Stephen Groom Music Producer? Poker Pro? Sports Bettor? Tune in next post to find out

Losing losing losing!

Well I joked about it last week when I said:

Words fail me for something specific to write but I can completely say that two weeks in I have never felt happier about my financial, employment and future security than I do now.  This is a tough thing to measure however as if I had have had a £651 losing day prior to writing this blog then this whole paragraph would be completely different.

Now it's time to do it... So I moved up to 100nl, and as any poker pro will tell you:  moving up is not an easy experience.  I remember hearing Andrew 'Balugawhale' Seidman discussing how he felt the first time he lost a $10, $50, or $100 stack and the fact that when moving between certain limits that everyone gets crushed to start with.  It turns out that I am no exception.  Given that I had heard Balugawhale discuss this phenomenon and the reasons that it happens I thought that I would find it pretty easy moving up.  So I fired up some £0.50/£1.00 tables, sat with £100 and started to play like I would any other session.  Then began the worst losing period of my poker playing life.  I lost in excess of 20 buy-ins.  I will list my first 10 100nl sessions below.  It it pretty discusting!

• 2hrs -451
• 4hrs +196
• 2hrs -188
• 2hrs -253
• 2hrs -267
• 4hrs -145
• 3hrs -9
• 3hrs -397
• 1hrs +23
• 3hrs -372

It was horrific.  Every time I opened sky, I expected that I was going to lose £200 and every time I did.  This went on until I was losing well in excess of £2,000 on sky since moving up and it started to have a serious effect on my mindset.  I mentioned last week that crippling varience would be an expectation of mine and that I would have to get used to it whether I liked it or not.  I also spoke about what my approach would be to dealing with such financial swings and that I must ensure that it does not effect my mindset or gameplay.  Well... It turns out that the difference between losing £1,xxx and £2,xxx was pretty major for me.  Had this happened while I was still playing 50nl it would not be unusual to me.  I would probably have continued playing through the downswing and not even considered that it would be something worth blogging about.  The fact that I was losing twice as much money each session/pot, and about 3x as much money as I ever had during this staking deal meant that it was very scary to think about winning the money back.

The odd thing about what happened is this.  I went on a huge 100nl downswing before ever experiencing a large period of winning at the limit, or an upswing.  This meant that the only measure of how long it would take to win back this money was the winrate which I had established at 50nl.  At that rate, it would have taken me well over a month to get out of this hole which would unfortunately meant 1 full month without pay.  A scary prospect.  This went on for days and I just couldn't win a hand!  No bad beat stories, no bitching, but seriously.  It was unbeliabable.  After my backer sent me another reload I was scared to open sky incase I lost another huge chunk of £££ and I had to tell him how much I'd lost again.

I'm not a psycologist but I'm pretty sure I was a little unhealthy or unstable at this time.  Probably depressed.  IDK.  Anyway, things got so bad after ~5 days that I started to jump into contingencies and what would happen when this poker pro thing met it's untimely end.  I started thinking about going back to work.  Would I be able to find a job in time to make a paychque for November?  Would Aspers take me back (lol!)?  Would I ask to go back?  Wait.. Wait.. Wait.. this is all silly.  I still have some £££.  Could I play on my own money if things got out of hand with Ben and he dropped me?! (At this point I should mention that Ben had never given any indication of intent to drop me.  Nor had he given up on any horses this easily before.  The thought that he was going to was a completely irrational one and is somewhat telling of the rediculous mindset I was in and the stupid thoughts going through my head.)  So yeah.  I was pretty messed up.  I have had a pretty rediculous week and I am glad that I have came out of it alive and kicking!

I don't know what changed or what happened but all of a sudden a few days ago I started winning.  2 days ago infact I had my biggest winning day lifetime and won ~£680.  This is what I was talking about when I said that I had no idea of the winnings that were going to come as a result of playing 100nl.  Just the losses.  So yeah.  I am more than half way out of makeup and I think that all of my worries and rediculous thoughts that came as a result of being stuck so much money have passed over me never to rise again.  I must say though that this moving up thing, and the downswing that unfortunately went with it is an experience.  One which I would not like to have to repeat again.

Cheers
Stephen

One full month as a poker pro and many more to come

So the month is over and I figured I'd round it up with a summary of my results since I left my job.  This is hopefully going to be a rarity as I don't like the idea of disclosing my finances publicly for all to see.  I am doing it this month however to give my friends, family or any interested parties an idea of what is possible grinding cashgames.  Specifically £50nl on sky.

I have no doubhts that I ran pretty incredible this month and despite the fact that I had a couple of ~£500 losing streaks during this period I believe that my hourly rate and monthly profit figures are unrealistically high and are an example of an above average month.  Despite this however, I was very suprised at just how much money was made and it very quickly gave me confidence in the idea of playing poker as a means of income.

So here follows my results from the 22nd of August to date.

Sky Poker Cash Games (£0.25/£0.50 and under, 50/50 split with backer)

These results while pretty aren't completely telling of the money which I made from playing on sky.  The way the staking deal works is that cashouts occur at the high-point of the graph and any time I am below that I am in make up.  This means that at the end of this period I took a 50/50 split of £1,799 and am currently in £152 of makeup.  This simply means that I will not see any more money from the staking arrangement until I make the £152 back at which point we begin to split profits again.

As I started this period in a significant amount of make up the total earned from cash games on sky on my side of the staking arrangement was £687.  An hourly rate of around £6.60.  This hourly rate may seem low but it is not when you consider that I hadn't cleared makeup until the 29th of august at which point I was already winning £500.  I take this to mean that I was roughly £500 in make up at the start of the month.

Live Cash Games (£0.50/£1.00 up to £2.00/£5.00, 50/50 split with backer)

A graph is pretty meaningless here as this doesn't account for much volume at all.   A much more useful groups of stats follows.

Total Cash Game Stake (50/50 split with backer)

So this means that I earned £2,212 over 125.5 table hours for an overall hourly on the month of £17.61.  Take from this ~ £500 of makeup that I had to clear before I earned any money and we arrive at £1,712 over 125.5 hours.  Of this I earned £856 over 125.5 hours giving me an hourly for the month of ~£6.80.  This is a rather low hourly and I definately wouldn't be quitting work if this was my expected monthly keep.  I have to take into consideration however that these figures involve clearing that £500 of makeup and also I wasn't allowed to sit higher than 50nl on sky this month.  This brings me on to an interesting development!

Moving up!

That's right.  Last month went so well that my backer has decided that he is confident enough in my ability to allow me to sit in 100nl (£0.50/£1.00) games on sky.  If I am able to beat these games at anywhere near the rate that I beat the 50nl games then I should see a significant increase in my winrate.  In addition to this I will also recieve a far higher amount of rakeback playing at 100nl.  I did a little bit of number crunching yesterday and concluded that 8 tabling at 50nl ~£4 of my hourly winrate comes from rakeback.  I should see this increase twofold at 100nl although I will be playing less tables to start with.  I speculate that 6tabling 100nl I will be making ~£6/hr in rakeback.

I think I've typed enough for today and I will continue to try to publish a blog weekly with a far lesser focus on money and results.  I will hopefully start to reflect and discuss the impact that not working in a conventional job has had on my personal life.

Thanks again for reading and please post any requests, comments or hopefully compliments in the comments box below
Cheers
Stephen
x

Week 2 as a professional poker player

Swings and Swongs....

Well, this past week has been pretty amazing for me results wise and everything else has been pretty good also.  I ended last week out of makeup and I was pretty happy to be able to come home and potentially be able to earn some money straight away.  Upon getting back from my long weekend spent with family I decided that it would be worth my time and effort to put in two marathon days at the end of last month in order to reach sky's Priority Club.  This meant that across Tuesday the 30th and Wednesday the 31st of August I played 17 hours of poker in total.  I also played more tables than usual during this time and made my goal by earning just over 10,000 sky poker points.

When I spoke to my backer about attempting to achieve sky priority status despite being so far behind the pace his reply was "It's impossible".  I felt very good and very positive to have achieved sky priority status and meet one of my goals for the month of August when I had feared (and basically submitted to) the fact that I wouldn't.  I believe that it is very important to continue to set goals for the short, medium and long term as it would be very boring and difficult to be motivated to work without feeling like I was achieving something.

While I did very well on Tuesday and Wednesday for volume, financially this period included my worst day on sky poker ever.  On Tuesday of last week I had a total loss for the day of 13 buy-ins.  A £££ amount of £-651.  This felt awful.  I can 100% admit that atleast some of the money was lost due to me playing bad due to tilting, stress, tiredness or whatever.  I mean c'mon.  Can you imagine how you would feel if you were losing 2 weeks wages in 2 hours or less.  I can 100% confirm that being stuck this amount of money in a session affected my mindset.  I was constantly doing all sorts of suboptimal stuff which I wouldn't usually do influenced by knowing how much money I was losing.  Realistically though, I must have ran pretty shit and been hideously unlucky to lose that amount.  But the nature of the game for me that day meant that once I  started losing money due to losing flips, getting coolered and running bad I compounded the problem by playing worse.

So... He lost all of his money.  He's broke.  He has failled.  He will be back to work within the month now.  Well, actually no.  I continued to play my target volume and play through the downswing and now I am back on track winning alllllll the money.  This brings me to another interesting little charm which poker and basically all games of chance have which will take some getting used to.  When you are losing, you feel like shit.  It is unavoidable.  You feel that you must be playing bad.  You must be doing something wrong.  You will never win again.  You've fucked up.  etc etc.  These are all of the feeling that I had after my big losing day.  Somehow though, after this bad day I went on to win back all of the money plus a substancial amount more to finish the week way ahead of any target or expectation which I had set for myself.  Now I feel great.  I feel motivated.  I feel like I am indestructable.  I must be playing good.  I will be able to win allllll the time. etc etc.  Basically just the exact opposite of how you feel when you are losing bags of money.

It will be important for me to get used to these emotions and not let it affect my game, my ego, my confidence or anything else.  It has became clear to me quite early (possibly to my benefit) that huge money swings and torturing varience will be a frequent and expected feature of grinding cash games.  The way I view it is like this.  I am playing these games solely to make money.  I make money by following a process of logical deductions which allow me to make the correct decisions and the ones which will make me the most money over the long run.  The results of any action, street, hand, session, day or week aren't important in the slightest and the only thing that matters is I make these decisions correctly and consistently.

If I could be disciplined enough to think this way all of the time then I believe that it would lead to a state of tiltlessness which will allow me to make the most money I potentially can.  Obviously we humans are emotional, conscious creatures and to approach something so robotically would be impossible.  The closer I get to this state the better though.  It will allow me to distance myself from any money swings which I encounter and let me play optimally always.

My one goal for this week was simple.  To play enough hours to be on target to achieve a total playing time on Sky Poker by week 4 of 120 hours.  Obviously my intention was to make money in doing so but that probably should go without saying.  I achieved this goal quite comfortably and have played a total of 31 hours and 45minutes the past week.  My running total since I started this series of blogs is 58 hours and 45 minutes of play on sky which means that I am close to my target of 60 hours but not quite there.  I aim to rectify this by setting my goal for next week to play at least 31 hours again. Oh and yes.  I did make a profit.

I delibrately said that I would keep my winrate and winnings out of this blog and despite recieving feedback that people want to hear these figures and see some pretty graphs I am not going to break the trend in this week either.  What I will say however is that I have made way in excess of what I thought I would and what I thought was possible.  I am very close to my target figure for the entire month and we are only half way there in terms of time.

This means that it looks very likely that I will be withdrawing myself from conventional salaried employment this month and I have set myself a deadline to know the answer for definite by my next weekly blog update.  I have now also set myself a personal goal to achieve my desired months winnings by the end of week 3.  Achieving this will make the decision making process alot easier.

I was asked to do a few paragraphs about my lifestyle and the effects that playing poker full time has had on other aspects of my life.  Words fail me for something specific to write but I can completely say that two weeks in I have never felt happier about my financial, employment and future security than I do now.  This is a tough thing to measure however as if I had have had a £651 losing day prior to writing this blog then this whole paragraph would be completely different.

The one other thing which I am very happy about relating to my lifestyle is my freedom.  Too much freedom will be a very bad thing for me while trying to maintain motivation and professionalism so I do not offer myself too much.  I do however have more freedom now than I have ever had in a different working or studying situation.  For example.  If I was irresponsible enough to do so, I could say to myself tomorrow that I am taking two days off to return to Gibraltar.  Now obviously this will have an affect on me financially because I lose two day's earning while travelling.  But realistically I could probably sleep on a friend's sofa, take a laptop and play 3 hours+ per day and still make a decent wage while out there.  I believe that that type of freedom will have an amazing impact on my quality of life.

Thanks for reading and I hope you are back around about the same time next week for my next blog.  Oh... about that.  It will most likely be posted on Monday the 12th due to me being in Nottingham for the Sky Poker Tour final on the 10th and 11th.
Cheers
Stephen