Quote:
Originally Posted by riverdog
Bikeking19,
Hey congrats on following your dreams! It sounds like things are going pretty well.
Take or leave any of what I have to say. Most people do not want advice and don't listen. That's ok. I rarely check into these threads. For background, I am 2+2 OG with an original signup number in the low 100s. I played semipro, meaning I had a high-paying day job, for 10 years. I won enough each and every year to support a family, something very few pros can say. Before that I went broke blowing $31,000 in hard-earned poker winnings learning no-limit in a 10-10-20 game. Yeah, that still makes me go hmmm. I am almost 50 now and have not played much in 6 years but still beat the Vegas 2-5-10rock and 25-50 PLO games and the 10-20/20-40nl, but with a radically different NL strategy.
But who cares? That really doesn’t matter except to convince you my thoughts may help you. So, now, let me say first, I had it far, far easier than you. Do you know what it was like to be skilled in no-limit when the PartyPoker 5-10 6-max tables opened up? It was like printing money. People had notes on me like "will three-bet QQ" and later "will three-bet 86s," "a maniac," "lucky as **** always has it when I call him down but bets crazy." You would have annihilated those games, trust me.
Ok. Here goes. Take it or leave it as you see fit.
I am happy to hear you are doing many things very, very right.
- Gym before poker. Use that anticipation for poker to your advantage, help regulate your blood sugar and mood, stay healthy, develop good habits while young – DO YOU SEE ALL THE OUT OF SHAPE, FAT YOUNG POKER PROS? Not for many years, I assure you. Please, please also choose a gym with plenty of natural sunlight. You will need the sun, one of the most powerful antidepressants in the world.
- Game hunting! This is the skill which decays and needs so much attention, care, and feeding. If you are playing $1-$2 or $1-$3 - and they are effectively the same in any good game - you ALWAYS have a good game to play in. To hear you say there are 100 Vegas games and there is always a good game makes me think you might be one of the very, very few who make it long term.
Sidenote: Please always remember your own advice. It sounds like you leave bad games quickly. Do you do the same when the game becomes bad, especially when you are stuck? Here is where the average "pro" fails miserably, either finding a room they like or failing to move to another table or casino when the game is not good. In my experience, the ability to continually table select degrades over time as ego and boredom increase. I hope that never happens to you.
- Not drinking at the table.
- Getting enough sleep! Wow this one is big.
- Not spending money stupidly except for the roulette part.
- Enjoying poker! Wow you come to this from a good perspective. Those who never held a corporate job have a hard time realizing how much the corporate world can wear a person down. Sitting with annoying people, grinding, dealing with variance – these are easier than dealing with a toxic corporate environment. Of course if you had a good corporate environment you won’t gain as much benefit but still, you worked first.
Ok, here goes the not--solicited advice. Again, whatever, ignore at will.
Dear Bikeking19,
I hope you succeed. I have seen so many fall by the wayside, become disillusioned, become unable to put in hours, become bitter, tilt, lose, hate life, and so on. From this, and from a deep understanding of the pain poker causes and the difficulty, some numbers to ponder:
1. Your hour goals are far too high. 39 hours of live and 21 hours online? That is too much. Even if you were a poker monk, it is too much. If nothing else, trust me on this.
2. Callypigian, in addition to having one of my all-time favorite 2+2 handles and being IMO a wise individual, nailed it:
"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."
This is super important as you pointed out. Play in good games. Anything else is serious tilt.
3. You have many enemies. Of these, boredom is the worst IMO, followed in no specific order by variance, youth (which makes it harder to resist boredom and variance), the lack of sunlight inside casinos, bad eating habits, bad sleep hygiene, loneliness, the difficulty civilians have understanding poker pros, and many others.
4. Tournaments are the kiss of death. They force you to play when you do not feel like it, and they are horrible investments due to the tax consequences, even if you are heavily advantaged. Play cash. Tournaments are tilt. You can play them, but when you do, understand that you are drawing on your allowable tilt budget.
5. Read limon’s Random Shyte thread. From this you will glean nuggets such as make a plan on how you will exploit or bust each person at the table (obvious but do you actually do it?) and others.
6. Read Elements of Poker and Painless Poker by Tommy Angelo. You must understand reciprocality to survive against other pros. Ego almost always gets people to move up. $2-$5 nl in Vegas has plenty of ok pros who ma seem tough. If you can learn to sometimes feel the flow of a poker table without immersing yourself, you will win. Detachment can help you immensely at the table. Stillness suppresses your tells, of which we all have many.
7. Find a few people good at game theory and watch their content. A comment: “optimum” and “game theoretic optimum” are misused even by game theory professors. There are strategies designed to be unexploitable, and there are better strategies designed to exploit bad play in opponents. Both are called optimum in game theory. In your games, you want to exploit.
8. Keep a book of good plays and good ideas. For example, when you play $2-$5, the first time someone three-best you from the cutoff or button, it is usually profitable to four-bet huge no matter your holding. Accumulate 30 or 40 of those plays, and your earn rate will grow.
9. Take breaks. Take breaks during play. Take breaks when you lose a couple sessions in a row. Walk. Think. Calm your mind.
10. Many players tilt the worst when they are winning. Hey you’re up $350 in a $1-$2 game. If your VPIP goes to 40%, you are on monkey tilt.
11. Don’t tip big. Those huge pot wins are a major part of your success. It makes no difference at the end of the year whether you tipped that $10 on winning a $725 pot or after you busted out twice. $1 is almost always enough, and you do not have to tip $1 for small pots. But do tip.
12. Maintain a modest lifestyle. There is so much you can do and have for little money. Tacos are delicious. Cheap, good food abounds in Vegas. Cooking is cheap and can be enjoyable, especially if you are cooking for someone else. Strip clubs are for idiots. Degening is for fools. Also, buy Green Dragon Sauce and eat the crab fat fried rice at Chada Street even though it’s $11.
13. Study. By this I mean in part yes, read good threads and listen to good people. But also take notes on them and on regs. Spend half an hour on game days rereading your notes. Deliberate practice. This is your profession. Study for real.
There is so much more to it, even assuming you don’t tilt much and play well. Good luck! You are playing for the long haul. Anything you can do to play more consistently, make fewer mistakes, tilt less, exploit more effectively, prepare yourself better with sleep and sunlight and exercise and study and acceptance and ego reduction, avoid making silly mistakes, and avoid spending money that doesn’t bring proportionate happiness makes you more likely to have choices in your future and to enjoy your life more. Maximize your happiness. Seize the day and the felt.
Or not.
-riverdog
Wow man thanks so much for sharing this was really great advice to hear and good insight, exactly what I'm looking for and appreciate.
On game selection, yes if the game becomes shorthanded, or just not good either with the rotation of players coming in and out or just the table action getting pretty slow, I'll either ask for a table change or just leave. It's not overly uncommon for me to sit down in a game and before the first orbit is complete already know this game isn't one to be sitting in. Yeah my first month here was fairly swingy and I think a huge portion of that was I would just go to a casino and put in a session, that was it because that was what I was used to. "I like this room." "Haven't been here in awhile." Those are things I have removed from my vocabulary when game hunting. Poker income tracker does a super solid job for me and tracking. It tracks games, stakes, days, times, notes on the game you played, and you can filter by all of those as well as cash or tournaments and live or online.
Yes I think gym is something that really helps, I got a good deal for $20/month no contract and really nice gyms all around Las Vegas and I'm in complete agreement about mental health and physical health being very important. I went on a moderately difficult hike today with a hiking group and it was very freeing just to be out doing something for a few hours and wipe poker off the brain. Mental health seems to be a pretty hot topic right now, and for good reason, it can make or break you. I had read elements of poker, painless poker is for sure on my list of ones to get to.
Live tournaments are usually a rare exception for me, sometimes the Aria $125 daily as that has a pretty good structure you can actually play poker in, and sometimes a Venetian deep stack, but other than that the rake and the hyper turbo structures introduce a much larger amount of variance even if you hold an edge on the field as a whole. I will play more online tournaments for low buy-ins, $22 and under, although online play hasn't been much of a thing lately really.
Agreed the hour's goals I set were very ambitious, I do not put up that kind of hours now. Past couple of months has been majorly just live, I've found normally that Mondays and Tuesdays tend to be the slowest action days, although not always, and will usually devote these days to more study time.
To the best of my knowledge, I rarely start having a higher VPIP simply because I have run up a stack. I know for some players they think now they can start playing more suited connectors and random broadways to try and hit some more hands but this is rarely profitable having a large stack in a cash game doesn't mean those hand become any more profitable to play, although obviously there are some spots you can take advantage of as a bigger stack, but for the most part I treat it as just cash, no matter how many stacks of red I have. I like your idea about making notes of moves and things to add to my game, I feel like that's a big thing that could really help a winrate overall.
Tipping yes I normally keep to a minimum, especially at these stakes where rake already affects your hourly so significantly, normally $1 is fine, and I won't tip on small pots, I bite my tongue when I see a guy tipping for taking down the blinds pre. That Bellagio pot was exceptional, before that I don't believe I'd ever tipped more than $5 and that was a rare case on very large pots.
Modest lifestyle, for sure man I'm on the Thinking Poker NitCast wagon. I love my Costco membership, heck even lunch there is like the cheapest in town. $2.69 for a drink and big slice of pizza. Prius getting 50mpg, always nice. Someone had mentioned how I deal with parking, yeah I don't pay lol. At Venetian, Wynn, PlanetHollywood they're still free, and at Caesars if you have a Nevada ID it's free, and yes with 75 hours of play with MGM you get free parking as well. I fear the day may be coming where I'm walking a mile just to have parked for free lol, but for right now it's good.
Breaks and enjoying poker: Absolutely man! I had mentioned earlier something I've learned to be content with is the small wins. Before going pro, a good session was usually defined as doubling up. But now, that's a tournament phrase, I play to win money, if I only win 100 bucks in a session and the game has broken down, rack it up and leave. As a rec player I would totally stay in games just with the goal of getting my stack to a certain size and then I would leave, obviously, this would cause major mental game problems. Yes I still enjoy poker, it's an amazing game, I want to continue to learn more and more about it and new things about it that I can use. I'm enjoying poker and I'm really enjoying my life in general right now. I just feel very solid and confident in this grind at the moment and I look forward to this summer and the things that are coming with that. I really enjoy using my brain if that makes any sense lol, I like solving things and diving deep into them, and poker lets me do that.
VLOG QUALITY: Yeah I know I really wish I had some nicer quality cameras. I'm going to look into getting something that shoots better and records audio better. I recently got a new and better phone because they were half off at Best Buy so hopefully HH will be a little better now, and it's possible I'm doing something wrong in production and or posting that is having a poor effect on the videos and I'm checking that out as well. Even though things have been going fairly solid over the past couple months, just throwing down a grand on vlog equipment doesn't make sense from a financial perspective, but I'm fairly confident I can find HD equipment without an HD pricetag.
BURGERS: So a little backstory on myself, basically lived in California until age 7, moved to Charleston SC until 15, moved to FL and went to school there, got a job in Cali, then shortly back to FL and now Vegas. From a price/quality standpoint In N Out tops my list, there are some other good burger restaurants that I enjoy, Umami is one of them, five guys makes a decent one as well, but spending less than $5 as opposed to $12 really makes me give In N Out a good rating. Best tasting burger in America? I don't think so, but best value for a good burger, yes, IMO, having been and traveled across much of America.
I was much happier with how my second VLOG is at least starting to emulate the top quality ones, still, some stuff to learn and a lot of fine tuning to do but even from a time standpoint the second one was much quicker and I found a lot of things much easier to get through.
Well, speaking of VLOGs I should proably hit the sack so I can get up and start editing this next one. Cheers!
