The Dangers of Google, Life since May

Well, you didn't call

So, I'd forgotten about this blog. Apparently it's associated with my name, and the first hit on google. My mother, wondering what I was up to, googled me the other day, and saw the last post (with the word "busto" prominently in the title), and through a series of inferences that made sense to a worried mother determined that I was a hopeless gambling addict frittering away my meager graduate student income at the felt.

That's what I get for leaving a blog in my name on the internets.

Fortunately, she's wrong. Since forgetting about this blog completely, I've turned into a solid tight-aggressive poker player and am making a lot of money, consistently, playing cards.


Life since May

In June, I started with $500 on Carbon Poker. I stuck to .10c/.25c poker ($25 buy in) micro-stakes games. I pretty quickly worked up to $1,000, enough to comfortably play .25/.50c ($50 buy-in) poker. By July I was rolled for .50/1 ($100NL) games, took a shot, and kept going up.

I'm beating 100NL at the moment for around 8bb/100 hands. A "bb" is the big blind, $1. That means every 100 hands I play, on average, I make $8. This number is the result of playing ~1k hands a day since June, so about 90,000 hands of poker.

Since that time, I've worked my account up to around $8,000. I have taken some shots at 1/2 ($200NL), but the players there are substantially better than the players at $100NL, and I will wait until I am better to beat those games. I don't want to fall victim to the Peter Principle and rise quickly to my level of incompetence, and it's no blow to my ego to admit that there are a lot of good professional players out there in the low-stakes games who are better than me by a fair margin.

It's very bad to think in terms of "hourly rates" in the short term, but I play about 400 hands per hour right now (8 tables of full ring), putting my at about $32/hour, which is very comfortable.


Tools of the Trade

For those in my family (or anywhere) who are skeptical that poker is a game of skill, you're wrong, and no gut intuitions or instincts on your part can make that otherwise. Insisting that poker is gambling and not a game of skill is like insisting that .9 repeating isn't equal to one, or that there isn't a difference in the cardinality of countable and uncountable infinities. It's a strategy game, like chess or go, with an element of chance that vanishes over the long term. Dad, I know you TA'd statistics, so you should understand when I assert that the law of large numbers is the best friend of a winning poker player.

I'm a professional student, and I'm good at learning fast. I've developed the skills and knowledge it takes to win money at this game over time (actually a period of about a year). I used to be an obsessive chess, then go player. Poker for me is like either of these, and occupies an identical place in my life (I also used to win cash tournaments at the castle club in Minneapolis, if it matters). I win at present, over the long run, not because I am lucky, but because I am simply better at the game than the subset of the competition I choose to play.

I've become a winning poker through 3 tools, principally. The first is the 2+2 poker forums, where players post hands and ask for criticism and advice (among other things). The second is the coaching videos at deucescracked.com, which have helped me exploit weak play from others much more clinically and consistently. The third are books written by poker professionals, most significantly David Sklansky's Theory of Poker and Dan Harrington's Cash Games books.

Poker and Life

I don't think poker is the best thing ever. It's a game with a silly name (poker? seriously?) that also happens to provide a very modest source of part-time income. I enjoy it for what it is. I plan to continue to play it until it ceases to be useful.

If all goes well, I will be beating 1/2 for a good rate by the beginning of 2009. I'll try to keep this updated as time goes on.

Tomorrow

Tomorrow will be the first day of an era of uninterrupted discipline. I wake up to my first shot at my $500 roll on Absolute.

I will play 4 tables of 6-max 25NL.

My schedule will be two hours on, two hours off, for three sessions.

Good luck, play well. Remember to meditate between hours, eat well, stay comfortable, and not play tired or stupid. Easy. Will post graphs.

How I Roll: Strategy Session I

I'm presently running 16/8/3 after 12k hands of 25NL, and I'm averaging about +4.5BB/100. All-in-all, I'm very happy with this situation. I think that my preflop leaks are pretty marginal, and I'm applying pressure positionally on the flop, collecting a lot of small pots in position.

By far my biggest leak is not shutting down on the turn and river when I should. There are far too many situations when I either:

Catch a hand OOP, donk into a pf aggressor, get raised, call. Donk again, get raised, call; repeat.
Catch a hand as an IP aggressor, get check-raised, call. Donked, call. Massive monkey-donk on river, call. In other words, I lose most of my chips in the worst possible way: to someone shouting in my face that they have a hand.

These are the kinds of situations where, if I had paid more attention to the action at the table, I might have had a sufficiently clear read on my opponent to shut down instead of donating a hard-earned stack.

There are different kinds of aggression in poker, and at the level I'm playing, most of it is scripted, because people aren't worried about table image or long-term meta-game, they just want to make the "high-percentage play" and get paid off in the long-run. This is obviously exploitable by anyone who reads the same books.

Swing and a Miss: Busto at Month Two

Hello. Among other things, I recently took a crack at learning poker. I am, to date, a failure at it, but this is consistent with expectations. I'm a young, college-educatedwhite male; that is to say I'm egotistical, insecure, impatient, and inattentive, four of the worst possible traits a poker player can have.

A short account of my first shot at poker, to explain where I am now:

This March, I deposited $200 onto Full Tilt Poker, and turned it into $500 in about a month of casually 6-tabling $0.25NL. I also became an avid poker reader, starting with three of Harrington's Hold 'Em books (two on tournaments, the first one on cash games), and started posting in the 2+2 poker forums.

About a month in, I hit a pretty bad run, and my bankroll sank to $220 over the course of two weeks. I realized that I had to step down to $0.10NL to not risk going busto, so I did, and I continued to run bad for another week, breaking about even over 10k hands at the ultra-micro limits. One fateful friday night I made the severe mistake of going on "tournament tilt" out of frustration, further kicking my ass down to ~$50 in one night.

That's where I am now. About two months in and more or less busto. On the one hand, I'm incredibly embarrassed by my behavior. On the other, I think this is probably the lightest possible way to learn what tilt can do, and what the psychology of even a very small downswing can feel like.

I plan to write a lot more about tilt as this blog progresses because I find it so fascinating. I am by nature a relatively sedate person, but poker is sort of like driving. Everyone who isn't you is a dipshit when you're on tilt, and their idiot plays make you MAD. This, despite the fact that their idiot plays are supposed to make you HELL OF PROFIT. It's not only completely illogical, it's completely ass-backwards.

So now I have $500 on Absolute Poker (a poor choice in retrospect), $150 in rakeback coming from Full Tilt, and a few days to reflect on my game before customer service at Absolute validates my account.