As a professional poker player, it feels like there are two separate times each year to make new year’s resolutions. The first is the same as when everyone else does: January 1st, New Year’s Day. The second is at the end of the event that everyone looks forward to throughout the rest of the year, the biggest poker festival in the world: The WSOP. It feels like such a culmination of efforts, excitement, heartbreak and expectations and is a true finale of the year’s events. The rapid fire schedule of potentially life-changing tournaments, combined with the busiest cash game days on the calendar in Las Vegas, makes for an exhausting six weeks of poker.
I’m always eager for the WSOP to start and, about 75% of the way through the schedule of events, eager for it to end. Traditionally, this is the only time of year where I register for the poker lottery, aka no limit hold ’em tournaments. While there is nothing more exciting in poker than being deep in a tournament, it is also the most high variance and both mentally and physically draining of the two main variants. Cash games provide the ultimate flexibility in start and stop times, while tournaments are the complete opposite. If you want to completely remove the invention that is the alarm clock from your life, be a cash game poker player.
I fired at 5 lotteries tournaments during the WSOP:
WSOP $565 Colossus – 731st place for $4027
WSOP $1500 Monster Stack – dnc
WSOP $235 Daily Deepstack – dnc
Venetian DSE $600 – 13th place for $3275
WPT500 $565 – 164th place for $1667
In the cash games between May 27th and July 10th, I put in 203 hours of work and showed a profit at a rate of about $72/hr. The majority of my sessions were 5/10 at the Bellagio, with some 2/5 mixed in around town, as well as a couple 1/2 games at the Golden Nugget for a change of scenery. Total profits during my 2015 WSOP comes to $20.1k.
