I took a break and played another 50 hands two tabling, winning back $33.

One of the crazy tables had some “interesting” work going on. If there were a lot of people in preflop, these two guys would start feeding the pot with anything. Both one huge $40 pot with total crap hands when then hit two pair or made a straight. But after I started paying more attention to them, that was the plan. If no one was in the pot, they played tight. But if 4 or more people were in the pot, they would try to cap preflop, and if they hit with their crap hands, they knew they were good, because everyone else at the table was playing solid hands. If the flops came high cards, they were out quick.

It was an interesting play if they really were doing that intentionally. I am not positive, but I do think they were profitable with the play. Definately something that would be worth simulating out to try to figure out how to make that a profitable play and what type of table it would need to be played against.

Now for the interesting part. I tried something new. It is a new poker technique that I have been working on called “making money while clearing a bonus.” It is new, at least to me, and I am considering patenting it.

Prior to playing at PokerRoom, I was two tabling at FullTilt on the .5/1 tables. Doing the same I wasn’t getting anywhere with the points, so I moved up to 10 player $1/2. Then I added another table. On top of that, I have been sick all week, slowing my response time with my mind numbed with cough medicine. I needed 840 point to clear my $120 in bonus at 7 points per bonus dollar. Each $1 of rake is worth .7 points. At $1/2, the max rake is only $1 hit once the pot goes over $10. It is hit alot, but it makes earning points rather difficult. I would say it probably took close to 3,000 hands to hit the 840 points.

The good news is, I didn’t just make a few dollars clearing the bonus, I actually make more than the bonus. So I am very happy with my 3 table $1/2 play. It took me a 2-3 hours a day, for 7 days to clear the bonus. Assuming I played 3k hands, thats 2.33bb/100, so that is even sustainable.

I just figured out that my stats have been turned off in pokerroom, so I have no numbers on how I played anywhere. That really sucks. I wish I had some real numbers too look at, but at least I have a nice account balance to look at.

I may be back to FullTilt until another bonus comes along. I will have to see if I can move up to $1/2, but level looks much tighter over there.

I signed up at Empire the last weekend in October and managed 4k hands with school and finals going on. So my play has picked up speed, but still isn’t profitable on its own. Thus the reason to start the Full Tilt bonus.

In general, I broke even on my first year of poker, which is relatively good from what I understand of most people’s first year.

Sadly, playing full time and making a living at it doesn’t seem to have happened this year.

16.6 bonus points are needed to clear every bonus dollar, so to clear the entire bonus, I need 9960 points. So far I have played about 700 hands and cleared a little under 100 points. So I will have to play more poker in the next 4 months than I have played the since I start exactly one year ago Friday December 2nd. The numbers are really rough right now, but between 50,000 and 100,000 hands to clear the bonus.

I guess I will post a year in review.

Short and focused go hand in hand. It is easier to manage distractions and boredom if the session time is short. This is also allowing me to analysis the few hands that I am playing. I am playing them well, but for the first time there are several hands that I am considering posting to 2+2’s forums to see if I could have made another bet or two.

This new focus on focus was inspired by HDouble’s post Poker, Zen, and Football. In it, he criticizes online players who let distractions take their focus off poker. My game has lacked focus lately, so I took his suggestioons to heart and do nothing but play the game while I am playing.

I have been on a good run lately and only part of that can be attributed to focus. At the beginning of this run, I lucked onto a few tables in a row that had 2 or 3 fairly to very loose players. It made me take note that I really need to pay more attention to table selection. I might be able to sit down at just about any $1/$2 and win. Instead, by picking a table that has a few loose players and leaving when they leave or tighten up, then my dollar win rate will go up significantly. This is what I have been doing, and it has been paying off.

It does mean that I have to wait for a seat to open up sometimes now, instead of just taking any open seat.

After my big loosing streak right before I left for Ireland I quit playing on July 4th and reread Small Stakes Hold ‘em and have played very infrequently since finishing it. Since starting again August 20th, I have only played for 2 hours and 42 minutes total, 192 hands in 11 sessions. Of those 11 sessions, 8 have been winners and two fairly large losers and one small loser. The largest loser was also my longest session where I only won 3 small pots in 63 hands, and played poorly. The poor play was probably a result of becoming frustrated with not getting any hands. So, if good hands are not coming my way after about 30 minutes of play, I should quit or at least change tables.

In the beautiful graph above, you will see my first consistent losses early own, when I was clearing my $350 in bonus money over my time off around Christmas. Then you will see a general up trend for a few months where it looked like I had finally clued in. And then lately, where it looks like I have lost all knowledge of the game of poker and totally sucked. Sucked while loosing large amounts of money in a very short time.

I leave for Ireland Thursday and I am not planning on playing poker until after I get back. More importantly, I am planning on spending some time relearning the game, as well as reviewing my hand histories. There is some knowledge from the uptrend that I have lost, that I need to regain.

In the last six weeks or so, I will catch myself playing some very good poker. Winning pots when I have nothing, minimizing losses, and building large pots when I have the dominate hand. The problem is, I have been playing really inconsistent poker. Last Friday, I played wonderfully. I sat at a table with a maniac. This man made the table awesome, he put the entire table on tilt except for me. Everyone congratulated me greatly when I finally busted him out, but I took over $80 from the table, and not all of it was the maniacs. He made the table incredibly profitable for me. Saturday, I lost my cool and went on tilt for something like $70 in 15 minutes. I think my win rate at that table averaged out to $-250/hr. Overall, I lost all my winnings from Friday and gave back another $50. I did manage to clear a bonus of $100 while on tilt, but again, not playing at all, I was up $130. Playing and clearing a bonus, I was up $50. Bad play Sunday and Monday wiped that profit out as well.

I stopped hating poker and started hating myself. The tilt table was 100% my fault. At one point I was up $28. That would have been a good time to move to another table and start grinding again. But no, I kept playing like a maniac, and like most maniacs, ended loosing it all. Over the weekend I had 16 loosing sessions, 9 of which were over $20. Wow, I had 18 winning sessions, too bad only 5 of those sessions were over $20.

Not reviewing my stats is definately a problem. Had I known that I was actually winning more often then loosing, maybe I could have avoided some tilt. It sure felt like I was loosing everytime I sat down at a table.

A friend of mine has been taking the numerical analysis approach to poker. He has noticed a trend that once you hit a certain dollar amount, that is your max for the table. Now the conspiracy theorists would say that the system is rigged. Luckily, his point was that there are probably other reasons causing that ceiling. So the goal is for me to review my play, and see that trends I can find. The dollar amount seems like it would be physcological for the most part. It could also be mental endurance. You are only profitable at your skill level when you are at the top of your game. I have seen this with my play and I bet if I go back and review, I will find that I loose money more often when playing late, or putting in long hours of continuous play. It is also possible that your playing style is not profitable in the long run, but is not what other players at the table expect, so you are profitable for a short period, and once enough people at the table catch on, your play becomes break even or you start to leak money.

Luckily, I have excellant stats on my play thanks to PokerOffice. Things I will be looking for in my game include, time of day when I played, how many hands have I played, how many hands/hour are being played, how many minutes have I played at the table, how many minutes have I played in that day and of course how do all those data points map to my profit.

I don’t think I need a mental break from poker the theory, but I need a break from the game. I sit down expecting to win big everytime. Lately when I sit at a table, it is a question of how I can make $10. But I should know that some days I will win the $10, and some days I will loose $6, but as long as I am winning more money than I am loosing than I am playing the right game. I have no idea how Ireland will reprogram my brain for this but hopefully not stilling at a table online for a couple weeks will help.

Results

At $5+$0.50, it beat 466 other players to come in second. He had been playing for two years by the time I got interested in poker, mostly live games. He didn’t start playing online until just recently, and went about six months prior not playing, due to kidney failure and the lack of money and energy that goes along with it. He just recently read Malmuth and Sklansky’s book on Advanced Hold’em and it really improved his game.

So it took him a few years to become profitable learning the hard way, and you can’t even say that. He still ended up reading a book. I am certainly not criticizing Steve, but I am poking fun at everyone out there who is not making use of all the books out there to help move their education along.

Congratulations again Steve. I am looking forward to a $1000+$100 finish in a few months.

Worse then the losses was my play last Friday night. No bad beats, I just played horrible poker. It is amazing how much difference just a little change in when you fold and when you bet makes. I played two sessions today, and the second session started off with several bad beats, but I followed that up with some seriously bad play. Once I was down over $50, I made some changes and managed to finish up for the session, but if it wasn’t for my poor play, I would have had a monster evening.

Now why am I playing two sessions of poker on a Tuesday? It’s bonus time at Party again. So I need 700 raked hands by sometime Saturday to clear my $100 bonus. I played 279 hands this evening which was a little over 3 hours of play and that puts me at over 600 rakes hands for the bonus. Making time to play 100 raked hands over the next 4 days and still make it to swimming shouldn’t be a problem. But it’t not likely that I will be getting up in 6 hours to go swim tomorrow.

Bonus time at Party changes the style of the play quite a bit. A lot of players drop down and play in the lower limits, either so they can increase the number of tables they are comfortable playing or decrease the risk. I am happy to say, that I have found I can play comfortably at almost any table now. Weak passive tables are still the best, but it really only takes one loose agressive player to make a table profitable. Even during this bonus time, I have not come across a table that was purely tight aggressive.

Focusing on minimizing risk is what turned my game around tonight. There was a guy two seats to my left for most of the night who would raise 1/6 hands. That changed how I played AJo, AT, KQ and KJ quite a bit. Pot size was also a real important consideration. If the pot was small and my hand was marginal, then I would fold a lot more hands than normal than normal. To give you an idea how how many hands I was taking too far, at one point early on I had a show downs won percentage of 10%. So 1/10 hands that I paid to see all the way to the end I would win. By the end of the night it was up to 60%.

< .unwanted philosophical rant>
But… Poker is not a lifetime vocation. Why? It’s not constructive. It doesn’t contribute anything to the world. It’s leeching extra disposable income off of people. Providing them entertainment? No, I don’t think so, not like a movie or ballgame. Because they don’t come to lose. They don’t come to pay me $40/hour to enjoy playing poker. They come to win, but don’t (on average). This is not being paid for entertainment.

We only have one life, and I think to spend all of one’s working years leeching extra money off of the rest of society is a waste. It’s sure great for a while though — a great way to pay for travelling the world, meeting great people, and building life skills like money management, discipline, independence, and people-reading. I wouldn’t be surprised if five years from now, ‘ex-poker professional’ is a great line to have on a resume when applying for a position as a negotiator, for instance.
< ./unwanted philosophical rant>

Leeching extra money off the rest of society is business. People play poker for the rush of winning a $50 pot playing $1/$2 limit poker. People who play solely for pleasure only play for the thrill of the win. I play for the thrill of the win, even though I play to make money and I play methodically, if the big pot wasn’t out there to shoot for, poker would be too boring to be entertaining.

You pay $9 for a movie ticket. But you could rent a movie, watch HBO, watch broadcast network or play a game of pick up at the park. But something has convinced you that this movie is worth $9.

The same is true for poker. You are convinced you can win, or you are just looking for a few hours of entertainment, and if you get lucky, so extra cash. Something has convinced you to play. If you are a professional poker player, you are not leeching off society, at least not anymore than a movie theather is.

I do not know who should be credited for the quote. If you know, shoot me an email.