Realistic Goals and Outcomes

It might be a while before I can reasonably expect to get in 40 hours a week of poker playing and studying.  I have much room for improvement as far as time management, but I need to set some kind of goal now.  Here's how I see it:

1. 25 hours per week is a realistic goal for now.  I thought about a goal of 30 hours a week, but since family has to be the priority, I need to be realistic and set a goal that I have a reasonable chance of reaching.  25 hours every week might not be possible, but I think that I can average that much.  Since an average month is 4.2 weeks long, my new time goal is 25(4.2) = 105 hours per month.

2. After careful analysis of my situation, I'm temporarily dropping my goal of spending at least 25% of my poker time studying.

My current bankroll is $111.70.  I'm playing $1.65 SNGs.  I should have a bankroll of at least 50 buy-ins to play SNGs, and my bankroll is 67 buy-ins, so I'm fine there.  But as I thought about it, the next step up in SNGs is $3.30, and if I was playing at that level I would have 33 buy-ins--only 17 short of the 50 that I need.

If I temporarily cut down on studying and concentrate on playing, and if I run reasonably well, I could have the bankroll to play $3.30 SNGs in about a month.  When that happens, almost everything doubles.  Every time that I cashed in a SNG, I would be making almost twice as much profit as I was before.

Playing $3.30 SNGs:

If I cashed in third place, my profit would double from $1.05 to $2.10.
Second place cash, profit would go from $2.40 to $4.80.
First place cash, profit would go from $5.10 to $10.20.
Bonus would double, from about 2 cents per SNG to about 4 cents.
Rakeback would double, from 4.5 cents per SNG to 9 cents.

I said that almost everything will double, because my win rate will go down a bit when I move up to $3.30s, at least until I get some information on the regulars and figure out what adjustments I need to make, the most important of which is the percentage of my hands that I play.

I don't think that the ROI (return on investment) drop will be big. I estimate that my ROI will go down from about 13% at $1.65 to about 10% at $3.30, at least until I get used to the new level.

So, with a $1.65 SNG and a 13% ROI, I make 21.45 cents per SNG.
With a $3.30 SNG and a 10% ROI, I make 33 cents per SNG.


Adding it all up:

For each $1.65 SNG
Profit based on 13% ROI          0.2145
Bonus                                           0.02
Rakeback                                     0.045
                                                    --------
                                                     0.2795 ~ 28 cents per SNG

For each $3.30 SNG
Profit based on 10% ROI          0.33
Bonus                                           0.04
Rakeback                                     0.09
                                                   --------
                                                      0.46 = 46 cents per SNG


The medium-term goal is to have at least 100 buy-ins to play MTTs at the $5.50 level, which is the least expensive MTT on Americas Cardroom.  100(5.50) = $550.  When I move up from $1.65s to $3.30s, and if I play 50 SNGs a week (a realistic goal of 10 per day, playing 2 at a time, for 5 days) my expected profit per week should be 50(0.46) = $23.  With 4.2 weeks in a month, that's a profit of  4.2(23) = $96.60 per month.

So playing 50 SNGs a week, my profit should average around $100 a month, which means that I would be fully bankrolled to give MTTs a go sometime this fall.  I think that all of my numbers are both realistic and attainable, but there are other ways that this could play out:

1. If the $3.30 SNGs go well, I might move up to $5.50s as soon as I have the proper SNG bankroll of 50(5.50) = $275.

2. Americas Cardroom could start offering MTTs as low as $1.  If that happened, I would be bankrolled to play them right now.  I think that is unlikely this year, though it has been mentioned by players and the site as a possibility.

3. I could decide to stick with SNGs for a while.  If it's going well I night keep grinding away at them for a while, perhaps working on playing more than 2 tables at a time and giving myself a little extra in my bankroll.  A bankroll of 100 buy-ins is, in my opinion, the absolute minimum needed to play MTTs.

4. We could wind up moving some time this year.  This is quite likely, and as we want to do it on the cheap, I will do most of the packing and moving of small items by myself--especially if we move right next door, which is one of the two most likely options.  In the long run this will improve our situation and save us a lot of money, but in the short run it could cut my poker time way back for as much as a month, given that not only would we be moving, but we would be also having a yard sale to get rid of some things (which might happen this year whether we in fact move or not.)

I'll close by saying that I didn't run the above numbers until I typed this post.  To the two or three people who might take the time to go though all of this, including the math, thanks for your help.  Putting this in writing, in a form that you can go through and understand, has helped me to think the situation through, including some of the alternative scenarios that I had not thought about until now.