Stephen Groom

20Nov/113

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

Filed under: Poker 3 Comments

11Nov/110

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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Filed under: Poker, Uncategorized No Comments

1Nov/113

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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Filed under: Life Happenings, Poker 3 Comments

23Oct/112

Big changes

So I haven't blogged very much at all in the last two weeks and that is mostly because some very major stuff has happened and I have taken this long to rationalise everything enough to begin writing about it. Alot of stuff involves pretty personal financial information and this post will be very vague and probably just cliffs about what has happened over the last few weeks and what my plans are to proceed.

So the first and most important thing is that I no longer have a backer for cash games. After losing consistently for 6 weeks under my previous stake I got to the point where I wasn't going to get out of makeup at any point in the forseeable future and this meant that I wasn't going to be earning any money for a long time either. After assessing my finances and monthly expenditure I decided that I could not afford to play under the cash game stake for long enough to start making money again. I decided that I was going to take some time off to play on my own money in order to save up a few months living expenses again.

I approached my backer to discuss my plans and all of the options available. We had quite a long chat and without giving up any details, I am now no longer staked by him. With the money that I have available, I have had to set some aside for a bankroll and start playing on my own. I have given myself a £50nl bankroll so I have moved down to that limit and unfortunately now my plans involve moving down and up as my bankroll dictates.

Aside from my bankroll I have a really small amount of money available for living expenses. Probably 2 months at best. I don't have close to enough to be comfortable and I certainly don't have anywhere near the £5k which I had decided I needed to play on my own money. Basically, I need to have a shit-hot November and get my bankroll built relatively soon or the game is up for me. I am going to continue playing cashgames on Sky starting at £50nl and play that limit in order to try to get my liquid-worth up to £5k. I will be moving down as soon as my bankroll reaches 20bi for 40nl, 30nl and 20nl and cashing out when I win at 50nl. I will not be moving up any time soon.

Unfortunately I am now back to actively considering other options such as conventional employment and will be leaving my options very open in the short term. Ideally I will have a good run in November and be back on my feet making more money than I had ever made whilst being staked. Here's hoping.

Thanks for reading
Stephen

Filed under: Poker 2 Comments

5Oct/110

October Goals and Targets

So.. October got off to a flying start! I am still in 4 figures of makeup with no sign of variance giving me a break and letting me win some money. I could divulge figures and rant for the duration of a healthy blog post but I doubht that this is constucrive and would probably be a bit boring to read also. This blog post instead will be about how I will overcome horrible negative variance with my own personal proven weapon. VOLUME! Despite that being in capitals I don't mean volume like shouting! Although if I wasn't alone in my flat there'd probably be alot of raised voices and rants as I step away from high three figure losing sessions. No.. I am going to overcome this brutal downswing by playing just as much poker as I had been before. The thing about losing money is that it hurts a whole lot more than winning money feels good. Winning money and running incredible doesn't really have a significant impact on ones motivation, willingness or eagerness to grind. I don't know why, it just doesn't. Losing however has quite a drastic effect. When I sit down and lose £500+ every time I log into Sky Poker it makes me hate the game. I make excuses not to grind and when I am grinding my game is most likely really suboptimal, maybe even a losing game because I feel so shitty and don't want to be doing this.

I am doing my absolute best however to overcome this and put in a large amount of volume for October. Downswing aside, I have done a little bit of research about the Sky Poker Priority Club, their Cash4Points bonus and what I can achieve using this programme. Some would call it "Having a system". I have a volume target, and a monetary goal for this month too. The most important thing however is the volume. I could go on losing for a lot longer, and I am prepared for such an event but it would be tragic if one day/week I woke up and decided that enough is enough and I am not playing today, tomorrow, this week or whatever.

So the goals (whichever comes first):

Make 28,000 Sky 'Poker Points'
Play 120hrs on Sky

That's it.. Pretty simple really and I am well on target for both. There is one other thing which I am hoping to achieve this month but I will not make it a goal is ultimately it is not my decision as to whether or not it happens. It is random chance, variance, luck or whatever you will call it. The goal is:

Cash out £800 my side from the stake

So this is everything which I am hoping to achieve for October and I have 31 days to do it. I am going to be playing a lot of 8 hour days and 6 day weeks this month as it is important to do my best to get out of this makeup hole as soon as possible. I will not be pushing myself too hard though as I can vouch that playing tired, emotional, tilted or any other negative state is very bad and results in losing money.l

28,000 Poker Points. This is a very important goal and if I achieve it will give me and indication of the amount of money which I will be able to make in the coming months. Hint: it's alot!.
28k points is worth £1,250
+25% for making over 10k = £1,562.50
At my current rate I will achieve this in 108 hours making my hourly rate just from rakeback £14.47/hr
Adding to this any money which I make in the games (the plan obviously isn't to lose or breakeven) I expect that my hourly rate will be high enough to give me a comfortable living.

For this reason, I am not particularly worried about being 4 figures in makeup at the time being. I am comfortable enough in the near future to be able to afford to look after myself with no income. Yeah I won't be going on any holidays or going out clubbing every weekend but I will get by. I made ~£1k in the games at 50nl last month and if I repeat the performance at 100nl over the next 26 days I will still manage to cash out a decent sum of money despite having started the month in over £2k of makeup.

My lifestyle has taken a little bit of a hit with the recent losing streak and more than I ever would have thought. I have stupidly let my sleeping pattern get messed up and am making it a priority to get it put back to normal again. In addition to this I am getting out a lot less than I would like to (in part due to being very tight with money this month due to potentially going a few months without an income) and I need to start thinking about what I am going to do and where I am going to go to change that. I have noticed that despite the fact that I have a very good group of friends centered around Poker and gambling, I could use a group of friends with something else in common just to hang out with and go out drinking, for food etc. Or a girlfriend . That'd fill the hole quite well.

I can also see my health having quite a hard time due to my new lifestyle so I have started to do jogging with my backer. We've been once so far and came to the conclusion that we are both very out of shape and need to do something about it. A gym membership is a very likely outcome as well as more jogging. We aimed to make it a weekly affair but due to us having horrible sleeping patterns and some other funny car related stuff this hasn't happened. I think we went once in the last fortnight. I must motivate myself to do this atleast once weekly. I will make that a goal for October also.

OK so I think I have ran out of words for this week so I will wrap this post up here. Once again thanks for reading and if there is something you would like to contribute or a suggestion for what to mention in next weeks blog please leave a comment below.

Thanks
Stephen

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