Stephen Groom Taking a shot at becoming a Poker Pro

A new approach

So as per usual, I get my blog back on track, get 20 or so posts with a decent readership and then take a whole month to write my next post.  I can't think of any reason for this other than bad results so basically the new measure of my success for the masses is how recently I posted my latest blog update.  Well the last few weeks have been very unusual and my outlook, aims, objectives and plans for the next 6-10 months have very quickly changed from road to robusto to avoiding becoming busto.  Let me explain.

So now that everybody knows that you can track results on sky I can discuss what happened and why I eventually moved my money off in mid january and moved to Pokerstars.  Since leaving my staking deal in October, my total profits are ~£5,400 including bonuses.  Since around mid-december though I have been breaking even in the games over a sample of ~ 100,000 hands.  Maybe I was just a breakeven play all along.. I don't know for sure but I won't be sticking around to find out.

So how did MTTs go on Pokerstars?

I can sum this up in one sentence without too much bitching.  I lost ~200 $8 ABIs.  If you wanna see how it went exactly, check out sharkscope.  Not good would be my assesment.

What went wrong then?

I have came to the realisation that when I was on sky, against the opposition at 50nl I shouldn't have been winning, I should have been destroying.  We have 99% of 6max regs playing 13/11/3, and two regs who I have played the most hands with playing 23/15/5 and 21/12/2 respectively there is no reason I shouldn't have been better than 5bb/100 in the games.  And I was breaking even! (well, .75bb/100 :p)  So basically the times I played on Sky, I wasn't putting in the work.  I wasn't winning what I should have been and I don't think I was totally ready for the pro grind.  Somehow in that time I have spent my £5.4k (Well £4.4k now after stars deposit) and have very little of it left.

What next?

I took around a fortnight off from poker completely while I guarded the withered remains of my bankroll.  I used my spare time to work on SkyHUD, and any time not spent on that was used to study poker.  After somewhere between 500 and 1,000 tournaments on stars I concluded that cashgames were where I would be making my future profits.  Cash games are where I have put the most work into my game and they are lower variance.  Low variance steady income is what I need now that I am back where I started, close to being broke.

So I have gotten together some eBooks, some training videos and a tonne of old hands in HEM to review.  I reckon that in the time off from poker I spent about 2 hours per day every day doing one or two of these things.  It is very early to say but I think I have improved my game over the two weeks that I took off more than I did over the whole 3 months that I was playing professionally.  I am sure I speak for the majority of pros here when I say that I didn't spend enough time working on my game.  The problem was that I saw my bank account growing larger at the end of each week and didn't see any need to change.  I was winning, and that was enough.

What happens next?

I have some money on Pokerstars and I am currently playing $25 and $50nl.  I say both because I am using a very aggressive bankroll management strat where I am starting to mix in bigger games when I have 10bi for that limit.  I currently have more than 10 so I am usually mixing in a table or two of 50nl with my 25nl games.  Doing this though I have to be extremely strict about moving down as sadly there will be no more deposits to follow...

As there are no more deposits left I am now looking for work harder than I ever had.  I am not yet at the point of desperation where I will be looking to flip burgers for minwage but I am looking for alot less than the £18k that I wanted to go back to work for this time 90 days ago.  Who knows, this poker thing might just work out in the end and I may stay pro but at the moment the best short term result for me would be to get a short-term or casual job with decent pay and get back some money so that I can decide where to go from there.

So.. Could I succeed as a professional poker player?

At the time of writing that article (14/08/2011) the answer is No.  I somehow managed to spend exactly 6 months working from home, with all of the benefits of being a pro but I don't think I was quite prepared or ready for what was ahead.  If memory serves I wrote the article in a way that suggested that this was an experiment rather than a committed, planned, educated choice and this is exactly what it has been.  I tried it, it worked out for 6 months but was I ready to make this work for the rest of my life?

If I could go back to 14/08/2011 today and do it all again with the knowledge and ability that I have today I would say 100% yes.  I would probably still be in my staking deal.  I would probably be playing 200nl with a 70/30 chop and maybe writing this from a penthouse in mexico or something but I am happy for the knowledge which I gained for free (well for 120 hours per month) and think that I have had a very good (and very different to most people's) quality of life in this period.  I am glad that I did this and don't think that I am any worse off financially than if I had stayed in my job.  Infact I think I am still better off AINEC.

Moving forward I will be yet again trying to succeed as a professional poker player but this time I have around 50% of the starting capital that I had in August and will be starting lower.  Maybe this time over the next few months will be stressful as I try to get my finances back on track but again this is all part of a bigger picture and the education I am giving myself will definitely help me in times of future hardship.  Let's not forget, I am only 21 and I have a tonne of choices ahead.  If I went completely cash-broke I'm sure I could sell my car and my stuff and move back home with my mother and go flip burgers.. There is no such thing as a dead-end.

On to the next chapter

Thanks for reading
Stephen

2011 wrap-up and looking forwards into 2012

Here we are at the top of 2011 and for the last 4 months I've been considering myself a "Professional Poker Player".  My risk-of-ruin had been pretty high from the outset and already once I have recovered from being pretty close to busto.  For this reason I am very happy that for now at least, I have managed to survive in this game.

The poker is the main talking point of this blog nowadays and what 95% of the content will be about in the future but as it is a pretty fun and important part of the year I can put that to one side for a few paragraphs.

2011 has been a very good year for me all in all and for once as I reflect I am happy with most if not all of the choices and decisions that I have made.  I am now 21, I have a BA degree with 2:2 hons, I have a new car and flat, a good circle of friends with similar interests, a new job (some might not call it that yet) which so far has been very rewarding and I have a better quality of life than I can ever remember having.

2012 for me is going to be about next-steps.  Taking everything that I have now and making a conscious effort to improve on what I would call a good solid foundation which I worked towards in the latter half of 2011.  I have already decided on a few achievable and measurable goals for what to achieve in the next 12 months and this post should hopefully allow me to revisit them and see how I am doing at achieving them and sticking to the famously useless New Year's resolutions.

What I want to achieve in 2012

• Play around 700,000 cash game hands on Sky Poker at stakes no lower than £0.20/£0.40 over 11 months
• Spend a full month of poker playing MTTs and play at least 600 individual tournaments
• Make £18,000 total profit (inc: bonuses) from Sky Poker
• Move up a limit on sky and be a consistent winning regular at £0.50/£1.00 on Sky
• Get onto Team Sky Pro
• Have a regular fortnightly home game
• Travel around playing a small, select sample of live poker games inc: bimonthly long-weekend trips to Nottingham for the deepstack festival
• Increase my bankroll enough to be comfortable playing £2/£5 live cash games
• Buy/adopt a Staffy dog
• Have at least one holiday abroad
• Increase the amount of socialising that I do in my spare time

I will use this list throughout the year to check back and report on how I am doing with my achievements.  I expect that I will probably review my progress quarterly.

As well as all of the positive things which I'd like to achieve and improve upon in 2012, there are ofcourse the negatives which ought to be addressed too.  This part is usually tougher:

2012 New Year's Resolutions

• Gambling
  I'm not sure of the best way to address or measure this but I certainly want to reduce or totally stop indulging in -EV gambling (casino games, fruit machines, slots, bookies etc).  This hasn't been a major problem for me but I have definitely spent/wasted/lost more money than I would like to have over the last few years. I think getting in control of this while I still play small will help me to stay away from such games when I have the ability to punt away large amounts of potentially life changing money.  I will start by saying that for the foreseeable I will totally stop all of the above activities.
• Health and Fitness
  This is a must-have on everyone's list but all jokes aside it will be very important for me this year given my working situation.  My diet could actually be far worse and I know a great many people who spend 6+hours a day in their home office who have far far worse diets than I do.  I don't overindulge on takeaways, I don't sit all night and munch on convenience-food and unhealthy snacks either.  I always have at least breakfast, one big meal and some smaller in-between meal snacks per day.  Now obviously this isn't ideal and I should be aiming to have breakfast + 2 meals per day but I find it tough when I am awake at night to be motivated to make a big meal at 4am.  I also have problems motivating myself to cook for just one person.  If there was someone else around I know for sure that I would eat more consistently and also cook better meals with more variety.  That is the thing which I would like to improve on more than anything else.  Quality of my meals.  I often find myself digging around the freezer for a quick 20-minutes and done meal to throw in the oven but really this isn't very satisfying or healthy.  There is nothing better than having your own home-cooked steak dinner but as I mentioned earlier it is tough to justify the expense and effort when eating alone.

  In terms of exercise I made a small start earlier in the year when Ben and I chose to start jogging.  Our laziness and Ben's injured foot means that this didn't last very long.  I will keep this up and maybe have a view to joining a Gym, swimming pool or some kind of sport to keep me busy.  In addition to this, if all goes to plan and I get my puppy (yaaaay), 3 walks a day will ensure I don't become heavier than my age in 2012.

I have now basically typed myself out so to all readers, friends, opponents etc I hope you had a very good Christmas and hope you have a Happy New Year!

Stephen
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Blog when you’re winning…

So as always seems to happen with peoples blogs (especially mine for some reason) I have managed to let between 3 and 4 weeks pass since my last post.  The reason?  I can only assume that it's because I've been losing a tonne.  From my high point at the end of November I am currently still stuck over £1k on Sky and overall it has been pretty tough.  Somebody commented to me that I seemed to be pretty stressed out and introvert at the peak of my losses (I was losing close to £2k about a week ago) and looking back I guess they were right.  These are the biggest losses I've ever incurred on my own money lifetime and to say that it didn't have a bad effect on my emotional state and personality would be a pretty big lie.

So yeah.. Where did it all go wrong?  November was my biggest winning month since leaving work and second biggest winner lifetime.  As I remember I had gotten pretty complacent and lazy towards the end of the month and when December rolled around I don't think that my head was in the right place.  By the 7th day in December I had lost all of the money in my sky account, loaded up another £1k and taken out my anger over at betfair casino losing a pretty hefty sum of money playing casino games (predominantly blackjack) which I don't mention in the quoted losses above /\.  That money I guess is expenditure, but it is very wasteful and changed my mind about table games very quickly.  I will definitely have something about that in my new year's resolutions/goals post in about a fortnight.

For all the bad it has done, my massive downswing at the beginning of this month has had it's benefits too however.  It has once again shown me how cruel poker can be and I have learned that emotionally I am not as close to being ready to deal with this as I once thought I was.  It has also taught me the importance of volume, planning, discipline and motivation.  At the beginning of the month I decided that I would aim to make around 16,000 sky poker points (£625).  This would have been equivalent to around 106 hours of 6tabling 50nl.  By day 13 of this month my target has now become a far greater 24,000 points (£1,250) and already by the end of the 13th I had made 11,652 (78 hours of play 6tabling 50nl).  Coupled with the fact that at my low-point this month I spent a few days playing 20nl and moved all the way back up through the limits playing 20, 30, 40 and now back to 50nl it is a pretty impressive feat.

At this point in time on an average day I am playing 8 tables of 50nl and playing between 6 and 8 hours per day.  Assuming a 20 day working month this should net me between 24,000 (£1,250) and 32,000 (£1,875) points per month.  If you then add to this the money made in-game this should lead to me having a very comfortable lifestyle next year at 50nl.  This is before we even discuss plans for moving up.

So in 2012 I will be making at the very least £15k from rakeback alone.  This solid foundation allows me to speculate that I should easily cash out over £20k from Sky Poker next year and allow me some kind of perspective for planning my year out in terms of profit and savings goals, moving up and potentially recruiting and mentoring micro-stakes horses as my roll allows.

I am going to take a leaf out of my friend Jon Lundy's book next year who showed me a very interesting structured plan for how he was going to spend his time in 2012.  No more staying up till 9am drinking and then sleeping in until 8pm the following day and missing grind.  I mentioned at the start of this process that this is a job first and foremost.  A person who treats his job with as much respect as most grinders treat theirs will have a very unrewarding and mediocre career and I need to do my best to keep some perspective.

My next planned blog will be around the 29th-31st detailing my plans for next year, new years resolutions and targets as well as my findings from 4 full months as a pro.  Please as ever leave a comment below if you enjoyed this read and have anything for me to discuss next time.

Cheers
Stephen