3yip: My Three Years In Poker
Part 0: Introduction to Me
A while back I was starting a new job and I popped into my poker ledger and noticed that it had been one year to the day since I made my first deposit. Thrilled by this discovery I decided to put down in writing my experiences from my one year in poker. Unfortunately, I'm not a very disciplined writer, and nothing ever came of it. But as August 28th approached the next year, I was shocked to realize I had been at my job for a full year. My how time flies. I also remembered how my first day at this job was coincidentally exactly one year after my first deposit in online poker, and I remembered the attempt to write down my experiences in that first year. With renewed vigor I dug out the file where I started my one-year account, and went to work continuing the narrative with the goal of creating a detailed account of my first two years in poker.
I did it. It was written for the poker layman, as the intended audience was my friends and family that either didn’t know I played poker, or knew I played but didn’t know how serious I was about it. It never saw distribution, however, beyond me making a few edits and revisions and my wife reviewing them. Now, as I’m venturing into new territory in my poker career, I thought FRuNL might appreciate a little retrospective from one if its long-timers. If not, whatever, it’s a little exercise in vanity for me. So I dove back into the seventeen-page manuscript I completed about a year ago, and tried to bring it up to date. I wasn’t going to re-write the whole thing, so you will still see some uber-basic descriptions of the most fundamental and standard things, but I added a bit of background and brought it up to date.
(For those of you that want to skip the excruciating details and pedantic explanations of poker concepts, the cliff’s notes are I won $2k at penny stakes LHE without PT or a HUD, then got them and switched to NL and pwned microstakes for a couple months --- skip to section 7 “Damned Internet!”)
I was a bright kid, usually a good student, except when something would bore me. I was a complete nerd in highschool - one pocket protector short of completing the stereotype – but I always ran with the “wrong” crowd, the freaks, druggies, and dropouts. I was a standout in science and mathematics, and I went to college at one of the premier engineering programs in the country. But after a couple years, my interest began to wane and I nearly failed out. I took some time off, and realized that just because I’m good at something, doesn’t mean I enjoy it. I was ambitious, and I made a decision to go for the American capitalist gold – I would become rich! I officially switched my major to business management, aced out the rest of my time in school, and three days after walking in commencement, I went to work at the 8th largest company in the US, on their management “fast track” program.
My wife and I refer to this time as “the bad years”. I threw myself into work, frequently pulling 80 to 100 hours weeks. I gained about 80 pounds because I didn’t take care of myself physically. My wife and I became distant. In one sense, my exploits at work were successful. I blew away expectations everywhere I went, and my responsibilities steadily increased. Two and a half years in, I was a “temporary” division head, reporting to a VP. The problem was that my pay was not increasing commensurate with my responsibilities – my company, despite the “internet boom” going on in the larger economy, was still an old-school paternalistic organization. The only way to get paid was to “do your time”. So while my management skill was recognized and my responsibilities increased, my pay did not. I ate well, and drank the best wines, but everything else in my life was in the toilet. I was in a miserable place, surrounded by miserable people, and faster than I could imagine I was becoming one of them.
Then 9/11 happened. For various reasons, one being physical proximity, it hit us pretty hard. Not really in a ‘fear of terrorism’ way, but in a ‘realize your own mortality’ way. One lazy Saturday morning soon after, the wife and I woke up and basically simultaneously said “what are we doing in this miserable life if we could die tomorrow?” So we quit our jobs and moved to California, just like that. No plan, no safety-net, nothing. Overnight we went from near-six-figure DINKs, to “follow-your-happiness” unemployed homeless in Berkeley California. To be honest, it was a rough transition, but if I had it to do over I would do it the same. We have a great network of friends and family. It took my wife about 6 months to find new employment, but with the bubble bursting and all, I never really did find a job. After about a year we landed a low-income-housing studio near Union Square in San Francisco. I started doing “odd jobs”. I worked in a restaurant, in a pharmacy. I worked as a handyman for a landlord I knew. I produced and stage managed local theatre productions, which was more of a passion than an income producing venture. I rediscovered my passion for baseball and went to a ton of Oakland Athletics games.
In this place, dirt poor but happy, our story begins.
Part 1: Introduction to Poker
I, like many, was first introduced to poker when the 2003 WSOP was broadcast on ESPN. It was awesome and thrilling to watch, especially then when I understood so little that every hand seemed amazing. I still remember clearly the two hands that really decided the winner when it was heads up, the first where Moneymaker bluffed Farha out of a big pot, and the second when he trapped Farha. I was definitely "into" poker, though there wasn't yet an urge to play. I just made sure to catch all the WSOP events whenever they were on ESPN, and I started watching other poker on TV, like Celebrity Poker Showdown. A friend showed me the Texas Hold'em game on his computer that he played, and I had a blast blowing a couple virtual buy-ins against virtual opponents. So, when making a big purchase at a computer store one day, I threw a poker game into the cart for kicks and giggles. This was mid-2005 or so, and the game was "T.J. Cloutier's World Championship Poker". I credit it with both developing my interest and confidence in playing for money, and with building a solid foundation for my game. As silly as it sounds, I did learn basic strategy and ABC preflop play for NL games from a videogame. After a couple months on this "trainer" I wanted to play against real people, and that's where this tale begins in earnest.
I used google to look for free Texas Holdem sites on the internet. Much to my dismay they were almost completely windows only. The first one I found that would let Mac users play was holdempoker.com, and I quickly signed up and started hitting their play money tables. The first day I remember with crystal clarity. They allowed you $1000 in play money with 2 “reloads” to replenish it if you lost it. The smallest NL play money tables were a $1000 buy in, with 5/10 blinds. I played for at least 45 minutes before losing my first buy in (BI), and then I found the reload button and lost my second BI in about 5 minutes. Then came the run that probably locked me into playing poker online…
if the ensuing events went differently, I probably would have logged off, assumed I sucked at poker, and never played again. I took my third and final reload, and through amazing skill (snicker), or at least sheer dumb luck, ran it up to over $17,000 over the next 4 hours. I didn't have any more crazy runs, but in the next week, over a series of ups and downs, I ran my play money up to $25,000, and that was enough for me. In my complete ignorance and innocence (it went way beyond naiveté), I decided I was a good poker player and would have my go at real money. On August 28, 2005, flush with cash at the time, I pulled out the check card and deposited $100 at holdempoker, and hit the tables!
Part 2: Playing for Money, Badly
I didn't know anything about anything at the time, least of all bonuses. The $100 was arbitrary. I found that I got a $100 bonus with my deposit, but the bonus came with a catch. One had to rack up enough player points to clear the bonus. C'est la vie, I figured, it would come in time. Now the two big tutorials in the poker videogame were cash games (aka rings) and single table tournaments (STTs or SNGs (for Sit'n'Gos)), and it was multi table tournaments that I watched on TV that piqued my interest in poker in the first place, so that is what I played. The lowest level of ring game was a $10 BI, which worked out great because I had gotten used to seeing and sizing bets on the play money tables that were a $1000 BI, so I just had to slide the decimal point over and all the numbers looked familiar. No need to do pesky math. I was best at SNGs on the videogame, so those probably made up the bulk of my play in those early days. The lowest level SNG offered was $5+.50, where 10 people ponied up $5.50 and $5 of that went to the prize pool, and $0.50 went to the site. The lowest MTT offered was also $5.50.
I tried to play one $5.50 SNG every day. I got into a little routine where I would hit a $10NL table and try to win $5 for the SNG entry, and once I won it I would sit out and "freeroll" the SNG. After I realized that I would want to play the SNG whether or not I won the $5 first I quit doing that, and would just play the SNG. If I cashed in the SNG (ten players, third place got $10, second got $15, and first got $25), I would often play a $5.50 MTT, but I never (ever) cashed in one of those, so they were, in my mind, for fun and experience only. Holdempoker.com also had some very generous freeroll tournaments back then. I believe twice a week they would run a 2000 person tournament that cost $0 to enter, and provided a real $500 prize pool for the event. Many serious players would never play a freeroll because the payout was so small for the amount of time you had to put into it that it wasn't worth it, but since (1) I was mainly playing for fun anyway and (2) any dollar amount was significant to me, I made sure to participate in them religiously.
So a Sit and Go a day, with maybe some ring game play, an MTT here or there, and sometimes more SNGs when I was doing well. I needed 1000 player points to clear the deposit bonus, and with 993 player points I ran out of money in late September. Only 7 points away from a free $100! There was no rational choice but to re-deposit and clear the bonus. We were still doing well money wise at this point, and I took a look at our finances and decided that we could afford $500 for my poker "fun". I'd run through $100 already, so I had $400 left in my "bankroll" for poker. I deposited another $200 into holdempoker.com, and quickly cleared the bonus and viola, back to $500.
It continued on like this for a while. I remember one day fondly, when my brother and I were at my parent's house and no one was home. I signed up in that afternoon's freeroll tournament, and he sat over my shoulder and watched me play. Everything clicked, everything went my way (AA on the first hand for a double-up, lol) and I played for 4 or 5 hours, eventually coming in second and winning $50. $50!!!!!!! What a high I got from winning $50.
I deposited my other $200 into the other Mac friendly site I could find, PacificPoker.com, for a $50 instant bonus there, and now had a wider selection of games to play. I mostly played my SNGs at holdempoker and my ring games at pacificpoker. Buoyed by small freeroll wins along the way - $2 here and $13 there - I continued to play $5.50 SNGs and $10 and $25 cash games for quite a while, and started to get really into the game of poker. I joined an online community of poker players, totalbluff.com (I know of at least two other 2+2ers that came from there), where folks got together to share the ups and downs of poker, as well as talk strategy and try to help each other improve their game. I was decent, or so I thought, but over all the ups and downs it was staring me in the face: very very slowly I was losing money to poker. I didn't want to be the chump at the table, the fish, and the fact was I WOULD NOT deposit any more money for poker (this was never meant to be an expensive hobby, the $500 I budgeted was not for year or anything like that, but for EVER). The fact was, if I wanted to continue playing I would have to improve. I would have to get better and be a winner to go on playing poker.
At this point I had run my PacificPoker balance, from $200 + $50 bonus, up to about $500 then gotten beat back down to about $300. On HoldemPoker I had about $200. The consensus agreement on the best book on poker was
Small Stakes Holdem (SSHE), the seminal text on beating bad players in small-stakes games of limit holdem. To this day it is still considered one of the best poker books ever written. I took a hiatus from playing poker and bought SSHE. I read it cover to cover, I studied all the examples, I took all the quizzes, and when I had finished it, I went back to the beginning and started over. Only then, after completing it twice and feeling like I understood the major concepts, I was ready to test them out at the tables.
The lowest level of limit holdem (LHE) available at holdempoker was .15/.30, meaning that in the first two betting round your bets were limited to $0.15, and in the last two rounds of betting you were limited to $0.30 bets. I jumped in feet first, and without any better way to describe it, began winning immediately.
Part 3: Holy s@!t, I'm winning!
The tools that I learned by reading SSHE, while rather sophisticated, were also rather mechanical at the table - if you have pot odds or sufficient equity in a given hand, play, if not, fold. I started to play two tables at the same time, then three, and eventually four. I stopped playing NL cash games, stopped playing SNGs, and stopped playing MTTs. I focused only on LHE, the game I studied and felt I had a chance to beat. I would play a couple times a week, usually all day long when I would, on 4 tables. Day after day, week after week, month after month, I continued to play. I was grinding the penny tables.
Win rates in poker are described in bb/100, big bets per 100 hands. The big bet in the games I was playing was $0.30. The target winrate for a winning player is 1bb/100. Some players are experts and do better, many don't achieve even 1bb/100 (most, of course, are losers long term). But it’s generally accepted that a thinking player who has studied the game can eke out a 1bb/100 winrate over the long term. Based on the number of hours I had played, and the number of hands I would see per hour, I got to the point where I had played 10,000 hands of micro-stakes LHE. Because of variance, the luck involved in poker, its generally not a good idea to look at short term results. At 10,000 hands I took a step back, checked how much money I had won, and to my shock I was beating the .15/.30 online games for 8bb/100. In no uncertain terms, I was crushing these games!
When my holdempoker account got to $500 I moved up to .25/.50 LHE. Now, while I had no real skill in poker, I was a highly efficient machine for picking up the bad money that bad players throw onto the poker table. The competition at .25/.50 was better, so now game selection became of paramount importance. There were a lot of tables I couldn't beat, but of the dozens of tables running and available every day all I had to do was find 4 that were full of bad players. If the bad players busted (that is, they ran out of money or left the table) I would leave and find another table with bad players. I could always find a table appropriate for my game to play at, but the key was not getting lazy and being ever vigilant in continually moving around finding the best tables available.
And I continued to win. At 8bb/100. Over 4 tables I was almost (not quite) making US minimum wage playing .25/.50 LHE online.
Playing for pennies, as I was, you don't win a lot of money. But the key now is that
if you are winning,
if you are not losing money every time you sit in a game, you can play indefinitely. And since poker sites offered deposit bonuses, free money for playing in their games, you could deposit to a new site and clear the bonus to claim this free money. The practice of continually working on clearing a bonus is called "bonus whoring", and for anyone that doesn't lose when playing poker, it’s an almost risk free way to make a little money and build a bankroll. It was time to take this seriously and maximize the value of my play. It was time to become a bonuswhore.
Part 4: Bonus Whoring
So in late March of 2006 I withdraw the $200 I deposited into Pacific Poker, leaving $100 still in the account in case I want to play a game here or there, and $400 from holdempoker, leaving $200 still in the account, plenty to continue to play the .25/.50 limit holdem games I've been playing. Both sites are ostensibly sending me a check which takes 6 weeks to arrive (I was nervous). To bonus whore effectively you need a way to quickly and easily move money between sites, and this meant opening an account with some sort of e-wallet. Neteller was the de facto standard for this purpose among online poker players, so I signed up for an account, and sure enough six weeks later I received two checks for a total of $600. My very first true profit ever! I had put in $500 and just taken out $600 in cash.
So what do I do with my newfound profit? What does a new business do with its profit? Drive it back into the business, of course. I deposit the money in my checking account and transfer the money to my Neteller account. Neteller was a terrific service that made moving money around fast and easy. After my first deposit, which required a lot of security and identity checks and took about a week, Neteller was electronically linked to my checking account and would let me move money around almost effortlessly. Now, instead of waiting 6 weeks for a check from a poker site, I could transfer the amount into Neteller, which was almost instantaneous, often taking less than an hour, then transfer the money directly into my bank account, where it would be available the next day. Additionally, since Neteller was essentially like a bank account, it provided a place for me to store my poker bankroll to keep it separate from my wife's and my money. I only had to mix them when withdrawing money, and could essentially keep it totally separate from our everyday finances.
Holdempoker.com was a skin site on the OnGame network, so called because it used the same backend software provided by OnGame, but the front end graphics were unique to the site (the "skin"). Since at any OnGame site I would be playing at the same electronic tables with the same opponents as I had been at holdempoker, it was natural that I play on other OnGame sites. The skin run by OnGame itself, pokerroom.com, was renowned for having very good bonuses. So *zing* I shipped an initial deposit to pokerroom.com to get the sign-up bonus and began chipping away at it. Since I was just playing the penny tables these bonuses took a very long time to clear. A $100 bonus required 1000 player points, and even playing 4 tables it would take me a full 8 hour day to make 100 player points. I'd play a couple times a week, so on average I could clear about $100 in bonuses a month. But since I was not losing money at poker, it was essentially free money and I kept right on grinding the penny-tables.
After I cleared the generous sign-up bonus at pokerroom, holdempoker was having one of its semi-annual redeposit bonuses. *Zing* I withdraw from pokerroom and start playing at holdempoker. After that bonus is done, Pokerroom is having a re-deposit bonus, and *zing* I move the money over there and play at pokerroom. Once I finished that, neither site had a current re-deposit onus, so I had to find a new site for a new player bonus. *Zing* I deposit to HollywoodPoker.com, another OnGame skin, and clear their sign-up bonus. Between those three sites I could usually find an active re-deposit bonus and just kept moving my money between the sites, playing wherever I could be clearing a bonus.
I took money from my bankroll and bought and read more books on poker -
Theory of Poker, Holdem for Advanced Players, Weighing the Odds in Limit Holdem, Holdem on the Come, and more. I found another online community that was less about camaraderie and much more devoted to improving poker skill, twoplustwo.com. It was run by the publisher of many of the poker books I read (including SSHE, the book that made me into a winner). I learned about important gambling concepts like bankroll management. While there is skill involved in poker, there is also luck. Bankroll management is the practice of setting the level of risk you will accept based on the variance in the game and the size of your bankroll, to ensure you never go broke. It’s like betting on coin flips where the coin comes up heads 60% of the time. If you have $100 in your bankroll it would be foolish to bet $10 a flip as there is a very real chance that you could end up bankrupt, or as poker players say, busto. But if you bet only $1 on every flip it’s unlikely (almost impossible) that you will ever run out of money, and if you play enough flips you will come out ahead in the long run. Poker is the same way. I would lose hands a lot, and would often even have losing days, but because I had an edge in the games, I would come out ahead if I played enough hands.
So that's how it went, day after day, week after week, month after month. I would read books and study poker and poker hands relentlessly. And a couple times a week I would log on and play, slowly but surely clearing one bonus after another. Until I poked my head above water about six month later and found that I had won $2000.
About $500 had come from clearing bonuses, but about $1500 came from my poker playing alone. I was very proud of my accomplishment, and to this day I think its one of the most amazing things I have done in poker - I won $2000 without EVER making a bet over $0.50. Wow. I withdrew the $500 I initially invested in poker and returned it to our bank account. I was now playing only on my winnings, and vowed never to put another cent into poker except what I won. I also withdrew $500 from my bankroll and gave it to my wife to buy a new wardrobe. At the least I felt I owed it to her for the endless hours I spent with my nose in a book or online studying or playing poker, but I also wanted to make it real, to show something tangible for all the work I had done and all the "virtual" winnings I had seen.
Part 5: Moving up and getting serious
The acceptable bankroll level for playing .25/.50 limit holdem was generally considered to be between $100 and $250. I had about $1500. I was waaayyyyy over rolled for the games I was playing. If you can play at (and beat) a bigger game without any more risk than the smaller game you are currently playing, you are missing out on potential profit, since the risk is still small but the wins will be bigger. So obviously I decided to take a shot at the next level up, .50/1 limit holdem, where the bets were limited to $0.50 in the first two betting rounds and limited to $1 on the last two. I lost $100 my first day.
Ouch. I moved back to where I was comfortable at .25/.50 and made it back, and decided to continue taking shots at .50/1 until I was comfortable there too. I continued mostly playing .25/.50 but mixing in .50/1 from time to time. These sessions were not as disastrous as my first session, but I really couldn't get my footing at .50/1. I talked with a lot of experienced players online and there was general agreement that the .5/1 level was a very strange level; it had a weird mix of decent and horrible players, and while it was beatable, the play led to a high amount of variance - big swings (both up and down) compared to what you win. Since I was adequately bankrolled for even bigger games, I went ahead and skipped .5/1 and started mixing in some play at 1/2 along with my usual games at .25/.50. I saw some middling success at 1/2, and decided to move my play there.
This is where I first had to deal with one of the most important ideas in poker - when playing, you are playing for CHIPS, not for money. Basically, in most situations you can describe, either empirically or mathematically, the optimal play, the play that will lead to the highest Expected Value (EV), and sometimes that play meant putting many bets into the pot. If you thought of these bets as money, it could make you vary from the optimal play ("this hand isn't worth ten dollars"). This wasn't a problem for me at .25/.50, after all I was playing for quarters and the money was in fact meaningless. But at 1/2 the pots could reach $50, and I had to abstract the notion of money and only play with chips to get comfortable in the $1/$2 games.
I found some purchase playing 1/2, and I would even open up a $2/$4 table on occasion when I saw one full of players that I thought I could beat, but it seemed like I was playing breakeven poker. I'd have wins, but it seemed that I would lose back whatever I won. I didn't expect to maintain my obscene winrate at the penny games (remember 1bb/100 is that "target" a good player shoots for, and I was killing that), but it can take 30,000 hands or more to determine what your winrate is, so I just continued to grind out the hands like I had always done. It seemed only the bonuses were keeping me in the black. Luckily, at least, you got more player points for playing in the bigger games, so the bonuses were clearing quicker these days. As I was grinding, I rededicated myself to improving my play, and ordered more books.
Middle limit holdem, How good is your Limit Holdem, and more. In this order of books, I picked up
Mike Caro's Book of Tells - a book considered fundamental by poker players that described tells in live games.
Reading this book inspired me to want to play live. I withdrew some money from online into cash, and one day (when I was house-sitting at my parent's place while they were out of town and I had access to a car) I decided to go to a casino and play live poker for the very first time. The smallest game offered live is 3/6 limit holdem ($3 in the first two betting rounds and $6 in the last two). I went to Casino San Pablo in the East Bay. Long story short I lost $180 that night, but this was no big deal. As I said, in poker there are a lot of ups and down, so while this was a lot of money due to the (relatively) large stakes, I was not concerned or disturbed. It was only 30BBs, the kind of loss I would see frequently online, even though the stakes were bigger so the dollar amounts were bigger too. It was just a night of poker. Some weeks later I followed it up by a trip to Artichoke Joe's in San Bruno, a card room I could reach on BART. This time I lost $240. Intellectually I knew that these results could be nothing more than noise, nothing more than bad luck, but just the same, having 2 huge losses my first two times out in live card rooms was very disheartening. I got very down on live play, and it would be months before I returned.
Somewhere in here my downswing began. My wins and losses online at 1/2 became just losses. I couldn't get in a winning session, and day after day more money leaked out of my bankroll. Eventually I had lost 200 BBs (at a mix of levels, it worked out to around $500) without booking a win. Now this is exactly why poker players practice bankroll management, sometimes there's nothing you can do and the cards just run bad. A 200BB downswing only has a 5% chance of happening to a winning player. But still, it happens, and I heard plenty accounts from players better than me having a downswing like this. So I just played on.
But then the downswing reached 300BBs. These were the worst losses I had ever taken, and to make it worse it was in the biggest games I had ever played. A winning player only has a 1% chance of having a 300BB downswing. Was it possible that I was not a wining player? Were all the months of winning just a statistical fluke and I was in fact still a losing player, still a fish? Just like flipping a coin, each event is independent, and losing one (or many) hands made it no more likely that the next would be a winner. I dropped down to the .5/1 limit holdem games, and once again rededicated myself to improving my play, improving my game.
But the coin flips just kept coming up tails! I felt I was trapped in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, and I just kept losing. My downswing reached 400BBs, and now it was virtually impossible for a winning player to lose this much! All evidence suggested that I was not a winning poker player. These were truly dark days as far as my poker playing was concerned. I had studied so much, I had worked so hard, and I had had some success, but now it had all turned to crap. I was sure I was a winning player, but any examination of the "facts" would suggest otherwise, so I just continued to play my "A" game, hoping that eventually the flips would start coming up heads again. I felt very lost. The only thing that kept me playing poker was that I was an incredible bankroll nit. The standard advice for a limit holdem player was to keep 200-300 BBs in your bankroll, and if I had stuck to that I very well could have been out of the game. But I was (as always) overly cautious, and was playing with closer to a thousand BBs. To make matters worse we were hitting some tough times financially, and I withdrew $500 from my poker bankroll to pay bills. After losses and expenses I had a mere fraction of what I once had in my poker bankroll.
But I continued to grind. My immense downswing reached 500BBs. An astounding number, and very few winning players have ever run into variance this hard, but I came out the other side. I eventually began, ever so slowly, but surely as well, to win in the .5/1 games. I was far, far off my peak in terms of winnings, but day in and day out I was in the black again, and I edged my way back, slowly rebuilding the losses I had suffered.
And just like many things in life, when it rains, it pours. I had worked up the courage to return to live play, and one day when I had borrowed a car for other reasons, I took a trip to the California Grand Casino in Pacheco to play a session of live 3/6 holdem. That night I won nearly $400 in just a few hours. I didn't have any more huge nights like my first three playing live poker (up or down), but I took it upon myself to explore the 3/6 games at local card rooms. I played at The Oaks in Emeryville, at The Palace in Hayward, at Lucky Chances in Colma, and other local rooms. The San Francisco Bay Area is probably one of the top ten places in the country for live poker. Make no mistake, it’s pretty far down the list, behind the obvious choices like Vegas, Atlantic City, and Los Angeles, but there is a lively scene, and I really enjoyed getting a feel for many of the local rooms.
So now I was winning, not a lot like when I was playing the penny tables, but I was building back what I had lost on the downswing. I decided, yet again, it was time to take another step in getting serious about my poker play. Pretty much every serious online player uses a couple of common tools. One is a program called PokerTracker that captures every hand you play to a database, which allows you to analyze statistics, break apart your game, and improve. The other is called a Heads-Up Display, or HUD, which reads stats from your PokerTracker database and overlays them on the table allowing you to quickly identify tendencies of other players and play a hand accordingly. To this day many serious poker players scoff at the notion that I was able to become a winning player without these tools, but I did. The thing was that they were windows only programs, so it would cost me a whole lot more than the purchase price to get them, as I would need a whole new computer. The total cost would be in the neighborhood of $500, more than 1/3 of my bankroll. This would be a huge hit, and might even require me to move down in limits where I couldn't win as much money. It took me a while to make the decision, but I eventually decided that it was necessary in order to take my game to the next level. I withdrew $500 and bought a cheap Dell PC, along with PokerTracker and PokerAce HUD.
Now that I had a PC, the number of sites that were available to me to play poker on skyrocketed. I consolidated my bankroll, and decided to open an account at Full Tilt Poker. They had a generous $600 first-time deposit bonus, but even better they worked with promotional organizations called affiliates to offer "rake back" deals. By signing up through an affiliate I would receive 27% of my rake, the fees charged by the site for running the games, back into my poker account every month, essentially playing for a discounted rate. Though the bonuses always accrued faster, rake back was perpetual, so it was like an ongoing bonus.
So using PokerTracker and a HUD I settled into the .5/1 limit holdem games at FullTilt. As my bankroll became healthy again after my atrocious downswing, I moved back up to the 1/2 games. In only a couple months I had cleared the $600 bonus and had some small winnings to show for my play on top of that. I had recouped the expense of a new computer, and then some.
My wife had decided to go back to school. While I kept odd jobs here and there, she had been the main breadwinner for our household for the last few years. If she were to return to school full time, I would have to be the breadwinner. So after a huge search, I got a job. I no longer had all day every day to think about, study, and play poker. I would still put in frequent sessions, but it was not as often and they were shorter, since I had limited time. The period between September and December of 2006 was very uneventful as far as my poker playing was concerned.
Uneventful, that is, except for one thing which was beyond my control. In November of 2006 republican senator Bill Frist, in a last minute shenanigan, inserted the verbiage for the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA) into the Safe Ports Act, a must-pass bill funding anti-terrorism security at American ports. Despite the popular conception that the UIGEA made online poker illegal, the bill did nothing to change its legality. It just gave teeth to enforcing preexisting anti-gambling legislation, mainly the Wire Act which forbade sports betting and the ten or so states that DID have laws against online poker (California is not one of them). Unfortunately, the market reacted as if the bill did outlaw online poker, and many sites, including the biggest of them all, PartyPoker (which I didn't play at) immediately pulled out of the US market leaving players high and dry. Worse yet, the USDOJ started going after e-wallets that did business with sports books, as sports betting was an long-standing infraction, and they now had teeth to enforce it online with the UIGEA. Neteller was the biggest and highest profile such organization, and while on vacation in the US, the DOJ arrested the Neteller founders. This caused a ripple effect as everyone was unsure about the legality of various acts and unsure about the overall state of online gambling. Within a couple days Neteller had frozen all withdrawals by US customers.
I had a thousand dollars in Neteller at the time, and now my money was frozen and inaccessible in a foreign bank account that had no FDIC insurance. This time of confusion was a shining moment for the online poker community, as they pulled together to help those playing in the US who had funds tied up in Neteller. I transferred my $1000 to someone in London, who I had never met and never talked to before, who withdrew the money and sent it back to me. Hours later Neteller froze inter-account transfer also, and many Americans were screwed out of their money. About 10 months later Neteller has finally un-frozen the funds and returned to their American customers the collective $60,000,000 they had absconded with. But due to the kindness of strangers, I didn't get caught up in the fiasco (thanks again Scottery!).
Other than that ridiculousness, I had shifted my focus to work and away from poker. After an amazing first 6 months of the year ($2000 without betting more than $0.50!), the last 6 months were boring. After the downswing and after all my expenses, including my withdrawals for a computer and to pay bills, I had basically broken even, and had about $1500 in my roll heading into the New Year.
Part 6: No Limit, Baby!
So the wife had finished her first semester of grad-school and was on her winter break. She took a 3 week long trip back to the East Coast to see her family and old friends, and I was alone, with my own break off from work, with nothing to do. I undertook a small exercise in personal control and growth, and decided to go on a fast. I would eat nothing and drink nothing, except water. I decided 3 days would be perfectly safe, that I would shoot for 4, but I would take stock after 3 days of fasting and decide whether to break it or to continue. In the end I found it was a beneficial exercise, and was actually easier than I expected - I ended up fasting for 5 days. The relevance of this being included in my poker story is that I decided to try to move from limit holdem to no-limit holdem (NLH) at the same time. No limit was the most popular form of poker played, fueled by its popularity on TV and as the format for the World Series of Poker championship. I promised myself I would play 10,000 hands of no-limit poker while on my fast, and once I came off the fast I would decide whether to move to NLH or continue playing the game I knew and could beat. I played the old comfortable $25 tables of NLH that I had played before I knew anything about poker, only now at Full Tilt Poker instead of PacificPoker. And I did indeed play 10,000 hands during my fast.
But the best part is that I won. $370 overall. I was up over 14 buy-ins! Over the 10k hands I had a winrate of almost 8bb/100. The win rates are different in NLH and LHE because of the different relative sizes of the blinds to the size of the bets and the pots. A winning NL player will win between 0 and 12 bb/100, but 6-8 bb/100 is considered a reasonable "target" to shoot for. I had jumped in feet first, and come out unscathed. It felt like those early days when I first starting winning at LHE - I was amazed at the results I was having and was thrilled to be winning money. My foray into NLH had given me a shot of enthusiasm I hadn't had for poker in quite a while. I decided to embrace this new-found enthusiasm and move all my play to the no limit tables. Furthermore, I endeavored to play as many hands as possible, not only because the more I would play the more I would win, but also because the more you played the more you could be sure about your true win rate and the more you could pick apart your game and find the weak points and improve them.
In January I dove right in. I tried to play every day, but in fact would only make it about 5 days a week. I would come home from work everyday and start playing poker, and I would play every weekend. Also, while many people will tell you that NLH is a more difficult game, that there is more to consider, I found that while there were more variables in each decision there were fewer decisions to make overall. This was basically because the bets were bigger, so while you may have to make as many as 20 decisions in a limit hand, in no-limit you were frequently all-in after only about 5. Since I was making fewer decisions, I could play more tables, so I went from 4 tables simultaneously, to 6. I was having a blast.
At the end of the month I took stock of where I was. I had gotten in over 20,000 hands and was winning at a respectable rate of 5bb/100 - I had won $800 that month. I now had more than double the suggested minimum in my bankroll to play $50NL. I withdrew $500 from my poker roll and bought Apple stock with it (+EV imo), and in February I moved up to the 50NL games on FullTilt.
These tables were much harder; I could tell players were making moves much more often and bluffing with more regularity. My winrate suffered, but I continued to grind. I added more and more tables each time I played, increasing from 6 to 8, then to 9, then eventually to 12 tables simultaneously. Every day I would come home from work and put $600 into play on online poker tables - the amount of money I would make all week at work, I would without thought gamble it on poker. As I racked up the hands I got a handle on the trickier play at this level and my winnings began to smooth out. That is, I wasn't winning more, but I was winning more consistently (fewer big swings up and down). I made $200 in February from rake back alone, which embarrassingly means the poker site made $800 from my play. My winnings from the tables continued to grow. I had my first $1000 month. In fact, after rake back I made nearly $2000 from poker in February.
I now had enough money to play the $100 NL games online. But I decided to put in another month at the 50NL tables to be sure I was a winning player, to be sure I wasn't just hitting a heater (the opposite of the dire downswing I experienced the year before). I watched my winrate climb from $5 an hour, to $10 an hour, to $15 an hour, to ???. And to be sure, it wasn't a heater - I ran into some serious runs of bad luck. I had two downswings of over 10 buy-ins, considered the limits of what a winning player will experience. I can remember one time I was having a very good night and Mrs. Kurt was heading to bed. I told her I was doing well and wanted to play just one more hour before I went to bed. Bad choice - I lost $400 in that hour. Dejected I signed off and went to bed, but the next morning I was invigorated and eager to "win it back" so I logged on and lost another $400. A terrible 24hours. Here we go again, right? Even after all that, I still made $800 in March - at my worst, I was still winning. To be sure, playing NLH had given a shot in the arm to my game that it desperately needed, and filled me again with a passion for the game of poker.
I ordered more books (are you sensing a theme?), this time centered around no-limit play.
Pot and No Limit Poker, No Limit Theory and Practice, The Mathematics of Poker, another book on tells, anything I could find really, as the literature on the subject is rather sparse. And I entered May taking shots at the $100NL games online. I dropped back to 6 tables so that I could concentrate to my fullest with the increased stakes, thinking I would add tables as I got comfortable in the games. I was just starting to experiment at $100 NL when one day my internet connection went out.
Part 7: Damn internet!
So I lost my internet connection and couldn't play poker. I needed to get my poker fix though, so I found some no-limit games at local cardrooms. Lucky Chances, just a short BART ride away from my apartment, spreads a no limit game with blinds (forced bets before the cards come out that determine how big the game plays) of $1-$1-$2 with a $200 maximum buy in. So I took a couple trips there. I won a little, lost a little, but was happy to have a substitute for online play while my internet was out.
It took almost a month for AT&T to fix my internet connection, and once they did I discovered that it still had issues. There was a bug that would cause it to go out for a couple seconds every few minutes, making playing poker impossible as I needed a continuous connection to play. I just started going to the live cardroom more often. And live play started to click!
The players are much more passive in live play, and you have to play your hands differently. I adjusted my game and began winning live. The days I lost were heartbreaking, of course, but the days I won were thrilling. It felt great to have a grand in my pocket which I had just won in the last few hours. I made a point to get to the cardroom at least once a week, and a strange thing happened. I started seeing the same faces there over and over. I started taking notes on the various players, started learning their game and how they played, and started winning, not just against the suckers at the tables, but against the regulars in the game. Just like previously when I was grinding the penny tables day after day and week after week, but now I was grinding the live games!
I decided to take a tour of the no-limit games around the bay area. I tried the game at Casino San Pablo that had 2-2-2 blinds and a $100 maximum buy-in. I lost $700 that night. I tried the 1-2-2 game at The Palace that was uncapped (unlimited buy in) but had a time charge of $7 per half hour instead of a rake. I lost $100 that night. After working my way through the games I could get to on BART, I decided the structure of the game at Lucky Chances was the best for me, and I started going regularly. My goal was to go twice a week, but in reality I probably only make it to the cardroom about 6 times a month.
My internet connection never got better. By not changing ISPs and getting a reliable connection (screw you AT&T) I have probably missed out on many thousands of dollars of value by not playing in the online games. But, as is probably no surprise to those who know me, laziness trumped greed and it was six months before I switched ISPs in order to be able to play poker from home. But the more I played live, the more I began to enjoy that game as well.
And as I got more comfortable playing live poker, I took the opportunity whenever I could to play in a new room. When in Vegas on a business trip I made a trip to the MGM poker room (I lost there), and the wife and I made an evening of going to the Cache Creek Casino up North (I lost there too), and when I was in Los Angeles with a friend I made a point of stopping off at the largest cardroom there, The Commerce (where I lost as well... I seem not to win the first time I play in any room).
My stake for live games started off as a small fraction of my overall poker bankroll that I had in cash (the rest was, of course, online), but over time it grew to the point where I had thousands of dollars stashed in hiding places around my apartment for when I wanted to play (ever see the beginning of Rounders?). Its feels strange at times to have cash lying around like this, but the key is to realize that it is not money, its chips. Just the same, I got a high interest savings account and put most of the cash in there, and just kept a couple thousand around for when I would go to the cardroom. This is my poker bankroll, separate from my living expenses and everyday budget. It’s just like points in a videogame to me... and the more points I have the bigger games I can play. I collect my points to get into bigger games where I can win even more.
This is where the “two year retrospective” ended (good news: the rest of this is not written for laymen but for 2+2). I
so wanted to include a brag in my treatise that I had won $10,000 at poker, but on August 28 of last year my career winnings stood at $9,900. Shame.
In late August and trough September I hit a huge downswing in live play. There is one hand I remember perfectly to this day which just about sums it up (warning: bad beat story). I’m sitting in a 1-2 NL game at Lucky Chances. Fishy player opens for $10 from MP, solid TAG calls from LP, I have A4s. Now the LP player is solid, but I’ve played with him a lot and have a terrific read on his game. There’s little chance I get myself into trouble here and we’re deepstacked (I have $500 he covers) so I call and take a shot. Flop comes A4A with two spades. I flop the nuts. Check, fish bets $20, TAG makes it $80. This is a flushdraw like always (he slowplays nut-type hands, pushing pairs and draws hard), so I smoothcall and doing what fish do, MP player calls too. In my head I’m chanting “
one time dealer!!”, and out comes the 6
on the turn. Effing brilliant! LP makes it $100, I go $300, fish gets it and folds, LP shoves and I snap call. He turns up A6 and the $1k pot gets shipped to him.
That’s just one hand, but I’m using it to illustrate a point. Because of the glacial pace at which hands come out in live games, combined with how infrequently I can get to the casino because I work full time and don’t own a car, it would take me over a month on average to grind back what I lost in that hand. Say it happens again the next time out, and now I’m digging out of a huge pit. Over the next few months I lost thousands of dollars in the local live no limit games - it would take me forever to get unstuck. Frustrated with the lack of a long run, I decided to return to playing online where I can rack up the hands easily.
Part 8: Internet Pokers 2
So I get my internet fixed up, and having left $1000 in my FTP account, I start again. Assuming my game might be a bit rusty, I start the grind at 25nl. In my first few sessions I lose 16 buy-ins. Nope, my game is not rusty. It is in shambles! For the first time in about 2 years I experience what its like to be –EV in a poker game, and I dive back into 2+2 posting and responding to hands, working hard on my game, being vigilant about keeping my volume up, and by the end of October I am back to even, and I’ve upped the number of tables I play regularly to 16.
About two weeks into November I’m up $1k in the 25nl games. Phew. Back to normal. So with $2k in the account I take a ten buy-in shot at 50nl and it does not go well. Drop to 25 and make it back in no time, and another shot at 50. Only to be beaten down a gain. Third time’s a charm though and I’m a reg in the 50 games by December. Somewhere in here I open a Cake poker account, and start splitting my time between there and FTP. I figure the no-HUD games are a great match for me, as I rely on it much less than most, even when multi-tabling. I also withdraw another $1500 from the roll to buy a swank laptop. A+ investment imo, as it arrives in time for a family vacation, and I'm able to continue to grind even while living it up at a beach house in Venice (California ldo). By mid-January both accounts are robusto, enough for a 10bi shot at 100nl. That lasts about 3 days. I was shattered at having lost $1000 in only a couple hours of play and take some time away from the tables.
In a fortuitous turn of events, during that time away I find a thread by WCGRider in BBV offering micro-stakes. I put in my application for a stake at 100nl, and he picks me, woot! Before we begin he does a thorough stat review with me, tweaking my game, shoring up leaks, and generally talking FR theory. Once we’re both content and comfortable, he gives me the stake, and I insta-start down 4 buy-ins. For those that have never played with someone else’s money, I cannot begin to describe how horrible it feels to lose. As a poker player and a gambler I lose money all the time – that’s why I have a bankroll: it happens, and I move on. But to lose someone else’s money feels so terrible, as if you had violated their trust. As atrocious as I felt, Doug was completely un-phased. He worked with me daily reviewing hands, and kept backing my play.
To be honest, I credit Doug, by having confidence in me, with giving
me the confidence to grind 100nl, and through the mini-coaching sessions, helping me tweak my game to “take it to the next level” and become a winner at 100. This is the part of the story where I go robusto!
I finish out my Doug-stake crushing 100nl. The end was kinda awkward… in the midst of a mini-swong a close relative died, and I had to pack up an leave on a moment’s notice for a part of the country where there are no cell-phone towers and the only internet is dial-up. Despite the abrupt end, I consider it a positive experience, and we both finished up on the deal.
When I return from no-man’s-land after a week and a half, I return to grinding on my own dime, and the robusto continues. Good times. I finish February at 6ptBB/100 at 100nl. I made $3500 at the tables, more than I made at work that month, in one quarter the time. Over $100 an hour. Dreams of sugar plum fairies are dancing in my mind. For the first time going pro seems to be a real possibility. I am ecstatic.
Part 8: Losing. A lot.
In March my heater ends, and my winrate returns to my career norm, around 2ptBB/100. But I’m still winning, in games where the stakes mean something. I’ve paid taxes on every penny I’ve won since the start. In the hopes that one day I would do this legitimately for a living, I wanted to stay on the right side of the law. 2007 was the first time I took a significant hit, and the fact that I was running well when it came time to write that check made it a lot easier to swallow. I continue to grind out a nice profit, and with my confidence soaring, and my bankroll healthy, I start to think about taking shots at 200nl. Being staked worked so well last time, I seek out another backer, and start putting in hands 200NL. Well, nothing ever goes according to plan, and after dropping 5 BI at 200, me and my back part ways. I continue my 200nl shot on my money, but lose another 5 bi. That’s my 10 buy-in “shot”, so back to 100nl to grind it out and come back for more later.
I settle into my comfort spot at 100nl, but for some reason I can’t put anything together. Every time I bluff, they have it, every time I call down, it’s a monster, every time I make a fold, they gloat and show me nine-high. I’m running about even, not winning, not losing, 'cause every now and then some donk shoves his stack in light and I pick it up. My head’s above water, but I finish out April on a 30k hands stretch that’s essentially break even. Meh, happened before, I’m sure it’ll happen again, just gotta grind through.
In May the pattern changes. I’m grinding hard every day. Each day I end up or down small amount, then after 6 days or so, I lose big. -7BI. Take few days off, then resume grinding, up or down small for a week, then BAM -9BI. Take a few days off, and repeat.
During one of these breaks I get a call from my brother on a Friday afternoon. He’s having emergency surgery in a few hours and is going to be laid up for a while. He’s got no family in the town he lives, so I tell him I’m coming up, and I take the following Monday and Tuesday off work. A couple hours later I get another call from him post-surgery. He’s effing fine! The procedure was a resounding success, he’s going home tonight, and to work tomorrow: don’t come. That evening I see on 2+2 that a couple of the FR regs are going to be whooping it up in Vegas, and seeing as I already took the time off work, I pack my bags, and at about 11pm hit the road for Vegas (in the car I just purchased with poker winnings). I show up the next day at 9am, and immediately sit down to free screwdrivers and live 1-2. I donk off a couple stacks at Bally’s before meeting up with El Nino at Caesars. I take a few stack off local grinders and drunk tourists while he FTs the daily deepstack and chops up a nice score. We go hit some more cardrooms together, where I learn a valuable lesson: 48 hours without sleep and about as many drinks does not make a good combination for poker. At the very end of the night I donked off a ton of money, losing not only my profits but about $600 on top of it. Since this was an impromptu trip I had no where to stay, so El Nino kindly invited me to crash on his hotelroom floor. The next day he takes me on a tour of strip pokerrooms, where I see an ungodly run of bad luck (I can’t remember how many times AA was cracked with the money in ahead), and I ended up down a grand on the trip. But it was a ton of fun, and I feel like I made a friend out of what was previously just a screen name.
The last few months were losers for me, but only marginally so. May/June was outright bad. I end up putting in good volume at a huge lossrate and losing a good chunk of my roll. I’m swonging pretty crazy. Whatever’s going on, its clear my trusty ol’ 14/11 style is not working anymore.
Figuring all the regs have me pegged as the nit that I am, I crank it up and start running 18/16, but in the first few days I have a monster -10BI downswing. 18/16 might work for me, but I decide adopting a new high-variance strategy at the bottom of my worst downswing ever is not a good idea. So I become uber-nit and run 8/6. This is an experiment in control as well as just an attempt to start winning again. Please please start winning again. It lasts for about 15k hands until I get set-over-setted a few times, and not playing enough hands to tangle and make it back, I give up on 8/6 as just too frustrating (and frankly, unbalanced) to be the answer. Once again, I dive back into study and into 2+2, working and reworking all my lines, looking for spots, finding leaks, getting back to fundamentals of winning poker. But all I can do is tread water. Then finally about three weeks into the month, I have another of my classic -10BI days, and finally decide its time to throw in the towel. Down somewhere close to $3k at the 100nl tables I put it together that I’m not +EV in these games, and drop down to 50nl.
50nl is the level I’ve played more hands at than anywhere. Its home. And with the exception of a few short shotments last year, I have always won there. Despite being decimated (in several ways) by my run at 100nl, I still felt that what I need was a little shooting fish in barrels at 50nl to regain my confidence and rebuild my roll. And “home” did not disappoint. I finished the month with 15k hands at 10ptBB/100. Deep breath. The econobox car I bought a month prior isn't "doing it" for me, so I buy a cheap old BMW, again with poker winnings. This car has been nothing but trouble, costing me more than the purchase price in repairs since. Sigh.
Emboldened by the short term positive variance, for July I signed up in the FRuNL challenge at the 50nl level. It started off well, with a nice 10BI run to start the month, and I even started taking some shots at 100nl again. But whenever I’d step into that fray, I’d get eaten up, so I decided to just finish out the challenge month at 50nl and take it easy on myself. And this is when the poker gods decided to prove to me that they do not have a sense of humor. At the bottom of (without a doubt) my worst downswing ever, I started a new downswing. This of the most classic kind – not being outplayed, not tilting, not even coolers, but just straight up bad beat city. I have the graphs to prove it. I got demolished in the games, ending the month close to 20bi under EV in all-in spots alone. I was only down a couple hundo on the month overall, but my volume was screwed by continually taking “breaks” and this was the last straw. I couldn’t take it anymore. I withdrew the max allowed from FTP leaving a pittance of my roll online, and vowed to not play a single hand of online FR NL in August.
Part 9: Post grind.
It only took a week for me to break my vow, and I had a -8bi day. I haven’t played FR NL since. Going back to my shots at 200nl, and including various assorted live game play, I am now down 60 buy-ins. I doubt you’ll hear from anyone around these parts who’s weathered such a downswing. But then again, its pretty much impossible for a “winning” player to suck more than I do (see location). I wanted to take the time and find a new niche, where I could study and learn to beat a new game, but thus far nothing has clicked. I’ve got a regular home game, and I’m going to continue in that. Its one place where poker is still fun for me, involving lots of drinking and trash talking, and not “serious business”. We’re starting up a series of tourneys where the grand prize is a WSOP buy in, so I’ll be ordering some more books soon, notably the HoH series. I’ll definitely be taking some shots at donkaments. You can now find me bleeding slowly at 50nl HU on FTP and 25nl 6max on Pokerstars, which means the majority of my bankroll is not in play. When I couldn’t make it to the cardroom for a week, or when I couldn’t get to a computer for a couple days, it always used to drive me nuts when my money wasn’t in action. Frankly, this won’t stand. So in a move to keep my roll in action while I was not, I began staking other poker players.
So far I’ve had 3 horses. One was an exceptionally high-risk/high-reward choice in the first place, and he busted a 20bi stake. Re-evaluating my risk tolerance, I chose not to re-stake. A second dropped 8bi and decided to pursue other interests besides poker. He’s always welcome back on stake. The third (actually, the very first) is working out like a charm, and I think we are both very happy with the stake so far. I’m still reviewing applications for stakes looking for more horses, including a live-game stake that I’m excited about and I hope happens. I’m just getting started in this arena, and I’m sure I will continue to stumble as I make my way, but I’m happy to be learning about the world of staking.
So yeah, 2 years at this job and 3 years in poker, and everything is still weird. Make of this post what you want, read it or not, I’m just putting it out there. Feel free to comment, give advice, make fun of me, or ask more questions as you see fit.
Peace.
Two Plus Two
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