Milestones

Last night went very well on Juicy Stakes Poker.  I played two tournaments.  I was knocked out of the second one fairly quickly, but the first one went very well.

I'm still playing mostly $1 tournaments to grind up my small bankroll on Juicy Stakes Poker.  The minimum withdrawal on that site is $250 (plus fees,)  I need to get my bankroll above $500 or so. Yesterday was a big step toward that goal.

I won my first MTT this year.  It was a bounty tournaments and I won the tournament plus four $1 bounties for knocking players out, for a total profit of $22,80.  I managed to hit some interesting milestones with that win:

1. My first win of the year.
2. My biggest one-day profit this year ($19.50.)
3. My Juicy Stakes bankroll is finally over $100 ($114.30)

Of course while I'm building my bankroll I'll be able to put more $2 tournaments into the mix, and it will all grow like a snowball rolling downhill.  As the bankroll grows I can mix in some higher buy-ins and it won't be two long before I get that first $100 cash and take it from there.

I just have to make sure that  I don't get ahead of myself.  Building a poker bankroll is a marathon, not a sprint.  The next step is to get  healthy so that I can get back into a routine of playing and studying 40+ hours a week.

I Hate Our Horrible Choices For Online Poker Sites

I played a tournament tonight and it was exactly like last night.  I wasn't catching any cards.  I finally got a decent hand (AT again) and I shoved again.  The only difference this time is that I was against one pair instead of two.  I lost to 77.

I checked the time and there was another decent tournament that had started a few minutes earlier. I looked for it and couldn't find it anywhere.  I was certain that it should be there because just a few days earlier I started an Open Office File called "Best Available Tournaments as of 2/9/0217 just so I wouldn't have this problem.  It has very detailed information on every tournament.  This is the listing of the tournament that I was looking for. The bold is for something that is especially good about that tournament.:

2314/JS/$100 GTD BTY/$2.20 with $1 to prize pool and $1 to bounty/30 minutes late registration/2,000 starting chips, 5 minute breaks/15 minute blind levels.

I went into tonight's tournament  knowing what I was looking for and where to look for it, but it wasn't there..  I couldn't find it.  I've been sick and was wondering if I was losing it. I checked the above-mentioned file and it was indeed on the list. I checked the Juicy Stakes Poker list of tournaments for tomorrow and there it was.   But I couldn't do anything to join a tournament 5 minutes late, and it's not the first time I've had trouble figuring out how to navigate Juicy Stakes Poker.  There are a lot of good reasons why I stopped playing on that site for more than a year.

Any reasonably intelligent person, knowing nothing about poker, could watch a friend play and know that something was off.  I'll give a couple examples of what I call "nonsense messages."

Example 1, Americas Cardroom: 

It is common to see a message that I am going to be moved to a new table.  That message is always posted after I have already been moved.

Example 2, Juicy Stakes Poker:

Several times during tonight's tournament when I was moved to new table, I got a message that the tournament was about to start.  This isn't rocket science.  Anyone who has participated in or watched any kind of tournament, whether it's poker or chess or softball, knows that a tournament by definition has one start and one end.  You play until there is one person or team left standing.

Nonsense messages like this are strangely common.  The worst part is a player who reports  a problem, whether large or small, is often ignored.  Two problems that I reported to ACR were recently fixed--more than a year after the problems were brought to their attention.

It's sloppy and unprofessional.  The term "amateur hour" comes to mind.  The flower shop around the corner wouldn't get away with operating like poker sites do.

I've Been Sick for a Week

First, you can disergard what I said in my previous post, which was about my January results.  I explained adaquately how just one big win can have an a big effect on the results of an entire year, so I'll leave it at that.

I have the flu.  I've had just about every symptom, including: explosive diarrhea, dizziness, loss of appetite, chills, weakness and lower weight.  I finally felt up to making decisions at the table last night so I played a tournament.  It did not go well.

Before I was knocked out last night I folded 31 hands in a row.  I wasn't getting any cards at all.  I finally wound up with ATo, there were 5 limpers, and I was last to act. There was over 500 in the pot, and my stack was just over 2,000.  No one had shown any strength, and the pot was a big percentage of my stack--it was a no-brainer shove.  I couldn't believe it when two players called,, and when all three hands were turned up it was even worse than I thought.  Both villians had pairs, sevens and threes. There was a seven on the flop and that was it for me

Since I played for less than an hour I decided to take a shot at another tournament that started two hours later, and I registered.  Five minutes before the start I changed my mind and unregistered.  I knew I would be OK to play at 2214.  I just wasn't sure if I was up to playing for five hours to make the final table.

I'm gradually getting better and I might try to play two tournaments tonight.  I'll have to see how I feel.then.

January Numbers

Wow, I can't believe that it's been a month since my last post.  A lot has happened in that time, some of it good and some of it bad.  Everything involving poker has been so crazy that I hardly know where to begin, so I'll save that for future posts  I will also explain this post because I know that some are going to be confused.  Of course, questions are always welcome if you want to put something in the comments.

I realize that most people don't want to read post after post about my studying, or what I do with my administrative time.  On the other hand, I've said many times that short-term thinking can ruin a poker player.

Think about baseball.  Winning 90 games in a 162-game baseball season is considered success and will usually get your to the playoffs.  There will be a lot of winning and losing streaks during the season. Poker is much more volatile than baseball, in fact, winning poker players don't cash in most of their tournaments. It's not unusual for a good player to cash less than ten percent of the time and still make a profit, because the profit in tournament poker usually comes for a few very large, cashes.

That's whey I don't talk about my results in every post unless sometime unusual happens, for example, a very large cash, I don't think that it's worth sharing how much I won or lost that day, or even that week.  I have decided to compromise and post detailed numbers for each month and maybe sometimes for a week.

Without further ado, here are the January numbers for the two poker sites on which I play.  If I list a tournament as "break even" it means that either it was a free tournament in which I didn't cash, or I cashed for exactly enough to cover my entry fee.

Americas Cardroom, 26 tournaments
12 break even
3 net wins
10 net losses
RESULTS FOR JANUARY -$1.73


Juicy Stakes Poker 22 tournaments
0 break even
11 net wins
11 net losses
RESULTS FOR JANUARY +$35.70 

Going it Alone With Poker

I"m learning a lot about poker from Jonathan Little and other poker pros that I follow and study.  I'm learning so many new things from Little's coaching site that I can't keep up.  Based on what I've learned just in the last couple weeks, I need to make a lot of changes to my game, including defending my blinds more often, and betting more often when a scare card comes, for example, a fourth diamond hitting the board.

There are a lot of plays that I don't make because they seem counterintuitive.  But if you can show me the math that says I'm wrong, I'll change the way I play.

The new things that I'm always learning may be hard to understand or execute, but I'll trust the math and do what needs to be done.  There is, however another problem that might be bigger than I thought, and I don't think that it's solvable.

I hear over and over from a lot of pros that you can't make it in poker all by yourself.  It seems like every time that I watch poker on TV or watch a coaching video, someone is telling me either that it's very important that I go over hands with other players, or that.I have to have a poker coach to get good enough to make real money.

Little said  something like the following (it's not an exact quote but very close):

I had 11 different coaches at various stages of my poker career.  If I spend $200 to a coach and fix one leak, it's worth it.  I've spent 20 thousand dollars on coaching--and it was worth every penny.  If you want to get really good, you need a coach.

As for the poker friend part, maybe it's the introvert in me, but I have no clue how to find one.  I play a lot online and almost no one uses the chat box any more.  The ones that do are usually crying about their bad beats.

I also play live tournaments, though not much lately, but it's really hard to talk to someone during a poker tournament and get to know them.  First, I'm not going to talk strategy at the table.  That's a great way to tell your opponents how much you know (and don't know) about poker.  Nothing good can come of that.  Second, it's almost impossible to talk to someone during the five-minute tournament breaks that come every 90 minutes.  I have five minutes to go to the bathroom and get food, with little time left for conversation.

I don't really believe that there is no way to make money playing poker as a "lone wolf" but a lot of very good poker players believe it.  That scares me, but I'll just have to prove them wrong.

A Day Without Poker and a Disappointing Week

It is 2336 on Saturday, 12/24.  For the first time since being a full-time poker players has been a reality instead of a goal, I didn't play poker at all today.  The week will be over in less than half an hour.  The day, and the week, got away from me.  I was under the weather for a few hours one day, and there were a lot of Christmas things going on with relatives.  Also, my wife and I went to a New Years Eve Christmas service at our church.

I didn't get close to putting in 40 hours this week.  I'll wind up with 27. That's not going to get the job done.  I try to pile a lot of hours into the first few days so that I don't get behind, but nothing seemed to work out right this week.

"Piling up" hours isn't exactly a goal. I like flexibility, and rather than working eight-hour days, I usually wind up working five or six hours a day seven days a week.  That usually gets me to my 40 hours and lets me do what I want during the day.  I failed to consider that despite my best efforts, occasionally an entire day is going to get blown away.  I can't count on being able to work every day to get my hours in.

I suppose that I could just accept that I'm not going to get in 40 hours every week.  After all, people do take days off and go on vacation.  However, I can't afford to think about time off until I'm turning my poker playing into money.

I think that the minimum cashout on Americas Cardroom is $100.  When I can do that without putting my online bankroll in jeopardy, then I can start thinking about things like an occasional day off.  Until then, I should do what a lot of small business owners do--work 50 hours a week, or 60, or whatever it takes to get the business off the ground.  It's almost 2017 and I've said that in January I want to hit the ground running.  It's time to make that happen.

I'll end on a positive note.  Studying was 30% of my work time this week.  Keeping my study time at or above 20% is one of my most important goals.  In the long turn  I have no doubt that a study emphasis will pay off.

A Very Deep Run

In my previous post I said the following:

I've been playing some of these, noting how the players play in general and I think that I'm getting the hang of it. I started out crashing and burning in the first hour, then I was getting in the top quarter of the field.  Soon I was regularly getting in the top 100 of fields of 600 or 700 players.  In my last two I got knocked out around 50th place.

I just finished going very deep in an 11-cent tournament that is very popular on Americans Cardroom and runs seven days a week.  Like the freerolls, it's not a lot of money but it's a cheap way to practice some of the things I'm working on.  Last night, everything feel into place.  I played for 5 hours and 13 minutes, finishing 4th of 892 players for a cash of $7.45.

I've been working on a lot of aspects of my game and doing a lot of studying over the last few months. Whether I make any money has been secondary.  It's all about being ready to make some real money in 2017.

My goal is always to spend 25% of my time studying, but last week is was 33%, one third of my poker time that week spent in study, and that study emphasis is paying off.  I've been working on a lot of aspects in my game and it's all starting to come together.

I'm working on ideas that didn't exist for me just a few months ago.  In yesterday's tournament  I sometimes defended my blinds with 75% of my hands.  A month ago I would have thought that was crazy, but a week ago I watched a video with Jonathan Little and Alexander Fitzgerald discussing the importance of blind defense and why it was necessary to defend so often.  Several times during that tournament yesterday I was thinking about all of the plays that I was making that I wouldn't have even considered a few months ago.

Another very new idea for me is using different bet sizes depending whether or not you want to be called.  It's not new in the sense that the idea has been out there for a while and I knew about it, as one of the many things that I should learn how to do someday.  I never dug into that because it was just one of many things that I needed to learn..

That video, along with Little's Weekly Poker Hand videos, have really opened my eyes to a lot of things. In the videos Little takes one hand and talks about it for 10 minutes.  What if I had done this instead of that?  What do I know about this player?  What if I had bet a little more, or a little less?  What is the tournament situation?  What if my chip stack was smaller, or larger?

Now that I have my own office and a quiet place (and neighborhood) I have the chance to study all those things, which is a big part of everything coming together.   It's almost 2017.  Now it's time to start turning all the things that I'm learning into money.