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.