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.