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.