My background is that I got into poker about a year after the boom mostly due to my wife picking it up as a hobby (sharing a 7-card stud background with her own father). I played online for 5-6 years (I was a break-even player), and focusing mostly on tournaments (as the local laws at the time wouldn't allow for no-limit cash games). I got pretty serious into the hobby when I figured out that despite all players getting random cards from the same available pool and folks turning their cards over at the end to see who wins, that there was actually some strategy involved.
In January 2011 I lost my job and sort of lost my way in the professional world. I had intended to take some of the money I had set aside to give online poker a real go (as most serious players fantasize about making a run at turning a fun hobby into a real livelihood). But in the meantime I realized that I didn't much care for playing online nearly as much as I enjoyed the experience of sitting down with people in a real actual brick-and-mortar card room. The parts of the game that appeal to me are figuring out what my opponents are doing and not letting them figure out what I'm doing. Sitting there in the same room with them made that a whole lot more enjoyable. (The online game is much more mathy in nature as you can play many more than 10x as many hands per hour, *and* you miss out on some of the physical "tells" which are available in a live setting, meaning that a winning player gravitates to a more game-theory optimized style rather than an exploitative style which focuses on your immediate opponents. I "get" the math involved online, but I find the live style to be much more entertaining, and as it turns out, lucrative).
For about eighteen months, not long after I got serious about the game, I started skimming $20/week out of my paychecks and only allowed myself to "gamble" (if something was clearly a mathematical losing proposition such as roulette or craps, I wouldn't touch this money, but things with positive expectation such as poker or Zaxxon's football pool were fair game) with that money. If I didn't have money in my bankroll, then I wasn't off playing cards. After that time I had built this bankroll "up" to about $1000 (had I never gambled I think that number would've been closer to (52+26) x $20 = $1600) at which point I decided I didn't need to keep adding to it. So there's the genesis of my seed money.
A few years back the local laws changed and allowed folks to play cash games closer in style to no-limit (our max bet or raise is capped at $100, so if you're only sitting on a stack of $200 chips you're not really all that constrained as to how the spread limit betting works). I was sitting at a $2-$100 spread-limit cash game on Friday April 15, 2011 now seared into all online players' heads as "Black Friday," the day the US Government shut down UB, Full Tilt, and Poker Stars. I had about $100 on Stars, and had (have?) about $180 on Full Tilt. Since I was never enamored with the online game and since I couldn't play it any longer, I sort of transitioned my full energies to the live game. But April through September are pretty outdoorsy months out here, and I was dealing with some rather important things in my personal life, so I didn't Get Serious™ about things until September.
And so September 1, 2011, was when I started writing down notes from every poker session I've played. And I've just about finished off my first notebook. (If we've played poker together in the last seven months, I've probably written down a few words about my impression as to how you play.) I've also got a spreadsheet with some of the more numerical stuff, which is where the graphs and numbers from this post will be generated.
The spreadsheet has 119 rows worth of data from all the games I've played in casinos (Colorado and Las Vegas), local home games, and games I've hosted (17 new entries per month on average). 90 of those entries are tournaments of some sort (roughly 2/3rds of which have taken place in casinos and 1/3rd in home games), which leaves the other 29 entries as cash game sessions. On any given day 1-5 entries could be generated (say MHS and I went up to the casino to play in a noon tournament, I get busted out early and sit in a cash game while she keeps playing in the tournament, then I enter the 3pm tournament while she's still going, I bust out, play cash, and enter the 7pm tournament: that's 5 entries), so I'm not spending more than 15 days/month playing cards. But 8-10 days a month probably wasn't too far off (at least until I returned to a life of gainful employment).
Here's what should be 119 incremental data points across that time frame:
A few things jump out of this right away:
1. That's a lot of ups and downs.
2. More ups than downs though!
3. Take away my five biggest ups and I'm pretty much an even player.
4. Of course, that's the nature of someone who focuses on tournaments: limited downsides (very few large "downs") with opportunities at making infrequent big scores.
The two most recent big jumps (Fri 3/30 and Sun 2/29) are probably worth a bit of discussion. The Sunday tournament saw me buy-in and then rebuy (after I busted out) at $310 a pop each time (!!!!). That's a bit over my head (and would set off some risk of ruin calculators based on how much I have available in my bankroll {which started off on 9/3/11 well above $0}), but I had recently been playing well and I had many hours to kill that day (as my wife was also in town all day doing something else). The decision to buy back in was 100% related to how well I thought I had been playing already that day (I had a pretty good string of unfortunate events which lead up to my getting busted out), and as it turned out it was a good decision. Of 105 entries in that tournament I outlasted 101 people and took the 4th highest prize (we played down to the final 8 then devised a "chop" of the prize pool based on how many chips we had left at that point, I took $3205 out of the prize pool (which was higher than the scheduled 3rd place prize). From that $3205, I'd take out $620 in entry fees, $30 which everyone agreed to give to the player who finished one place out-of-the-money ("the bubble boy"), and $150 in tip (5.9% of my net).
Last Friday I found myself in a weird place. If one is a slave to arbitrary time frames, then March was shaping up to be my second losing month of 2012. In fact, after that big February score, March was shaping up to be *really* negative. So the pressure was on, and apparently I respond well to self-generated pressure. Friday was a good day already: earlier in the month I returned to the working world but now as an hourly employee. Since I can't claim overtime I'm forced to a rigid 40-hours-or-less schedule which frequently sees me not coming back to work on Fridays after lunch. Sometime in mid-morning (while I was still at work) my ostensibly working-from-home wife texted me saying that she was going to be making the 75 minute drive up to the casinos to play in a noon tournament. I got off work around 1pm, and I made the drive up to play in the 3pm tournament. Well by 8:45 pm, we were down to the final 5 players (of the 51 who had entered) and with $3410 left up for grabs in the remaining prize pool (sixth place got $160, which was $70 more than she had bought in for) someone ran the numbers and said that means $682 per person if we wanted to chop. With me sitting on roughly T200,000 in tournament chips (we started with T13k each) I was the big stack at the table, so I took advantage of my nice-guy everybody's buddy live-table persona and didn't have too much trouble convincing the chopees to agree to a $750-$665-$665-$665-$665 chop structure. We had paid 7th place $15 each, I was in for one buy in of $90, and I tipped $45 (7.0% on my net).
Then I went off and degenerately tripled up on the craps table (splitting half my profit with my wife like a good husband should — though there was no way I was sharing any of my poker winnings...). By then we were pretty tired so we went our separate ways on the drive back home (remember she had come up 3 hours ahead of me). I went the long way since it was a nice night and my car likes empty mountainous twisty turny roads. Well it may have liked them a bit too much as the local fuzz pulled me over in Nederland, CO. The officer was extremely respectful and kind, opening his introduction up with "I had you coming into town a 'bit hot,' but you're not going to get a ticket for speeding tonight." He shone his flashlight in my interior (hesitating on my Valentine-1 radar detector) but once he figured out that I hadn't had a drop of alcohol in my system, he was extremely cool about things. Turned out he had an earlier model of my car so we chatted autos for a while, him asking how much I liked it and me saying how much fun it is on the mountain roads, "But only at or below the speed limit, of course, officer." He told me that he didn't care how fast I went as long as I wasn't in his town and then went back to punch in my license and insurance. When he came back I got quite the surprise with his farewell, which I have committed to memory: "You have a good evening, and I just want you to know that there are no officers in the canyon right now."
I've never had an officer, at the end of a traffic stop, imply that I should drive more aggressively between there and my destination. (But I certainly took advantage of it!)
My good mood persisted through Saturday (as Ninyu and MHS can attest), and it didn't hurt that I cashed in both our home poker games last night.
The weird thing is that now that I'm earning an hourly rate, the first calculation I had done, on the spot, after winning that Friday tournament was to turn my profit into a number of hours I'd have had to work at my day job to make the same amount of money. Is that sick? That seems a bit sick to me.
April sees the local "quarter million dollar prize pool" Heartland Poker Tour in the local casino. Both MHS and I are going to give it a run as I feel like I'm seeing the cards pretty well lately. There are $160 and $3-- something qualifier tournaments, and I think the direct buy in (which I won't be doing) is something like $1160.
Some raw numbers (if you don't care, cut away from this post now) based on my tournament play:
@ Casino L, 39 tournaments, $4095 in buy ins (entries, rebuys, add-ons) with an average finish position of 9.0/22.9 players. $555 given out as bubble payments and tips, and $6051 total returned to me in prize money (a net of +$35.92 per tournament entered).
@ Casino G, 15 tournaments, $2040 in buy ins, 16.1/60.5 (avg position/avg num of entries — much more popular room than L). $307 given out voluntarily and $4680 given to me as prize money (a net of +155.53 per tournament entered).
@ Home games, 28 tournaments, $560 in buy ins, 2.8/7.4 position (lots of 1-table tournaments), $12 given out voluntarily, $831 in prize money (net +$9.25 per tournament).
Including the Vegas trip and everything else, I'm at 90 total tournaments with an average net return of $43.40 per tournament. $7053 in buy in amounts, $901 out in voluntary money, $11818 returned to me as prize money. My tournament ROI is 55% over these 90 tournaments including 14.2% of all my profits going out as tips (64% ROI had I never tipped). On average 31% of my opponents finish better than I do (though I think a graphical depiction of this % finish better than me may make more sense, typically only the top 10% of a larger tournament get prize money, so in those finishing better than 85% of the tournament is just as good as finishing better than 0% — and it wastes a whole lot more time!).
