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Monday, November 14, 2016

A day in the life...

Hey guys!  I don't have any real updates today so I figured I'd share a couple of stories just to give a sense of what this life is like on a daily basis.  I'm heading to Vegas on Wednesday for a few days and then heading to California for the Patriots @ San Francisco game.  The week after that is Thanksgiving so I likely won't be posting again for a couple of weeks after today.  For those of you who I don't see before then, have a great Thanksgiving!!!

A few weeks ago I was talking to a friend, one who hopefully reads this blog ;-), and I mentioned to him that I had played a 16+ hour session earlier that week.  He asked how it went and I told him that I finished the session down ~$50.  I was a little taken aback by his reaction when he exclaimed "Oh I'm so sorry!!"  While obviously I prefer to win every session that I play, I understand that this is a completely unreasonable expectation, and that all I can realistically do is put myself in the best position to win over the long run.  Much like the stock market, I'm going to have winning days and losing days, but the key to success lies in consistently making smart decisions.  Where the average job should show positive results over a 16 hour span, a job like this one may only show positive results over a 100-200 hour span.

So let me break down exactly why that session was a positive one despite the losing results.  This particular session happened on a day that Foxwoods likes to call "Monday Madness".  Without getting into too much detail, the poker room gives out over $36,000 in bonus money to the players over the course of 12 hours, and it causes a frenzy like no other.  At 1:00 in the afternoon there are close to 100 tables running where there would normally be 20-30 tables running at that time.  I try to never miss Monday Madness, which happens about once a month, because the games are always really good that day.  Unfortunately for me, I went pretty much my entire planned 12 hour session completely card dead, and lost a couple hundred over that time.  

Right around the time I was planning to leave, however, I caught a break in the form of a couple of really great opponents.  We're talking three friends who were all drinking and there to gamble and have a good time.  Needless to say, I never leave a table with this kind of action, and I quickly reloaded my stack to try and extract maximum value.  Well unfortunately for me, I got dealt KK on an early hand and ran it into AA for another $300 hit.  So at this point I was really deep in the hole, but still playing well and still understanding the value of staying at this table as long as these particular opponents were there.  Sure enough, over the course of the next six hours, I was able to win back almost all of my losses from smart play and careful table selection.  I have no way of controlling bad cards, but I do have some control over who my opponents are, and as long as I am constantly aware of this and taking advantage every chance I get, I should continue to be successful in the long run.

In a more extreme example, I encountered a man recently who called himself the "Casino Robin Hood".  He had recently won over $10,000 playing roulette and he was determined to lose a big chunk of it back to the poker players before calling it a night.  I have no idea why he was so excited to do this, but he knew he was losing and he truly didn't care.  Over the course of about 90-minutes he dropped close to $1,500 at my $1/$2 table (which is a very large amount for those stakes) and I was a beneficiary of a large chunk of those funds.  He was literally shoving his entire $100-$300 stacks into the middle before the cards were even dealt.  I don't think I could ever ask for a better opponent.


Anyway, thanks as always for reading, for following along with my journey, and for all of your words of support.  Have an awesome Thanksgiving and I look forward to writing again in a few weeks.  Hopefully I'll have a few stories from the Vegas trip that I'll be able to share ;-)

Monday, November 7, 2016

Grinding Grinding Grinding

So, I know what you're probably thinking.  It's been a long time since my last post... again.  Last time I took a while to write because things weren't going so well and it was difficult to write about what I perceived to be an ongoing failure.  So you're probably thinking that my lack of writing lately means that I've been going through more of the same. I mostly just think this because I've had multiple people approach me to make sure things are going okay.  I didn't understand why they were surprised to hear that things were going great, and then I remembered that the last update they received was a pretty depressing blog post.  Well I'm happy to report that things have started to turn around and I am in a much better place now than I was in a few weeks ago.  I received a ton of words of encouragement from many of you, and I can't thank you all enough for that.

Since I'm an engineer by trade, I figured the best way for me to outline how things are going would be through a labeled plot so we can all analyze some data together.  On the x-axis we've got hours played and on the y we have $ won/lost (I've taken out the actual dollar amounts).  The starting point is sometime in July after I left my job and officially started my professional career.  As you can see, things got off to a really fast start.  I got an unbelievable run of cards, everything went my way, and this was all before I started doing any serious studying.  Then I started to incorporate some studying into my game after about 25 hours of playing time.  If you've read my last blog post, you know how that went.  If you haven't read it, hours 25-100 in the graph below will give you a pretty good idea.  Luckily, things turned around for me after that.


I've put in ~150 hours of playing time since my last post and they have been very profitable.  This past Friday I finally took a shot at playing higher stakes, which is going to be one of the most important things for my progression through this journey.  While I can learn a ton and start to build a bankroll playing $1/$2 blinds, if I ever want to stop living off of my savings, I will need to start crushing $2/$5 games as well.

So, what changed between the last post and this one?  I think the answer lies in my constant persistence and working efficiently rather than trying to do too much at once.  When I first started studying I told myself that I needed to put in 4 hours of studying per day followed by 4 hour of playing per day.  It was brutal.  I dreaded the long study sessions, tried to cram too much information at once, and by the time I got to the tables I had too many new concepts that I tried to implement at the same time.  Then I remembered a little tidbit that I had read in countless poker blogs but failed to implement myself.  The best way to learn poker is to play poker.  So I started to play poker more.  I focused on hitting 30-40 hours / week of playing time, with 5-10 hours of study time.  All of a sudden I had motivation for everything.  I could really focus on learning a new concept with a 1-2 hour study session, and now I get to spend more time playing the game that I actually love playing.  It is amazingly easy to stick with a routine when you look forward to every part of the routine....
- Wake up sometime around noon
- Make food and study for a few hours hours
- Go to the rock gym & climb / workout for a few hours
- Head to Foxwoods and play until 4am
- Head home and sleep
- Rinse & Repeat every Tuesday - Saturday

This is my new grind.  I feel as busy, if not busier than I felt when I was working the 9 to 5 job, but now I'm loving every second of it.  My apologies for leaving everybody hanging after the last post, but this time I'm going to attribute it to just being busy and constantly grinding.  I have a few fun stories to share, but this post is starting to get long so I'll save those for next time and hopefully use that as motivation to post a little more often.