∇xB

I am a little late to the game on this one, but I want to get my New Years Resolutions in. New Years is kind of a crazy time for me since we all reform to be better in some personal or professional way, but my birthday is in early January and so I like to give myself a little slack so that I can still afford to do something punishing to my body in the name of celebrations. So there are a bunch of boring resolutions related to my health, but I don't think those are particularly interesting. If something interesting comes out of that I am sure it will organically become a topic in my blog. My self referential New Year's Resolution is to actually update my blog once a week or better. My final resolution comes with some back story. In early December it was going to be something to the effect of “pound the pavement, get out there and find a solid job and put poker on the back burner.” As healthy and balanced a resolution that might've been at the time, I've had to abandon and rework it.

I want to provide a little backstory here. In late November and into early December, Full Tilt was running its “Rush Week” promotion. Essentially if I cleared 1000 FTPs per day playing rush poker for a week, they were giving out $250. As sad as this is to say, prior to that I had never really put in series of high volume days, despite my being a “professional” poker player for the last 6 months or so. My volume was average, maybe 3 hours a day. It was basically a combination of run good and low monthly expenses that kept me afloat, since I was playing basically 1-2 mixed games and PLO50. Still, I just didn't have much to cover and so I never went out of my way to pad my BR. It occurred to me that this was in no way sustainable though, and I had an inkling that eventually something was going to give and I was going to be forced into a job. The thing was, I was okay with that. I wanted that, in some ways. The lazy life style of a poker pro, while appealing, isn't the end all be all for me and I know I can easily adapt to the working world. What I give up in free time I gain in structure and discipline in my life—something I am not afraid to admit I lack and sometimes miss.

I digress though. Rush week. I was going to find that discipline I lacked and use rush week as a launching pad. My goal for the week had little to do with the monetary value of the $250 bonus. The bonus was a carrot to keep me at my computer plugging away. Because of this I opted to only play rush PLO25. For those of you who don't know, rush PLO50 rarely runs and rush PLO100 is just not a very good game. I have personally had massive swings in that game and felt that the variance involved playing that much volume was not worth a $250 bonus and again, I am here to start learning how to grind.

It actually went pretty well the first day, I put up good numbers, won at a decent clip, and felt I was hitting a groove. Wake up, eat, session, gym, session, lunch, session, dinner and relax. It felt very naturally right away. The second day I didn't run so hot, and the third day I ran basically terrible. Over 15k hands or so I was down 12BIs and my confidence was shaken. On the 4th day of rush week, I decided I had had enough and settled on taking my $125 bonus for half the week, and taking the rest of the time off. On December 3rd I was felt so tilted and frustrated that I opted to withdraw almost my entire roll. I left myself $100 on Full Tilt and $100 on Stars because no matter how tilted I am, I don't yet have the capacity to just stop playing poker. I can however just play lower and work on my game while I allow myself time to mentally recover.

I need to be clear here: I wasn't bothered by the financial loss. All told 12BI at PLO25 isn't really that significant to me, and given RB and the bonus I probably broken even or was a marginal winner from the endeavor. What bothered me was my inability to beat a game that I felt was below me. I took some time to examine how I, a PLO coach, could get so thoroughly flogged at a stake I consider to be below me. The long and short of it is I simply wasn't prepared for the mental fatigue that comes with playing so much poker in a short period of time, nor was I ready for the speed at which 4 tables of rush PLO action happens. I ended up autopiloting pretty badly and when I looked at the 4 days of stats I was playing a style of something like 16/12. For reference, I typically play something like a 30/20 when I am playing my A game. I was disgusted with myself and my lack of ability to apply the skills which I had taken so long to acquire and hone, and so I promised myself that when the New Years rolled around, I would begin attacking the job market voraciously. For logistical reasons I couldn't start right away.

So I spent the month of December in what I would call a completely undeserved vacation. With only $200 in my effective roll and no desire to reload, I opted to play small tournaments just to keep myself mentally occupied. I wasn't really expecting to do much but pay rake and keep myself from starting drinking at 6pm. What I did not expect was that I would run fairly well early on. I got second place in a low limit quintuple shoot out and then another second place shortly after at a 4 handed PLO8 event. All of the sudden, I had somewhat of a functioning roll. I decided that I should at least clear my final month of ironman for the year end bonus, so with my new found capital I jumped back into the 1-2 10 game and 8 game. Here I proceeded to run hotter than the sun. I tend to feel awkward posting information like this but it is substantially buried within the bulk of this post, but I managed to clear something like $2000 in December playing almost exclusively 10 game and those few tournament wins. It was wholly unexpected and completely appreciated. Between that and some small bits of coaching income, I actually managed to even move up and take shots at the $2.5/$5 where I eventually stuck. To provide a nice cap to a huge month, I managed to place second in a 3k gtd 7 game tournament on Tilt for another ~$800 or so. Suddenly the roll that I sought to take away so that I could focus on the job search had reappeared, and grown stronger than ever.

So I found myself at a decision point. First of all, I came back from my vacation playing higher than I did before I stopped, and therefore making more money. On the other hand, the mental anguish associated with poker is something jarring to my personal life and I needed to remind myself there was a reason I said I needed to put poker on the back burner. Furthermore I needed to admit to myself that I am simply not cut out to be a true grinder. This is clearly evidenced by my insistence to play mixed games rather than focusing on pursuing a single game. Presented with the problem of trying to reconcile all of these factors I think I've come up with a solution. Also for those keeping track, this brings us basically up to present date.

I am going to find a job. I am licensed high school teacher and teaching is something that I enjoy. In order to keep myself from losing focus (which was why I cashed out my BR in the first place), I am going to force myself to play only during what I consider “high value” times of the day, to maximize my overall EV. This is something I should've been doing all along. In the past I would simply play whenever I felt the whim. Now I have gone through looking for ways to make the most of my time playing. In particular, I find that I have the highest EV in mixed game cash tables. The monotony of playing only PLO for hours on end grinds at me and causes me to play poorly as time wears on. What I am opting to do to make up for a lack of tables is to add in some tournaments that I consider to be high value based on my financial and personal goals, as well as what I consider to be my overall EV in any particular field. In practice this means some 40k gtds during the day as well as the 7 game gtd tournament daily. These tournaments provide extra value for me to be at the cash tables because they run during Full Tilt's Happy Hour. Assuming I bust from a tournament early, I will essentially schedule myself into two 2 hour blocks of play per day. This scheduling of my play time gives me a better idea of time that can and will be spent working towards finding a job.

Overall I do not think I am sustainable as a professional poker player, however playing poker on the side is definitely a way that I can make significant money. My hope is that the stability the job will provide will allow me to grow my bank roll to the point of being able to start playing in much higher stakes games. As best I can tell, it is the same regs in the 2.5/5 game that tend to populate the 5/10 game, and from my brief shots at 5/10 the regs that do not carry over were not particularly tough. I'd like to be able to take shots without any concern of what a bad losing session would do to my ability to provide for myself. I also don't want to put myself in a position where irrelevant things cause me to doubt my ability to play or even my self worth. The more important that it is to you that you be considered a “professional poker player,” the more your sense of worth relies on something that often cannot be controlled by you in the short term. Variance sucks like that. So my New Years Resolution for 2011 is to find a real job that I enjoy and provides for me at least moderately well, and to make myself into a world class recreational poker player. I have high hopes for the year to come, and will likely be updating with all sorts of less serious stuff as we proceed. As a final closing note, if anyone is looking to hire someone hard working and intelligent in the area of Worcester Massachusetts, by all means get in touch. But I won't hold my breath.

-DxB