i respect your patriots diversity! i degened for $40 last night on blackjack, cashed out with a -30 loss

Confirmed neither broke nor dead.

OK, now that's out of the way, I apologize I haven't been updating as regularly. Honestly February has been a pretty swingy month for me, and not just in terms of winrate. Mentally this has been a tough month, but not in the way you might think. Motivation I've found has been hard to keep up. Reference the beginning of this thread for my enthusiam and schedule all planned out. The schedule I believe works and is good, although I'm still sort of struggling with Monday and Tuesday and how to play those days, haven't found consistent results yet.

When I say motivation, I don't mean I don't enjoy poker anymore. I still love this game, I'm still enthralled with it to a high level. But the excitement of moving to Vegas has worn off, and to keep up a schedule on your own for high volume can be tough day in and day out.

Febuary had not been the best month for me in terms of profit, but this last week has been pretty insane. Earlier this week, from Sunday-Wednesday I made $1200. This wasn't with 30 hour sessions, I just ran pretty hot and on the right side of coolers honestly.

And then this morning came.

I had trouble sleeping, probably because I broke off half my big toenail playing basketball. (cue great mental image) So I got up early (7) which is ungodly for poker players, and began an online cash grind. (after waking up, shower, breakfast of course, I didn't just roll out of bed and into poker, no bueno) And then began the beats. Two outers, three outers, every outers, I lost them all. Within a couple hours, that $1200 profit was down to a measly $200. I took a break at this point lol. I reviewed every hand I played, with a few exceptions in a couple marginal spots I agreed with my play and knew overall I was still playing very well. Like Rocky in his first fight, and Mick is yelling "down! down! Stay down!" I got to my feet and beckoned Creed Cash Game to come at me. I haven't played so focused, thinking so critically about every single decision for so long in awhile. All that to say, I got back to the $1200 profit I had, which feels like a miracle.

For March, I look to improve on my mistakes and bad/lazy volume and schedule. I did not keep up with what I had set and it wasn't healthy mentally or physically. I did not stream very much at all either, even though at the start of the month I put a good bit of work into making it better.

If Monday and Tuesday are difficult to play because you can't find games, then put in more hours during the weekend and use Monday and Tuesday as your "weekend". Focus on putting in the hours when the games are good and sitting out when they are worse. This works weekly as well as over the course of the year. Make sure you are fresh and can grind long hours during the summer and then relax a bit more during the slow times in town.

It's the 80/20 principle. Keep a spread sheet of all your results in Excel sortable by casino you play, time of day (afternoon, early evening, evening, early nighttime, and late night (and super early morning/super late night), and day of the week. Also note how long each session was (2hr, 4hr, 6hr, 8hr, or over 10 hr) as well as what your graph looked liked in each session (meaning were you in the hole most of the night, were you up and down, were you ahead most of the night, create some "typical" categories of sessions you have). They use the sort feature to see when you make the most money hourly. You might be surprised to learn that you do best at a $5+$1 casino on the weekend between 8pm and 2am while you suck at a $4+$0 casino after 3am. Or you play horribly when you are either down a lot or up a lot and play best when you're around your starting stack size. Then adjust to your findings and focus on the times and situations who you make 80% of your money and avoid those Mondays and Tuesdays at the tables.

I agreed with the short version, and I agree with the long one as well! Thanks man that's very solid advice, I guess I got trapped into thinking of my schedule in weeks. Yes the software I track my play with is great, one software for everything and I can go in and look at hours, places, days and times played for what's being the most profitable.

Hi Bikeking19, we work in the same field. Which company do you work for? Do you do any ILS work?

Keep at it with the pokers!

@HelloFriends, thanks for the words of encouragement! Yeah I haven't done much ILS work, mostly avionics such as troubleshooting, cable building, software uploads, LRU replace/install. Always a pleasure to meet another avgeek!

So I had already mentioned in my last post that this past week kind of saved the month for me. Well the week wasn't done being awesome.

I drove to LA on Saturday. It was the first day of the LAPC 10k main event, while this is way way outside my current bankroll, it attracts a lot of the top pros without a very big public audience. I hopped into a great $3/$5 game. For those of you unaware, Commerce starts out pretty shortstacked in a lot of their games. The game is min/max buyin of $200. While in a normal poker game, the rake would most likely be unbeatable, there seems to be more gamble at the Commerce than any casino in Vegas. For example:

Hero has AA in bb. Villain 1 limps for $5 from MP. Button makes it $25. Hero has $190 and both Villians have him covered. Hero makes it $75 to go. Villain 1 calls, villian 2 jams. Hero makes the call and is all in. Villain 1 also calls. Flop 10cJh3s, turn 5s river 2h. Villian 2 turns over AQ, Hero reveals AA, Villain 1 mucks.

You'll see people with 1k and 2k stacks at this $200 buyin game, and the same amount of gamble as when they had a $200 stack with little knowledge of postflop play when deep. I also was just purely lucky when quad aces, a qualifying jackpot hand, hit on my table resulting in a $720 table share later in the day.

I kept track of when the Main event would go on breaks, one 15 minute every two hours. During these breaks I was able to track down several pros for a quick picture, a couple actually were willing to talk for a few minutes. I met Maria Ho, Antonio Esfandeari, David Peters, Qui Nquyen, Erik Seidel, Gordon Vayo, Alex Keating, and checked off the ultimate target of Daniel Negraneu. Qui and Gordon were a couple very cool guys, got to chat with them for a few minutes, even joined in some strategy talk with Gordon Vayo. I had met Vanessa Selbst and Fedor Holz here last year so I knew this was a great event for meet & greet and it couldn't have gone much better.

So I headed back to Vegas booking a total profit of about $1500 and my best selfie day to date haha. Also met Andrew Bradshaw, a manager at the Commerce and a cohost on the Top Two Poker Podcast with Chase Bianchi. We had emailed and talked before and they brought up a couple of my emails before on the pod, but meeting him was pretty neat as well.

I don't know how many of you are podcast people, but I listen to a lot of them. From strategy to poker news and just interviews, if it's regarding poker I'm probably subscribed. Usually when I have my headphones in at the table, that's what I'm listening to. Anyways, one of my favorite ones is Poker In The Ears, you may know it as EPT Not Live, hosted by James Hartigan and Joe Stapelton. They have a section at the end of every episode called "SuperFan VS. Stapes" Where they bring on a fan of the show, talk a few minutes about them and how they got into poker, and then do a trivia contest against Joe Stapelton on a subject of the fan's choosing. They had mentioned a couple weeks ago they needed more applications and to apply via Twitter. I did so, and this morning I saw PokerStars had DM'd me asking me to come on the show. So I'm very excited, I have the call on March 8th and I believe the episode will be released on March 13th, so stay tuned for that. Speciality subject is my favorite movie: Rocky.

I continue to look forward to March, I've heard great things about March Madness and Nascar coming into town and the games reallly picking up on the live side, so look to keep a close eye on the tables going. I'm also going to have a coach for Live cash games here with a local who is also crushing the games at a crazy win rate, I've never had coaching before only peers and subscription to training sites so I'm looking forward to that as well.

OK so it seems I've hopefully revived this thread after the long period of silence and I'll try and continue to post updates of the grind upwards. Oh one more thing I forget if I had mentioned before. But as far as Online play, I am doing a $1k-$5k bankroll challenge in cash between myself and another streamer on Twitch, Grind2Win. I'm currently right at 2.5k after a month or so, whoever gets to 5k first is treated to a classy steak dinner.

Very nice OP!

I strongly caution against this exact advice. The variance on your aggregate winrate is huge, and dividing it by day and time of day will lead to absurdly small sample sizes and chasing noise.

Instead, do keep an Excel spreadsheet, but of how good the game was (your subjective rating) on a scale of 1 to 10. Scatterplot your monetary results with your subjective ranking. When you start to see correlation between the two, sort by how good the game was and use that to base your decisions.

@callipygian yeah I actually use an app called Poker Income Tracker. It was like $7 bucks, I can track online and live, cash and tournaments, use a phone or PC, keep track of tips, places played, days, times, etc. It's very helpful it keeps track of a lot of data.

In other news, I was debating on playing the event #1 of the WSOP circuit stop in LA. I decided at 12:15pm to play the 4pm flight and boosted my prius over to the bike. Ran pretty well and got a couple punts into my aces, bagged up 54 bigs heading into day two tomorrow. Only the 3rd multiday live tournament I've played, bagging felt pretty awesome especially with a totally workable stack.

I go on the Poker In The Ears podcast this Wednesday, the episode will be released this Thursday.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. 266 people entered day 2 with 189 paid. Made some hands early on and chipped up a little bit, and then fairly card dead for the most part. Rocked a short stacked for hours, whole table was fairly short and I had an awful table draw seated between Bart Hanson and David "odb" Baker with a lot of button and blind vs blind play. Ended up taking 35th for $1,875 after 109s<K9s 4bb. Fairly happy with my play overall, could have taken a couple spots earlier with a KJs 3bet jam or an A7o mp jam but taking everything into account I'm still sleeping soundly.

Poker News published my story today: https://www.pokernews.com/news/2017/...egas-27304.htm

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You write very well, thanks for sharing the story in Poker News.

Thanks! I took some time putting this together.

Dude gnarly story about the bike accident! I'm from the area and in the article you said you commuted an hour each way to work north of LA. So were you like living in the San Fernando Valley and driving to Antelope Valley every day? If so that's a pretty intense commute everyday.

Maybe he works at the skunkworks in Palmcaster and would have to kill you if he told you.

Yeah it was a pretty decent commute, no traffic so that was good. I can neither confirm nor deny the job I may or may not had had. That's why I rode a bike, great gas mileage.

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I could care less where you worked, my former post-college roommate and best friend from HS worked for Northrup Grumman and I know there are only a handful of defense contractors out here so I could pinpoint it if I wanted to but there is no point.

Bottom line is I'm glad you found what you feel like is your calling at the moment and you are living how you want to and enjoying it. Keep it up man, you're living the dream

Seems like it would be weird to live in high-cost L.A. and then schlep over the hill to work when it's so much cheaper to just live in Palmcaster. I was offered a job in Van Nuys that I almost took because a lot of guys in the office lived over the hill that I could carpool with. That makes sense, a high L.A. salary and a low Palmcaster cost of living.

I grew up w/ my dad and several other dads in the neighborhood commuting separately every morning from north Ventura county to The Valley, DTLA or West LA nearly daily and most of them needed up with a heart attack, prostate cancer or both - I don't think it's much of a coincidence lol. The Palmcaster drive up/down I-5 isn't as intense as driving US-101 daily in/out of the city though.

I was living with a few roommates at the time so my living expenses were very minimal, I pay $300 for rent. That justified the longer commute time, especially when I was closer to LA and the beaches. Palmdale and Lancaster just had very little appeal to me.

At that rate that's pretty good to be in the city vs high desert

Hello,

I enjoyed your article. I was curious as to what your bankroll requirements or what you feel comfortable having for you bankroll in the 1/2 & 1/3 games you are currently playing?

Thanks

I have to admit that living in the high desert had a lot of appeal for me because I was moving from a small town in AZ. I really didn't want to live in or be in L.A.

Thanks, glad you enjoyed it! I did quite a bit of research into starting bankroll requirements. A common idea that I saw was 6 months of living expenses plus a good bankroll for what stakes you are playing. So I came out with more than that, I have more than 6 months of living expenses and a poker bankroll of $10,000. So that adds up to just over 33 full buyins for $1/$2, although some $1/$3 is $500. I don't think this is the minimum you have to have to do what I did, but I think it's a solid starting point. I guess if things really went south and I go on a prolonged downswing down to say, $2,000 or so, that would be about the point where I really start to sweat and have to make sure I didn't let my current roll affect my mental game. Just some of my thoughts on it, I can point to some podcasts, articles and videos I watched to research it. I've really gotten a pretty crazy response to my article. I never expected it to get the attention it has gotten, especially with 99% of it being positive.

I lived in Santa Clarita, which is much better than living in LA, very nice town outside of LA, Six Flags where a membership was $7 a month, just a nice location. Honestly the one downside to it was I just a little farther from Vegas, and if I lived in Victorville it would have cut out a decent chunk of that drive. But being able to go back and forth on one tank was fine, and it's not nicknamed "Victimville" for no reason.

BikeKing are you familiar with who CushLash on this forum is? You two I think would have much to discuss and he's a great resource of someone who's similar age and background as you who's been out here and successful for several years. If you haven't already reach out to him and offer to buy a coffee, I think it'll be worth your time and effort.

Also good advice on bankroll and living expenses imo