Wow. Turns out I’m pretty degenerate
This week has been pretty fun. I went and visited an old friend down at her new place in Brighton and met alot of cool people down there. A few drunken nights spent with a bunch of squatters and students in Brighton taught me that I really do enjoy travelling, meeting new people and broadening my horizons. I am 100% going to travel more in the new year and I am going to go as far as making it a new year's resolution, with some goals and targets too.
As far as poker is concerned since I last blogged I have played very little. I continued with my roll on 888poker for a couple more days and probably lost about 1bi but then I decided to cash it back out for the following reason. I am a tablegame degen!
I realised this as a result of a number of events in the past week which has taught me that I definately have a problem, leak or addiction which needs addressing. After a brutal losing session in Teesside I was seen spinning my change to the nearest £100 on blackjack and letting it ride. I did about 5 spins in excess of £50 and let the original wager ride for about 5 in a row until I finally lost (not letting profit ride unfortuaneltly) and I thought that this was totally out of character for me. I put it down to stupidity and decided to forget about it.
The next time was on Tuesday at the circus £100 game. I played in a deep 1/2 game (with an unbelievably soft lineup) and couldn't win a pot due to being totally carddead. I lost about £200 by blinding out, 3bet folding and folding lots of failled c-bets and left the game. On the way to the cage to cash my chips back out I was again seen playing £50 blackjack hands and higher. This was starting to look like a problem.
So I was playing on 888poker, had one of those sessions again, couldn't win a pot, couldn't get a 3bet or cbet through and lost a few bi. As I felt my mouse sliding to blackjack on the way to the [x] button to close 888poker I realised I was in trouble. I resisted, went straight to cashier and cashed out the remainder of my roll. Having $1k sitting right next to a high limit online blackjack game is totally unsuitable until I am sure that I can resist.
Now that I have recognised that I have a problematic tilty-degenerate blackjack streak in me I must think of a way to address it. I have a pretty good group of friends who travel with me most of the time when I visit casinos and I am damn sure that they would give me a slap around the head and ask me WTF i'm doing if they saw me spinning £100's on blackjack. I don't want to rely on this though. I need to convince myself that I have the self control to have £1k+ sitting in an online casino and know that it will never be exposed to negative expectation table games.
I think for the mostpart this will just require willpower and there will be no quick fix for putting a stop to this. I think that the longer I go without touching tablegames the easier it will be for me not to play. My friend Ben has a philosophy that he won't play table games at all. While I respect this I don't think it is completely healthy either. I believe that often it is fun to play micro-limit blackjack or roulette in a casino whilst drinking, waiting for a game to start or whatever but I need to address the problem of playing so high. I think that I will attempt to adopt Ben's ideal for a little while and set a target to not play tablegames completely for a period. Maybe another new year's resolution.
With that in mind, if anyone would like to lay me some money for a prop bet about me not playing tablegames for 1month, 3months or maybe even 6months to a year in 2012 then I'm all ears. We should discuss it in private however. No silly £5, £10, £50 wagers though. It would have to be a figure which it would hurt to lose.
Back to poker... On sky this month I have stopped tracking my progress via pokerjournal and the only measure of how well I have been doing is my cashout history. I am very happy with the amount of money I have made in the last 30 days to date but not too pleased with the volume. I don't know for sure how much I have played but I am pretty sure I've fallen below my 120hrs/month target. I think that I will begin tracking meticulously again in december either via PokerJournal or find a way to do it online (suggestions anybody?). This way I will know if I've been excessively lazy and know how short of my target I have fallen.
I think that is about all I have to say this week so please leave a comment if you want to discuss anything I've wrote.
Cheers
Stephen
Day 24 playing on my own
I have been playing on my own without a backer for the best part of a month now and with some significant changes coming up to the way I work I figured that today would be as good a time as any for a quick blog update.
The past month I've been on the biggest heater of my life. Not anything superuser like where I can feel myself winning lots more pots than usual, hitting more draws and sets than usual but when I look at the results I've achieved I can speculate pretty well that this is just me running incredibly well overall and that these results won't continue in the long term.
On SkyPoker alone I have earned around 3 months wages from when I dealt poker at the casino. Add to this my play live also and I have had a very comfortable 4 figure month. Only time will tell if this is sustainable but I can confirm that I would be extremely happy with half of the money I have earned. A sick hold'em session down at Gala Teesside this week was worth about 1/3 as much as I have earned on sky which has allowed me enough liquid cash to split my online money into two seperate bankrolls.
I chose to deposit on a second site in addition to Sky for a number of different reasons. Firstly the traffic. Sky Poker is a very low-volume site. Right now it is reporing that it has 1,399 players sitting across all of it's tournament and cash game tables. According to Poker Scout, Sky's average cash game player pool in the last 7 days was 345. Comparing this to 888poker (my new site) who achieved 2,200 gives an idea of just how small Sky is. At peak times I play on Sky exclusively as I believe the games are more profitable. During the afternoons and early hours of the morning however there are often as few as 3 tables, sometimes even 0 which makes grinding impossible. It is at these times when I will add 888.
The use of Hold'em Manager is also a big reason for chosing to play on a second site. On sky there is no tracking software available and the only measure of your success and results is the account balance at the end of a session. I could have glaring leaks in my game and be losing a ton of money which I feel that I will be able to identify better if I have a tracking app such a Hold'em Manager for post-session reviews.
The fact that I am now using HEM2 on 888poker means that I will have some statistics, hand replays and graphs to post within this blog for all of the results-focused readers that I have. (Yes I mean you simmy!) I expect to play around 15k hands on 888poker over the next 30 days so I won't have too much to post on that front in the near future though.
If you have any opinions about my choice to play on multiple sites, and the choice of 888poker please leave me a comment below.
Thanks for reading
Stephen
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Back to 50nl
I don't believe that I mentioned in too much detail how my life and financial sitiation was, mostly because it isn't in my best interests to tell everybody on the internet just how much money I do or don't have in my poker and bank accounts. Let it just be said that two weeks ago when I started playing on my own money I was in a fairly unpleasant situation financially and if I were to have gotten off to a bad start in poker I would have been in a lot of trouble financially very quickly. I was very close to going back to work and had even taken steps to begin searching for and applying for jobs.
Happily though, the exact opposite has happened and I am now quite confident and comfortable with my professional status and my financial sitatuion. This is entirely due to a huuuuuge heater which I have been on over the last fortnight since I started to play on my own money and I have managed to cash out enough money to keep me very comfortable for the forseeable and give me what I consider an acceptably low risk of ruin. Exact amounts will be kept for those who it concerns but 14 days ago when I started to grind again I considered that I needed to have a very successful November in order to continue to play poker professionally. Now though, if I break even for the entirety of November I will still be in pretty good shape. A losing month however is still not a good prospect. I have a sizeable bankroll for 50nl but I still don't have my three months life expenses quite yet.
I don't really know what else there is to say on the matter now. My quality of life is still really high and I am very happy with my work/play balance. I am spending a fairly high amount of time relative to most socialising, eating out and going out with friends and this is the main reason why I like the idea of continuing to be a professional poker player so much. The one thing which has bugged me a little bit recently is when for whatever reason somebody asks me in a formal environment what I do for a living. I still haven't decided what my go-to answer is going to be to this question but when I don't see it coming I am having a real hard time thinking of an answer. I wonder if other pro gamblers have had an issue with this but here is the process I have. For example, my GP asked me "so what do you do?". My immediate thought was "What DO I do?". To say I am a pro gambler is likely to lead to loads of awkard questions from people who don't understand the principles of the thing. My friend and fellow pro Martin and I had a discussion yesterday about the people who ask about gambling and say "So do you win every time you play", "Can you teach me your system", "If I give you (£10|£20|£50|£100) will you double it for me?" and from that I concluded that it is probably best to not discuss the idea with people unfamiliar with poker. So for the moment my go-to has been to say that I am unemployed.
Now, for me being unemployed is a negative thing. Somebody tells me that I am unemployed and I immediately jump to stereotypes which have grown within me as I have been growing up and it is not something which I want people to think of me. When I say that I am unemployed but show up in a nice car, with nice clothes wearing my watch I don't want people to judge me so I think I need to come up with something new to say to people. An approach which some people use is to be very vague, or avoid the topic but I think that this makes you seem untrustworthy or a little odd in some way. If you ask someone you have recently met "What do you do for your living?" and they answer "This and that" or quickly change the topic then what is your opinion going to be of them.
I kind of wish that last month I had luckboxed a place on to Team Sky Pro because then it is very easy to answer the question. "What do you do for your living Stephen?" answer: "Oh, I'm a team sky poker player". That rolls off the tongue alot better than "I'm a pro poker player" in my opinion. So basically I need to think a little more about how I am going to approach the subject in the future or luckbox my way on to Team Sky Pro in November. I know which I'd rather do.
Hmmmm. This blog seems a little rambly and chatotic so I will end it now before I get onto a nother odd tangent. As always, thanks for reading and this time I hope there can be some discussion about /\ in the comments below.
Cheers
Stephen
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