41 Days of Poker--It's harder than I expected.

I played another tournament today.  One of the rooms changed their schedule and I missed it somehow.  I got there and wound up playing a tournament that was a different structure and had a different starting stack than I expected, and I didn't adjust early enough.  I didn't cash.

I almost didn't make it to the tournament.  We have one car and my wife had to work about an hour longer than she expected.  When I arrive at a tournament at the last minute, it usually doesn't go well.  I need a few minutes to settle in and "get the lay of the land."  I wasn't prepared at all.  In hindsight, maybe I should have skipped the tournament today.  My wife wouldn't have felt rushed to get home, and I wouldn't have sat down to play unprepared for the change in structure.

That said, sometimes I wonder if I can tell the difference between an obstacle and an excuse any more.  This is a trial run for being a full-time poker player for the forseeable future. and I have to know that I can take it seriously and give it my best shot.  There have certainly been a lot of obstacles, but ultimately I either succeed or I don't.

41 Days of Poker--$50 Freezout

Happy birthday to me.  I turned 60 today, old enough to start getting my army retirement pay.

I played a live $50 freezeout yesterday.  I made some big mistakes on my last hand of the tournament.  Until then, I played really well.

I saw few good hands and didn't hit with any of my speculative hands.  By the beginning of the second hour of play I was hanging on with a pretty short stack.

Then I got aggressive in the right places, shoving often, and I watched my stack stay about the same size.  I didn't pick up very many chips on my all-ins because I shoved about ten times without getting a caller.

At the beginning of hour three my stack was getting really small and I was having to shove more and more often.  Before the big hand at the end, I had shoved between 15 and 20 hands and only been called once.  I wasn't picking up enough chips to keep up with the blinds and antes.  The players in my local poker room are aggressive early in tournaments and very tight when stacks get shorter.

Then it happened.  In the blinds (I don't remember which one) I limped holding 33.  Three players to the flop.  Then I complete messed it up.  The flop was something like 973r and I flopped a set.  I should have shoved right there.

I had shoved a bunch of times, no one had called me in a while and the table was getting antsy.  Then I made one of the worst mistakes in poker--falling in love with a hand.  I forgot about my shove or fold strategy and made big bets on the flop and turn.  One player called, we went to the river.  Runner runner straight for villian, and I was out of the tournament.

One could argue that I was way ahead mathematically and villian doesn't hit that straight very often.  That was indeed the case and negative variance has been hitting me in the head for several months. There is nothing I can do about that.  Even so,  I made so many mistakes in that one hand that I deserved to get knocked out:

1. I fell in love with a hand.  My strategy going into that hand was to play shove or fold poker. The table was so antsy that it was likely someone would call my next shove, but I got excited when I saw the set and I developed one of the most deadly of all poker maladies--Fancy Play Syndrome.

2. My bets were sized incorrectly.  As stated above, I went into the hand with a shove or fold strategy, but I lost my mind when I hit my set.  I didn't even think about bet sizing.  I bet way too much on both the flop and turn.  When we got to the river only a tiny fraction of the chips I had at the beginning of my hand were left.  Logically and mathematically, villian HAD to call.  He called with his gutshot and hit his straight.

3. I never saw the straight draw. I was so in love with my hand that I wasn't paying attention to the community cards.  When the hand played out I was waiting for the dealer to push the chips toward my stack.  In my mind, I had already won the hand and more than doubled up when I hit my set.

I have no excuse for my poor play and all the mistakes I made on that hand.  I have no excuse for not watching the board, because it's inexcusable.  I can't remember the last time I messed up a hand that badly.

My next live tournament will be on Tuesday, September 29, a $30 freezeout.  I will post my results Wednesday morning.

41 Days of Poker--Homefront issues

As much as I would like my life to be all about poker for a while, the world doesn't stop so that I can play poker.  There are always things on the homefront that need to be addressed.  In this case, we have car problems.

My wife and I live very frugally as we work toward putting ourselves in a great position when we retire.  Part of that frugal lifestyle is not having made a car payment for more than ten years.  We pay cash for used cars and keep them for a long time.  We currently have just one car, a 1998 Chevrolet Cavalier, and it won't last much longer.  Our mechanic told us that he wouldn't keep the car for more than six months because the bottom of the car is going to rust out sooner rather than later.

We have been agressively paying down some debt, making more than the minimum payments.  As one one debt gets payed off, the money freed up goes toward the remaining debts.  We might have to change course for a while and divert some of those extra payments to our savings account to pay cash for another used car.

So in the next few months we'll have to do something about another car, but that's wasn't the immediate problem.  I killed a big part of day dealing with the car a couple days ago and I didn't get much poker time in.

I got to sleep at about 0300, then I had to wake up and  my wife to work at 0530.  I unsuccessfully tried to take a nap before taking the care to Firestone at 0900.  I spent at hour at Firestone before I got the verdict, then I had to pick up my wife from work at 1430.

That pretty much ended my poker day before it started,  I asked Firestone to turn off the television in the waiting area, and since I was the only customer at the time they agreed.  I had my Kindle with me, so I got a little study time in going through Secrets of Profession Poker, Volume 2.

When I got home, I took a short nap before picking my wife from work, but I was too tried to concentrate on poker after that.  The studying and the administrative work that I had lined up didn't get done.

I don't work five-day weeks.  I don't take days off.  I try to spend at least a little time on poker every day, even if it's only for a couple hours,  That approach should make it easier to rack up my hours every week.

Tomorrow my loving and very romantic wife will expect me to go out for dinner tomorrow for my 60th birthday.  Being the frugal person that she is, she found a downtown restaurant.that she wants to try that gives free birthday dinners.  How can I turn that down?

This partial week got disrupted, but my first full Sunday through Saturday week starts two days from now.  I'll do my best to make sure that I put every one of my 50 work hours to good use.

41 Days--Filling The Time With Administrative Tasks

I came home tonight and I don't have to go back for a while.  Tomorrow I start my 41 days without having to be a live-in caregiver.  I'm usually a thoughtful, methodical person.  I ponder and analyze my situation and decide what to do next.  I'm even-tempered and don't get rattled or excited easily.  Being even-tempered is a very good thing for a poker player.

I'm not even-tempered right now.  I'm more excited than I've been in a long time.  I finally have some time to concentrate on poker, to study and learn, and to see what I can do when I can finally do my job!

I wish that I could play a live tournament tomorrow, but I'll probably have to wait a day or two, which is OK because I need to study as well.

I said in my previous post that I want to work 50 hours a week, with at least 25 hours playing and at least 15 hours of studying.  That leaves ten hours unaccounted for.

Some of those extra hours could be filled by going deep in a few tournaments.  I want to play three or four times a week, and if I played four times and went deep in all four, that could account for more than 25 hours.  I also could do some extra studying.

Right now however, I need to put in some serious administrative time. I am way behind in my recordkeeping.  I have a lot of data entry to do and I need to upgrade my systems.  I need to build a database that keeps track of everything.  I want to be able to find numbers on everything: buy-ins, add-ons, dealer tips and other tournament expenses.

I also need to upgrade my system for keeping track of other poker expenses such as software, office supplies and poker books.  I need to track my live and online bankrolls, and many other things.  I'm debating whether this should all go in one giant database that I can sort for what I want, or if aspects of my business should just be quantified by simple spreadsheets, which is mostly what I am doing now..

There is one thing that I need to do first before building a database.  I have to learn how.  I'm very comfortable designing and using spreadsheetbeing but I haven't built a database in years.  I need to invest some time in studying Open Office to get familiar with how their database works.

I cerrtainly won't have a problem finding things to do in the next few weeks.  I just have to be disciplined, not let the ADD monster get the best of me, and put in the time to get it done.

During the next 41 days I will track my playing, studying and administrative time and I will post it in this blog, to keep myself on track and to be accountable to my readers and followers.

41 Days--Filling the Time With Study

I plan to devote 50 hours a week to poker during those 41 days.  I've been thinking about how to spend that time. When I am no longer needed as a caregiver for my mother-in-law, poker will be my 50-hours-a-week career. Little or none of it will be spent playing online..  The online options are so bad that I won't be doing much of that until I have the time and money to get a lot of things straightened out online.

Given that we only have one car and that my local poker room is only open four days a week, those days that I can't play will leave me with a lot of free time in those 50-hour weeks. Much of that time will be used to study.  I read online forums and poker books, I use flash cards to memorize certain poker situations. I study, and talk to, other players.  I pick one thing to work on every time I play live--it might be looking for tells, or putting a player on a range, or something else, but I practice or study something every time that I play.  I watch coaching videos produced by some of the best players in the world.

There are some areas where I'm still very weak or haven't studied very deeply, and those areas can now get some attention.  I've really slacked off on the flash cards and I will put in more time on those.  I want to review my pots odds numbers and add some more.  For example, I want to make sure that I know my pot odds to hit the turn, hit the river, and to hit either the turn or the river (I have not worked at all on that last one.)  I should also know how most hands rank against a random hand.

I haven't worked much on equities, and I will be using the pokerlab.com Equity Trainer to become familiar with more situations.  I've messed around with equities a little bit, for example, I might check how TT stands up against different ranges, but that barely scratches the surface.  The Equity Trainer has quizzes for situations like "Big blind defense vs. MP2 [middle position 2] open-raise."  I have done no studying on how position affects equity, so that will be something new to work on.

Many of these areas are too big to tackle in a little over a month, but I can at least start to get comfortable with more study ideas and techniques.  There is always be more to learn.  Some of the most successful pros study 20 hours a week.

For now I would like to keep a balance of at least 25 hours a week playing and at least 15 hours a week studying, because I really need the playing time to practice and learn at the table and build my bankroll.  That adds up to 40 hours.  I'll talk about my plans for the other ten hours in my next post.

Today's Tournament Confusion

I was ready to play a $50 freezeout at my local charity poker room today.  In fact, I got there almost an hour early.  No one was ready to take my $50 or to stamp my entry slip that I would give to the dealer.  Neither the charity representatives nor the poker staff was ready to do anything.

When I showed up, it was like they had never done this before (the room is open four days a week.)  This was more than a little surprising because when I play in the city of Grand Rapids, 30 miles down the road, they are set up to register players three hours before the start of a tournament.

It took about 10 minutes before they were ready to take my money, and I found out that it was an entirely different type of tournament than I expected.  It was not a freezeout, in fact, there were up to four add-ons available..  I was pretty certain that Thursday had been freeze out tournaments for a long time, and I was told that I was wrong.

The Big Game Room has not updated their web site in six months and there is nothing I can find in writing that tells anything about the tournaments, so I have no way of knowing if I remembered things correctly or not.

More important, as things stand I can walk into the room at any time and find out that something has been changed without warning.  There are no web site updates, nothing is posted in the room, no announcements are made, nothing.

As mentioned in an earlier post, I recently found that the room was closed for a week when I went to play and saw a paper at the door stating that the bowling alley was closed for maintenance.  Contrast that with three of the Grand Rapids rooms (all have the same owner), whose site was updated twice during the week of September 6.

I didn't cash.  I was at perhaps my toughest live table to date.  Six of my eight opponents were final table regulars.  I was happy to have about the same chip stack an hour in as I did when I started.  Eventually an opponent went all-in preflop and he had me covered,  I had trouble putting him on a range and finally decided that it was big pairs and AK (thought I wasn't sure about the AK.)

I called with QQ, he showed KK and that was that.  After I got knocked out I asked him if AK would be in his range in that situation, and he said that he would never call off in that spot with AK.  My read was off, but his answering my questions was a very big deal,

The way he was talking, I'm almost certain that his range was aces and kings.  I didn't really expect him to answer my questions, but some players can't resist talking about poker at the table.  Knowing that his range to shove with an M around 50 is that tight, and that he is prepared to shove that early, I'll be better equipped to play against him the next time.

41 Days

One of the three caregivers for my mother-in-law said that she was burned out and she took a month off.  After that, it was decided that the other two caregivers would each be given a month off.  My month off is the month of October.  The September schedule has me off from September 23-30, so I will have a total of 41 consecutive days off from my caregiver duties.

That presents me with a lot of interesting choices and decisions.  I have to consider my bankroll.  I have been able to put some money in to keep it level while I go through my downswing, but that was playing once a week.  I will now have to choose my spots carefully.

Playing every day is not an option,  We have one car and most of the time I won't be able to get it for an afternoon tournament out-of-town and the local room is only open four days a week..  Also, I'm behind on my administrative work and I want to get my records straightened out well before the end of the year.

I need to get online poker set up as a good option, but that will have to wait.  I really need a computer strictly for poker to make that work the way that I want it too.  But not now. Win or lose, during those 41 days there be no distribution of poker funds between my different poker accounts. Protecting and building my live bankroll will be my main task for every one of those 41 days, and to that end I will be working at least 50 hours every week.

I feel a lot of pressure right now.  I have been helping take care of my mother-in-law in one way or another for several years now.  Before I was a half-time caregiver we brought her meals and did other things for her.  Poker had to take second place.  I will have 41 days to study, practice, get my records in order and build my bankroll.  I want to hit the ground running when I can finally play full-time.  I'm about to turn 60.  The clock is ticking.

I can't control statistical variance, but when those 41 days are over, I have to at least know that I did everything possible to make some good things happen.

Another 30-minute Tournament

Well, I can say one thing about the evolution of my poker strategy.  I'm definitely not the cautious, timid player who played too few hands and tried to hang on for the final table.  Once again, a big hand in the first hour knocked me out.

I was dealt AK and the flop was AKJ.  No cards came that hit a straight draw and myself and another player wound up all-in on the river, where my top two pair lost to villian's set of jacks.  I'm more than a little concerned about my bankroll.  That was the only tournament I played while not on caregiver duty, in line with my previous discussion about babying my bankroll.  Dropping $60 on a weekend is a lot less scary that dropping $120.

Next week there are two days that I can play, and it will be in either Grand Rapids for $45 or in Muskegon for $50.  When you figure in the gas, the costs are about the same.  The most important thing is that playing just one tournament a week and keeping the cost down will keep my bankroll alive until I can get back on the winning track again.

On September 23 everything changes and I will have a lot more chances to play and some interesting choices to make.  More on that in my next post.