It's Been a Year
so i thought i'd do a little year in review. my last day of work (hopefully ever) was january 6, 2006. i was playing a mix of multitable tournaments (~400ish people) and single-table tournaments (9 people), or mtts and stts, although i dropped the mtts pretty early on. i had kind of an annoying run where i was getting to the last 20-30 in a 400 person tournament a fair amount, but going that far really doesn't pay much at all (as a rough guess, in a $100, 400 player mtt, 50th gets $200, 20th gets $300, and 1st gets $10,000). so getting a bunch of 20th's bummed me out, but the stts were going well, so i switched to those full-time.
stts were very good to me. they were the first time i was making good, consistent money. i learned how to multi-table, which is a very useful general online poker skill. i found a good group of stt'ers on the 2p2 forum and did more emailing and im'ing about poker than i had before. around the summer/fall, a lot of stt'ers were moving to cash and making a lot more money and enjoying it, and i was getting tempted. but i wanted to try to have as big as possible one-year income and i thought there'd be a decent learning curve with cash, so i figured i was going to play stts until, well, today, and then switch to cash.
but i had a brutal 3-week breakeven streak, and i thought i didn't have any chance of making the goal that i had set out for myself at the beginning of the year, so i decided to take the short-term hourly-rate hit and learn to play cash (btw, if you want to know a bit more about the difference between cash games and stt/mtt's, see the post right below this one).
cash games have continued to be great, and i'm making a good bit more than i ever have before. i learned pretty quickly - thanks very much again to 2p2'er pasterbater and everyone else who helped me learn.
so let's see... goals for the year. my first goal is for everything to just keep going how it's going. i'm very happy with how i've done so far playing 2/4 and 3/6 (2/4 means the small blind is $2 and the big blind is $4, and the buy-in is $400), and i'd just like to keep grinding out some more hands to convince myself that my results can stay consistent. i just passed 100k hands of 2/4 and 3/6 combined, and if i get to 200k with similar results i'll be very happy.
people generally talk about either 50k or 100k hands as the "long term," but since the program pokertracker calculates your standard deviation per 100 hands, you can calculate a confidence interval for your true win rate. even if you just look at an 80% interval (scientists use 95% or higher) with 100k hands there is a very wide range in what your "true" win rate is. basically the gist of all that is that you need a huge number of hands in order to really be confident what you're earning in the long term.
as the year progresses, the games will keep getting tougher. people already talk about how much tougher the games are than they were six months ago, and the regulations connected with the unlawful internet gaming enforcement act (i'm not even getting into that) are going to make things suck more. hopefully it'll be a minor annoyance and not a total shitshow catastrpohe, but the games will get tougher. i still haven't played too much cash, so if things go well then i'll learn more and get better and at least be able to keep up my current win rate.
well, i pictured this being a long, sweeping post full of predictions and discussions of my strengths and weaknesses, my goals and resolutions, a long boring story about my setting up hard-wired internet in my house, but screw it, i want to go play.
stts were very good to me. they were the first time i was making good, consistent money. i learned how to multi-table, which is a very useful general online poker skill. i found a good group of stt'ers on the 2p2 forum and did more emailing and im'ing about poker than i had before. around the summer/fall, a lot of stt'ers were moving to cash and making a lot more money and enjoying it, and i was getting tempted. but i wanted to try to have as big as possible one-year income and i thought there'd be a decent learning curve with cash, so i figured i was going to play stts until, well, today, and then switch to cash.
but i had a brutal 3-week breakeven streak, and i thought i didn't have any chance of making the goal that i had set out for myself at the beginning of the year, so i decided to take the short-term hourly-rate hit and learn to play cash (btw, if you want to know a bit more about the difference between cash games and stt/mtt's, see the post right below this one).
cash games have continued to be great, and i'm making a good bit more than i ever have before. i learned pretty quickly - thanks very much again to 2p2'er pasterbater and everyone else who helped me learn.
so let's see... goals for the year. my first goal is for everything to just keep going how it's going. i'm very happy with how i've done so far playing 2/4 and 3/6 (2/4 means the small blind is $2 and the big blind is $4, and the buy-in is $400), and i'd just like to keep grinding out some more hands to convince myself that my results can stay consistent. i just passed 100k hands of 2/4 and 3/6 combined, and if i get to 200k with similar results i'll be very happy.
people generally talk about either 50k or 100k hands as the "long term," but since the program pokertracker calculates your standard deviation per 100 hands, you can calculate a confidence interval for your true win rate. even if you just look at an 80% interval (scientists use 95% or higher) with 100k hands there is a very wide range in what your "true" win rate is. basically the gist of all that is that you need a huge number of hands in order to really be confident what you're earning in the long term.
as the year progresses, the games will keep getting tougher. people already talk about how much tougher the games are than they were six months ago, and the regulations connected with the unlawful internet gaming enforcement act (i'm not even getting into that) are going to make things suck more. hopefully it'll be a minor annoyance and not a total shitshow catastrpohe, but the games will get tougher. i still haven't played too much cash, so if things go well then i'll learn more and get better and at least be able to keep up my current win rate.
well, i pictured this being a long, sweeping post full of predictions and discussions of my strengths and weaknesses, my goals and resolutions, a long boring story about my setting up hard-wired internet in my house, but screw it, i want to go play.
posted by pokerschwab at 2:49 PM
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