A Day Without Poker and a Disappointing Week

It is 2336 on Saturday, 12/24.  For the first time since being a full-time poker players has been a reality instead of a goal, I didn't play poker at all today.  The week will be over in less than half an hour.  The day, and the week, got away from me.  I was under the weather for a few hours one day, and there were a lot of Christmas things going on with relatives.  Also, my wife and I went to a New Years Eve Christmas service at our church.

I didn't get close to putting in 40 hours this week.  I'll wind up with 27. That's not going to get the job done.  I try to pile a lot of hours into the first few days so that I don't get behind, but nothing seemed to work out right this week.

"Piling up" hours isn't exactly a goal. I like flexibility, and rather than working eight-hour days, I usually wind up working five or six hours a day seven days a week.  That usually gets me to my 40 hours and lets me do what I want during the day.  I failed to consider that despite my best efforts, occasionally an entire day is going to get blown away.  I can't count on being able to work every day to get my hours in.

I suppose that I could just accept that I'm not going to get in 40 hours every week.  After all, people do take days off and go on vacation.  However, I can't afford to think about time off until I'm turning my poker playing into money.

I think that the minimum cashout on Americas Cardroom is $100.  When I can do that without putting my online bankroll in jeopardy, then I can start thinking about things like an occasional day off.  Until then, I should do what a lot of small business owners do--work 50 hours a week, or 60, or whatever it takes to get the business off the ground.  It's almost 2017 and I've said that in January I want to hit the ground running.  It's time to make that happen.

I'll end on a positive note.  Studying was 30% of my work time this week.  Keeping my study time at or above 20% is one of my most important goals.  In the long turn  I have no doubt that a study emphasis will pay off.

A Very Deep Run

In my previous post I said the following:

I've been playing some of these, noting how the players play in general and I think that I'm getting the hang of it. I started out crashing and burning in the first hour, then I was getting in the top quarter of the field.  Soon I was regularly getting in the top 100 of fields of 600 or 700 players.  In my last two I got knocked out around 50th place.

I just finished going very deep in an 11-cent tournament that is very popular on Americans Cardroom and runs seven days a week.  Like the freerolls, it's not a lot of money but it's a cheap way to practice some of the things I'm working on.  Last night, everything feel into place.  I played for 5 hours and 13 minutes, finishing 4th of 892 players for a cash of $7.45.

I've been working on a lot of aspects of my game and doing a lot of studying over the last few months. Whether I make any money has been secondary.  It's all about being ready to make some real money in 2017.

My goal is always to spend 25% of my time studying, but last week is was 33%, one third of my poker time that week spent in study, and that study emphasis is paying off.  I've been working on a lot of aspects in my game and it's all starting to come together.

I'm working on ideas that didn't exist for me just a few months ago.  In yesterday's tournament  I sometimes defended my blinds with 75% of my hands.  A month ago I would have thought that was crazy, but a week ago I watched a video with Jonathan Little and Alexander Fitzgerald discussing the importance of blind defense and why it was necessary to defend so often.  Several times during that tournament yesterday I was thinking about all of the plays that I was making that I wouldn't have even considered a few months ago.

Another very new idea for me is using different bet sizes depending whether or not you want to be called.  It's not new in the sense that the idea has been out there for a while and I knew about it, as one of the many things that I should learn how to do someday.  I never dug into that because it was just one of many things that I needed to learn..

That video, along with Little's Weekly Poker Hand videos, have really opened my eyes to a lot of things. In the videos Little takes one hand and talks about it for 10 minutes.  What if I had done this instead of that?  What do I know about this player?  What if I had bet a little more, or a little less?  What is the tournament situation?  What if my chip stack was smaller, or larger?

Now that I have my own office and a quiet place (and neighborhood) I have the chance to study all those things, which is a big part of everything coming together.   It's almost 2017.  Now it's time to start turning all the things that I'm learning into money.

Americas Cardroom Freeroll Leaderboards

I took a closer look at the Americas Cardroom leaderboard promotion and it might be worth pursuing. Of course it's not easy to finish in the top ten of any kind of tournament, even a freerool, when it can have between 500 and 1,000 players.

I've been playing some of these, noting how the players play in general and I think that I'm getting the hang of it.  I started out crashing and burning in the first hour, then I was getting in the top quarter of the field.  Soon I was regularly getting in the top 100 of fields of 600 or 700 players.  In my last two I got knocked out around 50th place.

I took another look at the prizes and they are better than I thought.  The top 10 are decided by the number of points accumulated during the week..  Points are from 10 points for a first place, 9 points for second, down to 1 point for a 10th-place finish.  That means that I wouldn't have to win the whole thing to get some value from it.

The other interesting thing is that the prizes are better than I thought.  I thought that first place got a free ticket to a $215 tournament and that  everyone else got less than that, but it's a pretty good deal even for the players who finish in places two through ten.

First place wins a ticket to play a $215 tournament and a ticket for a $55 tournament.  Places 2 through 10 get a $55 ticket.  If the $55 tournament has more than 100 players (I think it would be a lot more) that's a prize pool of over $5,000,

I have no idea how hard it would be to crack the top 10 of the leaderboard.  The whole thing might not even be feasible for one reason or another.  I would certainly have to put in a lot of volume.  A freeroll goes off every hour and I would have to play as many as possible. to have any kind of a shot.

Two things would have to happen for me to have a decent shot:

1. I would have to have a completely clear schedule, pretty much doing nothing but eating, sleeping and playing poker for a week.

2. No studying during a freeroll week, only playing.

Number one is tricky.  I would have to pick a week with a decent weather forecast so that I didn't spend an hour or more every day dealing with all of the snow.  And there is always the Available Guy issue lurking out there.

As far as number two, I always want to spend at least 25% of my weekly poker time studying, but that's easy enough to work out.  If I had a no-study week I could balance it with 50% study the next week.  Maybe my leaderboard could be once a week, or just occasionally when I could clear the time. I really won't know exactly how this might work until I dig into it a little more, by playing more of them and by looking up some information online on how these leaderboards play out, whether the same players usually in the top ten, etc.

I'm not sure if I'm going to do this or not, and it might not happen for  a couple weeks or maybe three months from now.  I might not do it at all. I have no idea how many players are trying to get to the top of the leaderboard.  It could be a hundred or a thousand.

I will report back with my findings.

I Only Missed One Hand

I have said before that I almost never miss a hand when I play poker.  I never know in which hand I might win a big pot and get into the money, or even win the tournament.  Just the opposite happened a few minutes ago.

I was playing an online tournament with 711 players registered.  After about two hours we were down to 84 players and I was in 62nd place.  The top 10 places were paid.

I was low on chips but getting closer to the money. I was looking for a hand to shove so that I could win enough chips to make it to the final table because only the top ten players cashed.  When the hourly 5-minute break started I needed to have a bowel movement.

I got back just in time to see that I missed most of the hand and that my pocket queens had been folded.  That would have been the top 5% hand that I was hoping for. A few hands later I was knocked out of the tournament.

I have a few rules about poker:  Two of the most important are that I won't enter a tournament when I'm too tired to play well, and that I will never miss a hand.  I missed a hand today and I paid dearly for it.

Short-Term Time Management

Devoting 40 or more hours a week to poker is a big adjustment:

     My wife and I have very different work schedules.

     I have to make choices.  I can't follow nearly as many TV shows as used to be the case.

     I always have to adjust for outside factors that demand my time, for example, shoveling after a snowstorm.  That's not something that someone in a cubicle with a boss nearby has to think about--he has to keep working until 5 P.M., it's not optional.  He can deal with the foot of snow in his driveway when he gets home.

I'm making a lot of the adjustments successfully.  One area where I'm getting better is managing small amounts of free time.  For example, I never know when I might get knocked out a tournament. If I'm out after an hour what should I do then?

One thing that took me a while to figure out it to not waste time and always have something else ready to work on.  Now when I finish a tournament, I don't have to find something to do.  One of the first things that I do after I turn on my computer is to set up anything that I might need during the day so that I have things ready to study.  I might open as many as ten windows.

I open the twoplustwo,com poker forums.  I open a poker coaching site so I have a video waiting, ready to be studied.  If I have something administrave to take care of I have Open Office ready to go. All of those things, a quarter-hour at a time, add to my poker hours.. Little time is wasted.  I can sit at my desk for five hours with 4.75 of those hours being productive.

What if I only have a few minutes between events, for example, a tournament ends and I want to play another one that starts in 7 minutes?  For that I have my Daily Task List open.  Some of the things on that list include exercise (push-ups, sit-ups and squat thrusts) and checking E-mail, Facebook and my planner to make sure that my world outside poker is in order.

I know that this level of list-making and detail seems crazy to some of you, but to me it's just the opposite.  It keeps me from being the ADD-addled Clif who was too disorganized to turn in a term paper on time or remember an appointment.  The amount of focus and organization that I need for poker is helping me keep the rest of my life straight as well.

In many ways I'm the best Clif I've ever been.  I'm 61 years old and I think about running my second marathon, or about how much money I'll make playing poker over the next ten years.  Retirement is not on my radar.

A Day of Study

I said yesterday that my study percentage for the week was way too low and that I was going to fix that. That is exactly what I did.  I only played poker for 1.25 hours yesterday.  Everything else was study.  I said yesterday that this week only 12% of my work time has been spent studying.  I turned that around and now study is 27%, right where I want it to be, at or above 25%.

Here's what I studied:

I reviewed flash cards for the top 10%, top 20% and top 50% of hands.

I watched a video on how to use the equilab.com poker equity calculator.  I already use it, but is has features that I have not yet learned to use.

I watched Jonathan Little Weekly Poker Hand videos 78-81,

I spent time in the twoplustow.com poker forums.  While I was there I found a forum thread discussing poker players who take Adderall.  I wrote a long post about how my life was falling apart before I was diagnosed, at age 40, and got the right medication.

I won't go into the details, but I have a 99th percentile IQ and still failed to graduate from two colleges.  That tells you all that you need to know about how ADD can mess someone up.  After telling my story, I finished it with this, just so there was no misunderstanding about how I use the medication:

I don't get high. I don't get a buzz. Adderall doesn't give me an advantage at the table. I make sure that I get enough sleep to play a long tournament. If I'm too tired to play well I don't pop a pill, I skip the tournament. I take Adderall as directed, one pill each day. It is simply a drug that I need to take in order to lead a normal life, just as Insulin is for a diabetic.

Just Grinding

Most poker days are just grinding.  No big highs and lows, no big problems, no big cashes.  Today was one of those days.  My son will have a car soon and once we don't have to give him rides, that will cut down on the Available Guy Problem and things will be a lot easier.

No one needed a ride today.  Nothing was messing with my schedule.  When Wednesday ended at midnight (it's 0024 on Thursday as I type this) I had worked 8.25 hours.  I'm still not used to having my own office in a quiet neighborhood and (most of the time) being able to work whenever I want.  It feels great!

I have to take the car in for some work today, but on Friday I might just sit down sometime in the morning and work for 10 straight hours.  It would be great to pile up some hours and still have time to watch TV at night.

My poker day yesterday:

SNGs plus one MTT, 6.5 hours.
Study on poker forums, 1.25 hours
Flash cards, 0.5 hours.
TOTAL, 8.25 HOURS.

I finished with the flash cards a few minutes after midnight.  Flash cards at midnight, or whatever kind of studying other players do, certainly isn't as glamorous as what you see on TV.  You see people sitting around poker tables playing for six-figure paydays--but those people didn't get there by accident.  They put in the work, just as I am I'm doing.

I'm happy with what I did today but there is one adjustment that I need to make.  This week so far I've done way too little studying.  That will be how I spend most of my poker time today.

My spreadsheet is set up to keep a running total of my percentages.  Study is at at 12% of my time this week.  I need it to be at least 25%, so the rest of the week will be heavy on study.  I've been slacking on the flash cards, not doing that every day as I should, so that will definitely get some attention every day for the rest of the week..  There are so many things that I need to learn, so many leaks in my game that I need to fix, that sometimes it's hard to know how to manage my study time.  I need to work a lot on flash cards, but sometimes I get frustrated, knowing all of the things that I don't know and should be working on..

I have memorized the top 10%, 20% and 50% of hands and I will review those as well odds and outs to hit the turn..  I need to regularly review what I've memorized before it starts slipping away, but I need to start adding some new hand ranges as well.

I like to play 50% of my hands from the button whenever I can get away with it, but for the times I can't get away from it, as well as for other situations, I would like to memorize the top 30% and 40% so that I have that in my arsenal when I need to tighten up a bit.

Of course I recognize that I could easily tighten my ranges by just dropping some of the weakest hands, but I think that knowing exactly what cards are in a range, especially online, will be very helpful.  When I'm looking at the heads-up display on my monitor I can see exactly what percentage of his hands my opponent is playing and I can be precise in responding by playing in the top half of that range, or by making other kinds of adjustments suggested by the math or by game theoretical considerations. Knowing precisely which hands are in various ranges will make that a lot easier.

So, that was my poker day and those are the kind of  things that I think about when I play or study. Not exciting, but all important to learn.

Thinking More Deeply About a Hand

When I started playing the clarinet in fifth grade, I learned to play a scale.  As I played in elementary school, then Jr. high, high school, college and finally in an army band, I learned more about music, and about scales, every step of the way.

In music there isn't just a scale.  There are major and minor scales.  Minor scales come in melodic minor and harmonic minor.  There are pentatonic (5 note) scales which are used a lot in Asian music. There are modal scales.  I just took a look on Google and there are a bunch of scales that I've never heard of.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_musical_scales_and_modes

Playing a poker hand is like that.  When you're a beginner, you probably bet if you think you have the best hand--but to be a good player, you have to know if you're getting the correct pot odds to play. Later you learn that there are express and implied odds.  Just as when a musician is playing scales, there is always more for a poker player to learn.

One of the most important poker sayings is, "It depends."  There often is more than one way to profitably play (or maybe not play) a hand and it depends on a lot of factors.  For example, how many players are in the hand and what the stack sizes are (how many chips each player has)?

Lately I've been watching videos of  World Poker Tour Player of the Year Johnathan Little's weekly podcast and it's been a revelation.  He talks his way through a hand that he played and says what he was thinking while he was playing.  As they say in the commercials, "But wait!  There's more!"

Once Little has analyzed the way the hand was played, he starts asking "What if?  What if I had bet a little more (or less) in that spot--what might have happened? Was that a reasonable spot to bluff?  On what level was my opponent thinking? Would he have folded if I went all in?  Would he have been suspicious if I made a small bet?

I started digging into those videos at about the same time that I was reevaluating my bet sizing.  I realized that my bet sizes were too consistent. Always doing things the same way has it's place in poker.  If I bet half the size of the pot whether I have a good hand or not, it makes me harder to read.

While what I was doing wasn't bad, there are times when it's better to do something else.  In particular, I noticed that some players will put a lot of chips in the pot if they can do it a little at a time.

Here is an example:

I have a pair of kings, a very strong hand that will win the pot much of the time.

Villian and I each have stack sizes of 1,000.

If I bet 250, a player might fold because he doesn't want to risk a fourth of half his stack.  However, if I make small bets on every street, I might get him to put in 200 chips by the end of the hand.  In this situation some weak players will think sometime like, "It's just a few more chips and I don't want to give up yet."

Combining what I figured out on my own with what I've learned from watching Little's videos. I now look at hands very differently.  I don't think about whether an action is a good play, I think about whether it's the best play.

I Failed

I didn't get my hours in last week.  I didn't even get close.  My goal is 40-50 work hours per week.  As stated previously, I had several jobs where I worked a lot of voluntary overtime, so this shouldn't be a big deal.  Last week I let it get away from me.  I worked a total of 25.5 hours.

No one was dying.  No one in my family was hospitalized.  I wasn't sick.  There was no emergency.  I have no excuse.  There were things, mostly involving family, that I allowed to get in the way.  The leaves had to be raked before it started snowing.  A family member needed a ride to work.  Things like that.  Too many things.

To some extent all of the things that had to be done were important, but again, there is no way that my wife would have bailed out on her job to do those things.  Once again, I was Available Guy.  By Thursday, I was way behind in my hours.  By late Friday night there were not enough hours left in the week for me to hit 40.  I worked a few hours on Saturday, but I took most of the day off.  I was upset and not fit to risk money at the table or to attempt learning anything.

Here are my hours for last week:

Playing poker, 18.5 hours, 73%
Study, 5.5 hours, 22%
Administrative: 1.5 hours, 6%

I'm not thrilled that I missed my study goal of 25%, but I'm really upset about the total hours.  In a previous post I mentioned that when I play live tournaments I turn my phone off, and that I was thinking about doing that when I'm working at home.  I'm seriously considering that again.

I'm going to try hard to pile up hours early in the week so that I'm not scrambling later in the week to catch up.  Perhaps sometime soon I'll start posting my financial results, but that's secondary right now.  As always, it's about the process.  If I don't put in the hours at the tables and put in my study time the results won't be there.  If I'm in a hand with someone who studies ten hours a week and I only study for five hours, he has an edge.  I need to be the one with an edge.

Most of all, I'm trying to get everything in place, including doing a lot of studying in areas where I'm weak, so that I'm ready to hit the ground running in 2017.

Poker, Porn and Sensational Headlines

In my previous post I said that I would talk about what kind of things I study.  Later, I realized that I had already done that as part of a recent Facebook posts.  Here it is:

I just read an online article titled "How a British town became a home for porn, poker and online scams."   As a poker player who plays tournaments both live and online, I have to respond.

First, the headline was incredibly misleading.

The article describes how shell corporations work and how a lot of people in the same British town had their names on the paperwork for such companies, often without knowing anything about what the companies did. Out of many business types under the umbrella of shell companies, the headline writer evidently decided that pornography and poker were the most scandalous examples.

This isn't 1950. Poker players don't sit in a smoke filled room with their guns nearby if they're needed. They aren't shady characters. Poker, as much as chess, is a form of intellectual combat, in fact, poker is one of the games recognized by the International Mind Sports Association along with chess, go and other games. In legal disputes about poker rooms in various states, judges have ruled that poker is a game of skill and that under the law poker should not be treated as a game of chance.

I got interested in poker when I saw two people playing a hand on TV. The players were Dr. Michael Binger (theoretical physics) and Dr. Chris Ferguson (computer science and artificial intelligence.) That told me all that I needed to know about what kind of game poker is.

I play poker tournaments. That is my job. According to the US Department of Labor, that makes my job title Professional Poker Player. I work at least 40 hours a week, playing, studying and taking care of occasional administrative tasks.

As this point I should be completely honest about some of the things that I've done in the last few days. I hope that it's not NSFW.

1. I read a 60-page database manual to learn how to keep better records of my time, money and tournaments.

2. I Studied "Weekly Poker Hand" videos made by a World Poker Tour Player of the Year.

3. I used flash cards to memorize or review different poker odds, outs, equities and situations.

4. I played both single-table and multi-table online poker tournaments.

5. I spent time on poker forums exchanging information and ideas with other players.

None of the above had anything to do with pornography or shell corporations.

As always, feel free to make a comment or ask a question.

Another Busy Work Week

This week it was another hard push.  We were going to have Thanksgiving Dinner with our family on Thursday.  Saturday we were going to take our grandchildren out for a horse-and-carriage ride and the lighting of the downtown Christmas tree.  At about 1800 on Wednesday I looked at my wife and said, "You know, I'm just going to have to sit my butt in that office and stay there until midnight"--and I did that.that.

I thought it would be easy to work 40 hours.  After all, I worked all kinds of overtime at various jobs. At one job there was so much voluntary overtime available that I sometimes worked aroud 60 hours a week.  Once I worked all three shifts (first, second and third) in the same week.

The difference with poker as a job is that you're locked into that commitment.  You can't volunteer and then change your mind.  It's the only priority and nothing can get in the way.  Being self-employed is different.  I'll always have the Available Guy label on me unless I'm playing a tournament out of town with my phone turned off.

My wife and I are getting better at working things out but I think that it's always going to be awkward.  We will never really have schedules that match.  She gets up early, goes to work early at her home office, and is done by around 1500.  Most weekends she does not work.

I play poker.  Poker is a nights-and-weekends business.  On weekdays almost all of the tournaments in the area poker rooms are at night, on the weekend, or both.  I can theoretically play online any time I want, but most of the good weekday MTTs start between about 1900 and 2200  The big promotions like the Sunday Millions are usually on weekends.

My wife gets out of work at about the same time that my granddaughters get out of school, and she wants to see them as much as she can.  That's about the same time that the main part of my work day starts. I can and often do play during the online off hours, but I'm an MTT player.  MTT players have to go where (and when) the tournaments are.  During the off hours I'm often limited to SNGs online.  I love my grandchildren and I want to see them often, but the conflict between that and maximizing profit is going to be difficult sometimes.

I did get my 40 hours in.  I wound up playing or studying starting on Friday at 1000 and ending on Saturday on 0327, with breaks totaling about 4 hours.  I spent the final 2.25 hours of that push going over Jonathan Little's Weekly Poker Hands for 2.25 Hours.  When I stopped studying at 0317 on Saturday I was at at 39 hours.  After we took the grandchildren out, I came home and signed up for an MTT starting at 2020.  I got knocked out at 2242, giving me another 2.25 hours for a total of 41.25 hours for the week.

I know that this emphasis on hours seems very process-oriented,  That is exactly what it is, by design. Getting good at anything is about the process.  How many miles to you have to run to train for a marathon?  How many hours a week do you have to play scales to be a good clarinet player, or practice rudiments to be a good drummer?  To be a doctor you have to go to school until around age 30.

I have a process, and it's pretty specific.  I want to work at least 40 hours a week.  I'm doing that.  I want at least 25% of my poker time to be study.  Last week I fell short but this week I hit the studying hard:

Playing, 59%
Study, 39%
Administrative, 2%

I'll talk about what I study in a future post.  The study percentage won't always be that high, as I hope to spend some time going deep in MTTs before too long. For the forseable future I would like to keep study at or above 25% every week. I'm thinking about poker differently than I did just two weeks ago and it's exciting.

Mission Accomplished

Last week I worked for over 40 hours.  It wasn't easy.  I only count events, when I am actually working.  When I'm "on the clock" and I do something poker-related for 15 minutes or more, I record the time by the quarter-hour.  If I play for two hours, then take a five-minute break before I study, the five-minute break doesn't count.   The clock starts again when I'm studying.

There are a lot of family things going on this week. I feel like I'm already scrambling to get this week's hours in before the family things happening on Thanksgiving (Thursday) and Saturday..  We have two of our sons coming from a distance, in fact, one has just moved back after several years in Alaska.

It's great to have so much of the family together again and it's certainly not something I should complain about.  However, if I really intend to be a poker pro, I have to put the work in.  After all, my wife knows that she's going to work her 40 hours this week, and I need to look at my job exactly the same way.

Last week it was really a scramble.  My last work hour was study.  Specifically, between 2240 and 2353 I spent some time on the coaching site of Jonathan Little, a two-time World Poker Tour Player of the Year.  At a subscription cost of $10 a month the site is a tremendous bargain.

I finished up my poker time by reading Little's blog, then watching videos of the Jonathan Little Weekly Poker Hand, episodes 116-121.  When I finished it was 7 minutes before midnight and I had reached my goal.

My hours for last week:

Playing poker online, 29 hours.
Studying, 9.25 hours.
Administrative, 2 hours.
TOTAL, 40.25 hours.

I wanted studying to be at least 25% of my work week and I fell a bit short, with study at 23%, but I'm just getting used to being a full-timer.  Soon everything will fall into place.

The Pursuit of the 40-Hour Work Week

I think that making this my first 40-hour work week leaves my wife conflicted.  For a long time I've been Available Guy, the utility infielder, the part-time poker player that could do whatever needed to be done, at whatever time it needed to be done, while my wife worked her eight-hour days, five days a week.  We had a few conversations yesterday that went something like this:

Me: I have to put in at least 40 hours a week.  Poker is my job now.
Her: I know, but I need you to help me with (fill in the blank.)

This isn't just about my wife and I.  Once I got a call asking me to pick up my granddaughter because other family members were "at work."  All of those people who were "at work" were closer to her than I was at the time.  I was Available Guy.

As I type this it's 0208, Saturday morning, and I have recorded 29.25 working hours this week.  We had our grandchildren over for several hours yesterday.  My wife finished her work day.in time for us to pick up the girls from school.

I spent time with my grandchildren yesterday, and I have to make up that time today to get my 40 hours in.  It's not negotiable. I won't set that precedent my first week.  I'm going to bed soon, and when I wake up my number one priority, my only priority, will be to put in those last ten work hours.

I now have my own office. I can set my own schedule, though I do have to pay a lot of attention to the tournament schedule.  I'm not going to fail in my first attempt to put in a 40-hour week.  I hope that every month I can put in at least one 50-hour week, but one step at a time.  I have had many jobs where I worked a lot of overtime.  Sometimes my wife works a more-than-40-hour week.  Poker is my job now, and there is no reason that I can't put in my 40 hours, and more, to make poker a big success.

Available Guy is dead.

Thoughts From The Grocery Store

When my wife and I go grocery shopping, I'm the designated cart pusher.  As is always the case, when I'm not doing something I get bored.  So when she is checking prices, or when she goes somewhere and says "I'll be back" I need something to do.  We went shopping yesterday and I had a pocket notebook with me.  I wrote down some things that I've learned or been thinking about that I need to add to my poker arsenal.

1.  I need to add a 3-bet stat to Holdem Manager 2.

I use HM2 to keep statistics on the other players when I'm playing online.  I started with the basic two or three stats that most players track on the heads-up display.  I'm tracking eight of them now.  Some players track as many as 20 while playing 10 tournaments at once, but that's way beyond my capabilities at this point.  I'm slowly adding them states, one at a time, as I get comfortable with scanning more and more numbers.

I decided to add the 3-bet statistic ("3-bet" is a poker term for reraising.)  I'm not good with 3-bets at all.  I don't use them much postflop, but more important, I think I fold to 3-bets way to often.  There is a lot of information out there about the optimal way to play against 3-betting.  I need both to learn study that, and I need to pay attention to c-bet percentages when I play online.  I \need to know how often I might expect 3-bets from a certain player and then adjust my play accordingly.

2. I need to pay more attention to the Rule of 5 and 10.

That rule says that you should play speculative hands only if they are between 5 and 10 percent of your chip stack.  I won't go into the reasons for that, but it's a good rule.  I'm always looking for a spot to play suited aces, suited connectors and small pairs and I think that I play them pretty well most of the time.  The problem is that sometimes when I'm shortstacked I don't pay enough attention to what percentage of my stack that bet is going to cost me.  I need to fix that.

3. I said in a previous post that I intend to devote 40-50 hours a week to poker, with 40 being the absolute minimum.  One of my favorite quotes comes from financial advisor and radio talk show host Dave Ramsey:

"I know a lot of millionaires.  I don't know anybody that got rich working 40 hours a week."

That's very important, but I also need to concentrate on how those hours are apportioned.  As a part-time player I had way too many weeks were I would play poker for 15 or 20 hours, and only one or two of those hours were study time.

Numbers like that are not going to get me where I need to go.  I'm going to make sure that doesn't happen again.  I just checked my Poker Time Sheet, which is a spreadsheet that I keep on Open Office. My percentages are currently: playing 62, study 28, administrative 10.  That's what I want my numbers to look like almost every week.

I will report my numbers at the end of this week.

Future Plans for Poker

Before I can talk about the future I have to talk about the recent past. The last few months I have been working on a lot of things.  I have been concentrating on hitting the ground running in 2017 and not worrying too much about what happens in the rest of 2016.

First, I have to upgrade my recordkeeping by the first of the year..  I have to make sure that my records are straight when I'm making enough money playing poker to interest the IRS.  I've always declared all of my income, but now that I will be declaring myself as a Professional Poker Player (that's the US Department of Labor classification for what I do) and making enough that someone might get curious.enough to audit me I'm going to be ready. They could even ask me to prove with a time sheet that poker is my main source of income and the main source of my work hours, but I'm already doing that.  I time all of my poker activies, whether play, studying or administrative, to the nearest quarter hour, just like I'm punching a time clock.

I  plan to go way beyond what is required and have a very complete list of my statastics for every tournaments I play: buy-in, start time, end time, amount won, type of tournament, poker site, etc. etc. The IRS loves information and well-kept records.  If I give them a big information dump any planned audit will probably be canceled..

By the end of last year I had no live bankroll, which was probably inevitable.  A study of regulars on the World Poker Tour shows that at the highest levels, the ones that make the most money are the ones that cash between 8 and 16 percent of the time.  The math behind this is that if one is cashing at least 8% of the time, he has a good chance of making a profit.  However, when you're cashing more than 16% of the time, you're not taking enough chances to get those few but very large payouts, because most of the tournament prize pool goes to the top three places.

The biggest bankroll that I ever had for live tournaments, most of which start at around $50, was never more than 10 buy-ins.  I had some decent cashes playing live, but never any of really big ones.  Playing with such a small bankroll is almost a guarantee of growing broke.  In math terms, my risk of ruin was always high.

Since I have no live bankroll, I've been playing exclusively online and that's  going fairly well.  I'm only breaking even, but I'm doing that while I'm learning a lot and trying a lot of new things.  A year ago I was playing almost nothing but live deepstacked tournaments.  I'm now playing a lot of online deepstack tournaments, but I've also been playing a lot of SNGs (sit & goes, a one table tournament with 9 or 10 players.)   need to have as many poker options as possible.

I'm learning a lot about when to be more aggressive and when to dial it down.  I'm much better at adjusting to table conditions.  I'm better at realizing when I need play a bad hand because I'm in position and/or when I'm getting good odds to play and/or it's a good spot to bluff.

It's been interesting.  I've been working on a lot of things while playing online tournaments between $1 and $3.  At one time I was playing both $1.50 and $3 SNGs as well as MTTs between $1.10 and $3.30.  At one point I ran my online bankroll down to $8, then I put the experimenting to one side, stuck to $1 tournaments and got my bankroll up to $36 in a few days.  Two deep runs in MTTs helped me with that, I had two nice cashes (for $1 tournaments) finishing 2nd of 116 players, then two days later 73rd out of 1,110.  I think I'll just keep running it up playing $1 tournaments until I'm up to $150 to $200, which if all goes well will take less than a week.

The most important thing is that now I have an office. No more playing in the living room a few feet from the television. No more negotiating about who gets the TV or the computer.  My wife only needs the computer part of the time, so now she works around my poker schedule and she can watch TV whenever she wants.  Probably later next year or early 2018 we will get another computer so we each have our own personal computer.

I love my first taste of really playing full-time--I've wanted to do for so long!  A few days ago I had a 10-hour poker day, 8.5 hours playing and 1.5 hours studying.  It was great to finally be able to do that!  The amount of work that I'm putting in should help me improve much more quickly.

My time management goal is to work a minimum of 40 hours every week, and at least 50 hours some weeks.  I want at least 25% of that total time to be studying.  I don't care about what happens every day.  I could have a day with no poker followed by a day where I put in 12 hours, as long as it adds up to 40+ hours a week I really don't care.  Poker is all about winning in the long term, so I don't even want to think about short time periods.

If this goes as well as I think it will, I'll just keep playing online and when I make enough I will occasionally cash out some of it to take shots at live tournaments.  When I get that big live cash I'll try to keep the live and online bankrolls entirely separate. I wanted to keep the two bankrolls entirely separate but for now I need to use one to boost the other.  In time it will all work out.

That's the plan and I will of course keep my readers up to date about how it goes.  As always, feel free to fire away with your questions and comments.  I've been mostly playing today.  Now it's time to watch a coaching video.

I'm a Full-Time Poker Player!

I haven't posted here in a very long time.  The last two months have been crazy and very little poker has been played.  Moving from our old place, and moving into the new place, were both much more eventful than expected.

My wife and I at one-point lived in a two-story house, then we moved to a much smaller house.  This last move was a major downsizing effort.  All of the stuff accumulated at previous residences was way too much to bring to a trailer park.  We did it to downsize, simplify our lives and save money, but some of the issues were daunting,

The main problem was what to do with all of our stuff.  My wife and I were both going to have a home office in the trailer.  There would be no basement..   No Attic.  No spare room.  We had to get rid of a lot of things and it took several weeks and three dumpsters to do that.

While that was going on, we found out that there was a major flea infestation at the new place.  I could sit down in a recliner and have fleas crawling all over my hands and arms in a matter of seconds. I flea-bombed the place, but that was only part of what was needed.

We found out that fleas have a very quick life cycle.  Some eggs would survive the bombing and there would be brand new baby fleas in less than a week.  So, I drove the seven miles from the old place to the new just to vacuum, every day, for three weeks, until we were sure that all the fleas and their eggs were finally gone.

Fleas weren't the only surprises that greeted us, for example, the mattress pad had cigarette burns.  It really hurt to realize that the new caregivers had both fought and smoked around my mother-in-law.  There were a lot of unpleasant surprises.

While all that was going on were were struggling with the huge amounts of stuff that could not go with us to the new place. For starters, I estimate that we had about 1,500 books in our home.  We tried to sell some of them, and other things, at a flea market, with very little success.  We made a few trips to the local rescue mission store to donate some of our things.   In the end, we were running out of time and we wound up throwing at least 1,000 books into the dumpsters.

It hurt to throw away all of those books.  It reminded me of the book (and movie) Fahrenheit 451.  One of my dreams was to someday have a home library for all of those books.  But, this is the 21st century and no one needs physical books any more.  My newest poker books are on my Kindle.

The move was much more expensive than expected.  We didn't expect to fill dumpsters at more than $100 a pop, we didn't expect a pitched battle against fleas and we didn't expect to use professional movers twice.  It set us back financially for a couple months.  After that we can go back to paying off all of our debts and I will be able to afford some things that I need to keep poker going, inlcuding properly setting up my new poker office.

I'm finally in the new place.  I have my own office where I can study and play poker. My next post, which should be tomorrow, will talk about my plans for poker as I look forward to 2017.

Republican or Libertarian?

I used to be a very active Republican.  I was a county Volunteer of the Year and I twice ran for local office as a Republican--but after today, something that I told my wife a few days ago became even more true.  I told her that every day I am a little less Republican and a little more Libertarian.

Many times in this blog I have talked about what both federal and state regulations have done to my chances of making a living playing poker.  As I become more and more aware of the havoc caused by government laws and regulations, I become more and more convinced that none of the major party politicians are willing or able to do anything about it.  Almost no one seems to care about our national debt of around $19,000,000,000.*  More and more tax of your taxes and mine are going toward paying the interest on that debt.

Other than Republican congressman Paul Ryan, who continues to insist that we have to cut the national budget and attack the debt, even if we have to (gasp!) cut entitlements, I don't trust any of the politicians to get it done.  I mention all of this because the laws and regulations of the federal government have a huge affect on the way medicine is practiced in the United States--and that affects my medical care and yours.

When I saw a doctor as a child, that doctor had a nurse. My doctor now has six different people that come in and out of the office while I am being examined,  It takes a small army of people to understand all of those regulations and do the required paperwork.

This of course makes everything more expensive and complicated.  I was forced to change the drug that I take for Attention Deficit Disorder because my insurance company wanted me to take something that is less expensive for them to cover.

Again, this all happens because of excessive government regulation.  In cases where the government is not heavily involved, everything is cheaper and easier. As an example, Lasik surgeons have great results.  The service continues to get better and less expensive, because doctors compete to give the best service at the lowest prices.

That's called a free market.  It works.  Only Libertarians get it.  Many politicians say that they understand and that something should be done, but they do nothing.

Fast forward to today, when I went to get the new drug.  It was not available.  It needs a prior approval that has kept two people in the doctor's office working for the last two days.  The pharmacy bounced it back to the doctor's office again because the prior approval paperwork that my doctor's office had done was deemed insufficient.

In summary, I talked to the doctor five days ago.  They gave me a written prescription which I took to the pharmacy the same day.  Five days later, I still don't have that drug or the new one.

When I play a poker tournament I'm competing with eight or nine other people at the table who want my chips. Sometimes there are hundreds of players (or more) in a tournament.**  I'm trying to finish in the top three, where most of the prize money is, without the medication that helps control my Attention Deficit Disorder.  Figuratively speaking, I'm competing with half my brain tied behind my back.

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*http://www.usdebtclock.org/

**When I was still fairly new to poker, I played an online tournament with a $3.30 entry fee.  I finished 7th of 4,200 players and cashed for $384.

A Medical Setback

Something that I think about all the time is that the clock is ticking on poker.  I need to make something happen but, as detailed in previous posts, that never seems to happen.  There are often good reasons for that, for example, when I was acting as a caregiver for a relative.

Yesterday was my 61st birthday.  I don't have unlimited time to get my career as a poker player off the ground.  Now it's on hold, again for good reason.  We are moving to a place where it will be much more quiet, I will have finally have my own office and we will save about $400 a month over what it costs to live where we are now.

I told my wife a few days ago that in November when we're all set in our new place, I can't let anything else get in the way of poker.  I have to make it happen NOW,  Then I went to pick up a perscription--and I found out that the insurance no longer covers Adderall.

I definitely have some things going for me at the poker table, and my brain is in some ways my best asset.  My IQ is 154.  But in other ways, my brain isn't so good.  I have Attention Deficit Disorder and I have a problem moving information from short-term to long-term memory.

What that practically means is that if I play poker against you today, tomorrow I'm not going to remember most of the details about how you play and I certainly won't precisely remember any of the hands. ADD makes is very difficult for me to concentrate, be organized or stay focused--this is a big deal not only at the table, but when I'm home studying. Try using flash cards to memorize hand ranges when you have a poor memory and have trouble concentrating.

ADD hasn't been that much of a problem once I knew what I was dealing with and found the proper medication.  It doesn't help with the memory problems, but it helps me focus at the poker table.  It also helps me sit for a boring half hour looking at flash same cards over and over until I finally get a new hand range memorized.  I have to review the cards often or I forget what I learned, but I can do that.

Without Adderall it would be impossible to do a lot of that things I can do now.  Without Adderall I took my 154 IQ  to three different colleges and finished withonly one degree, from a community college. I had to repeat some classes to get that far.

This is really scary.  The first ADD drug that I took didn't work, and I found what I needed with Adderall on the second try.  Now the insurance company wants me to try other drugs which may or may not work for me.  My other options are to pay for Addrall out-of-pocket or go through a long appeal process to get covered for Addreall.  Neither is a good option.

This is really scary.  The clock is ticking, louder and louder.  Poker was mostly on hold for two years while I was a caregiver, and now this.  It's really discouraging.  I hope that this isn't as bad for poker as I think it will be.

I'm Moving

I haven't been posting lately because there isn't much to talk about. Poker has been on the back burner and that will continue for a few more weeks. I'm working on poker less than 10 hours a week.  My wife and I are moving and dealing with all that entails. I'm back to posting every day, or at least almost every day,  For the next few weeks this blog will be about moving as much as it is about poker.  We will be moving on or around October 10.

The move will give me a much better situation for poker, both studying and playing online.  I'll get into the reasons for that in future posts.  Also, since summer started there has been one murder per month with 1/2 mile of our current home.  The most recent was three days ago. That's not the main reason we are moving, but it certainly reinforces our decision.

It's not a big move geographic move.  It's only six miles north of where I am now.  You could call it a Dave Ramsey move.*  A lot of people would say that moving into a trailer is a step down, but it's going to save us a boatload of money and that is our goal.

More about both moving and the state of poker in future posts.

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*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dave_Ramsey_Show_(radio_program)

Technical Issues and Other Stuff

This has been a weird year for poker.  I've made a lot of changes, I've fought and I"m still fighting a lot of technical and other issues and it doesn't seem like I'm getting anything done.  I'm not making any money and I'm not putting in as many hours as I should.

Those issues are definitely being addressed.  I've done a lot of work on my game, learned a lot of new things and tried a lot of new things at the table.  Some of the new things worked and some need work.

Now that I have the top 20% of hands memorized, I thought I was ready to go.  The problem was that I didn't really think through which of those hands I wanted to play in what situations.  For example, aces are in the top 20% but so are Q9s and JTo.  I had not thought very much about which hands to open with, from what positions and in what situations.  That's rather important.

I haven't really worked on that at the tables very much.  The top 20% of hands are very playable early in a deep MTT, but that range is usually way too loose early in a SNG.  Since I can't play that many hands in an online SNG I can only work on that during a live tournament--and I'm only playing live once a month because of bankroll issues.  Most of my poker money is online right now and I need to build up a live bankroll.

I'll briefly run down some of the other things I've been working on:

Limping with a mixture of pairs, suited connectors, good hands and sometimes throwing in any two broadways to make myself unpredicatable, maybe even a little scary.

Trying to pick up timing tells online.

Playing a few small MTTs online, usually two or three a week.  I got a small cash, coming in 8th of 44, about half an hour ago.

I have two online poker sites up and working with Holdem Manager.  It turns out that the action on Juicy Stakes Poker is close to dead, but it's an emergency alternative where I can usually find something to play if ACR is down.  Two great alternatives--one with very few players and one that crashes at least once a week.

I will go into more detail on some of the issues and what I'm doing about them in the next few days, including going over some numbers..

The Biggest Battles Aren't Always at the Table

I was busy with other things much of the day yesterday, so I didn't get to play a lot.  I did play a SNG that took over 1.5 hours to play, then I got busy with other things.  I wasn't worried about it because starting iearly in the evening I was free, and I was rested enough to play well into the morning..

When I tried to start playing last night, Americas Cardroom was down again.  I hit the REGISTER button to get in a SNG.  Nothing happened.  I decided to try something else, so I hit the CASHIER button to see how much money I had on the site.  Again, nothing happened.  Everything was down.  I tried again a couple hours later.  Still down.

As usual, I found things to do to keep busy.  I watched TV and goofed off for a while, but I also watched some poker videos.  I just finished watching a video on how to play speculative hands.  That was useful, because I don't play suited aces often enough and I need to be reminded of that from time to time.  It's not a huge leak, but it's a leak.

That's what happened online.  The live poker situation is equally ridiculous.

I went down to my local poker room (which I have begun calling the Information Black Hole) to find out what was happening over the July 4th holiday weekend.  They didn't know.  Yes, you read that correctly.  I visited them on Saturday (it's Sunday Morning now) and they don't know if they will be open less than a week from now. How is that possible?  How can the players, the employees, or anyone else operate in a situation like that?

My answer is that I can't and I won't.  The local poker room is 1.8 miles from my house, but I almost always drive 30 miles to a poker room in another city.

It would be really nice if I could just play without having to fight so many battles to do so.  I'm trying hard not to come across as a whiner, but the truth is that sometimes it's very hard just to cut through the crap so that I can play poker. To give you an honest picture of what my days are like I have to tell you the good, the bad and the ugly.

My Next Live Tournament

I'm getting excited as my next live tournament is getting closer.  I will playing live the night of Sunday, July 3.  It will be a $50 tournament with a first prize of around a thousand dollars.

The original plan was make most of my money playing live and fill in some of my free time making a little money online.  I'm doing the opposite because I have money on two online sites but I no longer have a live bankroll set aside. Downswings happen to all players from time to time and I've hit a big one in my live play,

I had two good live cashes in June of 2016 and haven't cashed live since.  The bottom line is that I'm only playing live about once a month, so it might take some time before I get the next good cash to get online going again.  Before I started this post I played two SNGs and I'll be playing online until around 0300 (it's 2134 now) with one break in there somewhere.

I Let Someone Else Control My Schedule Today

Once again I've given control of my schedule to someone else.  I have no mechanical aptitude and someone is coming over today to help me with the lawnmower.  But I don't know what time he will be here, all I know it that it's supposed to be sometime this afternoon (it's 1504 now.)  I can't be in the middle of a tournament when he comes over so I can't start one now, and it's my fault for not agreeing to a specific time.

There are of course other things that I can do.  After I post this I will spend some time updating my records and if he's not here by then I'll probably watch a coaching video.   The good thing about the coaching videos is that I can fit them in anywhere because I can always stop one, then come back and finish later.

A couple days ago I got an E-mail about a video on adjusting for heads-up play.  As I play a lot of SNGs I get a lot of heads-up practice, but players and theory change over time.  It certainly wouldn't hurt me to brush up a little, especially since first place in an MTT typically pays about twice as much as second (in one-table SNGs it's 50% of the prize pool for first and 30% for second.)

There is always something that I can work on, but I'm still angry at myself for giving away control of my schedule like that.

Reevaluating My Work Hours

Before I get to the main point of my post, a quick update:

The fun never ends.

Because I'm a night owl and I do my best work when it's quiet, my best work hours are are between about midnight and 0400.  Not tonight.  It's 0213 and Holdem Manager is down with a server problem, which means that if I played now my results wouldn't be recorded.  I have to find other ways to amuse myself.

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My goal, once I had my home office properly set up (which I hope will be by the end of this week) was 50 hours per week. A few days ago I realized that that goal is probably too high given the way I count my hours.

I count my time by events to the nearest quarter hour.  For example, if I study flash cards for 13 minutes, that goes down as 0.25 hours.  If I play a SNG for 80 minutes I record that as 1.25 hours.

Remember, I only record my time when on a specific poker-related task.  Bathroom breaks or lunch breaks don't count.  I won't just go in the office for three hours and come out thinking that I worked all that time.  To use the examples in the paragraph above, if I study flash cards from 1200-1213, that goes down as 1.25 hours.  If I play my SNG from 1233-1243, that's another 1.25 hours.  The time between 1213 and 1233 doesn't count.

 I have ADD and I can easily get distracted or lazy.  Tracking every minute of actual work time helps keep me on task.

Given the way I add up my work hours, trying to put in fifty hours a week isn't realistic.  Once I'm making a real income, which should make my job more respected by friends and family, 50 hours per week might be a more reasonable goal.  For now 40 hours is much more realistic, and I expect to hit that goal every week, starting in July.

SIt And Go Shortage

I was looking at the SNGs available on two sites, Juicy Stakes Poker and Americas Cardroom.  I knew it was bad, but I didn't know how bad.  SNGs barely exist any more.

I looked late in the evening and Juicy Stakes had no SNGs with players registering.  Zero.  On Americas Cardroom you can always find a SNG if you're willing to wait a few minutes for it to fill up.  So if I'm the one that starts a SNG at midnight and I have to wait a bit for eight other players to join, that's annoying, but not a big deal if I manage my time wisely.

 During the five to ten minutes (occasionally up to 20 minutes between midnight and 0400) that I sometimes have to wait, I can do other tasks such as studying, or I can go to my checklist.

Every day I have in my planner a list of things that I want to get done.  It includes poker-related items like reviewing flash cards or putting up a blog post.  It also includes non-poker items such as checking my E-mail or Facebook.  While I'm waiting to play I can just go down my checklist.

That said, I had no idea until a couple days ago that there has been a big change in the SNG situation.  There aren't many SNGs available.any more.

When I played SNGs on PokerStars, I played at the one-, two- and ten-dollar. levels.  I made money at the $10 level, but even higher levels, up to $50 and beyond, were available.  That is not the case any more.

We no longer have PokerStars in the United States.  Juicy Stakes and Americas Cardroom have SNGs at $1 and $3.  That's it.  I have my Americas Cardroom filters set for everything under $5.  I just assumed that the higher levels existed and that I would eventually move up.  As has happened many times, the poker environment has changed and I have to rethink everything.

Taking Care of the Details

On the days that, for whatever reason, I can't play poker, I spend much of my time with recordkeeping and other details.

I keep a planner, one page for each day, and I write down all of the things that I want to accomplish that day, or I make notes for future days.  Yes, I actually write, with a pen.  I'm not interested in a digital planner, because I'm not going to get on a little phone or tablet screen and enter the seven steps needed to solve a complicated technical problem with my poker software.  It's quicker and easier to write it down.

I'm cheap, so I didn't buy a physical planner.  My planner is a binder with one page of notebook paper for each day of the year.  Simple, functional, portable and inexpensive.  I love technology but it's not always the best solution.

Yesterday I cleaned out my planner.  It contained pages going back to early May.  I looked at every page before I removed it to see if there were things that didn't get done, I consolidated those things on two pages of notebook paper and put them in the front of my planner, with the goal of tacking one of them about every other day.

Here are some of the things that I listed:

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Contact Avast to find out when I will have to renew my antivirus subscription.

Figure out how to get Holdem Manager 2 to work with Juicy Stakes poker.

Post room reviews in a poker forum.  (I might post some of them in this blog as well.)

Add percentage calculations to my time sheet (this is a Open Office spreadsheet, not handwritten.)  I don't just want to know how many hours a week that I work, I need to know the percentages.  I especially want to make sure that at least 25% of my time is spent studying.

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I"m not just playing poker.  I'm running a business.  That's the way the IRS sees it, and that's the way I have to treat it.  Again, this is not exciting or glamorous.  Someone who does a job well always does extra things behind the scenes that you don't see . Doctors read medical journals. Pro football players study game film

My wife works at home.  A half hour before she officially starts work she is setting everything up on her desk and two monitors so that she's ready to go when her shift officially starts

Successful poker players do the same things.  We don't just play a card game.  We study.  We plan our sleep schedules so that we're rested enough to play long tournaments.  We keep good records, both for our own benefit and for the IRS.  Poker players have to pay taxes just like everyone else.

A Post About Nothing

I've been struggling with two competing impulses.  One is to post something every day, because that's what one is supposed do to remain relevant in the blogosphere.  The other is not to post every day, because most of the time nothing very dramatic happens.

There is another consideration.  Those of us who are MTT (multitable tournament) specialists train ourselves to think only in the long term.  I care about my monthly results, but I know that all that matters is how much I've won or lost at the end of the year.  Anything less isn't a statistically valid sample size, therefore what happens in a day or a week means nothing.

I had a $350 live tournament cash a few months ago and I haven't had one since since.  That's how tournament poker works.  It's very high-variance, income is very irregular, and just three or four very large cashes can make a player profitable during a calendar year.

After thinking about this for a while, I decided that I need to post a lot more often.  If there are stretches where not much happens, I should get on every day and say that.  You can join me and feel my pain.  There are certainly things to talk about besides wins and losses.  I can talk about what I'm studying, or how I'm feeling, or future plans.

So, here is the subject of today's less-than-exciting post:

I tired to play and nothing happened.

I signed on to America's Cardroom to register for a couple SNGs and nothing happened.  I hit the REGISTER button for both a $1.50 and a $3 SNG and my name did not appear on the list of players for either SNG.  I did some checking online and others were reporting the same problem.

After two posts comparing online and live poker, live tournaments definitely win this round.  I have never seen a live tournament fail to start when there were enough interested players.

Why Online Poker is Better

In my previous post, I listed the reasons that live poker is better.  I like it much better than playing online.  That said, in some situations and for some players, online poker is a better choice.  Like a lot of players I do both.  Here are some reasons that online poker might be the best choice for you.

1. It costs almost nothing to get started.  When I started playing on PokerStars I didn't have a lot of money to invest.  I learned about poker from watching the World Series of Poker and the World Poker Tour on TV.  I tried play money games on Party Poker to figure out how everything worked.  I read library books about poker, and when I realized most of them were really old, I used interlibrary loan to get newer ones. Once I got a Kindle I started downloading poker books from amazon.com for about $6 per book.*

When you start playing online, you will find all kinds of tournaments, from 10 players or less to hundreds or even thousands of players.  Buy-ins can range from $1 to hundreds of dollars.

2.  You don't have to deal with people.  Maybe you're an introvert and you don't want to spend several hours in a poker room packed with 50 or more people.  Or you don't want to deal with the guy who's been drinking for the entire tournament and is loud and obnoxious.  Just stay at home and play online.

3. You can play whenever and wherever you want.  Most live poker tournaments are at night and/or on weekends.  My local room has tournaments only Thursday through Sunday.

Online, you can look up the tournament schedule and play whenever you want.  You can play in the afternoon when you get home from work.  If you work second shift, you can play poker in the morning.  I know of a single mother who made her living playing online while her children were in school.

You can play wherever you want as well, All you need is a laptop and an internet connection.

4. You can track the statistics of your opponents.  If you're serious about making money playing poker online you need to get Holdem Manager 2.  It's a tracking and database program with a heads-up display.  You can choose what you want to track from the hundreds of available statistics.  I track the number of hands that I've played against that player, the percentage of his hands that he chooses to play, the percentage of raises before the flop, how often he continuation bets or folds to a c-bet, and how often he folds to button steals when he is the small or big blind.  All of those statistics are displayed on the screen while you play.

If you're a serious player and you're not using Holdem Manager 2 you're at a disadvantage because your opponent might be.

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*I recommend two books for anyone getting started with poker.  The first is The Theory of Poker by David Sklansky.  It's a good theoretical overview of what you are trying to accomplish at the poker table.  The second is Harrington on Holdem, Volume 1.  This is a great book for learning the basics of how and when to bet, call, raise or fold.

Why Live Poker is Better

I will be playing a live poker tournament in a few hours.  I don't do that very often.  I have money on two poker sites, so I have an online bankroll.  I had a big live downswing and I don't have a strong bankroll for live games.  I wanted the majority of my play hours to be live, but it hasn't worked out that way.  Until I can grind my bankroll back up I have to be very careful with my tournament selection, only playing those with a structure that best plays to my strengths.  If that means only playing live once or twice a month, so be it.

Live poker is fun because it's a different experience every time, with a different mix of players every time.

I have played in lots of different poker rooms in different cities all over Michigan.  I have played in a Masonic Temple and in a Catholic church.  I have played in bars, restaurants and bowling alleys and in a standalone poker room in a strip mall.  I've played against people young enough to be my grandchildren and old enough to be my father.

I play against men and women, highly educated people and high-school dropouts, geniuses and those with below average IQs.  Poker accepts every race or type or kind that you can imagine.  Most are at least reasonably nice nice people--but not all.

Sometimes there will be an obnoxious drunk at my table.  There are gentlemen and there are men who like to stare at breasts (and to be fair, women who enjoy displaying them.). About a month ago I knocked a guy out of a tournament and he spent two minutes yelling that I was the worst player in the room.

If you can't deal with that, you're playing the wrong game.  If you are a champion of diversity, enter a live poker tournament and you'll be right at home.

Poker is the ultimate meritocracy.  My age doesn't matter as long as I'm at least 18 (21 in some casinos.)  My resume doesn't matter.  My education or income doesn't matter.  Either I cash or I don't, and usually only 10-15% of the players cash.  Live poker tournaments don't give participation trophies.

Playing online just isn't the same.  You don't see or talk to anyone.  When I played on PokerStars I described live poker as more fun because, "I'm playing against a real person, not an avatar from Uzbekistan."*  I often spend over an hour playing an online SNG with no one typing anything in the chat box.

One more thing.  If I want to cash out after an online win I have to jump thought a lot of hoops.  The site on which I play is not located in the United States.  Getting money out involves foreign banks, payment processors, and sometimes issues with US credit cards or banks.  The first time you cash out you have to send a bunch of paperwork to prove that you are who you say you are and that you live where you say you live.  Receiving the money can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks.**

If I cash for $500 in my tournament tonight, all I have to do is walk over to a table and pick up an envelope which contains the cash.


Next Post: Why Online Poker is Better

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*PokerStars at that time accepted players from all over the world.  I really did have someone from Uzbekistan at one of my tables.

**The main site on which I play, Americas Cardroom, has some very quick payout methods, for example, money sent to your special debit card--but the fees are significant.  On the other hand, I can ask for one free paper check a month (minimum $100) to be mailed and it's free, but it can be a week or more before I receive it.

How Much Did You Win?

Poker players get asked about their money all the time:

How much did you win? 

How much money to do you make? 

What if you lose all your money?

Are you rich?

Recently a woman found out what my job was and she asked if I was rich.  She was really excited.  She had obviously watched one of the poker shows where six or seven figures in cash is dumped on the table when the tournament is down to the last two players, with the winner getting all of the cash.*   I thought it was about time to talk about how much money poker players make.

Here are some things you should know about poker players and their money:

1. Poker income is irregular.  In his first season on the World Poker Tour, Jonathan Little lost about fifty thousand dollars.  The next year his profit was over a million.  For the average player the numbers aren't as big, but for any player it's a wild ride.

I don't cash in every tournament.  I don't cash in most of them.  No one does.  I can go to my local poker room, sign up for a $50 tournament, and compete with 60 other players for the $1,000 first prize  It's likely that if that tournament runs on ten straight Sundays there will be ten different winners.  Places 2-5 will win smaller prizes.  The other 55 players go home with nothing.

2. Poker work hours are irregular.  We play when and where the tournaments are running  That might be an online tournament starting at 0900 or a live tournament that starts at 1800 and ends around midnight.

3. Poker players work for their money.  The top players work at their job more than 40 hours a week. I study poker books. I play both online and live.  I use flash cards to memorize hand ranges, for example, I know that the offsuit hands that are in the top 10% of all hands are AJo+ and KQo.  I study coaching videos and poker books.  I use a spreadsheet to keep track of my time in quarter-hours, just like I'm punching a time clock.

4. Poker incomes vary.  As with any other profession, some poker players make a lot more money than others.  For some players it is their full-time job.  Some make a million dollars or more in a year.  Some make 5- or 6-figure incomes. Others play part-time for a side income.  Some go broke because they aren't good enough, or don't study, or didn't mange their money well.

Don't be like this guy:

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/42/two-plus-two-magazine-forum/going-broke-1436641/

My response to this player is post #7. 

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*Other options such a check or wire transfer are usually available.

I'm Still "Available Man"

I realize now that the Available Man problem has not gone away.  As mentioned in an earlier post, I became the one available to be a caregiver to my mother-in-law because I was the one in the family that "doesn't have a job."  I will never let someone say that to me unchallenged again and I am no longer a caregiver, but the problem persists.

I have two family members that might need that kind of help at some point, possibly soon. I know that at some point I will be asked to do more than my share.  It's not that they will want to take advantage of me.  The problem is that some point someone will be needed and I will be called because John and Jane Doe are "at work," It already happened once, when the family members who were "at work" were much closer to a family member that needed a ride to the hospital than I was. I've thought about this a lot, and I'm still not sure how to handle it.

I will agree to be part of any caregiver rotation just as I was with my mother-in-law.  But I won't let my job be messed with.  Poker is just like any other job in that very few people get rich doing it part-time.  I will insist that my job be treated with as much consideration that of any other family member.

To a lesser extent, this happens at home.  If something has to happen during "normal work hours" my wife has employers that expect her to cover the scheduled hours.  If I plan to be at my computer playing online poker in the afternoon and she plans to be working on her computer at home at the same time, I will have to be the one to change my plans if a 2 P.M. appointment has to be handled, My wife has no choice, that's just the way it is.

I've thought about this a lot, and there are some things I can do.  When I play a live tournament, which can take six hours or more, I always have my phone turned off.  I'm thinking about doing the same thing when I play or study at home.  I don't want to be disturbed when I'm playing for a $1,000 first prize at my local poker room, and I need to treat playing at home (or studying so I can make that money) the same way.

Online prizes of a thousand or more are available online more that you might think, in fact, as I have mentioned on this blog, most tournament pros don't make their money from a a lot of small cashes.  A large part of their income comes from a few large cashes.  How big the potential cashes are depends on the amount of the buy-in and the number of players. For example, a $5 online tournament with 800 players would have a first prize of about a thousand dollars.  The math is simple:

$5 X 800 players = $4,000 prize pool.  First place usually gets about 25% of the prize money.

Some online tournaments with thousands of players can run for eight hours or even longer--and that's part of the problem.  I don't have scheduled hours.  When a tournament ends, I might study, or play another one, or watch TV.  My tournaments can be online or live, in a poker room two miles from my house, or in another city.  Some of my live tournaments start at 1500, others start at 1800 or 1900.  Online tournaments are available 24 hours a day.  I don't care when I play, but I'm making some changes to get my work week up to 50 hours a week.

Tournament selection drives my schedule, and it's crucial that I carefully decide what, where and when to play.  Among the things I might consider when choosing a tournament is:

Will I be rested enough to play at the scheduled starting time?
What percentage of my poker bankroll does it cost to enter?
How big will the prize pool be?
What is the level of competition?
What are the incidental costs such as travel, food and drink?

I consider those things every single day before I start my work day.  I don't have anything like a regular schedule that I can put on a piece of paper so everyone knows when I'm not available.  I need to be free to choose my tournaments on a day--by-day basis if necessary.  I am for the most part free to do that.  But that very freedom can make others think that I'm available on demand--and therin lies the problem.

Math Keeps Me Sane

It would be easy for me to get discouraged.  Lately, I'm playing poker but not making any money.  I'm building up small amounts of money that I had sitting on two online poker sites, so that I can get my bankrolls big enough to make some money.  In live tournaments I haven't cashed in several months.

There are good explanations for this.  First and foremost, after several tries at being a full-time poker player, this year is the first real chance that I've had to make it happen.  In 2014 and 2015 I lived with my mother-in-law every week, 3-4 days a week, as her caregiver.  The family started with a rotation of two or three people doing that job, and two years later I was the only caregiver left standing because all of the other family members were, in their own words, burned out.  I never signed up to be doing it by myself and I quit.  Someone outside the family is now doing that job.

What really made that situation hard to deal with was that I wound up spending all of that time as a caregiver because a family member said I should do it because "I didn't have a job"  and I didn't speak up.  I should not have been silent.  I should have said that poker is my job.  But once I said yes, I was going to fulfill that commitment.  I had no idea I would be doing it for two years, but once I commit myself to something I don't quit.

Starting in February of this year, poker was finally my one and only job--but I'm starting all over again, after not getting the proper play or study time in for the last two years.

So, what does math have to do with this?  It tells me that this is normal.  Some players start out as big winners, then the reality check comes and they don't get anywhere for a while.  Some are just the opposite.  Like me, they do the studying and the other work, but they don't get results right away.

There are two mathematical concepts at play here, statistical variance and sample size.

Statistical variance says that over a small sample size a player's results do not indicate how good that player is.  A good player can play ten or more tournaments, sometimes many more, and not cash in any of them.  That's called negative variance.  A bad player can, over those same ten or more tournaments, cash in several of them, because he got a good run of cards or for other reasons.  That's positive variance.

To put in simply, poker is a long-term game.  It takes a while, a statistically valid sample size, for the cream to rise to the top.  To give an extreme example, in his first season on the World Poker Tour, Jonathan Little finished down fifty thousand dollars.  The next year, he was up over a million.  Little is now a two-time WPT Player of the Year.

That's pretty extreme variance, but I'm not competing against the best players in the world. so my edge over the field won't be as small at Little's.  As I have the chance to play more and more live tournaments, which is my main focus, after 25 or 50 or 100 tournaments, at some point the results will be there.  I spend 25% of my poker time on study every week.  I watch coaching videos.  I read and study poker books.  I make flash cards to memorize different hand ranges and other things that I need to memorize, for example, which hands are in the top 20%.  For those who want to know, those hands are:

66+,A4s+,K8s+,Q9s+,J9s+,T9s,A9o+,KTo+,QTo+,JTo

A few of the people that I play against are probably doing that kind of studying.  Most aren't.  Very few have poker as their only job,  My last two tournaments I finished 26th of 72 and 8th of 34.  I'm going deep enough often enough that I know I'm close to making things happen.  Even more important, every tournament that I play I can see where I've improved and where I need to improve,  I learn from every tournament and the more I play, the better I'll get.  It's only a matter or time, or to put in another way, playing enough tournaments that I have a large enough sample size that short-term variance is not an issue.

Today's Live Tournament

I played a live $50 tournament today.  Lately I have played a lot over in the next county, but this was my second straight tournament in Muskegon.  The room is conveniently located 1.8 miles from my house.

It would have been a nice one to win.  There were 72 players, which means that first place would probably be over $1,000.  Unfortunatey my downswing, both live and online, continues.  I can't seem to win or cash anywhere.

Of course I know that much of it is negative statistical variance.  I'm spending a lot of time doing some serious studying..  Almost every week I hit my goal of at least 25% of my poker time being spent on study.  I had some small cashes ($250 or less) a few times in late 2015 and in January 16. I have no live cashes in the last three months, even though I know I'm a much better player than I was a few months ago.

Eventually I'll start cashing again, but it's always tough riding out the downswings.  I played pretty well and at one time today I had a very large chip stack.  Then something happened that was a big blow to my chances of cashing.

I had about an average stack when I was dealt pocket aces.  I raised with them and got two callers, always an exciting situation when holding aces.  I was about to make a big bet that would have caused the other players to make a tough decision--there was enough money in the pot that I would be happy if they folded.  Then the dealer said something, and I thought she was telling me that I forgot to post the blind (I know,it doesn't make any sense, I had a major brain fart) so I put the chips in the pot.  What she was telling me it was that it was my turn to play, and since the chips I put in the pot were more than the minimum bet, that automatically forced me to make it a raise.

Since I had raised, I had to bet enough more chips to make it a minraise. I put in the chips that completed the raise.  I had intended to make a big bet and put my two opponents to a decision but I never got the chance.  Both of those players bet big (a raise and a call) and I had to consider the possibility that one of them had flopped something better than top pair.

I lost the initiative.  With half of my chips already committed to the pot, I decided to fold.  I eventually got my chip stack up to where it was before that fiasco and it stayed there for a few minutes as we got down to four tables. I had rebuilt my stack until it was above the tournament average, but it didn't hold up..  I was unable to keep up with the rising blinds, I got all it all in, my AQ lost to AK and I was out in 26th place--far short of the final table finish that I needed to get into the money.

I'll probably take another shot at that tournament next Sunday.

Study Habits

Having both Attention Deficit Disorder and a problem moving information from short- to long-term memory has profoundly effected my life.  My IQ said that I was a genius.  My grades said something very different.  My high school GPA was a very average 2.6.

I didn't put the entire picture together until, at age 40, my ADD was diagnosed.  I managed to graduate from community college, sometimes only taking one class a semester.  I failed to get degrees from two Universities, in computer science and political science.

Once I realized what I was dealing with, it took me until about age 45 to beat back a lot of the bad habits.  It took me until about age 50 to start building some good ones.  It's a battle that I will fight every day of my life.

I was studying flash cards yesterday.  When I was done I realized how far I have come, even though it will always be a struggle.

I have been working on memorizing the top 10%, top 20% and top 50% of hands.  I need to know each of those ranges for different reasons. Most of the top professionals play about 20% of their hands, so I decided to open up my game and get comfortable playing that many hands.  I couldn't do that unless I knew what hands were in that range.

I opened my equity calculator (available free at equilab.com) and found out which hands were in the top 20%.  Then, as I have for top 10% and top 50% of hands, I put those ranges on flash cards.  For example, my flash card for suited hands in the top 20% shows the following:

A4s+ (ace-four suited plus, an ace paired with a four or higher of the same suit), K8s+, Q9s+, J9s+, T9s.

I have three flash cards for each percentage range: suited, unsuited and pairs.  Yesterday I worked on the 20% range for half an hour, then I added the cards for top 50% of hands and worked on those ranges for another half hour.

After I was done I realized what a big deal it was.  I pounded away on the flash cards for an entire hour!  Flash cards are boring, and people with ADD are very easily bored.  Memorization is very hard for me.   I told my wife, who for a while was a member of the Bible Memory Association, that  she could memorize in a day what took me a month, and it wasn't a huge exaggeration.  A few months ago it was a chore for me to work on flash cards for 15 minutes.  I'm a lot more diligent with my study, but I can never let my guard down.

I can only study when I'm in control of my environment.  There can't be any distractions.  If I hear just a few words from the television, my concentration is gone.  I study in a room by myself, with the door closed, wearing earplugs.  If I'm watching a coaching video, I listen to the sound on headphones. If I was getting a house built from scratch it would have a soundproof room.

I'm typing this between online SNGs and the time is 2234.  It's quiet outside, my wife is in bed and even the cats are sleeping.  I don't always have perfect study conditions, but I do everything that I can to control my environment, or failing that, to study or play poker online in as close as I can get to complete silence.  Most nights I play or study until well after midnight.

It is after midnight now.  It's 0142 and I just finished proofreading this before posting.  Time to play another SNG.