A Day Without Poker and a Disappointing Week

It is 2336 on Saturday, 12/24.  For the first time since being a full-time poker players has been a reality instead of a goal, I didn't play poker at all today.  The week will be over in less than half an hour.  The day, and the week, got away from me.  I was under the weather for a few hours one day, and there were a lot of Christmas things going on with relatives.  Also, my wife and I went to a New Years Eve Christmas service at our church.

I didn't get close to putting in 40 hours this week.  I'll wind up with 27. That's not going to get the job done.  I try to pile a lot of hours into the first few days so that I don't get behind, but nothing seemed to work out right this week.

"Piling up" hours isn't exactly a goal. I like flexibility, and rather than working eight-hour days, I usually wind up working five or six hours a day seven days a week.  That usually gets me to my 40 hours and lets me do what I want during the day.  I failed to consider that despite my best efforts, occasionally an entire day is going to get blown away.  I can't count on being able to work every day to get my hours in.

I suppose that I could just accept that I'm not going to get in 40 hours every week.  After all, people do take days off and go on vacation.  However, I can't afford to think about time off until I'm turning my poker playing into money.

I think that the minimum cashout on Americas Cardroom is $100.  When I can do that without putting my online bankroll in jeopardy, then I can start thinking about things like an occasional day off.  Until then, I should do what a lot of small business owners do--work 50 hours a week, or 60, or whatever it takes to get the business off the ground.  It's almost 2017 and I've said that in January I want to hit the ground running.  It's time to make that happen.

I'll end on a positive note.  Studying was 30% of my work time this week.  Keeping my study time at or above 20% is one of my most important goals.  In the long turn  I have no doubt that a study emphasis will pay off.

A Very Deep Run

In my previous post I said the following:

I've been playing some of these, noting how the players play in general and I think that I'm getting the hang of it. I started out crashing and burning in the first hour, then I was getting in the top quarter of the field.  Soon I was regularly getting in the top 100 of fields of 600 or 700 players.  In my last two I got knocked out around 50th place.

I just finished going very deep in an 11-cent tournament that is very popular on Americans Cardroom and runs seven days a week.  Like the freerolls, it's not a lot of money but it's a cheap way to practice some of the things I'm working on.  Last night, everything feel into place.  I played for 5 hours and 13 minutes, finishing 4th of 892 players for a cash of $7.45.

I've been working on a lot of aspects of my game and doing a lot of studying over the last few months. Whether I make any money has been secondary.  It's all about being ready to make some real money in 2017.

My goal is always to spend 25% of my time studying, but last week is was 33%, one third of my poker time that week spent in study, and that study emphasis is paying off.  I've been working on a lot of aspects in my game and it's all starting to come together.

I'm working on ideas that didn't exist for me just a few months ago.  In yesterday's tournament  I sometimes defended my blinds with 75% of my hands.  A month ago I would have thought that was crazy, but a week ago I watched a video with Jonathan Little and Alexander Fitzgerald discussing the importance of blind defense and why it was necessary to defend so often.  Several times during that tournament yesterday I was thinking about all of the plays that I was making that I wouldn't have even considered a few months ago.

Another very new idea for me is using different bet sizes depending whether or not you want to be called.  It's not new in the sense that the idea has been out there for a while and I knew about it, as one of the many things that I should learn how to do someday.  I never dug into that because it was just one of many things that I needed to learn..

That video, along with Little's Weekly Poker Hand videos, have really opened my eyes to a lot of things. In the videos Little takes one hand and talks about it for 10 minutes.  What if I had done this instead of that?  What do I know about this player?  What if I had bet a little more, or a little less?  What is the tournament situation?  What if my chip stack was smaller, or larger?

Now that I have my own office and a quiet place (and neighborhood) I have the chance to study all those things, which is a big part of everything coming together.   It's almost 2017.  Now it's time to start turning all the things that I'm learning into money.

Americas Cardroom Freeroll Leaderboards

I took a closer look at the Americas Cardroom leaderboard promotion and it might be worth pursuing. Of course it's not easy to finish in the top ten of any kind of tournament, even a freerool, when it can have between 500 and 1,000 players.

I've been playing some of these, noting how the players play in general and I think that I'm getting the hang of it.  I started out crashing and burning in the first hour, then I was getting in the top quarter of the field.  Soon I was regularly getting in the top 100 of fields of 600 or 700 players.  In my last two I got knocked out around 50th place.

I took another look at the prizes and they are better than I thought.  The top 10 are decided by the number of points accumulated during the week..  Points are from 10 points for a first place, 9 points for second, down to 1 point for a 10th-place finish.  That means that I wouldn't have to win the whole thing to get some value from it.

The other interesting thing is that the prizes are better than I thought.  I thought that first place got a free ticket to a $215 tournament and that  everyone else got less than that, but it's a pretty good deal even for the players who finish in places two through ten.

First place wins a ticket to play a $215 tournament and a ticket for a $55 tournament.  Places 2 through 10 get a $55 ticket.  If the $55 tournament has more than 100 players (I think it would be a lot more) that's a prize pool of over $5,000,

I have no idea how hard it would be to crack the top 10 of the leaderboard.  The whole thing might not even be feasible for one reason or another.  I would certainly have to put in a lot of volume.  A freeroll goes off every hour and I would have to play as many as possible. to have any kind of a shot.

Two things would have to happen for me to have a decent shot:

1. I would have to have a completely clear schedule, pretty much doing nothing but eating, sleeping and playing poker for a week.

2. No studying during a freeroll week, only playing.

Number one is tricky.  I would have to pick a week with a decent weather forecast so that I didn't spend an hour or more every day dealing with all of the snow.  And there is always the Available Guy issue lurking out there.

As far as number two, I always want to spend at least 25% of my weekly poker time studying, but that's easy enough to work out.  If I had a no-study week I could balance it with 50% study the next week.  Maybe my leaderboard could be once a week, or just occasionally when I could clear the time. I really won't know exactly how this might work until I dig into it a little more, by playing more of them and by looking up some information online on how these leaderboards play out, whether the same players usually in the top ten, etc.

I'm not sure if I'm going to do this or not, and it might not happen for  a couple weeks or maybe three months from now.  I might not do it at all. I have no idea how many players are trying to get to the top of the leaderboard.  It could be a hundred or a thousand.

I will report back with my findings.

I Only Missed One Hand

I have said before that I almost never miss a hand when I play poker.  I never know in which hand I might win a big pot and get into the money, or even win the tournament.  Just the opposite happened a few minutes ago.

I was playing an online tournament with 711 players registered.  After about two hours we were down to 84 players and I was in 62nd place.  The top 10 places were paid.

I was low on chips but getting closer to the money. I was looking for a hand to shove so that I could win enough chips to make it to the final table because only the top ten players cashed.  When the hourly 5-minute break started I needed to have a bowel movement.

I got back just in time to see that I missed most of the hand and that my pocket queens had been folded.  That would have been the top 5% hand that I was hoping for. A few hands later I was knocked out of the tournament.

I have a few rules about poker:  Two of the most important are that I won't enter a tournament when I'm too tired to play well, and that I will never miss a hand.  I missed a hand today and I paid dearly for it.

Short-Term Time Management

Devoting 40 or more hours a week to poker is a big adjustment:

     My wife and I have very different work schedules.

     I have to make choices.  I can't follow nearly as many TV shows as used to be the case.

     I always have to adjust for outside factors that demand my time, for example, shoveling after a snowstorm.  That's not something that someone in a cubicle with a boss nearby has to think about--he has to keep working until 5 P.M., it's not optional.  He can deal with the foot of snow in his driveway when he gets home.

I'm making a lot of the adjustments successfully.  One area where I'm getting better is managing small amounts of free time.  For example, I never know when I might get knocked out a tournament. If I'm out after an hour what should I do then?

One thing that took me a while to figure out it to not waste time and always have something else ready to work on.  Now when I finish a tournament, I don't have to find something to do.  One of the first things that I do after I turn on my computer is to set up anything that I might need during the day so that I have things ready to study.  I might open as many as ten windows.

I open the twoplustwo,com poker forums.  I open a poker coaching site so I have a video waiting, ready to be studied.  If I have something administrave to take care of I have Open Office ready to go. All of those things, a quarter-hour at a time, add to my poker hours.. Little time is wasted.  I can sit at my desk for five hours with 4.75 of those hours being productive.

What if I only have a few minutes between events, for example, a tournament ends and I want to play another one that starts in 7 minutes?  For that I have my Daily Task List open.  Some of the things on that list include exercise (push-ups, sit-ups and squat thrusts) and checking E-mail, Facebook and my planner to make sure that my world outside poker is in order.

I know that this level of list-making and detail seems crazy to some of you, but to me it's just the opposite.  It keeps me from being the ADD-addled Clif who was too disorganized to turn in a term paper on time or remember an appointment.  The amount of focus and organization that I need for poker is helping me keep the rest of my life straight as well.

In many ways I'm the best Clif I've ever been.  I'm 61 years old and I think about running my second marathon, or about how much money I'll make playing poker over the next ten years.  Retirement is not on my radar.

A Day of Study

I said yesterday that my study percentage for the week was way too low and that I was going to fix that. That is exactly what I did.  I only played poker for 1.25 hours yesterday.  Everything else was study.  I said yesterday that this week only 12% of my work time has been spent studying.  I turned that around and now study is 27%, right where I want it to be, at or above 25%.

Here's what I studied:

I reviewed flash cards for the top 10%, top 20% and top 50% of hands.

I watched a video on how to use the equilab.com poker equity calculator.  I already use it, but is has features that I have not yet learned to use.

I watched Jonathan Little Weekly Poker Hand videos 78-81,

I spent time in the twoplustow.com poker forums.  While I was there I found a forum thread discussing poker players who take Adderall.  I wrote a long post about how my life was falling apart before I was diagnosed, at age 40, and got the right medication.

I won't go into the details, but I have a 99th percentile IQ and still failed to graduate from two colleges.  That tells you all that you need to know about how ADD can mess someone up.  After telling my story, I finished it with this, just so there was no misunderstanding about how I use the medication:

I don't get high. I don't get a buzz. Adderall doesn't give me an advantage at the table. I make sure that I get enough sleep to play a long tournament. If I'm too tired to play well I don't pop a pill, I skip the tournament. I take Adderall as directed, one pill each day. It is simply a drug that I need to take in order to lead a normal life, just as Insulin is for a diabetic.

Just Grinding

Most poker days are just grinding.  No big highs and lows, no big problems, no big cashes.  Today was one of those days.  My son will have a car soon and once we don't have to give him rides, that will cut down on the Available Guy Problem and things will be a lot easier.

No one needed a ride today.  Nothing was messing with my schedule.  When Wednesday ended at midnight (it's 0024 on Thursday as I type this) I had worked 8.25 hours.  I'm still not used to having my own office in a quiet neighborhood and (most of the time) being able to work whenever I want.  It feels great!

I have to take the car in for some work today, but on Friday I might just sit down sometime in the morning and work for 10 straight hours.  It would be great to pile up some hours and still have time to watch TV at night.

My poker day yesterday:

SNGs plus one MTT, 6.5 hours.
Study on poker forums, 1.25 hours
Flash cards, 0.5 hours.
TOTAL, 8.25 HOURS.

I finished with the flash cards a few minutes after midnight.  Flash cards at midnight, or whatever kind of studying other players do, certainly isn't as glamorous as what you see on TV.  You see people sitting around poker tables playing for six-figure paydays--but those people didn't get there by accident.  They put in the work, just as I am I'm doing.

I'm happy with what I did today but there is one adjustment that I need to make.  This week so far I've done way too little studying.  That will be how I spend most of my poker time today.

My spreadsheet is set up to keep a running total of my percentages.  Study is at at 12% of my time this week.  I need it to be at least 25%, so the rest of the week will be heavy on study.  I've been slacking on the flash cards, not doing that every day as I should, so that will definitely get some attention every day for the rest of the week..  There are so many things that I need to learn, so many leaks in my game that I need to fix, that sometimes it's hard to know how to manage my study time.  I need to work a lot on flash cards, but sometimes I get frustrated, knowing all of the things that I don't know and should be working on..

I have memorized the top 10%, 20% and 50% of hands and I will review those as well odds and outs to hit the turn..  I need to regularly review what I've memorized before it starts slipping away, but I need to start adding some new hand ranges as well.

I like to play 50% of my hands from the button whenever I can get away with it, but for the times I can't get away from it, as well as for other situations, I would like to memorize the top 30% and 40% so that I have that in my arsenal when I need to tighten up a bit.

Of course I recognize that I could easily tighten my ranges by just dropping some of the weakest hands, but I think that knowing exactly what cards are in a range, especially online, will be very helpful.  When I'm looking at the heads-up display on my monitor I can see exactly what percentage of his hands my opponent is playing and I can be precise in responding by playing in the top half of that range, or by making other kinds of adjustments suggested by the math or by game theoretical considerations. Knowing precisely which hands are in various ranges will make that a lot easier.

So, that was my poker day and those are the kind of  things that I think about when I play or study. Not exciting, but all important to learn.

Thinking More Deeply About a Hand

When I started playing the clarinet in fifth grade, I learned to play a scale.  As I played in elementary school, then Jr. high, high school, college and finally in an army band, I learned more about music, and about scales, every step of the way.

In music there isn't just a scale.  There are major and minor scales.  Minor scales come in melodic minor and harmonic minor.  There are pentatonic (5 note) scales which are used a lot in Asian music. There are modal scales.  I just took a look on Google and there are a bunch of scales that I've never heard of.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_musical_scales_and_modes

Playing a poker hand is like that.  When you're a beginner, you probably bet if you think you have the best hand--but to be a good player, you have to know if you're getting the correct pot odds to play. Later you learn that there are express and implied odds.  Just as when a musician is playing scales, there is always more for a poker player to learn.

One of the most important poker sayings is, "It depends."  There often is more than one way to profitably play (or maybe not play) a hand and it depends on a lot of factors.  For example, how many players are in the hand and what the stack sizes are (how many chips each player has)?

Lately I've been watching videos of  World Poker Tour Player of the Year Johnathan Little's weekly podcast and it's been a revelation.  He talks his way through a hand that he played and says what he was thinking while he was playing.  As they say in the commercials, "But wait!  There's more!"

Once Little has analyzed the way the hand was played, he starts asking "What if?  What if I had bet a little more (or less) in that spot--what might have happened? Was that a reasonable spot to bluff?  On what level was my opponent thinking? Would he have folded if I went all in?  Would he have been suspicious if I made a small bet?

I started digging into those videos at about the same time that I was reevaluating my bet sizing.  I realized that my bet sizes were too consistent. Always doing things the same way has it's place in poker.  If I bet half the size of the pot whether I have a good hand or not, it makes me harder to read.

While what I was doing wasn't bad, there are times when it's better to do something else.  In particular, I noticed that some players will put a lot of chips in the pot if they can do it a little at a time.

Here is an example:

I have a pair of kings, a very strong hand that will win the pot much of the time.

Villian and I each have stack sizes of 1,000.

If I bet 250, a player might fold because he doesn't want to risk a fourth of half his stack.  However, if I make small bets on every street, I might get him to put in 200 chips by the end of the hand.  In this situation some weak players will think sometime like, "It's just a few more chips and I don't want to give up yet."

Combining what I figured out on my own with what I've learned from watching Little's videos. I now look at hands very differently.  I don't think about whether an action is a good play, I think about whether it's the best play.

I Failed

I didn't get my hours in last week.  I didn't even get close.  My goal is 40-50 work hours per week.  As stated previously, I had several jobs where I worked a lot of voluntary overtime, so this shouldn't be a big deal.  Last week I let it get away from me.  I worked a total of 25.5 hours.

No one was dying.  No one in my family was hospitalized.  I wasn't sick.  There was no emergency.  I have no excuse.  There were things, mostly involving family, that I allowed to get in the way.  The leaves had to be raked before it started snowing.  A family member needed a ride to work.  Things like that.  Too many things.

To some extent all of the things that had to be done were important, but again, there is no way that my wife would have bailed out on her job to do those things.  Once again, I was Available Guy.  By Thursday, I was way behind in my hours.  By late Friday night there were not enough hours left in the week for me to hit 40.  I worked a few hours on Saturday, but I took most of the day off.  I was upset and not fit to risk money at the table or to attempt learning anything.

Here are my hours for last week:

Playing poker, 18.5 hours, 73%
Study, 5.5 hours, 22%
Administrative: 1.5 hours, 6%

I'm not thrilled that I missed my study goal of 25%, but I'm really upset about the total hours.  In a previous post I mentioned that when I play live tournaments I turn my phone off, and that I was thinking about doing that when I'm working at home.  I'm seriously considering that again.

I'm going to try hard to pile up hours early in the week so that I'm not scrambling later in the week to catch up.  Perhaps sometime soon I'll start posting my financial results, but that's secondary right now.  As always, it's about the process.  If I don't put in the hours at the tables and put in my study time the results won't be there.  If I'm in a hand with someone who studies ten hours a week and I only study for five hours, he has an edge.  I need to be the one with an edge.

Most of all, I'm trying to get everything in place, including doing a lot of studying in areas where I'm weak, so that I'm ready to hit the ground running in 2017.