It's been way too long since I last posted. I've been doing a lot of administrative work getting my business in shape for 2013. I've been tinkering with everything, and I still am. I've improved my recordkeeping system quite a bit. I've completely redone many of my spreadsheets and made some other changes, and it should work well, make everything a lot easier, and yield better information.
2012 didn't go well at all, in fact, over the year I lost money, ending with a bankroll of just $9.49. I never stopped believing I could be good at this, and I kept reminding myself that during his first year on the World Poker Tour, Johnathan Little lost $150,000. The next year he was up over a million.
2012 was very discouraging emotionally, but intellectually I knew that it wasn't indicative of where I really was with my playing and studying. After a year like that, my wife hasn't given up on me (which was my biggest fear) so I'm not about to give up on myself.
I know enough to not get too excited about short-term results, good or bad, but I've definitely started off with a bang this year. My bankroll, which at the beginning of the year was $9.49, is now $113.31.
Some of my good results are partly due to because decisions I've made after considering the problems with Americas Cardroom tournaments. In my previous two posts I highlighted some of the those issues, and it's not getting any better. A few days ago someone on the twoplustwo.com poker forums wrote, "Every time you try to fix something, it just gets worse."
Given my situation, with no bankroll and poor tournament choices, I had to make a big change in my strategy.
The one thing on the site that is a little better is the availability of
one-table sit-n-go tournaments. For most of the day there are enough SNG players that I can sign up for one and it will fill up and start within 5 minutes. That's still nothing like when I played on PokerStars and a SNG could fill up in a minute or less, but by post-Black Friday* standards, it's a big improvement.
The new strategy was to play mostly the $1 SNGs, both to reduce variance (the smaller the tournament field, the lower the variance), and to use my winnings to take shots at MTTs until I got a good cash or two and rejuvinated my bankroll.
There was one more component to this strategy. Since the ACR tournaments are so messed up, I was going to only choose the few with a really good structure, which in practice meant playing a multi-table tournament no more than once a day, and only if I was making enough playing SNGs to pay to enter that tournament. Of course, being an MTT specialist and playing only one tournament per day isn't exactly the path to a big income, but for now, it's a workable strategy for building a bankroll while I wait and hope that ACR will somehow get it's act together.
Bankroll building isn't important just for it's own sake, though it is absolutely necessary. The higher you play, the more tournament options and structures are available. $10 tournaments have better tournament structures and options than $5 tournaments, and at $20 it's better than $10. The goal is to make money, keep building your bankroll, move up to higher buy-ins, play in better tournaments, and make more money.
For now, I'm back at it with a small bankroll, but I'm in much better shape than I was just ten days ago. Down, but definitely not out.
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*http://www.cardplayer.com/poker-news/13127-black-friday-the-day-that-changed-online-poker
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