimes be difficult to decide what to play.  One thing that must be considered is the site's VIP program.

VIP programs can be complicated, and there are different types of rewards, and different VIP levels, within a program.  For example, as one goes up the levels in the PokerStars VIP program, there are multipliers, where the number of reward points you can get are first doubled, then tripled, etc.  As I've mentioned previously, when I was playing on PokerStars some players earned over $100,000 in rewards just for playing, which doesn't include the amount won at the poker tables.  One player (Dario Minieri from Italy) used his VIP points to buy a Porsche.

On americascardroom.com you can't do anything like that.  They have the levels and multipliers  but the rewards program is new and evolving, and the number of players on the site is too low to allow the number of games that are played on a site like PokerStars.  Quite a few PokerStars players play 24 tables at a time, and one German player plays 100 tables at a time.

The programs can be very difficult to figure out.  There is actually a web site with calculators that help players figure out the value of the rewards they could win on the PokerStars VIP program.  A few days ago I wrote down some before and after numbers while I was playing, and after about half a page of math I figured out a lot of what's going on.  Keep in mind that I'm playing at a very low level, and usually only one table at a time, while I steadily and carefully build a bankroll that will give me the financial room to work on things like multitabling.

When I play one Double or Nothing SNGs with an entry fee of $5.25, here is what happens.  I won't bore you with the details of how I calculated this:

I clear 4 cents of my deposit bonus.
I earn  9.45 cents in rakeback.
I earn 1.93 Combat Points.  Combat points can be used to buy into certain touraments, but since I don't play any of them right now, I didn't bother to figure out how much a point is worth.

That doesn't sound like a lot, and it isn't .  If I played 25 $5 DONs in a week (possible, if I was a little light on the studying and admin work that week) I could get $3.36 a week in rakeback and bonus, at least until I cleared all of my bonus ($50.05, the amount of my original deposit.)

I did a quick and dirty calculation and came up with this:  Let's say that someone was really working the AmericasCardroom VIP program, playing 24-tables of $55 SNGs, the average time to finish a SNG is 45 minutes, and he is clearing a bonus.

With those conditions (there are certainly players that can do that) every 45 minutes that player is making about $45 a minute in VIP rewards alone.  That's $60 per hour just for playing, without conidering tournament winnings.

I will probably never get anything near that in rewards, because numbers like that give tournment poker players an interesting choice.  If you want to make a good solid, steady, predictable income, you play SNGs.  You can turn them over fast, and really work the reward programs.
But at far as money won at the tables, playing large multitable tournament generate more income, but that income is much more volatile.  Someone could play on PokerStars at the highest levels and win little or nothing for several months, then play the week-long World Championship of Online Poker, cash in several events, and win a million dollars or more in a week.

If someone plays only very large tournaments and they're good, the ROI (retun on investment) will often be 100% or more. But those large tournaments take a long time to play, so you're not going to turn them over fast enough to make much from the rewards system.  My best finish in a very large tournament was 7th of 3,200 players. The entry was $3.30, and I won $384 dollars (ROI of 116%.)  It took about 6 hours.

Most tournament poker players making a living online specialize in either very small tournaments of under 50 players, or very large tournaments of over 1,000 players.  I would be playing the large tournaments if I had a bigger bankroll, but even then the large tournaments on AmericasCardroom aren't all that large, with hundreds of players instead of thousands.  Until online poker regulations change in the United States, I'll have to make the best choice from whatever is available, and have money ready to deposit when the good sites are once again open to US players.

Results for week 5/13-5/19

Results for 5/13-5/19
-$12.80  Profit or loss from tournaments
     0.89  Rakeback
     1.00  Bonus
 --------
-$10.91

I can't be a winner every week.  I still have a good shot at a $100 month.  There is a part of me that doesn't even like to put down weekly results, because it's such a small sample size that it doesn't mean a whole lot.  But I put down weekly number for a couple reasons.

1. It's a blog.  No one is going to follow a poker blog when they only see numbers once a month.  Eventually I'll start talking more about good or bad days, milestones, and other things that happen inside of a month, but that's for my readers (including my wife), not for me.

2. It's a benchmark to which readers can relate.  Weeks are something that everyone understands.  Most people get paid every week, or every two weeks.  And my current poker site, americascardroom,com, posts rakeback amounts once a week.

I've done a very good job of training myself not to care about short-term results, so much so that it probably drives my wife a little nuts.  I'll be in the office for a few hours, come out and watch TV or eat dinner without saying a word to my wife about what happened and how I did--because I know I can't even think about short-term results.  In fact, a lot of poker players train themselves not to think about results at all.

I'm pretty close to having that mindset, and once I have enough of a bankroll to generate some income, unless I get a really big tournament score, I will barely care about how I do.  That may sound strange, but I know that poker is a high-variance game.  Some have estimated that it's about 80% skill and 20% luck.  Another way to put that is that 20% of the time, what happens is beyond my control--I either get good cards or I don't.  I'm at an unusually soft table or I'm not.  I can't control any of that.

Of course, I won't have tough tables all the time, and I won't get bad cards all the time. That's why poker is a long-term game, and you absolutely can't have a short-term mindset.  Right now I don't worry about days or weeks, but my monthly numbers are a little more important to me than they should be.  I'm really anxious to get enough of a bankroll that I can play the games I really want to play, take more chances, and relax and not worry about having a losing week or two, because I know I have the bankroll to ride out the storms.  I never had a real bankroll before, and I'm really excited that that admittedly short-term goal is in sight.

Results for week 5/6 to 5/12

New thing that I learned
The animal that kills the most people in the United States is deer.  There are three issues with deer.

First, there are a lot of them, 28 million in the United States.  Second, as we know very well in my part of Michigan, people can die in car accidents when avoiding or hitting a deer.  Third, deer kill more people than any other captive animal in the United States.

Sources: Miami Animal Police on Animal Planet, and United Stats of America on The History Channel.

You can learn a lot from watching TV.  I guess it isn't a vast wasteland after all, Jersey Shore notwithstanding.

----------------------------

Results for week 5/6 to 5/12
   $1.75  rakeback
   38.72  poker profit or loss
 --------
$40.47

I'm very pleased with this.This is the second week this year that I've made over $40, and the second week in a row that I've made at least $25.  It might not be long before I'm stringing together some $100 months.  $100 a month isn't really a lot of money, since I'll have to escrow about 25% for income taxes, and some time soon I'll have to start taking out some of my winnings to reinvest in the business.  $100 a month is really nothing as far as being able to do my share to pay the bils.  That said, there are several things that make me very optimistic about the rest of this year and beyond.

1. I'm closing in on a milestone.  I've never had a bankroll larger that $228, because we always had to take some out to pay the bills.  This of course helped in the short run, but killed my bankroll and with it my ability to make a decent income in the long run.  That's not going to happen this time. My bankrool is $163, and I'm going to wait until I have a bankroll of around $500 before I start taking anything out.  Even then I'm going to keep the total that I withdraw for estimated income tax paments, reinvestment and owner's capital well under 50%, so that the bankroll can keep growing.

2. More money to reinvest = more productivity = more money.  Once I take money out to reinvest in the business, that helps in two ways.  First, I don't have to take money out of family checking accounts for things like office supplies and poker books.  I've only spent about $40 that way this year, but I hope that soon all of that will be run through poker accounts that I will set up at my bank.

Of course, much of that reinvestment will help me become a better poker player.  Subscriptions to magazines like Cardplayer and Bluff will not only help me become a better player, but also keep me abreast of the poker landscape.  And better hardware and software, such as buying a second monitor,will make me a lot more productive.

3. I've said before that the higher the buy-in, the more choices that you have.  I can play different types of SNG, and even start playing a few MTTs again.  MTTs are high risk and high reward, and I can't do that when I have a small bankroll.  There will be much less pressure to cash in a $5 MTT when I have a $500 bankroll.  I could play several in a row without cashing, without having to be concerned about my dwindling bankroll.

4. The thing that I'm most optomistic about is me.  I'm going to get better.  I understand my learning style.  I'm a tortoise, not a hare.  If you would compare my learning curve with the average poker player, that average player can no doubt memorize more quickly and learn more tricks than I can in a week or a month.  But the way I study, I'm laying the groundwork that my steadily-rising trotoise curve will go way above the hare's curve.  It's only a matter of time.

My learning style is to get the big picture very quickly, but take a long time to fill in the details.  For example, I might understand very quickly what someone's playing style is, and how he is going to react to what I do.  But I don't always know what I have to do about it.

I learn in segments.  My brain works like this--OK, I need to stand up against this player who is bluffing a lot and running over me at the table.  But how do I go about that?  Should I play a wider range of hands?  Should I call or raise more with the hands that I am playing?  Should I bluff more?  Maybe I should approach this mathematically, figure out his range, and play hands that are in the top 50% of his range.  But anything that I do is eventually exploitable by a good player if I don't mix it up a little, so . . .

I attack a problem like this in little pieces.  Let's say that I pick a piece and I decide to work on playing in the top half of an agressive player's range.  But to do that, I have to have an idea of what his range is, and I have to know what hands are in the top half of his range so that I can respond.

So, I have some memorizing to do.  I can start by memorizing what hands are in the top 10% of hands.  I have that list on a Post-It note on my monitor, and I look at it enough that I'm close to having it memorized.  The top 10% of hands are 77+, A9s+, KTs+, QTs+, AJo+ and KQo.  So, when someone is playing around the top 20% of his hands in a given situation, I will know what to do.

But wait, what if the next guy is playing the top 50% of his hands, or the top 10%? Then I need to know what hands are in the top 25% or the top 5%, so that I can respond.

All of that is just for the mathematical solution to a bully at the table, and it's a lot of brute force memorizing, which is not something at which I excel.  But what about being able to read his tells?  I need to do more study in Caro's Book of Poker Tells.  What if I want to bluff more against him?  Game theory has a lot to say about optimal bluffing frequency.  I know because I've read a lot of forum posts where people say that.  But I don't really know it works.  I badly need to get a better grasp of game theory.

The bottom line is that players that can outplay me now won't be able to a month or a year from now.  The players who spend a significant amount of their time studying is a pretty small group, and those like me who nail things down to the smallest detail ("What do his conflicting tells mean?  What is the percent chance that I am the only player holding an ace at a 4-handed table?) are a very small group.

Of the live players in my city that I've talked to enough to get some idea of how they approach the game, there is only one that I think does the hard work to make poker a winning proposition.  I might run into him someday when the Heartland Poker Tour has a stop near me.
If I make it that far, it will be because I play a lot, study a lot, and practice proper bankroll management.  Those are the fundamentals of winning poker, and I take them all seriously.

Results for week of April 29-May5

Results for April 29-May 5
$25.85  profit or loss from tournaments
    1.00  bonus
    0.95  rakeback
 --------
$27.80

Now that's the kind of week for which I have been waiting.  My bankroll is at $130.59, and it would be great to close out the month well over $150.  I think that $500 is an amount where I could start taking out small amounts to reinvest back into the business.  I guess that makes a $500 bankroll my short-term goal, but thinking about poker goals in that wasy just doesn't feel right.

I'm very goal-oriented, and most of my accomplishments, from getting promoted in the National Guard to running a marathon, have involved goal-setting.  But I know that with poker, especially tournament poker, the volatility is so great that it doesn't really make sense to think of any kind of goal as far as amount of winnings, and that is especially true over any period shorter than a year.

With poker, my goals can really only involve the means, not the end.  The end is money, and I have no idea what that number will be. I can't control the end, only the means, so when I think about goals, I think about things like this:

---------------------------

I need to spend more time studying flash cards so that I know the math involved in different situations at the table.

I need to pick a new (to me) concept in the book that I am currently studying (Secrets of Professional  Tournament Poker, Volume 1, Fundamentals and how to handle various stack sizes by Johnathan Little), and practice applying that concept while I play.

Little says in his book that I should use PokerStove to run and study equities in different situations for 30 minutes a day, until they become second nature.  That is definitely one of the most important  things that I need to do to get better, but if I do as he suggests, how would that change my schedule?  Should I work more hours?  Take those 3 hours a week from my playing time?

---------------------------------

As I work on becoming a better poker player, things like the above are my goals.  It's about working on all of the many things that I need to do to become a better player.

There is so much to learn that it's not unlike a college degree plan.  In fact, at the highest levels, the top players often have advanced degrees. During ESPN coverage of the World Series of Poker it has become standard practice for the broadcasters, as part of their player introductions, to list each player's school(s) and degrees. 

I remember one televised tournament where a theoretical physicist was sitting across the table from a Ph.D. in computer science.  Many of the top players study things like psychology, game theory, statistics, and kinesiology, and they apply all of those disciplines at the table.

I have a lot of work to do.

Results for Week of 4/22-4/28 and Month of April

New Thing that I Learned
We used to think that humans were the only animals that used tools.  Later, we discovered that a chimpanzee can use a rock to break open a coconut. Now, we are learning that many different animals use tools.

On a recent Animal Planet program, I saw a crow put a stick into a hole in a tree trunk.  The worms inside the tree crawled onto the stick, the crow pulled it out--dinner on a stick!

-------------------------

Results, April 22-28
-$4.20  net result of poker tournaments
     1.92  rakeback
     1.00  bonus
    -------
 -$1.28


Results, month of April
- $5.57  April 1-7
 -23.76  April 8-14
  27.40  April 15-21
  -1.28  April 22-28 (I did not play on April 29 or 30.)
 --------
-$3.21


A breakeven day and month, with not a lot to talk about.  As mentioned in my previous post, the week of April 8-14 killed me. That's when all the MTTs became rebuy or reentry tournaments, and I spent the week trying out different things, figuring out what I was going to play next.  Like most of the available sites post-Black Friday, americascardroom.com has some problems and quirks.  But, as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld famously said, "You go to war with the army you have.."