I'm Back

This if my first post since October.  I was barely profitable in 2013, and most of the year was a mess.  The main online site on which I play crashes often, has a lot of timing errors (10-minute blinds levels can go for 11 minutes or more) and it generally doesn't work well.  I had lots of computer problems, and virus attacks like I've never seen before.  I think it was in November that I had my wife watch while I played a SNG, and in 5 minutes I got 4 popups from my antivirus program telling me that it had handled an attack on the computer.

It's been very hard to set goals.  I don't know how many hours a week I'll be working, because I'm living half of the time with my mother-in-law as part of a family rotation to keep her home as long as possible, and I never know what the day (or night) has in store.  When I come home from that, my first priority is usually to catch up on my sleep.

We had some unforseen family expenses in the last year or so, and $300 that I had set aside to build a live poker bankroll had to be used for those expenses.  We got a letter from a lawyer about an old debt.  We've been working hard on paying off all our debt, but that one got by me.  My car was totaled by a teenager that ran a red light, and being down to one car limits my freedom to go to live tournaments.  The car that we have required a $600 repair.  We had an emergency fund in a savings account, but that, along with my poker bankroll, took a big hit and we're slowly building it up again.

Losing most of my live bankroll was a huge blow.  For a poker player, money set aside for a bankroll is both business capital and inventory.  The business can't function without it.  To make a long story short,  most of my live bankroll was gone, and I'm down to playing $1 or $2 SNGs and MTTs online  Several years ago, I was playing $11 SNGs on PokerStars, with a 14% return on investment.  According to one of the player rating sites, my results were in the 97th percentile at that level.

Most important, as stated in an October post to this blog, the combination of everything that happened threw me for a loop.  I was trying to be organized about my playing and studying, and about managing the whole thing, but it got away from me.  Having ADD means having a very strong tendency to be distractable and disorganized.  That was me for a couple months. When I'm unable to plan, organize, and impose some structure on my life, things go badly.

Now I'm adjusting to the new normal, with a small bankroll and much less time for poker.  As the saying goes, it is what it is.

There is one thing that's been going well.  I am now playing a live tournaments about three times a month, and I would like to boost that to at least once a week.  That might not be realistic, and I already feel bad about taking time away from my wife when I'm already gone half of the time--but it is my job.  That's a priority decision that my wife and I will probably have to discuss from time to time. I'm learning a lot and making a small profit, and that's more than I expected at first.  Even when I don't cash, most of the time I'm only a few places out of the money, better results than I expected.  But I have to keep three words in mind--small sample size.

Still, while I am doing well consistently, I'm going to enjoy it.  I didn't expect much from live poker for a while, and it's still new to me.  I would have been happy to break even over a few months.  I have played maybe 20 live tournaments over several years, which is nothing considering that online I've probably played over 1,000.  Live vs.online tournaments require different skill sets, but it's coming, slowly.

It took me a couple months to get my head together and deal with all of this.  I took a step back, and I decided to reevaluate everything.  I'm writing a formal business plan, and these are some of the areas I'm working on, many of which will be discussed in further posts:

Playing more tables.  Volume matters in online poker, and those who can play a lot of tables at once can generate a much higher income.

Playing more hours.  I don't have nearly as much time to play, so 40-60 work hour weeks aren't going to happen in the near future.  But I can use the time I have more wisely, and establish realistic, scaled-down goals for both playing and studying.

Playing vs. studying.  Before all of this happened, my goal was to work a minimum of 40 hours a week, with at least 10 hours spent studying.  If I decide that a more realistic total is 15 or 20 total hours, I'm not sure if I still want to aim for something like 75% play and 25% studying.  With limited resources available (in this case, my time) I need to reconsider my priorities.

Managing technology.  I've been steadily upgrading my poker technology.  In the past year or two I've taken steps toward going wireless, including getting a new keyboard and mouse, playing a few SNGs on my wife's laptop while my mother-in-law was sleeping, and upgrading to a 30-inch monitor.  It really hit home recently how important that technology is.

In an E-mail to my father discussing some of these issues, I wrote the following " . . . getting knocked out of just one large tournament when I'm at the final table could cost me as much money as the total cost of my printer, monitor and external hard drive."  I looked at that sentence, and I was stunned at how important and profound it was.  When I start making some serious money, I have to make certain that some of it goes to regular maintenance and upgrading of my technology.  It is absolutely essential for playing online poker at a high level.  As I said to my father, online poker is a high-tech business.

Growing a bankroll.  To play live or online tournaments comfortably (not worrying about going broke, and not playing badly due to playing with "scared money") I need a bankroll of at least 100 buy-ins.  I'm playing at the $40 starter level for live tournaments, which means I should get my bankroll up to $4,000 just to be comfortable playing where I am now.  Moving up can't even be in the discussion.  I will talk about growing my live bankroll in my next post.