Month 2 as a Pro
this was originally on twoplustwo 3/6/06.
it's now been two months since i quit my job and started playing poker full-time. the short story is that everything is still going really well. i'm enjoying it more than i thought i would, and the results have been better than i'd hoped.
party's restructing was kind of a blow. i'd had a lot of success at the 55s and 109s at party, and i wanted nothing more than to get a few more thousand sng's under my belt to get a little more confidence that my results have some significance beyond a nice heater.
i tried playing the regular party sng's, but really didn't like them. they play much deeper around the bubble compared to the old sng's. i think the strongest part of my game is deciding whether or not to push 4- or 5-handed, and when there are 4 people left and everyone has 25 bb's, the game is changed pretty dramatically. i could learn to play the bubble with deep stacks, but frankly i like pushing pre-flop. there's a certain simplicity to have 1 decision per hand that i find appealing. also, when you're playing a lot of tables, reads become much vaguer, and reads become a lot more important when you're playing past the flop.
i tried the party speeds, but they have the opposite problem. as someone (ilya?) pointed out in a thread, you often get to a spot where it's 7-handed and everyone has around 5 bb's. then it's so hard to steal pre-flop that there's less room to pick up pots because the button's going to say "well, i've got A7 and we're nowhere near the money. let's see what you got."
getting rid of the 75/150 level sucked, and i thought it was kind of shady how they obscured it by doubling the starting stacks and increasing the starting blinds (i.e., there is no 150/300 level now). i have the same complaint about how they shortened the starting stacks from 67 bbs to 50. one of my qualms about playing sng's full-time is that i'm not sure how well it translates to other forms of poker. since no one plays ring nl with 50x stacks, i think they've effectively made the transition from sng to ring just a little tougher.
the clincher was when my party software crashed for the second time. it was pretty frustruting, as i bubbled out a sng where i was tied for 3rd without playing a hand, and missed a bunch of hands in other sngs. i emailed party and told them i was leaving for stars and withdrew all of my money. they wrote me a semi-incoherent email ("the connection problem must have been on your end since the other players remained connected" when the problem was not my connection, it was that their horrible software locked up. i'm positive i could work with a programmer friend and a graphic design friend and we could write the best client in a day or two, but that's another story.) anyway, to their credit, party gave me $100 and a 20%/$100 deposit bonus with no clearing requirements, so i deposited $500 and immediately withdrew the $700.
the other recent excitement is that i finally became a real poker nerd and bought and a second monitor. i had been 6-tabling stars turbos and decided to take the plunge. it is somewhat easier to play, but i thought it would make more of a difference, to be honest. it takes a second or two to figure out where i'm supposed to be acting sometimes and i time out probably once every couple of hours. when you have 5+ tables on one screen, there's overlap of the tables, so the way stars pops the most urgent window to the front makes it very clear where you're supposed to be. i'm usually playing 10-tables, 5 on each monitor (my laptop and a 2001fp), so i can use that effect, but a lot of times i'll only have 8 or 9 up while i'm waiting for another to start. it's annoying to look up from one table and there's basically no visual cue to tell which table to act on. there's just that little "time 30" circular timebank button on ones where it's semi-urgent, but there's no way to tell if you have 15 seconds to act before your hand is folded or 1 second (assuming you haven't put chips in yet, in which case it would go to the timebank automatically.)
the second monitor has also had the effect of reducing my mobility somewhat. it used to be that if my roommates were watching a movie in the living room, i'd bring my computer out there and split my attention between the movie/friends and playing. probably not great for the roi, but good for quality of life. now i might do it, but since i have to drop from 10 tables to at most 8, it's a little less appealing. also playing 8 tables leaves a lot less mental energy for hanging out. when i was 4-tabling party it was more doable.
my biggest complaint about stars is the number of games they have running. when you play party, at tuesday at noon you can fill 4 109s within a few minutes and play a lot more without any problem (at least you could, not sure what the scene is like since the upgrade). but right now there are only 3 114 turbos running right now, so it's impossible to 10-table without playing a mix of buy-ins. even at peak times you can't 10-table 114s.
so for a while i was playing a mix of 60s and 114s. i've mixed in a few 225s in the last couple days. i probably won't do that except for peak times - i can't imagine the monday at noon crowd is a bunch of executives on the tail end of 48-hour meth binges (the sunday crowd plays that way sometimes).
one thing i've really enjoyed about stts as opposed to mtts is the way you see the same people over and over. the old empire 10k guarantee was kind of like that, but now you really see the same people a ton. one day i noticed i was playing on 7 tables with the same person (rainkhan on stars). it adds another dimension to things - "i think pushing 24o here would be profitable, but if i get called, the bb is going to remember this, and i play with him a ton, and i don't want to loosen up his calling requiremnts." i've also gotten to know some of the 2+2er stt crowd (in the internet kind of way, im's and pm's), which is cool. i had the same kind of relationship with some mtt'ers when i posted there a lot, but with stt'ers it's different because you see the same people at the tables a lot, whereas it was pretty rare in an mtt with 400 people. last night i got heads up with wpr101. he has the same name on stars, but mine's different, so i knew who he was but he didn't know who i was. i outed myself, and it was cool to chat while playing heads up. we got all-in on the flop an early hand with his oesd against my top pair and he hit, leaving me with ~500 chips. then he went card dead and i climbed back to a small lead. we got all-in on the flop with his top pair against my pair + flush draw and his hand was good and there was no second comeback. it was a lot of fun. i was winding down for the night so i was only on a couple tables, so i could chat. it's a little funny to have a nice conversation with someone while you're playing for several hundred dollars, but you get over it pretty quickly.
technically my official month ends at the end of the day on the 6th of the month, but i'll jump the gun a little. i've been doing most of my non-playing non-social stuff during the day because there are more/better 114s at night. things like posting, errands, taxes (arrrrrrr, what a headache, can't wait till i finally finish it up). so without further ado, results (including month 1):
party
speed 109: 76, 8.6%
55: 362, 24.6% (3- or 4-tabling, all pre-split)
109: 607, 22.4% (4- or 5-tablind, all but ~20 pre-split)
stars 6- to 10-tabling
60: 456, 2.6%
114: 529, 20.8%
225: 22, -4.5%
the stars results say something about variance in roi. obviously it's not the case that my "true" roi is to kill the 114s and eke out a small profit at the 60s. i am surprised to see such a big disparity after ~500 of each though. i've been pretty lucky in where my wins have come: my roi at stars if you weight by the buy-in is 15.1%, but if weight all of the stt's equally then it's 12%.
and btw, i will be starting a blog of sorts pretty soon, just like "every other self-respecting poker pro," in the words of one poster. i'll let you know when it's up.
this was originally on twoplustwo 3/6/06.
it's now been two months since i quit my job and started playing poker full-time. the short story is that everything is still going really well. i'm enjoying it more than i thought i would, and the results have been better than i'd hoped.
party's restructing was kind of a blow. i'd had a lot of success at the 55s and 109s at party, and i wanted nothing more than to get a few more thousand sng's under my belt to get a little more confidence that my results have some significance beyond a nice heater.
i tried playing the regular party sng's, but really didn't like them. they play much deeper around the bubble compared to the old sng's. i think the strongest part of my game is deciding whether or not to push 4- or 5-handed, and when there are 4 people left and everyone has 25 bb's, the game is changed pretty dramatically. i could learn to play the bubble with deep stacks, but frankly i like pushing pre-flop. there's a certain simplicity to have 1 decision per hand that i find appealing. also, when you're playing a lot of tables, reads become much vaguer, and reads become a lot more important when you're playing past the flop.
i tried the party speeds, but they have the opposite problem. as someone (ilya?) pointed out in a thread, you often get to a spot where it's 7-handed and everyone has around 5 bb's. then it's so hard to steal pre-flop that there's less room to pick up pots because the button's going to say "well, i've got A7 and we're nowhere near the money. let's see what you got."
getting rid of the 75/150 level sucked, and i thought it was kind of shady how they obscured it by doubling the starting stacks and increasing the starting blinds (i.e., there is no 150/300 level now). i have the same complaint about how they shortened the starting stacks from 67 bbs to 50. one of my qualms about playing sng's full-time is that i'm not sure how well it translates to other forms of poker. since no one plays ring nl with 50x stacks, i think they've effectively made the transition from sng to ring just a little tougher.
the clincher was when my party software crashed for the second time. it was pretty frustruting, as i bubbled out a sng where i was tied for 3rd without playing a hand, and missed a bunch of hands in other sngs. i emailed party and told them i was leaving for stars and withdrew all of my money. they wrote me a semi-incoherent email ("the connection problem must have been on your end since the other players remained connected" when the problem was not my connection, it was that their horrible software locked up. i'm positive i could work with a programmer friend and a graphic design friend and we could write the best client in a day or two, but that's another story.) anyway, to their credit, party gave me $100 and a 20%/$100 deposit bonus with no clearing requirements, so i deposited $500 and immediately withdrew the $700.
the other recent excitement is that i finally became a real poker nerd and bought and a second monitor. i had been 6-tabling stars turbos and decided to take the plunge. it is somewhat easier to play, but i thought it would make more of a difference, to be honest. it takes a second or two to figure out where i'm supposed to be acting sometimes and i time out probably once every couple of hours. when you have 5+ tables on one screen, there's overlap of the tables, so the way stars pops the most urgent window to the front makes it very clear where you're supposed to be. i'm usually playing 10-tables, 5 on each monitor (my laptop and a 2001fp), so i can use that effect, but a lot of times i'll only have 8 or 9 up while i'm waiting for another to start. it's annoying to look up from one table and there's basically no visual cue to tell which table to act on. there's just that little "time 30" circular timebank button on ones where it's semi-urgent, but there's no way to tell if you have 15 seconds to act before your hand is folded or 1 second (assuming you haven't put chips in yet, in which case it would go to the timebank automatically.)
the second monitor has also had the effect of reducing my mobility somewhat. it used to be that if my roommates were watching a movie in the living room, i'd bring my computer out there and split my attention between the movie/friends and playing. probably not great for the roi, but good for quality of life. now i might do it, but since i have to drop from 10 tables to at most 8, it's a little less appealing. also playing 8 tables leaves a lot less mental energy for hanging out. when i was 4-tabling party it was more doable.
my biggest complaint about stars is the number of games they have running. when you play party, at tuesday at noon you can fill 4 109s within a few minutes and play a lot more without any problem (at least you could, not sure what the scene is like since the upgrade). but right now there are only 3 114 turbos running right now, so it's impossible to 10-table without playing a mix of buy-ins. even at peak times you can't 10-table 114s.
so for a while i was playing a mix of 60s and 114s. i've mixed in a few 225s in the last couple days. i probably won't do that except for peak times - i can't imagine the monday at noon crowd is a bunch of executives on the tail end of 48-hour meth binges (the sunday crowd plays that way sometimes).
one thing i've really enjoyed about stts as opposed to mtts is the way you see the same people over and over. the old empire 10k guarantee was kind of like that, but now you really see the same people a ton. one day i noticed i was playing on 7 tables with the same person (rainkhan on stars). it adds another dimension to things - "i think pushing 24o here would be profitable, but if i get called, the bb is going to remember this, and i play with him a ton, and i don't want to loosen up his calling requiremnts." i've also gotten to know some of the 2+2er stt crowd (in the internet kind of way, im's and pm's), which is cool. i had the same kind of relationship with some mtt'ers when i posted there a lot, but with stt'ers it's different because you see the same people at the tables a lot, whereas it was pretty rare in an mtt with 400 people. last night i got heads up with wpr101. he has the same name on stars, but mine's different, so i knew who he was but he didn't know who i was. i outed myself, and it was cool to chat while playing heads up. we got all-in on the flop an early hand with his oesd against my top pair and he hit, leaving me with ~500 chips. then he went card dead and i climbed back to a small lead. we got all-in on the flop with his top pair against my pair + flush draw and his hand was good and there was no second comeback. it was a lot of fun. i was winding down for the night so i was only on a couple tables, so i could chat. it's a little funny to have a nice conversation with someone while you're playing for several hundred dollars, but you get over it pretty quickly.
technically my official month ends at the end of the day on the 6th of the month, but i'll jump the gun a little. i've been doing most of my non-playing non-social stuff during the day because there are more/better 114s at night. things like posting, errands, taxes (arrrrrrr, what a headache, can't wait till i finally finish it up). so without further ado, results (including month 1):
party
speed 109: 76, 8.6%
55: 362, 24.6% (3- or 4-tabling, all pre-split)
109: 607, 22.4% (4- or 5-tablind, all but ~20 pre-split)
stars 6- to 10-tabling
60: 456, 2.6%
114: 529, 20.8%
225: 22, -4.5%
the stars results say something about variance in roi. obviously it's not the case that my "true" roi is to kill the 114s and eke out a small profit at the 60s. i am surprised to see such a big disparity after ~500 of each though. i've been pretty lucky in where my wins have come: my roi at stars if you weight by the buy-in is 15.1%, but if weight all of the stt's equally then it's 12%.
and btw, i will be starting a blog of sorts pretty soon, just like "every other self-respecting poker pro," in the words of one poster. i'll let you know when it's up.
posted by pokerschwab at 12:55 PM
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