Realistic Goals and Outcomes

It might be a while before I can reasonably expect to get in 40 hours a week of poker playing and studying.  I have much room for improvement as far as time management, but I need to set some kind of goal now.  Here's how I see it:

1. 25 hours per week is a realistic goal for now.  I thought about a goal of 30 hours a week, but since family has to be the priority, I need to be realistic and set a goal that I have a reasonable chance of reaching.  25 hours every week might not be possible, but I think that I can average that much.  Since an average month is 4.2 weeks long, my new time goal is 25(4.2) = 105 hours per month.

2. After careful analysis of my situation, I'm temporarily dropping my goal of spending at least 25% of my poker time studying.

My current bankroll is $111.70.  I'm playing $1.65 SNGs.  I should have a bankroll of at least 50 buy-ins to play SNGs, and my bankroll is 67 buy-ins, so I'm fine there.  But as I thought about it, the next step up in SNGs is $3.30, and if I was playing at that level I would have 33 buy-ins--only 17 short of the 50 that I need.

If I temporarily cut down on studying and concentrate on playing, and if I run reasonably well, I could have the bankroll to play $3.30 SNGs in about a month.  When that happens, almost everything doubles.  Every time that I cashed in a SNG, I would be making almost twice as much profit as I was before.

Playing $3.30 SNGs:

If I cashed in third place, my profit would double from $1.05 to $2.10.
Second place cash, profit would go from $2.40 to $4.80.
First place cash, profit would go from $5.10 to $10.20.
Bonus would double, from about 2 cents per SNG to about 4 cents.
Rakeback would double, from 4.5 cents per SNG to 9 cents.

I said that almost everything will double, because my win rate will go down a bit when I move up to $3.30s, at least until I get some information on the regulars and figure out what adjustments I need to make, the most important of which is the percentage of my hands that I play.

I don't think that the ROI (return on investment) drop will be big. I estimate that my ROI will go down from about 13% at $1.65 to about 10% at $3.30, at least until I get used to the new level.

So, with a $1.65 SNG and a 13% ROI, I make 21.45 cents per SNG.
With a $3.30 SNG and a 10% ROI, I make 33 cents per SNG.


Adding it all up:

For each $1.65 SNG
Profit based on 13% ROI          0.2145
Bonus                                           0.02
Rakeback                                     0.045
                                                    --------
                                                     0.2795 ~ 28 cents per SNG

For each $3.30 SNG
Profit based on 10% ROI          0.33
Bonus                                           0.04
Rakeback                                     0.09
                                                   --------
                                                      0.46 = 46 cents per SNG


The medium-term goal is to have at least 100 buy-ins to play MTTs at the $5.50 level, which is the least expensive MTT on Americas Cardroom.  100(5.50) = $550.  When I move up from $1.65s to $3.30s, and if I play 50 SNGs a week (a realistic goal of 10 per day, playing 2 at a time, for 5 days) my expected profit per week should be 50(0.46) = $23.  With 4.2 weeks in a month, that's a profit of  4.2(23) = $96.60 per month.

So playing 50 SNGs a week, my profit should average around $100 a month, which means that I would be fully bankrolled to give MTTs a go sometime this fall.  I think that all of my numbers are both realistic and attainable, but there are other ways that this could play out:

1. If the $3.30 SNGs go well, I might move up to $5.50s as soon as I have the proper SNG bankroll of 50(5.50) = $275.

2. Americas Cardroom could start offering MTTs as low as $1.  If that happened, I would be bankrolled to play them right now.  I think that is unlikely this year, though it has been mentioned by players and the site as a possibility.

3. I could decide to stick with SNGs for a while.  If it's going well I night keep grinding away at them for a while, perhaps working on playing more than 2 tables at a time and giving myself a little extra in my bankroll.  A bankroll of 100 buy-ins is, in my opinion, the absolute minimum needed to play MTTs.

4. We could wind up moving some time this year.  This is quite likely, and as we want to do it on the cheap, I will do most of the packing and moving of small items by myself--especially if we move right next door, which is one of the two most likely options.  In the long run this will improve our situation and save us a lot of money, but in the short run it could cut my poker time way back for as much as a month, given that not only would we be moving, but we would be also having a yard sale to get rid of some things (which might happen this year whether we in fact move or not.)

I'll close by saying that I didn't run the above numbers until I typed this post.  To the two or three people who might take the time to go though all of this, including the math, thanks for your help.  Putting this in writing, in a form that you can go through and understand, has helped me to think the situation through, including some of the alternative scenarios that I had not thought about until now.

Results for March, 2013

It's been more than a week since my last post, and I apologize.  As with many of my ADD weakness, in this case, letting things slide, I've come up with a fix.  As usual, that fix involves imposing structure on myself.

There are certain sites or pages that I always open when I get online.  For example, I always open several Open Office spreadsheets, including Poker Hours and Comprehensive Poker Worksheet, as a reminder to keep those things up to date after I play poker.  I've added a new one, Blog Ideas.

Now, as part of my regular routine when I first get on my computer that day, Blog Ideas will be open, not only to remind me to make regular entries, but also to put things down that I might want to blog about, before I forget my brilliant idea of the moment.

There is no excuse for my not posting almost every day.  Even if I don't have anything new to say (which would be very unusual for me) I post on the 2+2 poker forums nearly every day, so I can crosspost one of those posts on here.

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

I have been trying, so far without success, to post a Holdem Manager graph of my results.  I'm not sure why I can't make it work, but I'll keep trying to figure it out.  Since I don't like my thinking to be too short-term, looking at a graph of the last 60 or 90 days (or more) helps me to see the big picture of how I'm doing.  I hope sometime soon to be able to do the same on here.

Last month went fairly well, considering that I've given up on being able to get my 40 hours a week in under the present circumstances.  My first full week was 48 hours, and the others were between 20 and 25 hours.  More about that in a future post.  But I made some money last month.  As often seems to happen, the month had a rough strart but ended well:

   Dates            Profit or Loss
  3/1-3/2                 7.53
  3/3-3/9             -10.94
3/10-3/16            -14.19
3/17/3/23             19.07
3/24-3/30            17.80
    3/31                     1.20
                            --------
                            $22.54

Month ending bankroll: $108.02 

Sleeping In Pieces

When a lot is going on during the day, my schedule, and my sleeping, becomes a total mess.

My sleep patterns are wierd to start with.  I am a very sound sleeper, and once I'm sleeping, I'm out.  I don't hear sirens, thunderstorms, the drummer next door, or anything else.  When I'm really tired, it's not unusual for me to sleep for 12 hours.

Getting to sleep is another matter.  There comes a point when I'm playing poker that I get tired and start making mistakes.  When I'm done with poker I might just sit and watch TV for four hours, because I'm too tired to play poker or study and make any sense of it, but I'm unable to get to sleep.  If a new World Poker Tour episode is on, I watch that, and try to learn at least a little bit from it.  That's the best that I can do.

I prefer to play and study poker with hours something like 4 P.M. to 2 A.M., but in reality doesn't happen very often lately.  What I would like to do is get up around noon, take care of a few things, then play poker until I get tired, but it never seems to work out that way.  And right now, the combination of being Available Guy, and being a one-car family, is really messing with my sleep.

A few days ago I got to sleep around 3 A.M, got up at 5 A.M., took my wife to work at 5:30 A.M., came home, couldn't get back to sleep.  I finally slept for two hours, got up, spent some time with my mother-in-law, and picked my wife up from work a little after 2 :30 P.M.

Yesterday Safelight was coming to repair our windshield, so the car had to be here.  The appointment window was between 8 A.M. and noon.  I took my wife to work at 5:30 A.M. then slept on the couch while I waited for Safelight to come.  I woke up around 9 A.M to go to the bathroom, and I was able to get back to sleep.

The rest is a little fuzzy, but the timeline was something like this:

Safelight called around 9:30 A.M. to confirm the appointment.  Then they called around 10 to give me another time estimate.  Around 11, they called my wife's cell phone, and she called me, to tell me that they were close.  The left around noon, and I picked my wife up from work at 2:30 P.M.

After getting my sleep in little pieces for the last few days, I went to sleep around 4 P.M. yesterday, I slept until midnight, and I finally feel like I'm caught up on my sleep.  Now it's 2 A.M. and I'm typing this because there aren't many SNGs running.

For someone like me who wants to plan, who in fact needs to plan to keep from falling back into bad habits, this has been difficult, but I've had to accept that I can't change it.  My wife makes more than I do, and I have have to protect her income by doing things during work hours so she doesn't have to.  I sometimes have to take her to work and pick her up, because we're a one-car family.

At least for now there can be no planning, in the sense that I know when I'm going to play, or for how long.  I have to sleep when I'm tired and can get to sleep, no matter what time that is.  How much I sleep has become more important then how much I play.

That goes against everything I know as a poker player.  Many of the pros talk about the necessity of using volume of play to overcome short-term variance.  Others say that either you should have a schedule, or you should always be available when the games are good, which usually means nights and weekends.

I hope that I can function reasonably well in a situation where, once again, I don't have much control of what happens.  This time it's not me being out of control, it's about that control being taken from me.  It's not a good situation when someone with ADD is unable to plan and be organized.  I'm scared that things are slipping away.  But I have to make it work.

Fewer hours, but more money

I only worked 22 hours last week, but I made them count.

At one point I got my bankroll over $100.  About three weeks ago, it dropped all the way down to $71.  That downswing included 10 straight SNGs without a cash.  Now my bankroll is $102.   I've cashed in 10 of my last 12 SNGs, including four first places.

My plan was that once I got back over $100, I would decide if I wanted to change anything.  I'm going to keep things the way they are.  The least expensive MTTs are $5.50, and I certainly don't have the minimum 100 buy-ins to play those, so that's out.

A solid bankroll for SNGs is more like 50 buy-ins, so when my bankroll is up to $165 I'll move up to $3.30 SNGs, and keep doing what I'm doing.  Once I'm grinding SNGs for twice the stakes I am now, the bankroll building will seem a lot less tedious.

My Hours Will Be Cut For A While

Anyone who has read this blog more than once or twice knows how obsessive I am about planning and staying organized.  I don't want to be that guy any more--the guy who wasn't diagnosed wth ADD until age 40 and made a mess of his life along the way.  Because of that, I overcompensate and put a lot of systems in place to make sure that I never again am that confused, overwhelmed person that didn't even know how to be organized (though for a long time, I thought I did.)

There is going to be a big change.  My goal of devoting a minimum of 40 hours to poker every week, including at least 15 hours of study and 25 hours playing poker, is on the shelf for a while.

There are two things going on, and I knew that they were going to happen.  But a lot could happen all at once, and very soon.

I have a 90-year old relative who needs some extra attention, and that's no surprise.  We all knew it was coming.  I understood that at that point, her needs would come first.  That time has come, and four family members are on rotating duty, with each of us taking a day to spend time with her to keep an eye on her, and determine how much longer she will be able to continue living by herself.

Thing number two, which I also knew was coming, is that we could be moving soon.  We've been close a few times, and the house we were going to move into is conviently next door.  Moving day depended on when the owners moved to a farm with their horses.  They are now facing a deadline to have their horses moved, so that might be a live option soon.

There might be another option as well.  It's not conveniently next door (which would make the move much cheaper and easier) but it's still local, and the rent would be a lot less than we're paying now.  Eventually owning whichever home we move to is a live option as well.

So a month or two from now, it's very possible that we will be moving, which will put poker on hold for a while.  I will be the packer-in-chief so that my wife doesn't have to take much time off from work.

The disruption of poker will be temporary, and getting a new place, and getting my relative's situation resolved, are both good things.  If we have to decide between two options for moving, either way it will be a better situation, and less costly, than where we are now.

I will still keep track of my hours, just to keep my records straight, but unless I think I'm goofing off, I'm not going to worry too much about what those numbers are.  I would love to work 50+ hours per week every week for the rest of the year, but as Dave Ramsey is fond of saying, just when you think you have it all figured out, life happens.

Why A Bankroll Matters: A Practical Example

On Saturday Night Live Chevy Chase was playing the role of Gerald Ford when he was asked a question during a presidential debate.  In response to a budget question, "Ford" said, "I wasn't told there would be math involved."

Warning: There will be math involved!

What follows will, I hope, be instructive.

Most people don't understand randomness.  If a flipped coin will be "heads" 50% of the time, that doesn't mean that if it has been tails 10 times in a row, it is any more likely to be heads on the 11th try.  A coin doesn't have a memory, and evey trial is independent of the others.

Randomness can by messy, which is why very good poker players can have long winning streaks, but also long losing streaks.  Those long losing streaks are the reason that poker players need a bankroll of many times their tournament buy-in.  The numbers that I usually see tossed around* for a sufficient bankroll are something like this: 25 buy-ins to play cash games, 50 buy-ins to play SNGs (single-table tournaments), and between 100 and 300 to play multi-table tournaments.

Here is a practical example from my play on 3/15 and 3/17 (I didn't play on the 16th.)  It's a small sample size that mathematically proves nothing, but it shows how important a bankroll is.

Starting on 3/15 at 1845 and ending at 0317 on 3/17, I played 15 SNGs.  In general one has to cash in about 50% of SNGs played to make money.  I did not cash in the first ten, so I lost 15 buy-ins at $1.65 each.  Then I cashed in 3 of the last 5, including one 1st place cash (which is worth about 4 buy-ins.)

So, I need to cash (finish 1st, 2nd or 3rd) about 50 % of the time, but I failed to cash 10 times in a row, so I must be really bad, right?  No, that's just randomness.

If I'm capable of cashing 55% of the time, that doesn't mean that I'll necessarily cash more than 5 times out of 10, or more than 25 times out of 50.  But if play 1,000 SNGs, I should cash pretty close to 550 times.

Remember, I said earlier that a good SNG bankroll amount is about 50 buy ins.  The use of a proper risk or ruin formula would mean that while I'm dealing with those downswings, my risk of ruin (the chance that I will go broke and lose all of my bankroll due to variance) is probably something like 3%.  All other things being equal, the bigger the bankroll, the more cushion one has against variance, and the smaller the risk of ruin.  If I kept increasing my bankroll without moving up to more expensive tournaments, the risk of ruin would eventually be close to zero.

So, let's look at the numbers for those 15 SNGs.

My SNG buy-in was $1.65, and I lost 10 straight, so that cost me (1.65)(10) = $16.50.

In the last 5 SNGs I placed 3 times:  one 1st place, one 2nd, and one 3rd.  First place paid $6.75, 2nd place paid $4.05, and 3rd place paid $2.70, for a total of $13.50 in cashes.

For SNGs 11 through 15, I paid 5 buy-ins and cashed 3 times, so my profit for those 5 SNGs is:

(total of 3 cashes) - (5 buy-ins)
= (6.75+4.05+2.70) - (1.65*5)
= 13.50 - 8.25 = 5.25

Now, bringing it all together, I no-cashed 10 SNGs, then made a profit in the last 5, which comes to:

-16.50 + 5.25 = -$11.25.

I lost $11.25 overall playing those 15 SNGs  But lets look at the numbers a little more closely:

$11.25 is 6.8 buy-ins, so my bankroll covered that loss.  I'm not in any danger of going broke.

The 1st 10 SNGs, of course, cost me 10 buy-ins before I finally cashed.  Again, not a problem, because I have the bankroll to handle streaks like that.

Also keep in mind that in any poker tournament, including SNGs, a cash is always worth more than the buy-in.  In this case, my 3 cashes were worth a total of $13.50.  The 15 buy-ins cost me:

(15)(1.65) = $24.75

So I paid $24.75 in buy-ins and my total cashes were $13.50.  Just three cashes covered 54.5% of my buy-ins. ( It helps a lot if at least 1/3 of your cashes are for 1st place.)

Since I have a decent bankroll, losing might be frustrating, but it's not scary.  I know that there will be downswings.  I know that there will be upswings.  I've had times when I played 10 SNGs and cashed in 7 or 8 of them.  That's positive variance, just as failing to cash 10 straight times is negative variance.

Someone who doesn't understand these concepts will never be good at poker.  There are players who won millions of dollars on national television and are now broke.  I hear about a new one about once a month.  You have to be able to manage your money, both when you're playing poker and when you're not.

As long as I keep studying and improving, and as long as I keep a decent bankroll, I'll be fine.  I lost one of those 10 SNGS with my pair of queens against a pair of jacks, and my opponent got a third jack on the river.  Queens beat jacks 82 % of the time--but not every time.  When I lose as big favorite, and it seems to happen over and over, I know that it's just variance.  I take a few seconds to shake it off, then I open another SNG.

I know that I'm smarter than most of my opponents.  I know that I study more than just about all of them.  I'm learning to fix my mistakes and weaknesses, and I'm constantly learning how to better manage my ADD.  That's a winning formula, and it will pay off.

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

*There is a lot of math involved in coming up with buy-in numbers, using mathematical concepts like standard deviation and risk of ruin forumlae.  I could study the math and do my own risk of ruin calculations if I wanted to spend the time (I took two college statistics courses) but since those buy-in numbers are generally accepted and they tell me what my bankroll should be, I haven't bothered to investigate the math behind the concept.  I might at some point.

Cranking Up My Work Hours

One of my most important poker goals has always been to work more hours.  At some point I think I should be working at least 50 hours every week to get things moving in the right direction.  Working at home, not having a regular schedule, managing my own business and time, and being Available Guy is a lot for someone with ADD to deal with.  But there is another issue that I'm always aware of, but haven't talked about much in my posts.  I'm still working on forming good habits, something that will probably be a lifelong process.

I tend to be lazy, distractable and distracted.  I'll take a look at the TV as I walk by, knowing that I shouldn't listen to "just one news story," and I wind up sitting on the couch for an hour.  It doesn't happen as much, but it still happens a lot.

I was diagnosed with ADD at age 40, spent several years unlearning a lot of bad habits, and now I'm in the process of developing good habits, a process that will never be complete.

A lot about me is different than five or ten years ago.  I'm more intense, much harder on myself, and always thinking about ways to make myself work both more hours and more efficiently.  I stopped watching several of my favorite TV shows.  Even with my administrative time, I think very seriously about what kind of structure I need to make myself successful.

I even have to train my wife to keep me in check.  I tell her all the time, "Don't tell me it's OK to do it later.  I'll probably forget."  Sometimes she feels like she's nagging me to do something, but at this point I probably need that.

I think a lot about time managment.  I think about it every day, and whenever I look at the hours on my spreadsheet, I almost always wonder if I could have worked more hours, or more efficiently  Last week, for the first time it all came together.

I will always be tweaking something..  I'll never be satisfied with my poker playing, my work hours, or anything else.  There is always something that I can improve.  Because of improvements in my recordkeeping that are adding to my administrative hours, I have to work more hours to get my play and study hours in.  But I don't do anything without a reason.

Most important, I put in some serious hours last week, March 3-9:


                        Play        Study     Administrative    TOTAL
Goal              25.00       15.00         as needed            40.00
Actual           29.50       11.00             8,25                   48.75

Difference   +4.50      -4.00                                        +8.75

I'll be satisfied, for now, with getting four weeks in a row with at least 40 hours. I need to know that this isn't a fluke.  But then I'll start setting my goals higher.  I have to get those study hours up, and if that means that I have to work at least 50 hours a week, that's what I have to do.  I still waste a lot of time, and I'll find the hours somewhere, whatever it takes.