No Live Tournament Last Night

I didn't play the $50 freezeout last night.  I was a bit under the weather and very tired, so I passed.

If I had a so-called regular job I would have gone to work.  I worked for 12 years in a place where I sometimes worked all three shifts (first, second and third) in the same week.  I took every hour of voluntary overtime that I could get, which often meant 12- to 16-hour work days.  A 60-hour week was not unusual.  I was tired all the time

The difference is that when I went to work tired, I still got paid for that day.  If I go to a poker tournament tired, playing badly can cause me to lose money.  That's probably what would have happened, so I had to skip that one.

I said earlier that I'm being very choosy about tournaments, and because of the buy-in I'm skipping the one tonight.  I'll give it another shot next week.

I'm Always Adjusting

At the poker table I am always adjusting--to the number of players at my table, whether the big stacks are on my left or my right and how good the players are, for starters.  I find myself in the position of having to adjust my life the same way and almost as often.

Now that I'm no longer a caregiver, I've settled into a schedule that works well for me.  I sleep until noon.  I do much of my playing and studying between 1200 and 1500 when my wife is working and/or between 2000 and 0400 when she is asleep.  I usually work in blocks of 2-4 hours, playing a few online SNGs and/or doing some studying.  The almost absolute quiet removes most of the distractions and makes my ADD much less of an issue.  I didn't plan on playing online very much, but that was one of the necessary adjustments.

The truth is that I've never had much of a poker bankroll.  Last year my live poker bankroll was a little over $500, which sounds nice, but that's only ten buy-ins for $50 live tournaments.  100 buy-ins is considered a fairly safe bankroll  At the start of the year I had a little over $100 sitting on an online poker site, and since tournaments start as low as 55 cents bankroll isn't an issue.

When my bankroll got low while I was a caregiver and part-time poker player, I could use some of the stipend that we got for taking care of my mother-in-law to prop it up a bit.  Now that I'm a full-time player, the plan was for me to play a live tournament three of four days a week, but I quickly realized that I had to carefully pick my spots.  I can't play just any tournament.  I have to play the very best ones for me, whether that means the buy-in price or the structure or both.  With that in mind, I'm only playing live about once a week.  I don't have the bankroll to play what I want, I have to be careful and play only the very best tournaments for my situation.

That lead to another adjustment.  If was poker was going to be my full-time job and I was only going to play one live tournament a week, what would I use to fill the 50 hours a week that I had planned to work?  As mentioned early, I don't want to overstudy and underplay.  The balance has to be right.  I adjusted again, and that's how online poker was added to the mix

I added several hours a day of online poker to my schedule and quickly realized that I needed to make still another adjustment.  I had planned to do some multitabling to play more SNGs and make more money but I am no longer able to multitable, at least for now, even though I have done it a little in the past.

I've been working a lot of how to get the most benefit from using a heads-up display (HUD).When I added a second table I got totally lost. I can't watch the flow of play,think about what I'm doing and watch and interpret the statistics in the display for 16 different opponents on the two tables, plus the table numbers for bet, pot and stack sizes. I'm still getting used to what I'm doing with the HUD.  Watching all of those stats while thinking about strategy for two tournaments is just too much.  Until I can be comfortable with interpreting and using more than 100 different numbers between two tables, trying to play more than one table is too much.  I think that the information that I'm getting on all of the players at one table will be a more than fair trade-off.

I might never be good at multitabling in this situation but when I'm learning something new, I'm a patient person.  I'm comfortable learning things in small pieces.  When I was a clarinet player and a piece was difficult, in my practice I would sometimes break a musical phrase into smaller pieces of 2 or 3 measures until I had it all down.

Tonight (Saturday) I will be playing my only live tournament this week.  It would be nice to get a cash and bump my tiny bankroll up a bit.

January Online Results

Most of my posts are fairly long.  A few are quite short.  This will be one of the short ones.

In a recent post I said that I would soon be reporting my progress, with actual numbers.  I also said the following in a different post:

 "The online tournaments that I've played so far this year, mostly $1.65 single-table tournaments, have been more about tweaking the technology than about making money."

I don't have my live results on a spreadsheet yet, but I do have my online results.  I actually did make money while I was learning how to better use Holdem Manager 2.

 For the month of January, playing poker online, I was up a whopping $1.20.

A Much Harder Adjustment Than I Expected

In 2014 and 2015 I was a live-in caregiver several days a week, and a very part-time poker player.  That all changed in late January and I'm now a full-time poker player.  I love poker and thought it would be an easy adjustment, but there are a lot of things to figure out.

The first big change is that I'm on a regular sleeping schedule.  I set my alarm for noon almost every day because that's what poker players do.  A lot of the pros that you see on TV sleep in late.  As one poker author put it, "Poker is a nights and weekends business."  That is as true for me as it is for the top pros.

The tournament rooms within 40 miles of my house offer tournaments that usually start around 6 P.M. and can go well past midnight.  That's why I sleep in almost every day.  When other players are getting tired and grumpy around 11 P.M. I'm ready to go for a few more hours.

My daily schedule is in place now, but filling 50 hours a week is trickier than I thought it would be.  I am carefully building my live bankroll by being very choosy about what tournaments I play, which for now means playing only one, sometimes two, tournaments a week.  Until I have more money to work with, I am playing only the tournaments that fit best with my playing style and other considerations.  When I have a bigger bankroll to work with I can be less picky and play pretty much whenever I want as long as I keep my my average buy-in around $50.  When I have a bankroll of 100 buy-ins ($5,000) then I can think about the next step, building a bankroll that allows to me to play at higher buy-ins and make more money.

That's the plan, but I have to deal with the situation as it is.  I got a stipend for being a family caregiver.  I don't get that stipend any more so I have much less room for mistakes or mismanagement of my poker time and dollars.  I thought that I would play at least three live tournaments a week, but I quickly realized that without a decent bankroll I have to be a lot more careful.

The big question became this: If want to work 50 hours a week and I only play one live tournament a week, how should I fill the rest of the time?  I can and do study of course, but if more than half of my poker time is spent studying, I'm not getting much of a chance to play and try out the new things that I'm learning.  Spending more than 1/3 of my poker time studying is not a good plan.

There are of course administrative things I can do..  I have my new recordkeeping system laid out.  I just need to tweak a few of the details  I can improve my technology so that I can play more and better online.  I'm doing that, reluctantly.

Online poker is not a great option.  I play on Americas Cardroom, and it's considered one of the best sites available to American players--when the tournaments don't lag or completely shut down.  I need to get the hours in, so I'm going to have to take my chances.  I played online for about 2,75 hours tonight.  I track and record my time by quarter-hours.

I'm working on the admin stuff, I've increased my time studying flash cards from about 0.25 hours a day to 0.75 hours.  Along with the poker coaching videos, I watch videos on how to use my HUD (heads-up display) more efficiently when I play online.  I spend time online exchanging ideas with other players on a poker forum.  I stay in touch with the owners of two of the charity rooms so that I can stay informed on the business aspect of Michigan charity poker rooms and how I could be affected.

[Hmmm,one of my cats just knocked my pen on the floor, laid down on my planner and started purring.  She clearly doesn't understand the sanctity of uninterrupted poker time.]  Writing this goes under administrative time, and I find it quite useful.  When I am telling someone else about how I manage my poker time, it helps me to think through what I'm doing.

I haven't totaled my hours yet, but I know that this week I won't spend 50 hours on poker.  The number will be a lot closer to 25.  I don't want to do things just to do them, and I don't want to overstudy and underplay. It's really hard to make it all work, but I can play a lot more hours online than I have been.  The online tournaments that I've played so far this year, mostly $1.65 single-table tournaments, have been more about tweaking the technology than about making money.  I will definitely play more and/or longer tournaments next week.

I am scheduled to play a live tournament Saturday night, and I hope to get a nice cash and bump my bankroll up by a few buy-ins.

Posting My Poker Results

Near the beginning of every year I take a fresh look at everything that I'm doing.  I'm always tweaking my play in order to improve, but early in the year I take a comprehensive look at everything, including where and how often I play both live and online, what my study priorities are and tweaking my recordkeeping system.

Today I have been working on my records, but it reminded me that someone that reads a poker blog probably wants to know how much money I'm making.  To that end, I will start posting in more detail about the results of my play.

This goes against the way I have trained myself to think.  Tournament poker income is quite variable and it is about success over the long term rather than just a few tournaments.  The analogy that I like to use is baseball.

Any professional baseball coach knows that over a over a 162-game season his team will lose a lot of games, in fact, almost every team will win less than 100 of those games.  You don't have to win every time, you just have to win more often than most of the other teams to make it into the playoffs.

Poker is like that.   Just like baseball, playing poker has it's ups and downs.  There are long winning and losing streaks, but with poker those swings are more extreme than they are for baseball.  I talked online to a poker player who had played full-time the previous year and made a good income--but half of that profit came from just two very large cashes.  Another example:  My favorite poker author, Jonathan Little, lost about 50 thousand dollars during his first year playing on the World Poker Tour.  The next year, he was up over a million.

The bottom line is that I am very process oriented.  I know that over a statistically valid sample size (a year or more) I will make money if I play a lot and study a lot.  That's why I might post about using flash cards and not even mention money for a week or more.  I trust the process and the money will take care of itself.

Mindful of that reality (the mathematical term is statistical variance)  I have trained myself to barely care how well I do over a day, a week, or even a month.  I know, however, that blog readers aren't poker players, and they don't want an annual report, They want to know how much money their favorite player is making that month or that week.

Once I have my records for this year set up the way I want them, which should take no more than a week, I will start posting information on how I'm doing, in dollars and cents.

Flash cards

I'm off to a good start with a $250 cash ($50 tournament) last weekend.  When we were at the final table, someone said that it was one of the best final tables he had seen, and that everyone was a good player.

I agree, everyone was pretty good.  I'm good enough to be competitive and make a lot of final tables.  I belonged there.  Now I need to make it to the next step. I need to be the one with a big stack, When I sit down at the final table and look at the chip stacks, I'm rarely one of the top three.

I decided that to make it to the next level, my number one study priority has to be flash cards.  Instead of 15 minutes every day I am going to increase that to 30 minutes or more.  That was an abrupt transition, so I'll make it clear.

I need to get better at fighting the big stacks.  When someone has a lot of chips and is making a lot of big bets, I often just get out of the way. Choosing your battles (poker players call it "picking your spots") can be a good thing, but but at some point you have to stand up to the bullies.  One way to do that is to play in the top half of villian's range.  What I mean is that if villian is playing a lot of hands, say, opening with 30% of her hands, then I need to call with the top 15% of hands.  Over time, that will be profitable for me.

To do that, I have to know which hands are in a certain range.  I have to have a very good idea what hands are in the top 30% and I have to know what hands are in the top 15% so I know how to fight back.*  In my flash card work this week I've given a lot of attention to hand ranges.  I've worked on three groups of cards this week: odds and outs to hit the turn, top 10% of hands, and top 50% of hands.

I don't work only on hand ranges in my memorization work, but it will definitely be emphasized. I don't have a very good memory, so I have to come back to the things I know, like odds and outs, from time to time and make sure that I haven't forgotten them.

I have never heard of anyone using flash cards in their poker study, but I know myself pretty well.  I know what I'm good at, I know what I'm bad at, and when I'm bad at something I can almost always come up with a way to fix it or at least work around it.  Pounding the flash cards is a way to keep the things I need in my brain.

Today wasn't a good day for study or anything else.  I did the income taxes today and that ate up a lot of time.  I'm not going to get in a 50-hour work week, but I hope to do much better next week.

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*Anyone can download a poker equity calculator and type in a number, for example, 20% or 35%, and get a list of hands, but it's not quite that simple.  Putting a player on a range is, like many things in poker, both an art and a science,  Every player's top 20% is going to be a little different.  I play more suited connectors than most players. In your 20% you might have fewer suited connectors than the calculator suggests, but play suited cards more often.

Sometimes in poker the math rules, and in other situations it's just a good guide.