Milestone--Juicy Stakes Poker

My balance on Juicy Stakes Poker is now $250.02.  $250 is a nice round number, but it's more important than that.  The minimum withdrawal on that site happens to be $250.

Of course I'm not going to take out the money that I've made so far.  My job this year was to grind up a decent bankroll on both Juicy Stakes Poker and Americas Cardroom so that I would have more money to play poker as well as more places to play.  I guess I'm one for two on that one, as Americas Cardroom didn't go so well.

My plan is to take out $250 next year when my Juicy Stakes bankroll is over $500.  I never want my bankroll to go down, it should always be going up.  It will work something like this:

When I started this year my bankroll was around $40.  I've been grinding it up and now it's $250.

I keep grinding until my balance is $600.  I withdraw $300 and my new balance is $300.

I keep grinding until my balance is $750.  I withdraw $350 and my new balance is $400.

I keep grinding until my balance is $900.  I withdraw $400 and my new balance is $500.

The above are just estimates off the top of my head.  As my account balance grows I will be bankrolled to play higher and make more money, but poker tournament variance being what it is, it's hard to know exactly how and when that will happen.

There are other variables as well.  There will be times when I want to withdraw as much and as often as possible, and there will be times when I want to concentrate on growing my bankrolls.  Another factor is that at some point I'll be spending a lot more time on Americas Cardroom to get that bankroll growing.  Finally, I'll have to make some decisions on how to divide the money that I take out, and there are a lot of places that it could go, including, in no particular order:

a stake to revive the Americas Cardroom bankroll
a stake to start a live tournament bankroll
family budget
poker expenses such as office supplies, hardware, software, and poker books
owner's capital

There is always a lot to plan and think about, but things are definitely going in the right direction.  As always, your comments and questions are welcome.

Working Hours vs. VERY Angry Cats

I always try to put in 40 hours a week.  My work day starts sometime between 1600 and 1730 and goes until sometime the next morning.  That hasn't been working out real well.  That's partly my fault, and partly things that were out of my control--especially last week week.

I wasn't exactly goofing off.  I recorded 35.25 hours for the work week from Sunday, October 15 through Saturday, October 21.  Still, 35 work hours aren't enough.  Forty hours aren't enough.  I had one job where I worked a lot of voluntary overtime because I wanted to make more money.  Every chance I got I would work at least 50 hours.  It's about time that I took poker that seriously.  Forty hours should be the absolute minimum.

I mentioned earlier that I'm playing fewer tournaments and concentrating on the ones that are more profitable.  I still think that it's the right approach.  I have to adjust my schedule and put in some time in the afternoon, or later into the morning.  Since I'm playing fewer tournaments and most of the good ones are at night, that means more studying.

I have to accept that my normal work hours are going to get interrupted.  We have a different grandchild with us overnight once a month, and during the school year, that has to happen on the weekend.  Weekends are of course the most profitable time to play, but there is nothing I can do about that.

In one sense I have a lot of freedom and can work whenever I want, but that's not exactly true.  I don't have an employer, but I have a boss who tells me exactly when I should be working. His name is Tournament Schedule.  On any poker site, the best tournaments run on nights and weekends.

Last week my work hours got badly disrupted.  I have an excuse, but if someone brought my excuse to a teacher I don't think it would fly.  I had to make sure that angry cats were separated.

We have two cats, Vanessa Rousso (named after the poker player)* and Callie, who have a lot of fun chasing each other around the house.  When a human visitor comes over they hide.  When another cat comes over, they go crazy.

Vanessa and Callie were in the sun room, looking for birds, rabbits, chipmunks or whatever else might wander by, when a cat came up to the window.  All three cats started growling and hissing.  The next thing I knew, all three cats were throwing themselves against the window glass.

After the stranger left, our cats were so worked up that they attacked each other.  I didn't want to shut them in separate rooms or carriers in case one someone had to use the kitty litter.  They hate being locked in their carriers and would have got even more worked up.  Besides, it wouldn't be fair to lock them up when they're just protecting the homeland from intruders.

After a couple hours Vanessa had not calmed down at all, so I spent Friday night trying to comfort her. and keeping the two of them apart.  I had to do it again the next night when the stranger returned and Vanessa was again upset. She calmed down by 2300 and I was able to play a good tournament that started at 2314.

I ended the week on a high note.  I played two tournaments yesterday (Saturday) and cashed in both, finishing 9th of 69 and 11th of 57.

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*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanessa_Rousso

The Americas Cardroom Dilemma

(10/13/2017--I had to edit the title.  The original was "The Juicy Stakes Poker Dilemma, which doesn't make any sense.

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In my previous post I talked about how, even though I've run my very small Juicy Stakes Poker bankroll up to over $200, my Americas Cardroom bankroll is down to almost nothing.

At the beginning of 2017 I didn't have much of a bankroll on either site.  I decided that this year, instead of concentrating on live poker, where I clearly don't have the 100 buy-in bankroll to play the local $50 tournaments, I would spend 2017 concentrating on building up both online bankrolls first, then figure out my next move from there.

My current Juicy Stakes Poker bankroll is $229.66.  I built that playing $1 tournaments for a few months, then adding $2 tournaments later.  With Americas Cardroom, everything went wrong and that bankroll is down to almost nothing.

That's not surprising.  Starting with a small bankroll, one is always vulnerable.  To put in mathematical terms, my ROR (risk of ruin) was high on both sites.  I made it work on one site, where I now have enough to work with and safely continue building that bankroll.

So, what do I do about my grand total of 98¢ on Americas Cardroom?.  I could make another deposit, but I'm on a shoestring budget and I don't want to do that unless I have no other options.. I could play 11¢ tournaments and build a bankroll pennies at a time, but is a tournament where I can play for hours and make 50¢ worth my time?

I decided that yes, it is worth my time.  I need to play that 11¢ tournament two or three times a week.  I'm not going to play it every day, because it would step on other tournaments where I can make money that isn't denominated in pennies.

I played a live tournament once or twice every month last year.  I wasn't bankrolled for it, which of course affected my play.  In poker, that's called "playing with scared money."  I learned a hard lesson and lost a lot of money.  I've never going to stray from strict bankroll management again.  I'll take the hit and grind out the 11¢ tournaments for as long as it takes to be bankrolled for whatever the next level is (I think it's 50¢) and take it from there.

As I was about to publish this, I realized that there is another option.  Sometime in 2018, when my JSP bankroll is over $500, I will make my first withdrawal.  I might deposit some of that money onto Americas Cardroom.  But for now I'll stick with grinding the 11¢ tournaments.

Playing Fewer Juicy Stakes Tournaments

I try to get a lot of playing time in every day, but my approach has to change.  I'm making most of my money from just two or three tournaments and the others are dragging me down.  They just aren't worth it.

I've mentioned before that there aren't very many players in the early morning (roughly between midnight and 0700 EST.)  I've decided that those tournaments aren't worth playing  The prize pools are too small.  Sometimes I waste time waiting for a tournament to start, then it gets canceled because there aren't enough players.  A few days ago I registered for a tournament that started at 0229.  It needed three players to start.  It was canceled at 0228 because I was the only one signed up.

If my bankroll was big enough to play $5 tournaments I would have a lot more options, and at different times during the day, but I'm not going down that road.  If I took $5 from my bankroll to play a tournament and I cashed, it would be too tempting to see if I could do it again.  Players go broke that way.  My bankroll is my inventory, and just like any other business, I need to keep enough inventory in stock to keep the business going.  Playing with 100 buy-ins, my mathematical ROR (Risk of Ruin) is only about 3%.  I want to keep it that way.*

My Juicy Stakes bankroll has increased by eight times in 2017.  My strategy is working.  I need to keep playing with at least 100 buy-ins, keep growing my bankroll, and concentrate on the few tournaments that are worth playing and that I can afford.

Five days a week there are three tournaments that should give me a long-term profit.   They start at 1829, 2029 and 2214, but if I go deep in a tournament it might run into the next one, giving me only two to play that day.  There is a good tournament the other two days that runs at 2314, but again, an earlier tournament might step on that one.

The bottom line is that some days I might only play two tournaments.  That would be a short work day if I get knocked out of one or both early.  But, as the saying goes, the situation is what it is.  This is a "How badly do I want this?" moment.

The only reasonable option is to play less and study more, meaning that more than half of my poker time will have to be study.  Studying isn't at much fun as playing, and ADD tends to make me lazy and distracted if I'm not very careful.  Twenty-five or more hours of study in a week could certainly be a grind, but Bluffs is a huge study project, so the timing of this is actually pretty good.

It's a good thing that I track my time in quarter hours, I need those numbers on the screen to keep me disciplined.

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*My ROR is actually zero, because if have a bad run and my bankroll dips under 100 buy-ins for my current level I will drop down a level and build it back up.

September Results

Juicy Stakes Poker, August 2017
56 tournaments played:
14 net win tournaments:   +$67.98
41 net loss tournaments:    -$77.15
                                                ---------
                                                -$9.17


Americas Cardroom, September 2017
6 tournaments played:
2 net win tournaments:   +$0.64
4 net loss tournaments:   -$0.44
                                              ---------
                                          +$0.20




Combined results for September 2017:  -$8.97



I lost a few dollars last month and I should be upset, or at least disappointed.  I'm not, for two reasons:

1. A month is as good a benchmark as any, at least for most things.  However, in the big picture, my new record of playing 61 tournaments in one month is nothing.  Some pros play that many in one day. It's not a large enough sample size to prove anything.  That's OK because I didn't expect to be a big winner this year.  I'm setting up my bankrolls this year so that I have enough money to play with next year. I've done that with very disciplined bankroll management.  If you think that's easy, try playing nothing but $1 or $2 tournaments for a while if you're good enough to play much higher.

2. Using Bluffs: How to Intelligently Apply Aggression to Increase Your Profits from Poker, by Jonathan Little and Albert Hart as my guide, I've already read and studied it three times and I've barely touched the surface.  Memorizing and internalizing the concepts is daunting it itself.  Then I have to make it work in the real world.

At the same time I'm working on building ranges and understanding Game Therory Optimal (GTO)  play (see previous post) and that has been very hard to get through.  I have a lot of questions and I've already sent some of them to Jonathan Little.  I hope to get some answers in his 10/11 webinar.  If I do, I'll post it in this blog.

I can definitely say that everything continues to slowly but surely fall into place.  I'm much more comfortable with GTO play than I was a month ago, but as with bluffing, I have a lot of things yet to learn
Given all that, I'm very happy that I could take that on and still wind up close to even at the end of the month.  In fact, September played out a lot like August, with some good cashes at the end saving what was going to be a bad month.  A 9/28 deep run after 4.5 hours of play on Americas Cardroom, 19th of 574 players, got me positive for the month.  A Juicy Stakes Poker win in a $2.20 tournament on 9/27 (1st out of 57, $25 cash) once again saved me from a bad month.

Considering all of the new concepts that I'm trying to learn, I'm very happy with my September results.