The Good, The Bad and The Ugly in Two Days

March 26 and March 27 were certainly interesting poker days.

I'm not making money nearly as fast as I need to, so I decided that it was time to work on playing multiple tables on Juicy Stakes poker.  March 26th was a train wreck.

I knew that it would take me a little time to get comfortable with two tables, but it was a lot harder than I expected. Things were happening faster, but more important, it was an information overload.  I watch  nine different statistics for each player on my HUD (heads-up display.)  I pan to add another statistic to track sometime soon.  Some players track a lot more stats than I do.  There is a  link to an example of a poker HUD display is at the bottom of this post.

The trouble was that I wasn't adding 1 new stat for each player, as I plan to do sometime soon., I was adding 9 statistics for each of 9 new players,which comes to 81 more numbers for me to sort through. That sorting has to be done quickly.  Once it's my turn I have 25 seconds to act.

When I added the second table (9 more players) I had to scan the stats of 19 players instead of 9. That's a lot of extra information to add to the other things I have to think about at the table.  I crashed and burned at both tables, getting knocked out of two tournaments pretty quickly.

I didn't make huge errors, just a lot of small ones.  For example, I missed that someone's stack had become small enough that he was in all-in or fold mode, which affected how I should have reacted to that player.  That particular situation didn't cost me a lot of chips, but a lot of small errors added up to big trouble, and soon it was over.  I failed to cash twice, in the only two tournaments that I play which can draw over 100 players (more players equals a bigger prize pool.) I was down for the month with just a few days to go..  I had hoped to string together a few winning months, but March was in trouble.

I turned all that around in less than two hours.

On March 27th I played a bounty tournament.  The idea is that there is a prize pool, but each player also has a bounty on himself.  In this case, I could get a $1 bounty for each player that I knocked out.

I don't consider myself to be a good bounty tournament player.  I am so focused on making it to the final table and getting a big cash that it's hard for me to get excited about picking up an extra dollar or two in bounties-but hat night, everything came together.

It was a $2.20 tournament.  I jumped out to a big chip lead after 15 minutes and I was somewhere in the top ten for the rest of the tournament.  I made it to the final table as one of the smallest stacks but that didn't last long  I knocked out 3 players at the final table and I won the tournament.  First place paid $21.45,  I also knocked out 3 players at the final table ( I had knocked out 2 earlier) giving me a total of 5 bounties, adding $5 to my winnings.

I'm now up $17.45 for March.  That's not a lot compared to January or February, but it gets me closer to my bankroll goals.  Once I get comfortable with playing two tables, things should move a lot faster.

One more thing.  In an earlier post I said that I started with $34 on the site, then ran it  up to $100 in early February.  I said then that the next goal was to have $150 on the site.  My Juicy Stakes Poker bankroll is now.$158.62.

Now that my Schedule C poker business is better capitalized, I have more leeway in my tournament choices as well as with other business decisions..  Add to that the extra profit that I will make once I'm comfortable playing two tables and things should start moving faster very soon.

---------------

https://www.google.com/search?q=holdem+Manager+HUD&safe=off&rlz=1C1CAFA_enUS667US674&espv=2&tbm=isch&source=lnms&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi2-ezy-PXSAhVK6IMKHfUxC6cQ_AUIBigB&biw=1920&bih=974#imgrc=gaPvAjc8tpzuAM

Tournament Analysis

There is one thing that I have in common with two-time World Poker Tour Player of the Year Jonathan Little..  We both analyze everything.  I told my wife recently that I was "ruthlessly analytical."   She said, "I know" and shook her head.  She once asked me, "Do you always have to analyze everything?"  The answer is yes.  That's how I'm wired.

When I am deciding what to play, I analyze every tournament.  There are just some of the things that I consider:

How large is a typical prize pool?
How much does it cost to play?
Can I make it fit into my schedule?
How long would it take to play it out and win?
How quickly do the blinds and antes go up?
How strong is the field?

A lot of the top pros play all over the world.  Jonathan Little looks at at it a little differently. I love his logical and analytical take on poker travel.  From Poker News Daily, March 14, 2017:

I don’t like going overseas. Whenever you go, you lose a day. I don’t like giving away days. There’s enough going on in America that I don’t need to go overseas. Everything is more expensive and you don’t get to sleep in your own bed. If I go over there, it’ll be for a longer period of time.

February Results and Tournament Selection

In January my online play was +$35.70.  Frebruary was a little better at +$40.70.

It's good that I'm winning, but winning at that rate isn't going to get the job done.  For at least a few months I'll be playing only online and only on one site, Juicy Stakes poker.  The players pools are very soft and I should be able to win consistently, but I really need to start winning at least $50 a month, and there are reasons for that.

I'm depending on building a bankroll on one site and, when I have enough money on that site, cashing out some of that money for things that I need for poker.  The biggest need is to get back on Americas Cardroom.  I need that second site.  And I will have to get up to at least $500 on Juicy States to make that work, because their minimum withdrawal is $250.  I need to have two viable sites.

In 2017 I have my own office and I can devote a lot of time to online play.  This year I have played 55 tournaments on Juicy Stakes Poker.  The main feature of their tournaments is that the fields are very soft and very small.

Since the fields are small, the cashes will be also.  Earlier today I played for about 1.25 hours and played a tournament that had only eight players and three cashing spots ( took third place.)  Once I figured that out, I decided a couple weeks ago that since some of those very small tournaments finished as quickly as 1.5 hours, the best approach was to play as many of those two-hour tournaments as I could so that I could make money faster.

I cam up with a list of eight tournaments that were worth playing, but it turns out that there are some problems with that list.  The starting times are as follows:

0429
0759
2019
2214
2314
2329

There are two problems with that list.   The first is that I included tournaments with a buy-in of $3.30 or less.  That was a huge error.  How many times have I written in this blog that I need 100 buy-ins for the level where I'm playing?  With a bankroll of $130, I have no business investing 2.5% of my bankroll in one tournament.  Most of the tournaments where I didn't cash in February were $3.30, which wiped out a lot of my February cashes playing $1 or $2.

$2 is pushing it, but as soft as the fields are I think that I can get away with it.  I don't have a lot of choices and I have to play regularly.  I can live with a buy-in being 1.6% of my bankroll while I keep grinding it up.

Cutting out the $3.30s leaves me with a big problem, because three of the six cost that much.  That leaves me with three tournaments to choose from every day.  I really can only play two of them in a 24-hour period..

If I take the $3.30s off my list, that leaves me with tournaments starting at:

0749
2019
2214

In my most recent session I played the 2214  followed by the 0749.  That's a pretty big gap but I don't like to start at 2019,because that is one of the longest tournaments and it sometimes is still going when my favorite tournament starts at 2314.  My sleep schedule can get pretty scrambled but I usually can fix that with a nap before my next tournament.

I wish that I could come up with a way to make things happen faster, but I have to be patient and do it the right way.





.