peterbirks (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
peterbirks) wrote2006-05-24 01:16 pm
peterbirks) wrote2006-05-24 01:16 pm
Three blog light
In the land of karma-esque blog-surfing, I came across three blog entries today, out of three, which in a way referred to what is going on in my head.
Red Simon, noting a profit of $400 for the year, posted that I am bankrolled for 5/10 but I seem stuck in a 2/4 3/6 mindset.
.
He's referring to PLO8, but he might as well be writing about me. And his $400 puts into context my own bitching at being 20% light of my target for $5,000 by the end of May.
ThreeBet summed up for me what I think is a significant an unappreciated factor in Poker. Those who get to the top quickly have been lucky. That doesn't mean that they aren't good. But they've been lucky. I think that there are a significant number of players who could have got to the top, but were not lucky. And these people gave up and went elsewhere. Or these guys got lucky for a short while and then hit a run of bad luck. Some of these people played at too high a level for too long, busted out, and have never been heard from again. The more persistent dropped back to a lower level. Some of these people then stayed at the lower level (they'd seen what it was like up there during a bad run, and they didn't like it), while some others rebuild and give it another shot.
Similarly, I was lucky when I started playing Limit, whereas I was unlucky in tournaments. I was bad at both. But my luck carried me through at Limit and, when things turned sour, I had the funds to get me through my "improving time". Meanwhile, at Tournaments, I got fed up with the bad beats and I quit them as a serious proposition. Luck, as it were, made me a Limit player.
Anyway, ThreeBet has taken up No Limit, and his comments on this are relevant.
Anyways, I really feel like I'm approaching NL much like I used to approach limit when I did 2/4 and 3/6 limit online. I'm very wary about moving up. I always feel like if I won or have been winning for a while it's just luck and it'll all come crashing down soon.
I still haven't had the convincing string of wins that I would have at limit. At NL, the wins are supposed to be large and the losses rather small and sporadic. Well my wins are bigger than my losses, but still not overly large. And my losses seem to occur more frequently than some good NL players experience. Although many of those can usually be traced back to that one bad call, or one bad attempted bluff.
Certainly it should be expected that I'm not as good as guys who've been playing NL like I used to play limit. But it would be nice to just have that one day like I had with limit where all of a sudden I was winning and winning regularly for 18+ months.
If you play a sufficient number of hours and you are sufficiently better than the game, you should win most months at Limit. If you are a lot better than the game and you play a lot of hands, you should win roughly the same amount each month at Limit. It isn't "running lucky". You just play enough each month for most of the volatility to wear itself out.
Of course, once you reach the much higher stakes (as ThreeBet did at $80-$160) then, even though you may have an edge of 1BB an hour, the volatility is likely to be such that even 20,000 hands in the month might see a range of a few thousand loss to more than ten thousand won.
But the line that rings so true with me is that, at the moment if I win at $5-$10, it's just luck and it'll all come crashing down soon. I don't have confidence in the game (except at Virgin) to be convinced that my wins are what they should be. And the numbers bear me out. I'm marginally down at $5-$10 this year. The statistics (over a not very big sample) indicate that, as with many players, I can make my money at the rakeback, but I'm only breaking even at the table. I could eliminate this by focusing on the good Virgin gmes when they appear, but that leaves the problem of what to do the rest of the time. hence the thought about clearing the Full Tilt bonus.
The third relevant post was from my good friend Law School Dropout, who recently cleaned up $20K in a day. Nice work if you can get it. But he makes this important point:
I've spent countless hours reading a slew of books, learn about the latest electronic tools like PT, PAH and others, analyzing my game for leaks, and practicing, practicing, practicing. But the fact of the matter is that the vast majority of online poker players don't go to these lengths, and even the more time-consuming efforts of players such as myself pale starkly when compared to the long and dedicated hours my law school peers will be required to put in at their firm jobs.
Now, I thought to myself. Yup, I'm one of the vast majority that doesn't go to these lengths. But, then I thought to myself. Hell, I have a JOB.
Later in the same post, LSD, to initialize his name, posted that "I have been extraordinarily fortunate that poker and my internet business have provided me with a decent income stream without ever having to subject myself to 12 to 16-hour days, but at times like this I like to reaffirm my contempt for complacency".
I thought to myself, shit, when did I last not have a 12 to 16-hour day (and I include Saturday and Sunday here)? It's all very well LSD talking about "countless hours", but these are student countless hours. Meanwhile, I'm getting up at 5.30 in the morning, making my sandwiches, going to work, doing a full day, coming home, and then, and only then, can my "poker day" begin. I'm knocking in 100-hours plus a month at a game and I'm holding down a full-time job at the same time.
And not only that, but I have my washing, and ironing, and flat-cleaning to do. I have other things in life which are work in the sense that I don't like doing them, but they have to be done. If I didn't have a full-time job, if I didn't live alone in a relatively large place and have loads of those petty pain-like things to do, then I could devote countless hours to the studying and the practising.
As it is at the moment, I haven't watched TV in a week. Most of my spare time is spent doing what I do at work -- sitting in front of a computer. About 90% of my spare time is devoted to poker. Already, apart from poker and work, I have virtually no life. And on top of this, I'm meant to spend many hours studying and practising?
Well, obviously, it isn't possible. So, the answer has to be, play less, and earn less, with the hope of a longer-term reward from the reading and the practising. I can't, literally, physically, can't, add extra poker things on to a life which is virtually barren apart from work and poker.
Malmuth makes a point in one of his poker essays that many professionals eat, sleep and drink poker. He calls it a 24-hour job, but without taking this point one step forward. If that's the case, then it's one hell of a shitty job unless you love doing it. And the thing about any job that you "love" doing is, unless you are a very perverse kind of character, you aren't going to love doing it for long if it has to be a 24-hour job.
I think that this was something that I was referring to in the previous post. What exactly is my attitude here? How committed am I? Am I the type that says "Once it stops being fun, it's time to quit"? Or am I the type who says "who said that this was meant to be fun? Getting to be the best at anything isn't fun. Now, get your arse in gear and start working harder at your game!"
And my answer to that is; I just don't know. Part of me wants to quit. Part of me wants to carry on earning $1,000 a month at $2-$4, just seeing it as a menial but relatively easy job that happens to take up a lot of my spare time. And a third part of me wants to become even more obsessed, reading everything and practising, practising, practising.
And, to make matters worse, not only do I not know what I want to do, I don't even know which would be best for me to do.
I think what I would like is to play $5-$10, and to be stonkingly lucky for three months. That's not too greedy. That would get me into the zone of the game and give me the comfort.
However, this wish is on a par with threebet's finishing comment.
I guess while I'm at it, it would be nice to have a Ferrari, a beachfront mansion and a supermodel girlfriend, too.
Red Simon, noting a profit of $400 for the year, posted that I am bankrolled for 5/10 but I seem stuck in a 2/4 3/6 mindset.
.
He's referring to PLO8, but he might as well be writing about me. And his $400 puts into context my own bitching at being 20% light of my target for $5,000 by the end of May.
ThreeBet summed up for me what I think is a significant an unappreciated factor in Poker. Those who get to the top quickly have been lucky. That doesn't mean that they aren't good. But they've been lucky. I think that there are a significant number of players who could have got to the top, but were not lucky. And these people gave up and went elsewhere. Or these guys got lucky for a short while and then hit a run of bad luck. Some of these people played at too high a level for too long, busted out, and have never been heard from again. The more persistent dropped back to a lower level. Some of these people then stayed at the lower level (they'd seen what it was like up there during a bad run, and they didn't like it), while some others rebuild and give it another shot.
Similarly, I was lucky when I started playing Limit, whereas I was unlucky in tournaments. I was bad at both. But my luck carried me through at Limit and, when things turned sour, I had the funds to get me through my "improving time". Meanwhile, at Tournaments, I got fed up with the bad beats and I quit them as a serious proposition. Luck, as it were, made me a Limit player.
Anyway, ThreeBet has taken up No Limit, and his comments on this are relevant.
Anyways, I really feel like I'm approaching NL much like I used to approach limit when I did 2/4 and 3/6 limit online. I'm very wary about moving up. I always feel like if I won or have been winning for a while it's just luck and it'll all come crashing down soon.
I still haven't had the convincing string of wins that I would have at limit. At NL, the wins are supposed to be large and the losses rather small and sporadic. Well my wins are bigger than my losses, but still not overly large. And my losses seem to occur more frequently than some good NL players experience. Although many of those can usually be traced back to that one bad call, or one bad attempted bluff.
Certainly it should be expected that I'm not as good as guys who've been playing NL like I used to play limit. But it would be nice to just have that one day like I had with limit where all of a sudden I was winning and winning regularly for 18+ months.
If you play a sufficient number of hours and you are sufficiently better than the game, you should win most months at Limit. If you are a lot better than the game and you play a lot of hands, you should win roughly the same amount each month at Limit. It isn't "running lucky". You just play enough each month for most of the volatility to wear itself out.
Of course, once you reach the much higher stakes (as ThreeBet did at $80-$160) then, even though you may have an edge of 1BB an hour, the volatility is likely to be such that even 20,000 hands in the month might see a range of a few thousand loss to more than ten thousand won.
But the line that rings so true with me is that, at the moment if I win at $5-$10, it's just luck and it'll all come crashing down soon. I don't have confidence in the game (except at Virgin) to be convinced that my wins are what they should be. And the numbers bear me out. I'm marginally down at $5-$10 this year. The statistics (over a not very big sample) indicate that, as with many players, I can make my money at the rakeback, but I'm only breaking even at the table. I could eliminate this by focusing on the good Virgin gmes when they appear, but that leaves the problem of what to do the rest of the time. hence the thought about clearing the Full Tilt bonus.
The third relevant post was from my good friend Law School Dropout, who recently cleaned up $20K in a day. Nice work if you can get it. But he makes this important point:
I've spent countless hours reading a slew of books, learn about the latest electronic tools like PT, PAH and others, analyzing my game for leaks, and practicing, practicing, practicing. But the fact of the matter is that the vast majority of online poker players don't go to these lengths, and even the more time-consuming efforts of players such as myself pale starkly when compared to the long and dedicated hours my law school peers will be required to put in at their firm jobs.
Now, I thought to myself. Yup, I'm one of the vast majority that doesn't go to these lengths. But, then I thought to myself. Hell, I have a JOB.
Later in the same post, LSD, to initialize his name, posted that "I have been extraordinarily fortunate that poker and my internet business have provided me with a decent income stream without ever having to subject myself to 12 to 16-hour days, but at times like this I like to reaffirm my contempt for complacency".
I thought to myself, shit, when did I last not have a 12 to 16-hour day (and I include Saturday and Sunday here)? It's all very well LSD talking about "countless hours", but these are student countless hours. Meanwhile, I'm getting up at 5.30 in the morning, making my sandwiches, going to work, doing a full day, coming home, and then, and only then, can my "poker day" begin. I'm knocking in 100-hours plus a month at a game and I'm holding down a full-time job at the same time.
And not only that, but I have my washing, and ironing, and flat-cleaning to do. I have other things in life which are work in the sense that I don't like doing them, but they have to be done. If I didn't have a full-time job, if I didn't live alone in a relatively large place and have loads of those petty pain-like things to do, then I could devote countless hours to the studying and the practising.
As it is at the moment, I haven't watched TV in a week. Most of my spare time is spent doing what I do at work -- sitting in front of a computer. About 90% of my spare time is devoted to poker. Already, apart from poker and work, I have virtually no life. And on top of this, I'm meant to spend many hours studying and practising?
Well, obviously, it isn't possible. So, the answer has to be, play less, and earn less, with the hope of a longer-term reward from the reading and the practising. I can't, literally, physically, can't, add extra poker things on to a life which is virtually barren apart from work and poker.
Malmuth makes a point in one of his poker essays that many professionals eat, sleep and drink poker. He calls it a 24-hour job, but without taking this point one step forward. If that's the case, then it's one hell of a shitty job unless you love doing it. And the thing about any job that you "love" doing is, unless you are a very perverse kind of character, you aren't going to love doing it for long if it has to be a 24-hour job.
I think that this was something that I was referring to in the previous post. What exactly is my attitude here? How committed am I? Am I the type that says "Once it stops being fun, it's time to quit"? Or am I the type who says "who said that this was meant to be fun? Getting to be the best at anything isn't fun. Now, get your arse in gear and start working harder at your game!"
And my answer to that is; I just don't know. Part of me wants to quit. Part of me wants to carry on earning $1,000 a month at $2-$4, just seeing it as a menial but relatively easy job that happens to take up a lot of my spare time. And a third part of me wants to become even more obsessed, reading everything and practising, practising, practising.
And, to make matters worse, not only do I not know what I want to do, I don't even know which would be best for me to do.
I think what I would like is to play $5-$10, and to be stonkingly lucky for three months. That's not too greedy. That would get me into the zone of the game and give me the comfort.
However, this wish is on a par with threebet's finishing comment.
I guess while I'm at it, it would be nice to have a Ferrari, a beachfront mansion and a supermodel girlfriend, too.
What Do You Want Out of Poker and What Are You Willing To Do To Get It?
(Anonymous) 2006-05-24 02:06 pm (UTC)(link)I think the real decision for you here is indeed to figure out what you want out of poker. If your desire is to have a suplemental income, and one that actually means something to you which $1K a month probably doesn't for the amount of time it takes, then you will indeed have to keep studying and trying to improve so as to build a bankroll and achieve the necessary skills to play higher where a more meaningful earn can be had. But realistically, some kind of time frame should be set for this so that it isn't a lifelong and lifewasting effort.
And if on the other hand, you want to play poker primarily for entertainment, albeit a winning one, then the obvious course of action is to severely curtail your play, possibly even limiting it to live play so as to also get some social benefit from it. The plain fact of the matter is that not everyone is cut out to be either a pro player or even a highly skilled amateur.
I am like the player Mason mentions, in that I eat, live and breathe poker. But of course it is my fulltime "job". Even so, I try not to play on Sundays, primarily for religious reasons, but also to have a break, and I try to allocate time every day to read non-poker books or watch some TV or something, or even go out with friends. Nonetheless, when I go to bed each day, I usually fall asleep thinking about some poker problem.
Best wishes on figuring out what part you want poker to play in your life (of course you could try to win the lotto and be able to play fulltime with no financial worries as to what the results were :) ).
BluffTHIS!
Re: What Do You Want Out of Poker and What Are You Willing To Do To Get It?
For the past few years I've been fairly diligently applying my dictum that "it's fairly easy to make a lot of money if all you want to do is make a lot of money". Having had periods (relatively) recently when I have been goddammed poor, I still remember them with vivid freshness.
I wonder if perhaps I'm moving to a different life stage and I have to allocate a lower relevance to the "how much money will this make me" question and more relevance to the "how much will I enjoy this" question.
But, your analysis is right. And if you can find the right question, you are often well on the way to finding the right answer.
{PJ}
Sticking with it
I guess there will come a point in time when you do cut back on your poker playing but external things will lead to that. Just as your poker drives out the TV watching, so something else will curtail the poker. It isn't practical to say, "I will cut down the poker and fill my increased leisure time with an unspecified leisure activity". That's not how it works.
From what I glean from your tables and variances and all that crap, you don't consistently make money at a faster rate out of being more or less committed to playing poker. Playing tired and playing when you psycologically shouldn't, seem to have an effect but sheer volume doesn't enter into it.
I think you'd be happier playing less and studying more because I think you are not playing to make money, you're trying to understand and conquer the systems. You want to play well and win, not play lucky and win. So study and practise in lieu of playing is fine - just get out and smell the roses a bit from time to time.
It actually points up why I will never have any interest in playing poker online or otherwise and it goes to a different approach to games. I don't actually care much about winning and losing games so long as the experience is enjoyable and I'd rather be lucky than good. Of course I know myself to have an addictive personality so I think I'm wise to find excuses not to stick even a toe in the water. I'm guessing that playing online poker in search of being lucky is not a healthy pursuit.
Re: Sticking with it
The analysis is partly just me. It's more than "keeping score". I'm sure there are many poker players, probably the majority, who just sit down to play and keep no records at all.
Yes, you might also be right on the playing less and studying more. what might have been going wrong was that I was becoming target-oriented rather than a more abstract "performance oriented". In poker, money is "just a way of keeping score". But what I think I had started to iss was that it was not the only way of keeping score. Mikey has a slightly different attitude. Trying to win, but also trying to expand your range of abilities at different games. I was focusing too much on the bottom line this month.
In shore, I was falling into the trap often fallen into by many UK companies, fund managers and analysts.
PJ
no subject
"Poker is going to buy me ready made sarnies from M&S every day this month" and see if your quality of life feels any better as a result?
"Poker is sending me upper class on Virgin to Vegas in 3 months."
Or go the whole hog with a mini-mid-life crisis and buy a vintage sports car and let poker make the repayments?
I don't know if that appeals to your mindset or not, but perhaps it forces you to appreciate the difference that being a winning player can make to your life. Just earning a nondescript grand a month doesn't quite sound the same?
no subject
PJ
no subject
(Anonymous) 2006-05-24 06:14 pm (UTC)(link)Just wish I had more time to play, I might even make more than $100 a month then, but its nothing more than a way of passing time most nights rather than a alternative source of money of "a job".
redsimon
no subject
Surely the required bankroll for a winner at $5-$10 Limit O8 is about a thousand bucks?
PJ
Study What?
Here is a discussion on a study course in Security algorithms.
One of the characteristics of the poker literature is that generally, it is designed to be non-challenging.
For comparison, look at the interviews with Seidel, Harrington, Lederer etc about the Mayfair Club, and the seminars in poker conducted afterwards.
I've been thinking about playing PLO again, and I realised that I wouldn't play unless I had a 1,000 hands by a winning player to analyse, since the level of the literature I've read firmly refuses to rise above "Be careful when you are beaten".
I see a crying need for a poker study circles either online or locally. I definitely got the feeling that the Gutshot internet cafe fills this role informally, but I too have a job which prevents me spending time there.
Does anyone in London fancy meeting up say the first Monday of the month for a study circle?
Re: Study What?
(Anonymous) 2006-05-25 01:01 am (UTC)(link)Having spent some significant time there, I must regrettably inform you that the likelihood of receiving any intelligent input from the denizens of the Gutshot Internet Cafe is an extreme example of wishful thinking.
Re: Study What?
The only time I've spent time there, I saw one of the players playing Backgammon. I can't speak for his poker, but he was a live one against me (as he recognised after I'd taken a few bob off him: he simply quit rather than play on after an hour.)
And I'm a live one to most of the decent BG players. God help his poker.
So, where would a seeker after poker truth go to learn in the UK?
no subject
(Anonymous) 2006-05-26 10:32 am (UTC)(link)I must apologise for not posting here more often. I do read your stuff, but my inspiration levels are so low for most forms of online interaction that I *have* to leave it almost entirely for my blog or my bolt is very much shot :(
I think you seem to be suffering a bit from the ennui that you commented on other suffering this year. I don't think this is unusual. Most poker players go through some version of this if they are self aware at all. I would make one comment which I've noticed over the years. You do seem to fixate too much on the money value of your poker. I'm not sure why as it seem in other areas of your life, like your currency positions, you treat bigger sums of money with much less utility. I do know one thing. You can't play bigger stakes unless you can disassociate the size of the fluctuations from real monetary value. And if you can't do this, don't move up in stakes. Play less and play for fun.
gl
Dave D