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.

Americas Cardroom Freeroll Leaderboards

I took a closer look at the Americas Cardroom leaderboard promotion and it might be worth pursuing. Of course it's not easy to finish in the top ten of any kind of tournament, even a freerool, when it can have between 500 and 1,000 players.

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 took another look at the prizes and they are better than I thought.  The top 10 are decided by the number of points accumulated during the week..  Points are from 10 points for a first place, 9 points for second, down to 1 point for a 10th-place finish.  That means that I wouldn't have to win the whole thing to get some value from it.

The other interesting thing is that the prizes are better than I thought.  I thought that first place got a free ticket to a $215 tournament and that  everyone else got less than that, but it's a pretty good deal even for the players who finish in places two through ten.

First place wins a ticket to play a $215 tournament and a ticket for a $55 tournament.  Places 2 through 10 get a $55 ticket.  If the $55 tournament has more than 100 players (I think it would be a lot more) that's a prize pool of over $5,000,

I have no idea how hard it would be to crack the top 10 of the leaderboard.  The whole thing might not even be feasible for one reason or another.  I would certainly have to put in a lot of volume.  A freeroll goes off every hour and I would have to play as many as possible. to have any kind of a shot.

Two things would have to happen for me to have a decent shot:

1. I would have to have a completely clear schedule, pretty much doing nothing but eating, sleeping and playing poker for a week.

2. No studying during a freeroll week, only playing.

Number one is tricky.  I would have to pick a week with a decent weather forecast so that I didn't spend an hour or more every day dealing with all of the snow.  And there is always the Available Guy issue lurking out there.

As far as number two, I always want to spend at least 25% of my weekly poker time studying, but that's easy enough to work out.  If I had a no-study week I could balance it with 50% study the next week.  Maybe my leaderboard could be once a week, or just occasionally when I could clear the time. I really won't know exactly how this might work until I dig into it a little more, by playing more of them and by looking up some information online on how these leaderboards play out, whether the same players usually in the top ten, etc.

I'm not sure if I'm going to do this or not, and it might not happen for  a couple weeks or maybe three months from now.  I might not do it at all. I have no idea how many players are trying to get to the top of the leaderboard.  It could be a hundred or a thousand.

I will report back with my findings.

I Only Missed One Hand

I have said before that I almost never miss a hand when I play poker.  I never know in which hand I might win a big pot and get into the money, or even win the tournament.  Just the opposite happened a few minutes ago.

I was playing an online tournament with 711 players registered.  After about two hours we were down to 84 players and I was in 62nd place.  The top 10 places were paid.

I was low on chips but getting closer to the money. I was looking for a hand to shove so that I could win enough chips to make it to the final table because only the top ten players cashed.  When the hourly 5-minute break started I needed to have a bowel movement.

I got back just in time to see that I missed most of the hand and that my pocket queens had been folded.  That would have been the top 5% hand that I was hoping for. A few hands later I was knocked out of the tournament.

I have a few rules about poker:  Two of the most important are that I won't enter a tournament when I'm too tired to play well, and that I will never miss a hand.  I missed a hand today and I paid dearly for it.

Short-Term Time Management

Devoting 40 or more hours a week to poker is a big adjustment:

     My wife and I have very different work schedules.

     I have to make choices.  I can't follow nearly as many TV shows as used to be the case.

     I always have to adjust for outside factors that demand my time, for example, shoveling after a snowstorm.  That's not something that someone in a cubicle with a boss nearby has to think about--he has to keep working until 5 P.M., it's not optional.  He can deal with the foot of snow in his driveway when he gets home.

I'm making a lot of the adjustments successfully.  One area where I'm getting better is managing small amounts of free time.  For example, I never know when I might get knocked out a tournament. If I'm out after an hour what should I do then?

One thing that took me a while to figure out it to not waste time and always have something else ready to work on.  Now when I finish a tournament, I don't have to find something to do.  One of the first things that I do after I turn on my computer is to set up anything that I might need during the day so that I have things ready to study.  I might open as many as ten windows.

I open the twoplustwo,com poker forums.  I open a poker coaching site so I have a video waiting, ready to be studied.  If I have something administrave to take care of I have Open Office ready to go. All of those things, a quarter-hour at a time, add to my poker hours.. Little time is wasted.  I can sit at my desk for five hours with 4.75 of those hours being productive.

What if I only have a few minutes between events, for example, a tournament ends and I want to play another one that starts in 7 minutes?  For that I have my Daily Task List open.  Some of the things on that list include exercise (push-ups, sit-ups and squat thrusts) and checking E-mail, Facebook and my planner to make sure that my world outside poker is in order.

I know that this level of list-making and detail seems crazy to some of you, but to me it's just the opposite.  It keeps me from being the ADD-addled Clif who was too disorganized to turn in a term paper on time or remember an appointment.  The amount of focus and organization that I need for poker is helping me keep the rest of my life straight as well.

In many ways I'm the best Clif I've ever been.  I'm 61 years old and I think about running my second marathon, or about how much money I'll make playing poker over the next ten years.  Retirement is not on my radar.

A Day of Study

I said yesterday that my study percentage for the week was way too low and that I was going to fix that. That is exactly what I did.  I only played poker for 1.25 hours yesterday.  Everything else was study.  I said yesterday that this week only 12% of my work time has been spent studying.  I turned that around and now study is 27%, right where I want it to be, at or above 25%.

Here's what I studied:

I reviewed flash cards for the top 10%, top 20% and top 50% of hands.

I watched a video on how to use the equilab.com poker equity calculator.  I already use it, but is has features that I have not yet learned to use.

I watched Jonathan Little Weekly Poker Hand videos 78-81,

I spent time in the twoplustow.com poker forums.  While I was there I found a forum thread discussing poker players who take Adderall.  I wrote a long post about how my life was falling apart before I was diagnosed, at age 40, and got the right medication.

I won't go into the details, but I have a 99th percentile IQ and still failed to graduate from two colleges.  That tells you all that you need to know about how ADD can mess someone up.  After telling my story, I finished it with this, just so there was no misunderstanding about how I use the medication:

I don't get high. I don't get a buzz. Adderall doesn't give me an advantage at the table. I make sure that I get enough sleep to play a long tournament. If I'm too tired to play well I don't pop a pill, I skip the tournament. I take Adderall as directed, one pill each day. It is simply a drug that I need to take in order to lead a normal life, just as Insulin is for a diabetic.