Here are my results and reflections after my first 300 hours of recorded live poker in 2017. I began playing again in April.

Quick Background: I’ve played poker for a long time as a rec player but this is this first year I’ve put in serious hours. I’ve always thought I’ve been a profitable/break even player but I wanted to put some data behind my assumption and prove to myself that I understand the game.

Stakes and game type: All live NLH, mostly 1/3, with about 10 hours or so of 2/5

Results:

http://www.screencast.com/t/Gr9Gea6Xy

http://www.screencast.com/t/n8jR4vOZMeN

The biggest change I made after starting the Upswing Lab was in my post-flop framework. I immediately adopted the 4 category framework taught by Doug and that was super helpful in organizing post-flop decisions. After implementing Lab principles I drastically lowered the amount of spots I felt “lost” in post-flop.

The huge drawdown you see right after the first upswing was because I hadn’t quite calibrated the lab strategy correctly to my player pool. The games I play in are extremely loose/passive, sationy and multiway so bluffs rarely get through.

After tightening up my strategy significantly I began to exploit the loose/passive play by folding a lot to any aggression and making sure to limit bluffing. Yes I’m extremely unbalanced in some spots, but these players still pay me off when I have it…

You can see after exercising some risk control and adapting to the player pool I’ve been able to create a more stable equity curve.

Unfortunately the results are skewed down because of my latest drawdown. The magnitude of the move was exacerbated because I stepped up to the $500 buy-in game at the Wynn while in Vegas for a week or so.

It sucks to have down variance hit when you step up — but such is life. They don’t call it the grind for nothing!

Reflections

• Live 1/3 can still be easily beaten by basic ABC poker. Play tight, play in position, know when to fold and you will make money. Bluffing is probably breakeven at best considering the player pool will not lay anything down.
• Tight play works well in live games because you are exploiting people’s inability to exercise patience. It’s really hard for people to go an entire hour folding hand after hand. Eventually people get bored and they pay up to see flops and chase even if the price is horrible.
• Rake at the low limits is super expensive. Most of the hours I put in were at a room where the rake is a time charge. It works out to about $11/hour. Rake is eating up 50% of my bottom line at the low limits.
• As a live player having a great theoretical understanding of why to bet, why to bluff, why to fold etc. is super important. Unlike online players, live guys don’t have a ton of data that they can look at and make adjustments from. They need to rely on intuition and a great theoretical understanding of the game to keep their actions in check.

Poker As A Job

• After this run I realized I would never become a full-time poker player. Here is my reasoning:
• Sitting in a poker chair for 8-12 hours at a time is extremely unhealthy. Putting in that kind of sitting load day in and day out is brutal. I’m trying to prevent myself from living an extremely sedentary lifestyle.
• You can’t scale your time as a grinder. You have to put in the hours to make the money. This goes against my goal of maximizing earning power per unit of time. You can’t hire someone to deploy strategy at the table. You have to execute it yourself. A poker grinder is more like an employee rather than a business owner. I don’t mind doing some grinding, but I prefer building machines and systems that others can work within.
• The potential earning power is decent but not great. I estimate that if you get to 5/10 as a live player you cap out at $75/hr over a large sample which makes out to about $150,000 a year, Add in all the variance and the final reward looks just “okay.” There are easier ways to make $150k a year with 0 variance.
• The most profitable times to play are Thursday-Sat nights. If you want to maximize your earnings you basically need to work “service industry” hours. If your friends and family work outside of the service industry (mine do) then it becomes really hard to spend time with them and have fun with them. This creates a lot of lifestyle friction.
• All that being said I think poker is a GREAT part time gig.
• You can generate a nice side income.
• At part-time you can still go out on select weekend nights. There is no pressure to grind 12 hours on Friday and Sat night.
• You have way less financial stress. Poker winnings become a end of year “bonus” rather than a income source to live on. Your “real job” will take care of all bills and necessary expenses.
• I highly recommend the part-time option for anyone considering grinding live cash.

Plans Going Forward

• I want to build my profit cushion to $5,000 and move up to 2/5 as soon as possible. Since the economics of the game are so bad at 1/3 it’s critical I get up to the 2/5 level as fast as possible. Even if I have less edge at the larger game the reduction in rake as a percentage of money on the table is worth it.
• From the hours I’ve played at 2/5 so far the player pool looks sort of like this:
• One third of the table is the same loose/passive station players you find at 1/3
• One third of the table are tight grinders who moved up after figuring out how to beat the loose passive players at 1/3
• One third of the table is pretty good — I would have to dig into the lab again to beat these guys. A balanced strategy with a lot of creativity would work best.

That’s all I got! I look forward to any feedback, comments and questions.