Online Poker Update

As mentioned earlier, my preference was to spend the majority of my playing time on live tournaments.  But that's not always possible, so to get a good balance of studying and playing time I decided to start playing seriously online.  I haven't done that for a long time.

As you also know, I take bankroll management very seriously.  I had a little over $100 sitting on Americas Cardroom, so I did some math and decided that I should only play SNGs.  The standard bankroll recommendations are to have at least 50 buy-ins for a SNG and 100 for an MTT.

That would mean that to play $1.65 SNGs I would need to have at least $82.50 in my bankroll.  I started with about $120 on the site, so no problem.  To play $1.65 MTTs I would need have a bankroll of $165.00.  I don't have that much online.  So I"ve been sticking to SNGs.

For the first week or so I didn't win much because I was concentrating on what I could do with Holdem Manager as much as I was on the games.  But lately the SNGs have been going very well, and I'm now up $23.96 online this year.  My current balance is $142.16, just $22.84 since away from $165.

Once my bankroll is above $165.00 that not only opens up $1.00 MTTs, but it would also allow me to move up to the $3.30 level for SNGs.  Of course the higher the buy-in, the more that I can make so this opens up some new possibilities for making some real money.  I was playing $11 SNGs profitably when I played on PokerStars until 2011, so I should move up the levels on Americas Cardroom pretty quickly.

I wish I could play live tournaments three or four days a week, but with most of the buy-ins in the area poker rooms right around $50, I'm clearly not bankrolled to be doing that--but you have to start somewhere.  So I'm still being very careful about picking where and when I play live.  The next one will be on Saturday night.

I realize now that no matter how much I play live, online will have to be part of the mix.  There are some things I can do online that I can't do live.  My local room is only open four days a week and Saturday they have a  $100 tournament--so even though my local poker room is within walking distance (1.8 miles from my house) I spend a lot of my live poker time in Grand Rapids poker rooms, about 30 miles away.

Online, I can play pretty much whenever I want.  If I'm willing to wait 20 minutes for a SNG to fill up, I can play at 3 A.M.  I can play one, which usually takes a little over an hour, or I can play them one after the other (which I'm doing almost every day) during the busy times like weekends and early evenings (which I'm doing almost every day), or more than one at a time when I get more comfortable with using my heads-up-display and dealing with more than 100 statistics on the screen.

For now I'll be mostly playing online, but when I play live, I'll just have to hang in there until I get my first big cash of the year, which will give me a little more breathing room when choosing when and where to play.