Sleeping In Pieces

When a lot is going on during the day, my schedule, and my sleeping, becomes a total mess.

My sleep patterns are wierd to start with.  I am a very sound sleeper, and once I'm sleeping, I'm out.  I don't hear sirens, thunderstorms, the drummer next door, or anything else.  When I'm really tired, it's not unusual for me to sleep for 12 hours.

Getting to sleep is another matter.  There comes a point when I'm playing poker that I get tired and start making mistakes.  When I'm done with poker I might just sit and watch TV for four hours, because I'm too tired to play poker or study and make any sense of it, but I'm unable to get to sleep.  If a new World Poker Tour episode is on, I watch that, and try to learn at least a little bit from it.  That's the best that I can do.

I prefer to play and study poker with hours something like 4 P.M. to 2 A.M., but in reality doesn't happen very often lately.  What I would like to do is get up around noon, take care of a few things, then play poker until I get tired, but it never seems to work out that way.  And right now, the combination of being Available Guy, and being a one-car family, is really messing with my sleep.

A few days ago I got to sleep around 3 A.M, got up at 5 A.M., took my wife to work at 5:30 A.M., came home, couldn't get back to sleep.  I finally slept for two hours, got up, spent some time with my mother-in-law, and picked my wife up from work a little after 2 :30 P.M.

Yesterday Safelight was coming to repair our windshield, so the car had to be here.  The appointment window was between 8 A.M. and noon.  I took my wife to work at 5:30 A.M. then slept on the couch while I waited for Safelight to come.  I woke up around 9 A.M to go to the bathroom, and I was able to get back to sleep.

The rest is a little fuzzy, but the timeline was something like this:

Safelight called around 9:30 A.M. to confirm the appointment.  Then they called around 10 to give me another time estimate.  Around 11, they called my wife's cell phone, and she called me, to tell me that they were close.  The left around noon, and I picked my wife up from work at 2:30 P.M.

After getting my sleep in little pieces for the last few days, I went to sleep around 4 P.M. yesterday, I slept until midnight, and I finally feel like I'm caught up on my sleep.  Now it's 2 A.M. and I'm typing this because there aren't many SNGs running.

For someone like me who wants to plan, who in fact needs to plan to keep from falling back into bad habits, this has been difficult, but I've had to accept that I can't change it.  My wife makes more than I do, and I have have to protect her income by doing things during work hours so she doesn't have to.  I sometimes have to take her to work and pick her up, because we're a one-car family.

At least for now there can be no planning, in the sense that I know when I'm going to play, or for how long.  I have to sleep when I'm tired and can get to sleep, no matter what time that is.  How much I sleep has become more important then how much I play.

That goes against everything I know as a poker player.  Many of the pros talk about the necessity of using volume of play to overcome short-term variance.  Others say that either you should have a schedule, or you should always be available when the games are good, which usually means nights and weekends.

I hope that I can function reasonably well in a situation where, once again, I don't have much control of what happens.  This time it's not me being out of control, it's about that control being taken from me.  It's not a good situation when someone with ADD is unable to plan and be organized.  I'm scared that things are slipping away.  But I have to make it work.

Fewer hours, but more money

I only worked 22 hours last week, but I made them count.

At one point I got my bankroll over $100.  About three weeks ago, it dropped all the way down to $71.  That downswing included 10 straight SNGs without a cash.  Now my bankroll is $102.   I've cashed in 10 of my last 12 SNGs, including four first places.

My plan was that once I got back over $100, I would decide if I wanted to change anything.  I'm going to keep things the way they are.  The least expensive MTTs are $5.50, and I certainly don't have the minimum 100 buy-ins to play those, so that's out.

A solid bankroll for SNGs is more like 50 buy-ins, so when my bankroll is up to $165 I'll move up to $3.30 SNGs, and keep doing what I'm doing.  Once I'm grinding SNGs for twice the stakes I am now, the bankroll building will seem a lot less tedious.

My Hours Will Be Cut For A While

Anyone who has read this blog more than once or twice knows how obsessive I am about planning and staying organized.  I don't want to be that guy any more--the guy who wasn't diagnosed wth ADD until age 40 and made a mess of his life along the way.  Because of that, I overcompensate and put a lot of systems in place to make sure that I never again am that confused, overwhelmed person that didn't even know how to be organized (though for a long time, I thought I did.)

There is going to be a big change.  My goal of devoting a minimum of 40 hours to poker every week, including at least 15 hours of study and 25 hours playing poker, is on the shelf for a while.

There are two things going on, and I knew that they were going to happen.  But a lot could happen all at once, and very soon.

I have a 90-year old relative who needs some extra attention, and that's no surprise.  We all knew it was coming.  I understood that at that point, her needs would come first.  That time has come, and four family members are on rotating duty, with each of us taking a day to spend time with her to keep an eye on her, and determine how much longer she will be able to continue living by herself.

Thing number two, which I also knew was coming, is that we could be moving soon.  We've been close a few times, and the house we were going to move into is conviently next door.  Moving day depended on when the owners moved to a farm with their horses.  They are now facing a deadline to have their horses moved, so that might be a live option soon.

There might be another option as well.  It's not conveniently next door (which would make the move much cheaper and easier) but it's still local, and the rent would be a lot less than we're paying now.  Eventually owning whichever home we move to is a live option as well.

So a month or two from now, it's very possible that we will be moving, which will put poker on hold for a while.  I will be the packer-in-chief so that my wife doesn't have to take much time off from work.

The disruption of poker will be temporary, and getting a new place, and getting my relative's situation resolved, are both good things.  If we have to decide between two options for moving, either way it will be a better situation, and less costly, than where we are now.

I will still keep track of my hours, just to keep my records straight, but unless I think I'm goofing off, I'm not going to worry too much about what those numbers are.  I would love to work 50+ hours per week every week for the rest of the year, but as Dave Ramsey is fond of saying, just when you think you have it all figured out, life happens.

Why A Bankroll Matters: A Practical Example

On Saturday Night Live Chevy Chase was playing the role of Gerald Ford when he was asked a question during a presidential debate.  In response to a budget question, "Ford" said, "I wasn't told there would be math involved."

Warning: There will be math involved!

What follows will, I hope, be instructive.

Most people don't understand randomness.  If a flipped coin will be "heads" 50% of the time, that doesn't mean that if it has been tails 10 times in a row, it is any more likely to be heads on the 11th try.  A coin doesn't have a memory, and evey trial is independent of the others.

Randomness can by messy, which is why very good poker players can have long winning streaks, but also long losing streaks.  Those long losing streaks are the reason that poker players need a bankroll of many times their tournament buy-in.  The numbers that I usually see tossed around* for a sufficient bankroll are something like this: 25 buy-ins to play cash games, 50 buy-ins to play SNGs (single-table tournaments), and between 100 and 300 to play multi-table tournaments.

Here is a practical example from my play on 3/15 and 3/17 (I didn't play on the 16th.)  It's a small sample size that mathematically proves nothing, but it shows how important a bankroll is.

Starting on 3/15 at 1845 and ending at 0317 on 3/17, I played 15 SNGs.  In general one has to cash in about 50% of SNGs played to make money.  I did not cash in the first ten, so I lost 15 buy-ins at $1.65 each.  Then I cashed in 3 of the last 5, including one 1st place cash (which is worth about 4 buy-ins.)

So, I need to cash (finish 1st, 2nd or 3rd) about 50 % of the time, but I failed to cash 10 times in a row, so I must be really bad, right?  No, that's just randomness.

If I'm capable of cashing 55% of the time, that doesn't mean that I'll necessarily cash more than 5 times out of 10, or more than 25 times out of 50.  But if play 1,000 SNGs, I should cash pretty close to 550 times.

Remember, I said earlier that a good SNG bankroll amount is about 50 buy ins.  The use of a proper risk or ruin formula would mean that while I'm dealing with those downswings, my risk of ruin (the chance that I will go broke and lose all of my bankroll due to variance) is probably something like 3%.  All other things being equal, the bigger the bankroll, the more cushion one has against variance, and the smaller the risk of ruin.  If I kept increasing my bankroll without moving up to more expensive tournaments, the risk of ruin would eventually be close to zero.

So, let's look at the numbers for those 15 SNGs.

My SNG buy-in was $1.65, and I lost 10 straight, so that cost me (1.65)(10) = $16.50.

In the last 5 SNGs I placed 3 times:  one 1st place, one 2nd, and one 3rd.  First place paid $6.75, 2nd place paid $4.05, and 3rd place paid $2.70, for a total of $13.50 in cashes.

For SNGs 11 through 15, I paid 5 buy-ins and cashed 3 times, so my profit for those 5 SNGs is:

(total of 3 cashes) - (5 buy-ins)
= (6.75+4.05+2.70) - (1.65*5)
= 13.50 - 8.25 = 5.25

Now, bringing it all together, I no-cashed 10 SNGs, then made a profit in the last 5, which comes to:

-16.50 + 5.25 = -$11.25.

I lost $11.25 overall playing those 15 SNGs  But lets look at the numbers a little more closely:

$11.25 is 6.8 buy-ins, so my bankroll covered that loss.  I'm not in any danger of going broke.

The 1st 10 SNGs, of course, cost me 10 buy-ins before I finally cashed.  Again, not a problem, because I have the bankroll to handle streaks like that.

Also keep in mind that in any poker tournament, including SNGs, a cash is always worth more than the buy-in.  In this case, my 3 cashes were worth a total of $13.50.  The 15 buy-ins cost me:

(15)(1.65) = $24.75

So I paid $24.75 in buy-ins and my total cashes were $13.50.  Just three cashes covered 54.5% of my buy-ins. ( It helps a lot if at least 1/3 of your cashes are for 1st place.)

Since I have a decent bankroll, losing might be frustrating, but it's not scary.  I know that there will be downswings.  I know that there will be upswings.  I've had times when I played 10 SNGs and cashed in 7 or 8 of them.  That's positive variance, just as failing to cash 10 straight times is negative variance.

Someone who doesn't understand these concepts will never be good at poker.  There are players who won millions of dollars on national television and are now broke.  I hear about a new one about once a month.  You have to be able to manage your money, both when you're playing poker and when you're not.

As long as I keep studying and improving, and as long as I keep a decent bankroll, I'll be fine.  I lost one of those 10 SNGS with my pair of queens against a pair of jacks, and my opponent got a third jack on the river.  Queens beat jacks 82 % of the time--but not every time.  When I lose as big favorite, and it seems to happen over and over, I know that it's just variance.  I take a few seconds to shake it off, then I open another SNG.

I know that I'm smarter than most of my opponents.  I know that I study more than just about all of them.  I'm learning to fix my mistakes and weaknesses, and I'm constantly learning how to better manage my ADD.  That's a winning formula, and it will pay off.

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*There is a lot of math involved in coming up with buy-in numbers, using mathematical concepts like standard deviation and risk of ruin forumlae.  I could study the math and do my own risk of ruin calculations if I wanted to spend the time (I took two college statistics courses) but since those buy-in numbers are generally accepted and they tell me what my bankroll should be, I haven't bothered to investigate the math behind the concept.  I might at some point.

Cranking Up My Work Hours

One of my most important poker goals has always been to work more hours.  At some point I think I should be working at least 50 hours every week to get things moving in the right direction.  Working at home, not having a regular schedule, managing my own business and time, and being Available Guy is a lot for someone with ADD to deal with.  But there is another issue that I'm always aware of, but haven't talked about much in my posts.  I'm still working on forming good habits, something that will probably be a lifelong process.

I tend to be lazy, distractable and distracted.  I'll take a look at the TV as I walk by, knowing that I shouldn't listen to "just one news story," and I wind up sitting on the couch for an hour.  It doesn't happen as much, but it still happens a lot.

I was diagnosed with ADD at age 40, spent several years unlearning a lot of bad habits, and now I'm in the process of developing good habits, a process that will never be complete.

A lot about me is different than five or ten years ago.  I'm more intense, much harder on myself, and always thinking about ways to make myself work both more hours and more efficiently.  I stopped watching several of my favorite TV shows.  Even with my administrative time, I think very seriously about what kind of structure I need to make myself successful.

I even have to train my wife to keep me in check.  I tell her all the time, "Don't tell me it's OK to do it later.  I'll probably forget."  Sometimes she feels like she's nagging me to do something, but at this point I probably need that.

I think a lot about time managment.  I think about it every day, and whenever I look at the hours on my spreadsheet, I almost always wonder if I could have worked more hours, or more efficiently  Last week, for the first time it all came together.

I will always be tweaking something..  I'll never be satisfied with my poker playing, my work hours, or anything else.  There is always something that I can improve.  Because of improvements in my recordkeeping that are adding to my administrative hours, I have to work more hours to get my play and study hours in.  But I don't do anything without a reason.

Most important, I put in some serious hours last week, March 3-9:


                        Play        Study     Administrative    TOTAL
Goal              25.00       15.00         as needed            40.00
Actual           29.50       11.00             8,25                   48.75

Difference   +4.50      -4.00                                        +8.75

I'll be satisfied, for now, with getting four weeks in a row with at least 40 hours. I need to know that this isn't a fluke.  But then I'll start setting my goals higher.  I have to get those study hours up, and if that means that I have to work at least 50 hours a week, that's what I have to do.  I still waste a lot of time, and I'll find the hours somewhere, whatever it takes.    

Glorious Silence

I'm sitting in my office, waiting for a SNG to start.  My wife just left to visit her mother.  The cats are sleeping. Nothing is going on outside.  It is totally, completely silent.  I live near a busy street, so even as I type this, I'm starting to hear a little traffic noise.  But just for a few seconds, there was nothing.  I was excited that it was so quiet.  It's hard to explain, but when it's really quiet, I feel better, the silence is uplifting.

Sometimes I forget how the slightest thing can distract me.  A cat that wants some attention.  A few words from the television heard through the office door.  Someone shouting outside.  It all matters.

Something a lot of people probably don't know about ADD is that priorities can get messed up, because someone with ADD can concentrate obsessively on something that he finds interesting, to the exclusion of all else.

Fortunately, I love playing poker.  When that SNG starts, I'll be locked in.  When it's this quiet, I go into a zone where I see things more clearly, and I pick up on small things like a player hesitating just a second longer than usual before he bets.  Sometimes I don't even realize where I am.  It's hard to explain, but I feel like I'm part of the game, inside it somehow, like I've stepped into the virtual reality of the poker table on the monitor.

My SNG is starting now, and it's still really quiet, a glorious, almost complete silence.  I can't remember the last time it was this quiet, both inside and outside.  Sometimes I wear earplugs when it's noisy.  Maybe I should wear them all the time.

I know of a poker pro who keeps an office in a building separate from his house. Today, I understand why.

Two Unusual SNGs, part two

Brief bankroll update:  Nothing has changed.  I'm in a breakeven stretch where my bankroll has been $87, plus or minus $5, over my last 30 SNGs.  That's not really surprising.  After all, there are multitablers who would scoff at the relevance of my numbers because they finish 30 in an hour.

==========

As mentioned in my previous blog post, I started a SNG and after eight hours, it still wasn't finished.  As detailed in the twoplustwo.com poker forums, here is what happened.  The post in red was made by a forum poster who responded to some positive comments about Americas Cardroom.  All of the other dated posts were made by me in the 2+2 forums:


3/4, 0954

My SNG started at 1837 US eastern time, then went down without an explanation (on the site or in this thread) at 1850. It resumed at 1918, then went down again at 1926 with the onscreen notice, "Tournament is suspended by the host." It's still suspended. I waited for a while, then started and finished another SNG, and it's still suspended. Some tournaments are still suspended, but others have restarted.

It's way past time for some sort of explanation, or at least a determination of what is going to be done with my SNG that was suspended 2 hours and 35 minutes ago.

 

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3/5, 1419

 

So nice to see someone actually happy with something that an online poker site did. These posts are often so full of venom!

 

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3/5, 1750

What you call venom, others might call righteous indignation. The performance of this site/network is bad on so many levels. When the site went down, why wasn't a rep posting in this thread within 5 minutes, letting us know what was going on?

While I was able to start and play other SNGs, one of my SNGs was suspended for more than eight hours when I finally signed off. No one could post an update on the site or on 2+2 in eight hours?

I also sent an E-mail to support, which has not yet been answered, and live chat was down.

Horrible, horrible customer service. If that's venomous, so be it.

=============================

That's the story of unusual SNG number two.  It was open for more than eight hours, but officially it never happened.  I looked at the cashier page, and my buy-in was refunded.  I have not received a response to my E-mail, and no one from Americas Cardroom has anything to say, either on the site or on 2+2.

I'm already working on my next 2+2 post.  It feels like I'm tilting at windmills, not because what I'm doing is ridiculous, but because it probably won't change anything.  Post-Black Friday, we have the sites that we have.

WE ARE AMERICAS CARDROOM.  YOU HAVE FEW OTHER CHOICES.  WHAT ONCE WAS IS IRRELEVANT.  PLAYER CONCERNS ARE IRRELEVANT.  RESISTANCE IS FUTILE.

 

Two Unusual SNGs, part one

Last night, I played what I think were my two longest SNGs this year.  One lasted 1 hour and 44 minutes.  The other one started about 8 hours ago, and it's not done yet.

The one that lasted 104 minutes was one of those where I knew who the other good player was, he knew I was his main competition, and we each knew that the other knew we knew.  Nothing was said, nothing had to be.  Sometimes you just know, early in a SNG, that you're going to be heads-up with that guy* unless something unusual happens.

About 40 minutes in, we were in fact heads-up.  He was by far the chip leader the entire tournament, but I trapped him with a lot of big hands just before the heads-up, and I went into it with a slight chip lead.  With 13,500 chips on the table, I quickly got him down to 3.000, he fought back and had me down to 4,000, back and forth it went.

We were doing exactly what good players are supposed to do.  I adjusted, he adjusted to my adjustment, and I adjusted to his adjustment to my adjustment.  In game theory, theoretically two such players can adjust to the adjustments until they are both unexploitable.  This is a practical example of the Nash Equilibrium.  For a while I had a sense of what that must feel like.

Of course, in the real world somebody has to win.  The point of poker is to win money, not to reach an equilibrium.  And most of the time in poker, we are trying to exploit the other player (find his weaknesses) rather than trying to play unexploitably.

I eventually figured out that he was a "calling station" (someone who tends to call any bet that you make), and I made up a big deficit by making big hands, value betting, and knowing that my value bets would almost always get called.  But by the time we were heads up, he had adjusted, knowing that I was always betting strongly with my good hands, and he started folding more often when I would put a second or third bet in the pot.  Again, none of this was said, we just knew.

That's how it went, back and forth, one of us would be agressive, the other would figure out what betting that percentage of hands meant, and he would adjust.  He was one of the best heads-up players I've ever been against, and at one point he jokingly asked if I could see his cards.

The thing that, after more than an hour-and-half, finally broke our flirtation with Nash was that he got tired (this was a little after midnight.)  About 95 minutes in he said that he was tired, and that he was going to go all-in every time until someone won.  And he did exactly that.  Nothing is more exploitable than doing the same thing every time, unless it's telling someone that you're going to do the same thing every time.  After I folded to four straight all-ins, I knew that he meant what he said.

The problem was that I went completely card dead.  He would go all in, and my hand would be 83s, or 74o, or some other junk hand that didn't warrant risking all my chips.  I lost half my stack folding my garbage, and finally got to the point where I had to pick a hand and call his all-in.  Of course, I don't remember what the hand was (I would be really good at this game if I had didn't have the short-term memory of a goldfish), but I finally picked a hand and went with it, and he won.  He told me exactly what he was going to do, he did it, and I couldn't do anything about it.

Frankly, I don't think either of us wants to face the other heads-up again.  In fact, good profit-mazimizing players often practice "game selection" or "table selection," or sometimes even "seat selection"** to avoid certain players.

Normally I don't pass up any SNG on Americas Cardroom, because it takes too long for the next one to start.   But if I see a SNG, check the tournament page, and see that Pauls927 is registered, I'll probably move on to the next one.  With only three players cashing, why should I risk my buy-in playing against someone that will probably get one of those three spots?

In a local chess tournament, I enjoy being challenged, and I don't know what players I will be matched with.  That's fine for recreational chess, but with poker, it's all about the Benjamins.  A serious poker player will do anything that he ethically can in order to mazimize profit.

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*My practice is to use male nouns and pronouns when a field is mostly male, as is the case with poker.  Likewise I refer to a nurse in the abstract as "she" or "her" since most nurses are women.  As those conditions change (women predominate in US law and medical schools) I will change with them.  Five years from now I will probably refer to an unknown doctor as "she."

**Seat or table selection is usually possible only in live cash games.  In tournaments, whether live or online, seats are usually assigned.  In the local charity room, I picked a number out of a hat to get my seat assignment.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash_equilibrium

Results for February 2013

The results are pretty much the same as my last post.  I broke even for most of the month, then made all my money the last week.

Net profit: $21.58
Bankroll: $86.28

I hope to do much better in March, but poker variance being what it is, we shall see.