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.

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