Exactly as Planned

Yesterday I talked about grinding up small bankrolls and about how I should deal with the very small amount that I have on Americas Cardroom, saying the following:

"If I have to grind up this one up with a bunch of 20 or 40 cent cashes, that's what I'm going to do.   There is no room to maneuver without a bankroll of at least 100 buy-ins."

I did exactly that last night.  I played the 11 cent tournament, came in 24th out of 725 players, and cashed for 44 cents.  Of course I would have rather made it to the final table and won dollars instead of cents, and those cashes will happen, but I'm not going to fight my way through over 700 players and make it the final table every other day.  A 44 cent profit is 4 buy-ins, and I'll take that.

I did get a surprise as I was playing  I thought that the tournament would end in 3-4 hours, but I played for 4 hours and 20 minutes and was knocked out with 23 players left.  I did not expect it to take that long.  That's a lot of playing time for 44 cents.

Maybe on I should play more on Juicy Stakes, where I can generate more dollars, and only on Americas Cardroom only once in a while.  I'm not sure.  I need at least two sites going.  I need options.  The two sites offer very different things and I need to be able to choose a tournament from either depending on the situation.   I'll have to give it some thought, but it will all come together.

The one thing I'm sure of is that I learned my lesson.  I will never play with a short bankroll again.

Changes--Bankroll Management

I said in my previous post that I was making fixes or changes in a lot of areas.  One of those areas is bankroll management.  That change is part of the reason that I'm winning, but it's also the reason that I'm increasing my bankrolls very slowly.

I concentrated on live tournaments last year and that didn't go well.  I was playing without a bankroll, taking $50 from the family budget once or twice a month.  I seldom cashed, none were big cashes and I never had a bankroll of more than 5 buy-ins.  We all know how that story ends. A small bankroll equals little chance of success, and I lost money playing live in 2016.

Everything changed when we moved out of the hood.  We said goodbye to neighborhood gangs, constant noise and the bullet hole in our house.  We moved to a much quieter neighborhood.  Instead of playing on the kitchen table, I had my own office in a room where I could shut the door.

Having a quiet place to play and study makes a huge difference.  When you have ADD, limiting distractions is an absolute must.  I can do that now.  Given what a disaster live poker without a bankroll was and given that I now had an office, it made sense to concentrate on live poker.  I have done exactly that in 2017.  I have not played one live tournament this year and I'm not sure if I will. My mission in 2017 is to have decent bankrolls on multiple poker sites.

I started 2017 with $35 that had been sitting on Juicy Stakes Poker for two years.  I played $1.10 tournaments, the cheapest that I could find.  Even so, I only had 31 buy-ins, so I had to be really careful and stick with the $1.10 MTTs.  I made it work, slowly but surely grinding up my bankroll up to $175.  I need to keep grinding it up so that I have the 100 buy-ins necessary to play at $2.20 and beyond.  I have also been playing on Americas Cardroom, where I was also going to grind up a small bankroll, but that didn't go so well.  I lost it all.  Statistical variance happens.

I made the minimum deposit to keep playing on ACR, but just as with Juicy Stakes, I'm starting over with a very small ($25) bankroll.  There was a tournament running every night that was less than a dollar so, as ridiculous as it might seem, I started playing 11 cent tournaments on Americas Cardroom.  I played live poker with a very small bankroll and went down in flames.  If I have to grind up this one with a bunch of 20 or 40 cent cashes, that's what I'm going to do.   There is no room to maneuver without a bankroll of at least 100 buy-ins.

The bottom line is that I made a huge bankroll management mistake with live poker, and I'll never do that again.  I'm making very little money, but I am making money, with 4 winning months out of 5 and more than tripling what I started with on Juicy Stakes Poker.

There will be a lot more in future posts about all the changes that I'm making to put myself in a much better position in 2018.

As always, your questions and comments are welcome.

May 2017 Results

I should have posted this earlier.  I had a lot going on, and I guess posting that I lost money last month wasn't an exciting priority.  I will endeavor to be more timely in future posts.

May was the first month this year that I was in the red.  It was bound to happen sooner or later.  That's the nature of poker, a long-term game than can have some wild ups and down in the short run.  May wasn't a big hit, just the one month out of five that I didn't make money so far this year.

Here are the numbers, from the two sites where on which I am now playing:

Juicy Stakes Poker, May 2017
17 tournaments played
5 net win tournaments,   +$9.90
12 net loss tournaments, -$19.90
                                                ---------
                                               -$10.20

Americas Cardroom, May 2017
11 net win tournaments,    +$35.88
37 net loss tournaments,   -$64.35
                                                   ---------
                                                 -$28.47


Total results for May 2017, -$38.67.

No one likes to lose, but with only one losing month so far and the many changes that I've made in many areas, I'm reasonably happy.  For some perspective, here is a list of monthly results:

January              35.70
February            40.77
March                17.70
April                    8.79
May                  -38.67
                       ----------
2017 to date  $64.29

That's not a lot of money, but strange as it may seem, that's not the point.  Everything that I'm doing this year is planned to set myself up for success in 2017.  I'll be talking a lot about that in future posts. I'll go over some of the things that I've fixed or changed, as well as all of the obstacles that I've had to face, and in many cases, that I'm still facing.

I said in January that this was all aimed at breaking out in 2018.  That is still the plan.  Sooner or later I'll break through with a really big month, but for now I know where I'm heading and how to get there.

As always, your questions and comments are welcome.

Another Big Change

At the beginning of the month I said that I was no longer multitabling.  There has been another big change this month.  I'm back on America's Cardroom again.  I made the minimum $25 deposit to give myself access (that's not a fee, it's money that I can spend on tournaments.).

It wasn't working to have just one poker site and just a few decent tournaments.  I need options.  I need to play more tournaments, different tournaments and at different times.  I'm getting a good feel for whicht ACR tournaments are best for me to play and I will be updating my Best Available Tournaments page accordingly.

Even though ACR is in a lot of ways less reliable than Juicy Stakes Poker, I really needed another option.  I am playing mostly on ACR now, but it's nice to have options.  If Americas Cardroom is acting up, I can play on Juicy Stakes Poker, and if there's nothing good on Juicy Stakes Poker I can switch to ACR. 

The biggest change is that I have ACR available again, with  SNGs running a few times every hour, I can play just about any time, day or night and I've been taking advantage of that.

Having SNGs, which take about an hour to win, help me to fill the time much more easily.  When there isn't an MTT worth playing, I can open a SNG and while I'm waiting for eight other players to get it going I can study or do some administrative tasks.  If the SNG fills up quickly, I'll go back to studying later.  If not, then I'll study for a half hour or however long it takes to get nine players.

I'm hoping that this leads to big things.

No More Multi-tabling

I'm always adjusting, tweaking, or trying to find a better, more efficient way to do something. It's time to do that again, and the issue is which, or how many, tournaments that I play.

I'm always working on the balance between playing enough tournaments to keep me busy and being choosy enough to pick tournaments that give me the best chance to make a profit.  There will be some changes if I ever get a second site up (more about that in a future post), but the issue at hand is multi-tabling.

The basic idea of multi-tabling (simultaneously playing more than one tournament or cash game) is that divided attention will yield fewer dollars per tournament, but make more money in the long run. Here's a simplified example:

I play one tournament at a time and my average profit is $5 per tournaments.  If I play two at once, I might only average $3.50 per tournament, but the total is $7, which means I'm making more dollars per hour.  I thought that I needed to do that to make money faster, but I realized last night that I'm not ready for that yet and probably never will be.

I played a tournament last night that went very well.  I made the final table and got a decent cash. The results for one tournament don't matter than much unless it's a huge cash, but what's important is that it was the best that I've played in several weeks.

I haven't concentrated that well any time in the last month.  I realize now that is was much easier to lock in when I could concentrate on the dynamics of just one table.

Maybe I haven't had enough practice with two tables, but I don't think that's the issue.  I'm just not wired correctly to play multiple tables.  I thought about it and realized that with almost any task I compartmentalize and do one thing at a time.  I always break a task into smaller pieces. When I put up a blog post I usually have bullet points of the things I want to cover.

When I was working on a piece of clarinet music, I would often look at a difficult passage and break it down, working on only one measure at a time.  I would work on that measure over and over until I could play it perfectly several times in a row, then go on to the next measure and do the same thing. Only then would I play the entire passage and see how it all came together.

It all makes perfect sense.  Those of us with ADD tend to be bad at multitasking, but we're very good at locking in on one task if it's something that we enjoy doing.

There is one final reason that I need to stop playing two tables.  It's taken me away from the main task at hand, which is building up a bankroll as fast as I can.  If I had a big bankroll and could afford to spend a lot of time messing around and trying different things when I'm playing, maybe I could keep working on it, but I no longer think that it's the right approach.  Not only am I not good at it, but also I need to build my bankroll as fast as I can, and that's not going to happen with my concentration divided.

I need to keep being step-by-step methodical Clif and do things the way that works for me.  It's like the old joke:  How do you eat an elephant?  One bite at a time.

That's how I roll.

Waiting For My Next Tournament

I just finished a tournament, one of three that I thought I was going to be playing nonstop from 2019 to well after midnight.  The first one didn't last much over an hour so I have some time to kill. before the next one.

It was pretty ugly.  Negative variance really smacked me around.  Every time I got into the top ten I lost a big hand, almost always while having the most equity, but two hands in particular killed me.  My picket queens lost to tens, putting me back down in the middle of the pack.  I clawed my way up until I was close to the top ten and with queens again, I lost to threes and I was out.

The last couple of days have been like that.  Today my good hands didn't hold up.  Yesterday, I was completely card dead.  At one stretch I had opened with only 4% of my hands over two hours, the worst run of hands that I've had in any tournament this year.

Well, as Doyle Brunson famously said, "That's poker folks."  I shouldn't worry about two days, but I'll worry less when I have a decent (>100 buy-ins) bankroll.  Almost all of the tournaments that I'm playing have a buy-in of either $1.10 or $2.20.  With a bankroll of about $175, I'm bankrolled for $1 but not for $2.

As always, your questions or comments are welcome.

Adding a Second Site

In my previous post I said the following:

"I will be playing on a second site very soon.  That will give me more options for when I can play and when I can sleep.  I won't be locked into playing the same block of tournaments every night."

I thought that "pretty soon" would mean a day or two.  It's been a lot more complicated than I expected.  After several tries I have been unable to present my information to support's satisfaction.  I'm on my third try sending that information.  On my second try I had to prove who and where I was by showing them a utility bill with my name and address on it.  I sent a picture of a bill.  They responded that they couldn't read my name and address because it was blurry.  I agree that the picture was a little blurry, but when I looked very closely I could read every letter and number on the page.  I hope that I get some good news later today.

Last night would have been a great time to have more options.  Juicy Stakes Poker has a block of two or three tournaments every night, with starting times of 2019, 2214 and 2314.   The 2314 doesn't run every day, so sometimes I only get to play two.

I thought that I was all set to play three and get some practice playing two tables.  I had previously listed, so I would know at a glance, what tournaments were available that day.  I decided to skip the first one because I was too tired to play well.  I took a nap instead.  I played for exactly one hour in the second until I was knocked out at 2314. Then I found out that listing the 2314 had been a mistake.  It indeed starting at 2314--two days later. One hour of playing and I was done.

If the other site had been up, things would have been very different.  I would have had a lot of options, including three pretty good tournaments starting within two hours after I was knocked out.

I guess I won't have to worry about my study percentage this week.  I like to hit 25% or better and right now it's 32%.  Since I can't play any more  I'll do some extra studying to fill the time.  I'll be going over something that I downloaded (free, you know that I pinch my pennies) from Upswing Poker titled "20 Rules For Playing Flush Draws." One of their charts seems wrong to me, so I'll have to write  and ask why they advocate not playing when I flop bottom pair plus the nut flush draw.  That's has to be a mistake.