Below this paragraph is a link to a 2:51 video which shows how poker players think. My wife always asks if I have to analyze everything. The answer is yes. I'm a poker player. It's what we do. You'll see what I mean when Tony Dunst compares two poker hands in this video (2:51.)
https://video.search.yahoo.com/yhs/search?fr=yhs-iba-1&hsimp=yhs-1&hspart=iba&p=let%27s+break+it+down+tony+dunst#id=1&vid=9fda7e0cd41deb99d8b09af6a1a73785&action=click
I have a few poker rules that I almost never break. I should make a list and number my rules the way that Agent Gibbs does on NCIS. One is, "I will not play when I'm tired." If I'm tired when I play I'm likely to lose my concentration. It's hard enough to concentrate, given that I have Attention Deficit Disorder. Combine lack of sleep with with ADD and nothing good can come from that.
I was tired last night so I slept through the 2019 tournament that I usually play. I set my alarm for 2200 so that I could play at 2214. I played that one and wound up in a big hand early, I started with about 2,000 chips, I lost the hand and I was down to 414 chips after playing for about 20 minutes.
I hung on for a while and got a few more chips, but I was knocked out 44 minutes in. I checked to see when the next tournament started, and there wasn't one. That's because a few days ago I took another one off my list. I skipped one tournament, got knocked out of the second one early, and that was it. There was nothing else to play.
I have so few tournaments to play because on 4/14 I took another one off my list. On my Best Available Tournaments page I made this note:
"A
tournament that starts at 2329 was also removed because of small
fields and because 2/3 of the prize pool goes toward bounties."
It was the right thing to do. This is all about growing the bankroll and only playing the tournament structures that give me the best chance to make money. I have to follow the plan and grind my bankroll up to $500 with as little risk as possible.
That leaves me with a dilemma. What am I going to do with my time? I want to work 40 hours a week. When on one day I play for less than an hours that leaves a lot of time to kill..
Legally I don't have to work 40 hours a week to keep the IRS happy and prove that my poker playing qualifies as a Schedule C business. They don't care how many hours I work, as long as I don't have another job which pays more than poker and/or takes more of my time than poker.
As always, I'm considering my options. If there's a problem, I'll analyze it and either come up with a solution, or at least some good options. I haven't really thought this through yet, but off the top of my head, here are some things that I could do:
1. Tackle one study topic very deeply..
There are a lot of plays that I make because good players or good poker books have told me that I should. There is nothing wrong with that, but there have been times where I really wanted to dig into the math that the great players use to solve certain problems.
In Harrington on Holdem the author talks about a problem which involves several players in a hand, and how each player might react to what other players in the hand do. He shows the math to solve that problem. That math takes up six pages of the book.
Many times I have thought about digging deeply into the math, but I've never done it. Now would be a good time.
2. Reduce my poker time to 30 hours per week. That's a possibility, but I really hate to do it. If I'm not willing to work at my job for at least 40 hours a week, I'm not serious.
3. Tackle some important family projects.
We moved recently\and we live in a mobile home. Before that, we lived in a house with a full basement. We have a lot of things that we need to get rid of, both in our home and in storage.
Getting rid of all that stuff would improve my poker situation in three ways:
First, some of that stuff is taking up about half the space in my office, and I like having room to spread out and keep a lot of papers where I can reach them.
Second, my poker budget and the general family budget are both very tight right now. Not having to pay rent for a storage unit would take some pressure off.
Third, until a few months ago we had been working on paying off debt and being debt free in three years. That's been on hold for a few months because of expenses involved with the recent move. Freeing up money to attack our debt would, again, take a lot of the pressure off. I will discuss these issues in my next post.
All of the above are good answers. I've known for a long time that I need to get serious about advanced poker math. I also need to put in more study hours than I do. A few pros spend a full 50% of their poker time studying. I don't want to do that, but I try to keep study as 25% of my work hours. I've slipped in that area. There is no reason that it can't study more than 25% of the time for a while.
There are important family projects that need to be tackled, and cutting back my poker hours would allow me to do that. If one of those project was to get rid of all of our extra stuff, it would free up money for other things, including poker. I could also put in 40 hours some weeks and work less in other weeks.
How much I might get for putting a book, a 1943 hardcover New International Atlas of the World, Wartime Edition, on E-bay might affect some of those decisions. If I get some serious money for that book it's a game-changer. I could put some money toward my Juicy Stakes Bankroll, allowing me to play higher and make more money faster.. Or, I could put that money on Americas Cardroom, which has a lot of tournaments at all times of the day and night, some with great structures which filt the way I play. Some money to stock up on office supplies would be nice as well.
As always, your questions and comments are welcome.
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