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.