Future Plans for Poker

Before I can talk about the future I have to talk about the recent past. The last few months I have been working on a lot of things.  I have been concentrating on hitting the ground running in 2017 and not worrying too much about what happens in the rest of 2016.

First, I have to upgrade my recordkeeping by the first of the year..  I have to make sure that my records are straight when I'm making enough money playing poker to interest the IRS.  I've always declared all of my income, but now that I will be declaring myself as a Professional Poker Player (that's the US Department of Labor classification for what I do) and making enough that someone might get curious.enough to audit me I'm going to be ready. They could even ask me to prove with a time sheet that poker is my main source of income and the main source of my work hours, but I'm already doing that.  I time all of my poker activies, whether play, studying or administrative, to the nearest quarter hour, just like I'm punching a time clock.

I  plan to go way beyond what is required and have a very complete list of my statastics for every tournaments I play: buy-in, start time, end time, amount won, type of tournament, poker site, etc. etc. The IRS loves information and well-kept records.  If I give them a big information dump any planned audit will probably be canceled..

By the end of last year I had no live bankroll, which was probably inevitable.  A study of regulars on the World Poker Tour shows that at the highest levels, the ones that make the most money are the ones that cash between 8 and 16 percent of the time.  The math behind this is that if one is cashing at least 8% of the time, he has a good chance of making a profit.  However, when you're cashing more than 16% of the time, you're not taking enough chances to get those few but very large payouts, because most of the tournament prize pool goes to the top three places.

The biggest bankroll that I ever had for live tournaments, most of which start at around $50, was never more than 10 buy-ins.  I had some decent cashes playing live, but never any of really big ones.  Playing with such a small bankroll is almost a guarantee of growing broke.  In math terms, my risk of ruin was always high.

Since I have no live bankroll, I've been playing exclusively online and that's  going fairly well.  I'm only breaking even, but I'm doing that while I'm learning a lot and trying a lot of new things.  A year ago I was playing almost nothing but live deepstacked tournaments.  I'm now playing a lot of online deepstack tournaments, but I've also been playing a lot of SNGs (sit & goes, a one table tournament with 9 or 10 players.)   need to have as many poker options as possible.

I'm learning a lot about when to be more aggressive and when to dial it down.  I'm much better at adjusting to table conditions.  I'm better at realizing when I need play a bad hand because I'm in position and/or when I'm getting good odds to play and/or it's a good spot to bluff.

It's been interesting.  I've been working on a lot of things while playing online tournaments between $1 and $3.  At one time I was playing both $1.50 and $3 SNGs as well as MTTs between $1.10 and $3.30.  At one point I ran my online bankroll down to $8, then I put the experimenting to one side, stuck to $1 tournaments and got my bankroll up to $36 in a few days.  Two deep runs in MTTs helped me with that, I had two nice cashes (for $1 tournaments) finishing 2nd of 116 players, then two days later 73rd out of 1,110.  I think I'll just keep running it up playing $1 tournaments until I'm up to $150 to $200, which if all goes well will take less than a week.

The most important thing is that now I have an office. No more playing in the living room a few feet from the television. No more negotiating about who gets the TV or the computer.  My wife only needs the computer part of the time, so now she works around my poker schedule and she can watch TV whenever she wants.  Probably later next year or early 2018 we will get another computer so we each have our own personal computer.

I love my first taste of really playing full-time--I've wanted to do for so long!  A few days ago I had a 10-hour poker day, 8.5 hours playing and 1.5 hours studying.  It was great to finally be able to do that!  The amount of work that I'm putting in should help me improve much more quickly.

My time management goal is to work a minimum of 40 hours every week, and at least 50 hours some weeks.  I want at least 25% of that total time to be studying.  I don't care about what happens every day.  I could have a day with no poker followed by a day where I put in 12 hours, as long as it adds up to 40+ hours a week I really don't care.  Poker is all about winning in the long term, so I don't even want to think about short time periods.

If this goes as well as I think it will, I'll just keep playing online and when I make enough I will occasionally cash out some of it to take shots at live tournaments.  When I get that big live cash I'll try to keep the live and online bankrolls entirely separate. I wanted to keep the two bankrolls entirely separate but for now I need to use one to boost the other.  In time it will all work out.

That's the plan and I will of course keep my readers up to date about how it goes.  As always, feel free to fire away with your questions and comments.  I've been mostly playing today.  Now it's time to watch a coaching video.