I thought it would be fun to write an ongoing "trip report" of sorts to document taking myself from a poker loser to playing profitable poker. I want to keep this ongoing, in trip report style, with the exception that I already live in Las Vegas.

I make no qualms about it - I have been a lifetime loser at poker. But I've always wanted to be good at it, so I've decided to take on some coaching and give myself a concerted effort at becoming a profitable poker player. I approached a couple of people on these boards about coaching and I decided to work with cushlash and see if I can become a consistent winner at low/mid stakes NLHE.

Some general parameters I'm following:
- Thanks to the Bitcoin market, I had a pretty good 2013. I didn't quite make "buy an island and retire" money, more like "don't need to worry about bills for a long time to come" type of money. So I'm not sure if I'm looking to go "pro" at this. I just don't want to be a losing poker player. I'm just setting some short-term goals, like, "Can I make my utility bill payments from poker this month?". This also means that I've slowed my work down in other areas. I only take on clients that I REALLY want to work with. Everything else goes towards poker or studying towards my Masters degree.

- I have a set bankroll for this. This BR is exclusive to poker and I keep track with the Poker Income app (great little app!). The number is between the ridiculously low numbers you hear and Ed Miller's 100 buy-ins number. Either way, I consider myself to be well-funded for this.

- I also do consulting, so I will be splitting my time between client sites and the tables. That's fine, the clients give me something to do with my time and provide consistent income. In theory, this provides a replenishable bankroll, but again, I already have money set aside for this. If my poker BR goes bust, it wouldn't change my lifestyle in any way. I only mention the clients because it's what I would be doing away from the tables.

- I will focus on 1/2 and 1/3 NL. I have no visions of grandeur or classiness. I'm more than willing to ham it up with the tourists at Mandalay Bay and Luxor and places like that. The goal is low-hanging fruit - the money I win from them spends the same as anyone else's money.

- Finally, I will have minimal play at CET properties. I do consulting work for CET (for online poker) and I don't want to mix the two efforts. While there is nothing in my contract that excludes me from this, it's just a personal rule I'm putting into place.

This is my initial result set after a few hours of play and 2 coaching sessions. How I got here will be the subject of my first entry.

Good luck...looking forward to more installments.

GL Jim!

Good luck!!

how are you calculating your tips/meals?

It's part of the Poker Income app. You "run" it while playing and press a button each time you tip and it tracks it for you. It's a good little app for this.

Also I don't eat at casinos. I eat at home before leaving in order to minute expenses. I'm going to start bringing my own water too

Mission accomplished. Profitability achieved. Coaching worked.

/thread

$70 in tips over 16 hours??

Tips/Meals (Maybe he bought a couple of burgers tableside.)

This thread has potential.

I know that sounds like a lot but it's really only about 4 pots/hour (-ish) plus a few bottles of water (waitress tip). I'm going to start bringing my own water.

Either way I'm confident this number is accurate. I use the app consistently for it. I think most people underestimate how much those tips add up in the long run.

I forgot about drink tips. And yea, it's like a $ per pot and if you're raking 3.5 pots an hour + some water that's the perfect number for your hours played.

Re: Tips

I don't usually bother tracking them. But maybe that's because I'm only on pace to log like 400-500 hours live this year due to work, so ultimately I'm not really concerned how the $ or 2 a pot is affecting my roll.

Also, I'm prone to give a dealer a bigger tip when they throw down a suckout for me or when I've hit the high hand JP at The Mirage. $3 usually for a nice pot suckout and I tossed 2 redbirds to Leo @ The Mirage when he dealt me my first ever live straight flush back in February. I was BS'ing in 3/6 night before the Super Bowl after laying some prop bets at the Sports book and like 90 mins into sitting, tada! Leo rivers me a 6-10 Moneymaker. If it was NL the pot would of been bigger b/c it was 3 handed and Villains hit A high flush and A high straight, respectively, and I would of probably hit dealer with a $20 for dealing out my first live one in NL.

I had my first coaching session with cushlash. I have promised to not reveal everything we talk about so I'll only provide general terms.

My biggest takeaway is that I need to change my perspective from trying to make a hand (flop a hand) to making the right bets to control the hand. Our session involved talking about how often opponents will miss a flop - they will miss a lot. So initiative and position mean a ton in order to win the pot.

This may seem simple to some of you with more experience. But it's new to me. I've always been of the mindset of "let me limp for a cheap flop and see if I hit anything". In retrospect, that's terrible. So this session helped me think about poker with a view of aggression, position and initiative.

Interesting thread and I'm looking forward to more updates. I do have a question though. I realize that you're just following the app, but I don't understand the purpose of tracking tips. Your profit of $331 is net of the tips anyway, so what do you do with the added info that it was actually $331 + $70? If you're going to track the $1 or so per pot that you tip, why not also track the $4 rake? Both are just two components of the cost of playing live poker, right?

On a somewhat related matter, one of the items I started tracking this year for the first time is the amount of promotion/bonus money (high hands, etc.) I get in return for the added jackpot drop I have to pay in South Florida. (All casinos down here are $5 + $2.) So far, I'm averaging $6.39/hr. I think tracking something like that is more interesting than tracking the dollar amount of tips, but perhaps that's not relevant to you if you're not playing at (m)any rooms that have a jackpot drop.

Didn't mean to go off on a tangent like that though; let me reiterate that my main purpose in posting was to say how much I like your idea of tracking the effect coaching has on both your style of play as well as your winrate. Genuinely looking forward to further updates of your progress.

I'm not sure if there is (will be) a purpose for it. I'm really just tracking it an interesting side-note. There's really very little that can be done about it. At the very least, it does serve as a reminder to bring some of my own supplies. Those bottles of water at a $1 can add up rather quickly.

Mandalay Bay
I don't understand the TRs that are inevitably summed up as "I only played V, Aria and Bellagio and got crushed!!11!1!". Well, yeah, I think those are hard rooms to play! But I'm more than happy to get off-the-beaten-path and hit rooms that aren't necessarily filled with pros. Mandalay Bay is one of these rooms.

I started getting back into poker by playing their 10AM tourneys. It's a fun mix of people and I've cashed in it before. But I stopped playing them due to the high take out - it's just criminal. Regardless, its well-lit, OK staff and close enough to the parking lot to not make it a backpacking adventure to get there

I've been playing MB in the afternoons, around 3PM or so. I'm building up my stamina by only playing an hour or two at a time. At that hour it's a good mix of tourists and locals (mostly off-shift dealers). I would say that about 60% of the hands here have also involved straddles - I make a mental note to talk to cushlash about them. I was definitely surprised at how often they happen.

There were few notable items during my first couple of sessions at MB. I did manage to post a couple of wins and then I lost two buy-ins. So that wasn't a good thing. But I did feel like I was putting some of my new-found knowledge to work. I was able to get a feel for pushing people around with bets and I fired three bullets for the first time in my life. It was an interesting process to go from trying to make a hand to think more about my bet sizing instead.

At this point my BR is at -$400

Refer back to my original post - I don't necessarily need to work right now. So I'm using some of my extra time to pursue my Masters degree. I'm pursuing a Masters in Applied Statistics from a very large east coast university.

So I became curious at when my results in poker become significant. You always hear the number of 1000 hours or something even higher than that. But I'm not sure I have enough data for that. However, what I do have from the Poker Income app is the proportion of my sessions that are profitable. So, I can definitely find out how many sessions I need to be significant. If I can be profitable after the significant number of session then that's a good thing. It won't give me a win rate or mean that I'm a *very* profitable player, but it's a good start.

Let's take "n" as the number of significant sessions. The formula is as follows:


The z-alpha value represents a confidence level and the pi represents a proportion. Finally, E represents your desired margin of error. You get the z-alpha from a standard statistics table and you make up your own E level.

I'm going to choose a 95% confidence level, which leaves a z-alpha value of 5%. You divide that by two leaving you with a value of 0.025. I use that value and check my stat tables and come up with 1.96.

I already know that my proportion of winning sessions is 71%. I know it's early, but let's just use this as a number for now. Finally, I will use a 10% margin of error. That's insanely high, but I'll use it for the sake of simplicity. That results in the formula of:

(1.96^2(0.71)(0.29)) / 0.10^2 = 79

I'll round this number up for 80 sessions as being a significant number of sessions. I cross-check this number with what's known as the Conservative Method, whose formula is:



(1.96^2(0.5)(0.5)) / 0.10^2 = 96

Good, I'm not too far from the Conservative Method.

This gives me a goal to go after. I want to log 80 sessions in my Poker Income app and see where I end up after that. Of course, if I go bust before then, it's not a good sign. If I'm still around, then it's a good sign. Again, I don't consider this the "end all, be all" number. But 80 sessions seems like a good "temperature check" to see where I'm at. If I can be profitable after 80 sessions then I'll be happy. At the rate I'm playing, that will be about a 3-month effort (or so) to get to 80 sessions.

Pretty interesting endeavor JB. Good luck and keep at it! Don't get discouraged if the new found knowledge backfires at the tables, it often takes a while to successfully incorporate into ones game.

subbed...

still kinda confused about why your being such a nit about these 1$ waters.

It wouldn't make sense to be a nit if I'm a tourist in town for a long weekend.

But, I'm basically going to be playing throughout the whole summer, virtually every day and I get thirsty in dry Vegas. So if you take that in the aggregate, you're talking about a decent chunk of change over the next few months here. It will pay to bring my own water bottle.

How big are the bottles of water?



Just joshing you, man. I dgaf where you buy water. I'm more interested in poker.

I like this idea for a thread. I wish you improvement and rungood!

This idea seems similar to other threads in the House of Blogs, no? I'm not a mod nor do I play one on TV, but maybe that might be a better place for it rather than the more congested LVL?

stop making hero calls and stop three barrel bluffing... leak plugged.