bits and bits

• The dramatic unveiling of Digby was really really cool. I'd put up links to explain it but I don't feel like it now. So I guess that is just an inside comment for people who know what I'm talking about.
• That kind of makes me revert back to a blogger identity crisis that I fall into from time to time. What am I doing? Am I informing? Commenting? Exposing? Ranting? I dunno. I just do whatever I feel like. Is that still a good way to do this.
• I still get ad revenue from poker sites. I play a few hands on Full Tilt every once in a while. I can barely stand to watch WSOP coverage on ESPN. I still enjoy High Stakes Poker though.
• Speaking of TV, the new season of Man vs Wild started last week. Bear Grylls is awesome. Les Shroud on Survivorman is also awesome, but I haven't seen any new shows from him in a while.
• Brice Lord introduced me to....
  

time to wake up

I've lost $2600 so far this week. I've spewed away over 250 big bets in about 5,000 hands. And I decided to play some $10/20 this week, so some of that is at double my normal stakes.

So, let's put things in perspective. This is my 2006:



Yeah, after this week I've won $1,000 so far this year. Pretty awe-inspiring.

This week is once again forcing me to stop and do some serious self-evaluation. I can't hide any more from the following observations:

• I'm not making a very good living from poker.
  
• I don't seem to be improving.
  
• I'm not enjoying the game, or this lifestyle, nearly as much at I used to.
  

This is leading me to form these theories:

• I'm not good enough at poker to make a living from it.
• I'm never going to get any better. I'm maxed out.
• I hate poker, and I hated my old job. So I need to figure something else out.

Of course, I've known myself to overreact to downswings before, so I'm not jumping to conclusions right now. But I need to get serious about this in a hurry.

Commence serious rant.

From time to time I've observed that I tend to live my life as if I'm waiting for something to happen to me, instead of making something happen for myself. That's how I've been with poker too. I read stories about guys who were just grinding along at low limits and then one day something just clicks and they start crushing their game and soon they're playing $100/200 and winning 6 figures in a month. Its like I've been just sitting around waiting for that to happen to me. What the fuck? What a terrible approach.

How am I going to get make myself get better? Yeah I've read a couple books once or twice. Yeah I spend a lot of time reading poker forums. But I don't REALLY think about that stuff. I don't REALLY try to learn. I just kind of put it in front of my eyes and go through the motions without any heart behind it. I don't go back through my hand histories after a session and look for mistakes I made. I don't bust out a calculator and figure out if I had the odds to make that call.

At some point I stopped thinking about poker. I stopped working at it. I rarely put my opponents on hands. I mostly just play my own cards and hope I'm playing profitably. Sometimes I'll notice that a players stats look really bad, and so then I assume I'm better than them. Mostly I just isolate and then call down. I'm not playing poker, its like I'm playing Marco Polo and just treading water in the corner of the pool hoping the blind idiot doesn't bump into me. God forbid I actually swim around.

Going through the motions doesn't cut it in the real real world like it does in the fake real world (corporate world). Hell, going through the motions puts you on the fast track to success in the corporate world. People pretend to be busy all day, then they even stay in the office late to make it look like they're working reallllllly hard. Questioning the way things are done is more likely to get you scolded than rewarded. So you just sit at your desk and find ways to make your boss think that you're better than the guy sitting next to you. But your boss doesn't care because he's thinking of ways to make his boss think he's better than the guy in the office next to his.
When I lose, I assume bad luck is to blame. I'm playing well so it must be bad variance! So I'll make it up in volume! I'll play more tables and more hours! Who am I trying to convince? I've got hundreds of thousands of hands now, and they say that I'm winning at most 1BB/100 hands, and showing no sign of improvement from a year ago. I probably play even worse when I play more tables, and I certainly don't learn anything.

All of this makes perfect sense. I didn't quit my job to play poker, I quit my job because I didn't like it. When I quit, my idea was that I could pay the bills playing 20 hours per week and use the extra time to figure out what the hell to do with my life. And I've done the first part - I've won barely enough to pay my bills this whole time - but I haven't done the 2nd part. I don't know what I want to do with my life.

At some point I just started saying "I'm a poker player" and that was what I was doing with my life. Except I never actually have approached it that way. From time to time I've made token efforts to fix some problem but I've never truly approached poker like I'm running my own business and I have only myself to answer to.

Hopefully this latest loss has shocked me into coherence. I need to do 2 things really quickly. First I have to start devoting some time to figuring out what I plan to do with my life, both for the next few years and beyond. And second, I need to figure out a better way to approach poker as long as it is going to be my primary income source.

It has been almost a year since I quit that job. In some ways I've been living the dream. But I think it is time to wake up.

As prescribed

The inevitable carnage since the last post:

heat continues

I'm on a tear in this $5/10 6max game on Party. Obviously there's a healthy amount of good luck at work here. But some of the credit has to be given to my new and improved game selection methods. This post on an excellent poker blog describes a similar process to what I've been using. Don't read that guy's posts if you play in my games though.

Anyway, I don't like to post what is basically a brag, but I do it because:
1) I complain a lot, so I should give some space to the good times.
2) A brag post is 100% guaranteed to initiate a 200bb downward correction, something I certainly deserve.

short term is pretty

Last Thursday, for some reason I decided to sit in the Party $5/10 6max game for some reason. That particular game had always given me fits, but it was good to me this week. If I could maintain a third of this winrate over 50,000 hands I'd be beyond thrilled.

Need to get used to 30BB swings

A pair of short sessions today, both are 3-tabling.

A little over an hour this morning:



An hour this afternoon:

Cool... shit ... yay!!

3 tables of $5/10 6max on Party. 7:30am to 9am today. Why bother with coffee?

Add on the next session

I've said it before and I'll say it again: I swear a fucking miracle happens every single hand in these games. I sit down and instantly suffer an unspeakable string of beats. I guess it is because every player takes any remote semblance of a hand all the way to showdown no matter what.

You'd think that with those conditions I'd

1.) be able to win
2.) not cry like a 6 year old girl about every bad beat.

Unfortunately I can't accomplish either of those. Why do I keep torturing myself?

Party 6max

I'm always complaining about Party's 6-max games. I like to imagine that I'm the most unlucky man alive, but I'm sure I've been doing something wrong. This chart is from a 2 hour session at $5/10 this morning, and illustrates how severe the swings are in this game. I'm sure players who frequent the shorthanded tables could show you even more severe variance. It makes it pretty easy to get frustrated. Note that if I had given up after an hour, the tone of this post would be a lot less playful.