Fixing My Spreadsheets and My Health

I mentioned in my previous post that my spreadsheets got a bit out of control while I was sick, because I didn't have the extra energy to do anything except play poker and sleep.  I did a couple things today to fix that.

1. I started running again, which will certainly benefit my health in general and my energy level in particular.  Money has been a little tight since we moved so I didn't want to spend a lot on another pair of running shoes.  The local MC Sporting Goods store is closing and I got a good deal on a pair of shoes.

I'm surprised at how out of shape I was.  I thought I would just run a mile at a time until I got back in shape, and it wound up being half a mile.  My legs felt really heavy.  I'll keep at it though, and I think that after doing a half-mile a few times I'll be able to increase my speed or my distance pretty quickly.  I've run races from a mile to a marathon, I know how to train and get back in shape (even if it's a little harder at age 61).and I'll get back where I need to be before long.

2. I worked on the spreadsheet problem, but I couldn't figure it out.  I had to get on the Open Office forums and post a question about what I need to do.  I wrote in the post that I will probably play around a thousand tournaments this year.  If I play only online I could easily play that many, as it's only 2.7 tournaments per day in a 365-day year. But if I wind up playing a lot of live poker, that online tournament total will be a lot smaller.

Here is what I posted on the Open Office forums:

I am a professional poker player playing online tournaments. I don't know how many tournaments I will play this year, but probably around 1,000.

Here is a simplified description of what my spreadsheet headings look like:

Column Headings: Date/Tournament Number/Buy-in/Profit or Loss

What I need to do is Freeze the column headings in place. I also need to keep the totaling lines and totals in place. This is a one-column example of what the spreadsheet looks like:


Buy-in
-------
20.00
10.00
15.00
-------
$45.00


Using this example, I need the two rows above "20.00" to stay in place and I also need the bottom tow rows, "-------" and "$45.00", to stay in place. I also need to be able to scroll down as I add data from tournaments I have played that day, without losing the headings,

The other issue is how/where to set up the totaling row (in this example, the "45.00" row), since my estimate of 1,000 tournaments is a very rough one. Right now I have to scroll up to see the headings and down to see the totals. I have too many rows to fit on a page, and I need to fix that. Any help is appreciated.

A Pretty Good Month

I'm pretty happy with how this month has gone, especially considering that I was sick for two weeks. I was a mess.  My sneezing, nose-blowing and other scary noises were frightening our cats and I felt lousy.  I rarely get sick and it's no fun at all when I do..

I persevered through all of that and it looks like this month will be better than the last one.  Of course, I could get hit by negative variance, causing me to crash and burn the last three days of the month.

That's not really likely though because I'm very careful with my bankroll management,  For January I was up $38.60. With three days left in February (and fewer days in the month) I'm up $53.02 for the month.

One of the advantages of playing on a low-traffic site like Juicy Stakes Poker is that I get to know the other players really well.  When I'm playing against 70 or fewer players, many of whom I play against several times a week, it doesn't take long to compile some pretty good statistics on how they play.  When a player does something unusual I can also type a note.  After seeing that player a few more times, I'll check that not and get a good sense of whether that player is as crazy as I thought he was.

When I was doing nothing but playing poker this month everything went quite well, but while I was sick a lot of other things didn't get done.  I didn't study much.  I wasn't doing the day-to-day things like checking my E-mail or doing my administrative tasks for poker--which left me with a mess to clean up.

When I do nothing but play small tournaments all day I can wind up playing several each day.  I've been meaning to fix a glitch in my records.  I put together a spreadsheet for keeping track of my live tournament results, but I knew that I was going to have to expand it.  Now that time has come, and it's a little messier than I thought.

It's been a long time since I have had to split or freeze windows for very large spreadsheets, and I've never had a poker spreadsheet this big.  Also, I have it set up with side-by-side records for each poker site, because I thought that I would be playing about the same number of tournaments on each site, which would mean that I could scroll the whole thing up or down.  The problem is that I have  have only played on one site this month and I could soon wind up with one site taking up more than 100 rows than the other..

So, I have to fix the spreadsheets.  I have to get back to spending 25% of my time studying,*  It's been almost a month since I put in a 40-hour week, and that should be the minimum.  It's time to embrace the grind.

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

*Given  the importance of building a decent bankroll so that I can play higher stakes, I might let the study percentage slip a bit until I have over $500 on Juicy Stakes..  I will make sure to study every day in March so that I don't completely stop working on my weak areas.

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.