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.