It's Time to Pull the Trigger

Since 1/1/2017 I've spent most of time building up a bankroll, starting with $40 on Juicy Stakes Poker.  It's time to take some of that money out so that I can, as cash game millionaire Dusty Schmidt says in the title of his book, Run Your Poker Like a Business.

The minimum withdrawal is $250 but after a lot of thought I decided to make it $300, even if my online bankroll will be a little smaller than I would like.  It will be apportioned as follows:

1. $100 for owners capital.*

2. $100 for a poker bank account.

3. $100 to start a live bankroll.

A few words about each of the above:


1. For most of the past 1.5 years I've had money in a poker account but none in my pocket.  That was my choice because I didn't want to take any more than I had to out of the family budget.  Still, it gets old not having walking-around money.  I hope that now or in the very near future that money will come only from poker.

2. The reason for a business bank account is to make recordkeeping easier.  If I buy a poker book or something for my office it will be with a debit card tied to my poker account.  Every expense will wind up on one bank statement so that I will know exactly what I spent, and so that I can prove that to the IRS if necessary.

3. I need more than one place to play.  I might be awake at almost any time of the day and night (this will be posted a little after midnight) but that doesn't mean that there will be something good to play when I want to open Juicy Stakes Poker.


Another consideration is that most good players make more money playing live tournaments than playing online, because there are more really bad players live than online.  An average player in a $10 online tournament is a much better player than an average player in a $50 live tournament.

I had to make some tough choices. I really wanted to get into Jonathan Little's Poker class** but that will have to wait until my second or third withdrawal.  My starting balance for poker expenses will only be $100.  If I take $37 a month out of that account, those numbers don't work.

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*"Owners capital" is an accounting term for money that the owner takes out of a business.
** See 6/12 post, paragraph 4.

A Disappointing Week

Why was my week disappointing?  Yes, I had a downswing, but that's poker.  June is still going to be a record online month, so a bad week isn't a big deal.  In a year when I'll play somewhere around 500 online tournaments, being up or down for one week barely matters

What I'm disappointed in is my performance.  A few minutes ago I finished my last tournament of the week.  I looked at the spreadsheet where I track my time and my hours were:

Playing, 26.75 hours
Studying, 7.50 hours
Administrative, 3.25 hours

Total hours, 37.5

That's unacceptable.  Another player who misses his* goal might not think it was a big deal.  It is in fact a very big deal.  I always have the same weekly goals, and they aren't about money.  Each week I need to study for 10 hours and work a total of at least 40 hours.

This is a big deal because:

1. My wife works 40 hours a week, sometimes more.  I should do no less.

2. If I want to be competitive at higher levels of poker I need to be studying.  Players who study understand the math and theory and they have a lot of tricks in their bag.  I'll get run over if I don't keep up.

3. I have Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) and trouble moving information from short-term to long-term memory.  When my wife tells me about some future date or activity, I often stop her and say, "If I don't write it down it didn't happen."   Then I write it down on my calendar and in my planner.

I have a very high IQ, which for many years masked my disabilities.  I stumbled along and got a 2.6 GPA in high school, largely because I was a pretty good musician and got an A in all of my music glasses.  I failed to graduate from two different four-year colleges with three different majors.

Now that I know what I'm dealing with I can perform at a much higher level, but I can never let my guard down.  I'm easily distracted.  I study in an office with the door closed, sometimes wearing earplugs.  If I hear one spoken sentence on the television news, that might be enough for me to lose  focus for a few minutes.

After playing four tournaments yesterday I was sure that I got my 40 hours in for the week, but the numbers on my spreadsheet told a different story.  That's why I keep close track of everything, whether it's checking items off in my planner or typing in my hours on a spreadsheet after every tournament or study session.

I need to do better next week, and every week.

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*When those in a profession are predominately of one sex, for example, professional poker players, I use the masculine pronoun  (See article below about why more women don't play poker.)  For example, I would refer to a kindergarten teacher as "she" or to a bricklayer as "he" unless I knew otherwise.  If I was discussing high school teachers of unknown sex I would alternate my use of the masculine and feminine.

Why more women don't play poker:

https://www.mpn.poker/blog/why-most-women-dont-play-poker/

Updates

Some updates on what I'm doing and thinking about:

1. Americas Cardroom: It's an even bigger mess now.  I wanted to have three options for playing poker: Juicy Stakes Poker, Americas Cardroom and live tournaments.  It doesn't look Americas Cardroom is ever going to get straightened out so it looks like Juicy Stakes is option 1, live poker is option 2 and there is no option 3. I will use the money I was going to deposit on Americas Cardroom to start building a live bankroll.

I just looked at the most recent poker forum posts about ACR.  Here are four of those posts:

Usually they pause them [tournaments] but straight up cancelled.
"Technical issue"

down for me.. rip

I can login now but no tables showing and it just gets stuck on configuring account

I can login but after that I am unable to click any tabs or tables.
EDIT: Nevermind it's all good now but the tourney schedule is ****. All the good mtt's for the evening were cancelled.

2. Database issues: I had one more issue with my database connection, but it's worked for several days in a row so I guess that everything is OK now.

3. Tournament selection:  I'm making some changes.  Just because I'm able to play a lot higher (due to a bigger bankroll) doesn't mean that it's always a good idea.  I'm competitive at the high end of what I'm bankrolled to play, but I dominate the field at the low end.  I'm been playing mostly the high-end tournaments.  I'm up a little bit doing that, but the swings are so big that I'm not sure I want to deal with that kind of variance right now.  I'm bankrolled (100 buy-ins) to play up to $8.80 tournaments, but the variance can be nasty.  Here's an example:

When I play a $6 rebuy and add-on tournament, to be competitive I have to buy-in for $6.60, get an $6 rebuy at the beginning of the tournament (so that I have a big starting stack) and pay another $6 to get the add-on.  That's an investment of $18.60.  Failing to cash in a few of those took a chunk of my bankroll, but I also had a couple 3-digit cashes that made up for the losses.  Even so, I'm going to back off and decrease my average buy-in a little bit.  Just because I can live life on the edge doesn't mean that I should do it.  I'm going to keep my buy-ins at $5.50 or lower for a while and see how that works out.

As always, your questions and comments are welcome (see box below.)

An Intense Day

Yesterday was all about poker.  I started my day by solving the problem with the database connection.  After I did that, things lined up so I could play tournaments close to one right after the other with only a few breaks.

The tournaments that I played had the following starting and end times:

1430-1549
1830-2044
2107-2230
2314-0150

As is often true with poker, the tournaments were a wild ride.  I was down about $40 after the first three, than made up half of that with the last one.  After all the technical problems this week it was nice to get a lot of poker in, but I'll have to make sure that I get my ten study hours in this week, so part of today will be memorization time (flash cards.)

I've come a long way in a short time.  About a month ago I got my Juicy Stakes Poker bankroll above $400, then I was stuck between about $360 and $400 for a while.  About a week ago I hit $900, then it dropped a little and I've been stuck between $850 and $900.  The current number is $865.59.

Now that the technical problems are fixed, the next major project will be a withdrawal from Juicy Stakes poker.  It's more complicated than just taking some money out.

First, I have to decide how much to withdraw.  I want to take some money out to operate the business, but again, it's not that simple.  Here are the steps that I'm thinking my way through:

1. I have to get a lot of information and paperwork together.  The first withdrawal on Juicy Stakes Poker is a complicated process.

2. I have to decide how much to take out.  The minimum withdrawal is $250 and I was planning to take that much out when I had a bankroll of $650.  I wanted to leave enough in the bankroll to keep playing and keep moving up to higher levels--but now the situation has changed.  My bankroll is over $850, so I have to think some more about how much I should take out and how it should be apportioned.

3. I need money for basic business needs like office supplies, but there are other needs as well.
I want to get in an online class at pokercoaching.com where the teacher is World Poker Tour Player of the Year Jonathan Little.  I already learn by watching his videos, and I can't even imagine how much that class would improve my game.  That's $37 a month I think, which would be $444 a year, a pretty large chunk to take out of my winnings.

4. I need to work on my computer skills.  The computer is my most important money-making tool and my 1980s computer science classes don't hold up in the 21st century. I want to at least subscribe to PC Magazine (Personal Computing) so that I can keep up on the latest trends as well as software and hardware developments.

I can't do or afford all of those things at once.  Of course, some of it will depend on how much money I make during the rest of the year.  If my bankroll keeps growing like it is now, $37 per month for coaching won't be a big deal when my average profit is $200 or more per month, but I have to keep in mind that I'm not going to make a profit every month.  It doesn't work that way.  I made a profit in 2017, but there were three months when I lost money.

 I have some tough choices to make.

Miscellaneous Update

Not much to report but I'll do it anyway.

1. It's 2304 as I type this and I hope to have my technical problems with the database solved sometime tomorrow (Sunday) morning.  To show you how complicated the instructions for this are I'm giving you a link.  The copy that I printed out fills four pages.

Keep in mind as you scan this (I don't expect anyone to actually read it) that many of the instructions refer me to other places or to a video.  I think that if every possible instruction, subinstruction and video referral was listed one a a time there would be about 200 hundred of them.  I'm hoping that I can solve this before I have to go that far.


2.  In poker, as with any profession, there is a lot that goes on behind the scenes.  As I have some new readers, I decided to give you an inside look at the kind of things that we discuss on the poker forums.  This discussion was about a pro who is working on designing a new online poker site.  Here are parts of that conversation:

Player 1:  Will doug polk advertise and promote the site?
Having him promoting the site is better than tenthousands of $$ on untargeted ads
He is by far the biggest influencer in the poker sphere. He reaches a ton of people. If he says the site is legit and the only hope for online poker because the rake is low enough, that will stick with the people much better compared to an ad RIO obviously paid for.

Player 2 (Me):  The average recreational player who goes to casinos on weekends won't know who Doug Polk is. A lot of serious players will. The problem with that is that serious players are analysts. They won't play on a site just because Doug Polk or Daniel Negreanu or any of the Phils recommends it. They would want details (rake, player pool size, tournament types, etc.) I would take a look at a site recommended by any of those players, but I'm not going to put down a big deposit without carefully checking it out.

Player 3:  Don't know but I guess within his audiance (sic) are quite a lot of fun players, who love poker, who'd like to be big but who are not exactly approaching everything with a stone cold pro attitude.

Me:  Stone cold pro attitude?  What a nice thing to say, thank you.

More Technical Problems

I'm down again, and this time it's my Avast antivirus and cleanup package that did it to me.

Their cleanup program lets me put programs to "sleep" to clear space in the system when I'm not using something.  When their display suggested I put Postgres (my database program) "to sleep", that sounded reasonable.  The only time I use that program is when I'm on the computer and playing poker.  When I'm doing a blog post, reading the news feed or checking my E-mail I don't need access to the database for anything.

Well, it seems that when Avast uses the word "sleep" it really means "kill."  The link between the database and the program that uses it (Holdem Manager 2) is broken.  I got into the guts of the Postgres database to restore the connection, but I was unable to do so.  In stead of playing poker tonight, I will be working on solving that.

I know that I gained some new readers (hello everyone at Eye Care One!) in the past week, so an explanation is in order.  You're probably wondering why I need a database to play poker.  Don't be afraid to ask questions.  The next two paragraphs are copied and pasted from my 6/1 post.

My wife asked me if I could play without a HUD, and the short answer is yes--but it would be a very bad idea.  I have a poker rule: Never bring a knife to a gunfight.  I never go to a tournament unprepared.  If I don't have a bankroll of 100 buy-ins for that level, I don't play.  If it's a rebuy tournament I won't play if I can't afford at least three rebuys.  If I haven't had enough sleep, I won't play.

If I play without a HUD, I'll have the knife and the players with a HUD will have the guns.  I can't do that.  I've been plowing through some of the videos (there are hundreds of them) on how to use the Holdem Manager 2 HUD, but for some reason I haven't been able to make it work, even though I've set up HUDs in the past.

The bottom line is that tracking and studying information is important to poker players that want to make serious money.  Information technology is important in almost every profession.  When pro (American) football players are on the sidelines you will often see a group of players huddled around a coach who is holding a tablet.  If I'm playing against someone who studies and uses technology and I'm not using it, I'm at a competitive disadvantage.

I'm not going to play at a disadvantage, so I'm out of commission for a day or two or whatever it takes to get back the connection between the Holdem Manager 2 program, the Postgres database and the HUD (heads-up display.)

For any of you who are curious, the link below will show you what a HUD looks like in real time during play (the pretty girl in the picture is a bonus I guess.)

https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=poker+hud+software&&view=detail&mid=AD58FF5E55ECEB7E35F7AD58FF5E55ECEB7E35F7&&FORM=VRDGAR

As always, your questions or comments are always welcome (see box below.)

What Happens Next?

The month of June is far from over, but I already have enough big cashes to ensure that it's going to be a very good month.  The whole idea of this plan was to grind my way up the levels so that I could make some serious money.  I'm doing that now.  After grinding mostly $1.10 tournaments for almost a year and a half, the situation has changed, and I have a lot of decisions to make.

Part of my plan was to get my bankroll on Juicy Stakes Poker up to at least $650, then make the minimum withdrawal of $250 to get some working capital for the business.  I've already blown past $650 and I'm playing much higher than I was a month ago, which gives me a chance to make a lot more money.

I have a lot of needs.  I've been running this operation on fumes since January 1, 2017.  Now that I have access to some money, I would love to make a deposit on another site and/or get a live tournament bankroll going.  Of course, as is true with any business I need office supplies, subscriptions, and in my case, things like advanced poker software for studying, and of course poker books.  I've been running this operation on a shoestring for a year and a half.  I think about things like whether I should buy more of the pens that I like.

I'm also considering spending $37 a month to get coaching from World Poker Tour Player of Year Jonathan Little.  The way it works is that there would be quizzes, Little would  read my answers and grade my papers, and those of us in his class would discuss the answers in a webinar  It would be amazing to get input from one of the best players in he world.

It all comes down to a choice of what my emphasis should be.  Should I go all in on making money, withdrawing little or nothing for now, continuing to grow the bankroll and moving up in stakes?  Or should I should I take enough money out now to put the business on a sound footing, including having another online site and some money for a live bankroll, even if it takes a big chunk out of my bankroll?

No matter how I try to split the baby, something has to give.  For example, if I keep moving up and making more money without getting the professional coaching, eventually I'm going to run into better players and I won't be ready for it.*  There are no easy choices here and I didn't expect to have to make those choices so soon.

I'll see where I am at the end of the month, then I'll have to start making those decisions.

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* One option that I might consider is to stop moving up, even if 

I'm bankrolled do so.  Then I won't wind up against good players before I'm ready,

A Record Breaking Month

The title of this post might seem strange since it's only June 10th, but everything is different now.  I'm smashed all of my goals for one month and I'm close to meeting all of my goals for the year.

Since the beginning of 2017 I've played about a thousand online tournaments, most of them at the $1 level.  The idea was that I would gradually build up bankrolls on one or more sites so that I was able to play higher.  I have used very strict bankroll management.*  If I don't have 100 buy-ins at a level, I don't play.  That means that if I wanted to play $1.10 tournaments, I better be backed up by a bankroll of at least $110.

That slog from the beginning of 2017 until now sometimes seemed like it would never end, but as my Juicy Stakes Poker bankroll was up to $220, then $330, I could play $2.20 and $3.30 tournaments.  I knew that it was a good long-term plan and that I had to trust the process.  Eventually I wanted to have solid bankrolls to play higher levels on at least two poker sites, as well as a separate bankroll for playing live tournaments.

This has been, by design, a long, almost plodding, step-by-step process.  I didn't want to skip any steps on the way to a five-figure poker income.  By sometime in 2019 I hoped to have good bankrolls on two online sites and a separate online bankroll.  I work at least 40 hours a week, with at least 10 of those hours being study.  I knew that it was a good plan and I stuck with it--until now.

In June everything exploded.

I have been doing very well playing mostly online tournaments, so well that I consider it a bad day if I don't make it to at least one final table.  I'm so much better than most of the players in those $1.10 tournaments that it's like we're playing a different game.  Then it happened.

When my bankroll went over $400, I had a chance to start mixing in some $4.40 tournaments and I did very well.  I thought that as the levels got higher the players would be better, but so far that hasn't happened.  I'm making money so fast that in less than a week my bankroll was over $500.  I kept winning, growing my bankroll and moving up.  It's been crazy.

Here are some of things that have happened in the first 10 days of June:

Not long ago I said that it was about time that I had a $100 month.  That ship has sailed and it's still gaining speed.  I cashed for a total of $96 in the first two days of June.  In the first ten days I have cashed for $40 or more six times.  Compared to my grinding out the small cashes in $1.10 tournaments, it's a whole different world.

I realize that I won't always win at this rate.  At some point I will have a bad week, or even a bad month, but at the levels I'm playing on Juicy Stakes Poker the competition is so weak that I'll certainly make a lot more money than I did last year.

What I have to figure out now is what's next.  Many of my goals for this year have either been met or are very close to being met.  The landscape has changed and I have to figure out how to react.  Look for that post in the next few days.

As always, your comments and questions are welcome (see box below.)

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*In the mathematical and investment worlds, this is called a "risk of ruin" formula.  The idea is that if you are an investor with a lot of money to back you up during a downswing, you'll come out OK in the long run.  In the poker world it's called "bankroll management."  If someone is making a career of playing multi-table tournaments, that player should be backed up by a bankroll of at least 100 buy-ins.

 

May 2018 Results

This will be one of my shortest posts.  I didn't play much so there isn't much to tell.  I did some studying but that's all.  The reasons:

I had big computer problems.  I spent several days trying to figure it out and I couldn't.

I took the computer in and got it back five days later.  Things still weren't right.

I ordered a new computer.

After the computer came I spent several days trying to figure out how to set it up.    It was a different operating system and there were other things that I had never seen before.

I took both computers into the shop so that they could move the information from the old computer to the new one and set everything up for me.  They had the computer for five days.

When I got the computer back there were a lot of weird glitches.  For example, the HUD wasn't working correctly and the virtual poker table randomly changed sizes from time to time.  I found out that I was supposed to back up my poker database and I didn't do that.  That took several days to solve.

Oh, one other little thing.   I was in a jury pool for a high-profile murder trial.


Here are the results for May:

May 2018
+$3.20
4 net win tournaments	+$17.80
6 net loss tournaments	-$14.60

April 2018 Results

I apologize for being so late with this.  I got hammered in April and I lost most of May when I was down with computer issues and other problems that I've talked about in earlier posts.  I was discombobulated for a while.  You will get the May numbers tomorrow.  There has been a lot of doom and gloom in my recent posts, so I'll tease you with this:  June is already well on the way to being my best month in a very long time.

In April I started playing higher because I was bankrolled to do so.  There is nothing wrong with that, but variance was definitely not on my side.  Sometimes you get very hot (as I have this month) and sometimes you go very cold (as I did in April.)  By the end of my first week in April I was down $56.45 and never completely recovered.

Here are the numbers:

April 2018
-$27.95
10 net win tournaments	$118.23
27 net loss tournaments	-$146.18

At this point it's worth repeating that the swings in poker (positive and negative statistical variance are the mathematical terms) are so big that you can't really understand what it's like until you've been through it.  If you get upset when you lose five tournaments in a row you won't last long.  In fact, if you lose money for five straight months and get upset, poker probably isn't for you.

If you are confident that you can play poker for a year and make a decent amount of money (whatever that means to you) then you might have the right mindset for poker.  If you play a lot during that year, variance should start to even out over time--but if you play one weekend a month at your local casino. your chances to make money are very small, for two reasons.

First, with such a small sample size,variance could slap you in the face and you might fail to cash in every tournament that you play that year.  Second, if you only play two days a month, you won't learn and improve enough to make money.  And don't forget studying.  Some pros actually spend more hours studying poker than playing.*

April was a mess.  May, as you will find out in my next post, barely happened.  I was fighting so many issues that I sat out most of the month.  I did some studying of course, but it's really hard to be motivated when I can't use anything that I'm learning.  I don't have the numbers with me, but if I was really serious I would have spent at least 40 hours in May studying.  I think it was more like 25 hours, I was lazy and there is no excuse for that.

I'll give you the May numbers tomorrow.  After that I promise that I will have some very good news about the first week of June.

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*Poker players love to argue about the correct balance between studying and playing.  It's one of those questions for which there is no correct answer.  I always try to make 25% of my poker time studying every week, which means that if I'm working 40 hours a week, at least 10 of those hours will be spent studying.

Update on the Technical Issues

In my previous post I talked about technical problems that I've been having, the combination of which put poker and /or my computer out of commission for about a month.

Now that I'm back to something closer to normal, I decided that the easiest way to update you would be to address some of the things that I said earlier.  So that you don't have to refer to a previous post, I've put it all together in one post.

What follows is my previous post, with my updates in bold type like this.

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

I apologize for waiting so long to post again.  I got involved in a huge mess and didn't think about anything else.  That was not fair to my readers.

I might address some of what I say in this post  in future posts as well, but I want to give you more timely updates.  Some of the problems are solved, some are partly solved and some are not solved at all, but I'm not going to keep you waiting for however long it takes to completely dig out of my mess.

My previous post, on May 20, was entitled Down for a Week, so it's only fitting that this one is Down for a Month.

Everything possible has gone wrong for the last month.  As mentioned in my previous post, I had a lot of computer problems.  Things aren't any better since then.

The computer lag was so bad that I didn't play for a few days.  I tried to solve the problem but decided that it was above my pay grade.

It took me about three weeks to solve the password problem with Juicy Stakes Poker.

I ordered a new computer.  I spent several days trying to figure out how to transfer everything from my old computer to the new one.  When I couldn't figure it out, I decided to take it to my computer tech and have them do it.

My tech told me that it would take 2-5 days.  It took 5.

When I got the computer home I had trouble figuring out how to use the new machine.  There were two issues.  First, I couldn't figure out the new operating system (Windows 10 instead of 8) but I thought it best to figure out how to use Windows 10.  I still haven't really done that.

I'm playing again--a lot.  I missed playing so much that I didn't do much of anything poker-related, except for playing, for the last week.  I need to get back on track and make sure that I'm spending at least 25% of my poker time for studying.

I'm on a roll right now.  I just had steak of eight straight cashes, including two of my biggest cashes since I rebooted my approach to poker starting on 1/1/2017.  That will definitely be discussed in a post sometime this week.

On the old computer my wife and I had separate "sides" and we logged in with separate passwords.  I would only see my files and she would only see hers.  It's not that way any more.  Today when I looked at my Open Office "Recent Documents" to open my spreadsheets, the entire list was downloads from her job.  I had to hunt for what I needed.  Our files and folders are no longer separated (even though my tech said that he could do that) so that's really awkward.

When I used Holdem Manager on the new computer for the first time, most of my database was either gone or inaccessible.  I started to play a tournament and all of my numbers started from zero, After playing a few hands in a tournaments, the "Hands" statistic for every player was in the single digits.  I previously had statistics covering hundreds of hands, thousands in a few cases, for the regulars in that tournament.

I wrote to Holdem Manager support on the twoplustwo.com poker forums and asked what I should do.  Here is the response:

You can't just copy files from the old PC to the new PC. You have to backup your database/settings and then restore them after you have installed HM2 on the new machine.
Please see this FAQ to transfer/backup data. This will ensure that you have your hand histories and HUD saved to import into a new computer, and as a backup to restore in case of an emergency. I recommend you do this at least once a month and keep the last 2 or 3 most recent backups (and your \HM2Archive folder) stored on an external drive and/or cloud storage site like dropbox or google drive.

I looked at the FAQ and it's too late to do all of the things that I was supposed to do.  I messed everything up and I don't think that there is a way to fix my database issue any more.

My wife and I talked it over.  She has dealt with information lost in system changes and she thought that I should just start over with a clean database  I hated the idea that I was going to lose so much (I have over 5,000 hands on one player who I regularly meet at final tables) but starting over did seem to be my only option.

I started over.  I used Revo Uninstaller to delete both the HUD  and the database and I downloaded new ones.  I still have problems.

I was tracking statistics on two sites, Juicy Stakes Poker and Americas Cardroom.  Now the dropdown menu on the upper left doesn't show any sites and I can't figure out how to get the two sites back in.  I was in fact tracking on Juicy Stakes Poker, or at least I think that I was.  When I played a few hands I don't know if that information was saved or not, and I have no idea if Americas Cardroom stats will be saved.

My wife asked me if I could play without a HUD, and the short answer is yes--but it would be a very bad idea.  I have a poker rule: Never bring a knife to a gunfight.  I never go to a tournament unprepared.  If I don't have a bankroll of 100 buy-ins for that level, I don't play.  If it's a rebuy tournament I won't play if I can't afford at least three rebuys.  If I haven't had enough sleep, I won't play.

The HUD (heads-up display) problems are not completely solved, but there are numbers for me to store and look at.  I'm still not able to get the HUD to work and look like I want it too, but I am able to play and track the numbers starting from zero since I got my computer back.

If I play without a HUD, I'll have the knife and the players with a HUD will have the guns.  I can't do that.  I've been plowing through some of the videos (there are hundreds of them)* on how to use the Holdem Manager 2 HUD, but for some reason I haven't been able to make it work, even though I've set up HUDs in the past.

To top everything off, I'm now seeing this message on my one-week-old computer:

"You are running out of disk space on drive E:"

I'm baffled by the disk space issues.  I have no idea why transferring my information and programs to a new computer would cause a problem like that.  I'm afraid that if I call the computer shop they will tell me to bring it in again, which could leave me without a computer for another week.  I can't be down again.

This could all be solved quickly of course.  I could farm the problem out.  All I would need to do is find a local online professional poker player, who is also a HUD expert and a computer technician and would want the job, to set everything up.  Then I could get two new computers, one for me and one for my wife, find the money to pay cash for all of that (we don't do debt) and I'm all set.

Short of that, I don't see a solution, but I have to find one.

I am far from having a complete solution.  Fortunately, I post the results of every tournament that I play on a 17-column spreadsheet, so even if my results tracked by the software are not correct, I have backups for myself and for the IRS, should they have any questions.