Andrew

What is the “long term” in live poker? It isn’t rhetorical… I would seriously like to know your opinion.

The short and medium term has been good to me. Ever since moving up to 2/5 full time, I’ve taken each hand much more seriously than when I was putting in all those hours at 1/3 where both the competition and the stakes made me extremely bored. That, combined with endless hand discussions with friends (more on that later), combined with some good old-fashioned run good has resulted in me having very good months lately, and January was no different.

The Bellagio has been my home base. Despite it’s shortcomings, particularly regarding customer service and especially when compared to other top quality rooms such as Aria and the Wynn, I can’t disregard the results. Since the start of 2013 I’m averaging well over 10bb’s an hour in the Bellagio 2/5NL games, over 476 hours. A lot of those hours (the ~50 earliest) were very poorly played compared to my current game, mainly because I was still making adjustments while trying to move up in stakes. So when I exclude those hours from the stats, the hourly ticks up further.

I’ve been through horrific downswings and written about those. I’ll throw in a #nojinxs hashtag and hope for the best here. But I’m just wondering when this 2/5 hourly rate that currently displays in my Poker Journal app will be considered legit. Wondering when I can breathe a little easier, knowing we aren’t just having a one time menage with the variance mistress and lady luck while both are in a good mood. Keep the Bellagio Cocktails coming.

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I just got home after playing my final session of 2013 at the Bellagio. I used to really dislike playing there. It was always cramped, and the floor guys were unwelcoming. These days, the poker room is slightly less cramped after they removed a few of the tables. Still kinda cramped though. And the floor guys are, I guess, a little more welcoming. Most of them. But I’ve found a sense of comfort and confidence playing in the 2/5 games at the B. See here, from tonight:

I straddle, and utg raises to $25. It folds around to me and I call with 10 10. The flop is Js9c3s, and I check. My opponent tries to bet $50, but blatantly string bets and the dealer pushes half of his bet back to him. I call. The turn brings the Ad. Not my favorite card as more of utg’s range is now in front of my tens, and he continues with an actual bet of $50 this time. I still call. The river is a brick: the 2c. I check one last time, and my opponent grabs a stack of reds and places his $100 bet in the middle. He kind of has to have an A, a set, or some sort of bluff… I don’t think he’s good enough to bet KJ or KK here. Sets are hard to make, but an A makes a lot of sense. Doesn’t feel right though. Feels weird. So yeah, I call. He flips 88, we scoop.

When you make a call in that kind of river spot, it isn’t all that different from getting it in with QQ vs AK preflop. You’re a small favorite (in this case, I think physical tells combined with betsizing and player type analysis gives me an edge), but you’re gonna lose a decent percentage of the time. But for the past 3 months or so, my hero calls have felt more like getting it in with AA vs AK. Some people think confidence is overrated, and that you should be able to play optimally without that kind of intangible force. I think being in the zone is huge. Of course, running good helps too.

I certainly haven’t ran bad over the last few months. This, combined with what I hope is good play, has allowed me to put up a solid hourly rate of $56/hr over the past 500 hours of live 2/5 no limit holdem. It’s good enough to firmly plant myself as a 2/5 reg with hopes of taking shots at 5/10 in the somewhat near future. I’ve been in this position, at least monetarily, before. It’s easy to forget that poker will always be a grind when things are going good. But this time I’m going to tell myself to stay in the moment and to keep working hard. I also have statistics on my side this time. Nobody knows what exactly the long term is in live poker, but the number of hours I’ve put in feel like tools I can use when I need them; tools I didn’t have before which always resulted in not doing the job correctly.

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On the life side of things, 2013 was a year I’ll never forget. I got engaged! My beautiful fiancée put up with me for 4 years (and counting) of fumbling about the low stakes poker world. How she stuck around through all the downswings and uncertainty of a poker lifestyle is beyond me, but I am thankful, and excited. When I was younger and I would picture my future wife, I’d see someone nice, attractive, funny, intelligent… Pretty standard list. She’s all of those things, but she’s something else that I never considered: she makes me want to make myself better. That is, in my opinion, the best trait you can find in a partner.

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I’m not really one for new year’s resolutions, so I don’t have any of those. I also used to think goals were the way to go, but I recently read an article by the creator of “Dilbert” in which he claims that “goals are for losers.” So I won’t rattle off a big list of goals for 2014. I suppose I do have a handful of things I’d like to accomplish:

1) Win an MTT tournament. Although, I don’t think anybody has actually ever won one of these things because I don’t see how it’s remotely possible. Pretty sure it’s a scam.
2) Become a 5/10 reg.
3) Get in better shape.
4) Blog more, and create more content in general.

But what’s more important than the goals is the path, and the process. If you want to move up in stakes, this is what you need to do:

1) Play a bare minimum of 150 hours a month. Focus on hours in good games, not on daily monetary results.
2) Share every semi-questionable hand that you play (or observe being played) with a group of poker-playing colleagues/friends who are also trying to advance their poker lives, and keep an open mind regarding feedback. They also need to share hands that they play and be open to feedback from you. Always question lines, ranges, sizings, etc.
3) Take shots as soon as you’re financially able.
4) Don’t worry too much about balancing your lifestyle. Balance will be easier when you’re making more money per hour, which will allow you to work less hours. Get mentally tough by practicing, not by balancing.
5) Try to have a routine. This will probably be affected as game quality ebbs and flows, but try.

Happy new year.

I used to have a standard bad dream when I was in a downswing. It very well still might come back but I haven’t had it in a while. I’d be driving a car, sometimes my car and sometimes some other random car, and suddenly the weather would get really bad. There would be super high winds, and sometimes a tornado would make an appearance. (They used to scare the crap out of me as a kid growing up in Michigan, even though I never saw one. I think it was mostly the extremely daunting warnings on TV and the shrieking siren a few blocks over that the city sounded.) The winds would get stronger and stronger, and I’d slam on the brakes, so hard that I’d be fully standing on the brake pedal, and there was nothing I could do to stop the car moving towards the tornado and directly into certain peril.

There couldn’t be a clearer metaphor when that dream would arrive. The downswing was the wind, the tornado was bustoland, and stomping on the break was my useless, but fully devoted and dedicated effort to work hard and play my best.

I had a different dream recently. A little less perilous, but unfortunately still falls under the “bad” dream category.

I don’t know about you, reader, but I used to fucking love rollerblading. So, there I was in my dream, rollerblading like a boss. Until I got lost. I knew that I was trying to find my way back to my car, but I ended up on a road in the forests of Oregon or something. I’ve never been to Oregon, which means I don’t know my way around Oregon… especially the forests. I was rollerblading my ass off; sweating, skating hard, but getting nowhere. Just skating and skating and skating.

Lately I’ve been playing 2/5NL (3/5 and 5/5 when I’m in LA). I have a temporary deal with a friend that protects me from a losing month while sacrificing some of my winnings. I think the deal has replaced the tornado with the forest. I guess it’s an upgrade, exchanging a windy death for an aimless, pointless wander without progress.

Of course, that’s only a mere one way of looking at it. I feel like I’ve turned a corner with my play recently. While there are some tough players to be found in the 2/5 games around Vegas, the only real difficulties in moving up from the 1/2 and 1/3 basement stakes are:

1: Understanding what the leaks in your game are and actively working on fixing them. In 1/3 games, you won’t get punished for mistakes nearly as often or as severely whereas when you move up, you get away with less.
2: Dealing with new betsizes and larger monetary swings. The standard deviation for my 1/3 sessions on the year is about $500 (yours is probably lower; I just can’t help myself sometimes…). For 2/5 to 5/5 it’s about $900. That means every day you’re swinging a very large percentage of your monthly nut.

Having friends who are eager to work on #1 together has been massively helpful for my game, despite their never ending stream of annoying text message disagreements about the merits of 3betting for value vs flatting to keep in dominated hands. #2 simply comes with more hours at the table.

I might still be in the thick of the forest, but I think there is progress.