I Think the Alligator Bled to Death

   Okay, I got fed up with FullTilt Poker after constantly losing big chunks of my bankroll so I withdrew my money back into my bank account.  Then one weekend I felt like playing some live poker so I went up to the California Grand in Pacheco.  They now have one to two tables of no limit holdem with a 2-2-3 blind structure with a $3 bring in bet and a $200 max buy-in.  Let me tell you now, the way this game was going, it would've been nice to sit down with about $600.  Anyway, I bought in for $200 and after 4 hours of play, won myself $300 in profit.  Not bad!  The next weekend I went back and lost my whole bankroll in two days.  After losing a chunk of my roll at FullTilt, I didn't have that much left anyway.

   Now with my bankroll gone, I have no way to play poker on any regular schedule (not that it was too regular to begin with).  Looking back, I think if I were to do things differently, I would've saved up enough money to just play live instead of online.  The point of playing online in the first place was to build a roll so I could play live.  I've figured out that there are a lot of people trying to do the same thing I am...sit on my ass at home and make money.  Well, online it's easier for people to play tight because all they have to do is push a button all day drinking ice tea while watching reruns of Seinfeld.  They don't even have to suffer the pain of waiting for a hand to play because they've got 4 to 8 tables on their screen so that almost every other hand is a big pocket pair.

   Yeah okay, so you people might think I'm just bitter because I lose at poker.  Well, maybe I am, maybe I'm not, I don't know.  I'm just upset that I've played and studied hard for about two years to try to at least make a suplemental income from poker and have gotten nowhere at it.  Do you realize how disappointing that is?  That's it, I'm tired of struggling to make things happen for me and then end up broke.  I've got a wardrobe of clothes that hasn't been updated in 3 or 4 years, single, no social life, and no friends.  Yeah, sure I have friends that I play poker with at my house every Saturday night, but no real personal friends I can go hang out with on weekends or something.  This is what I do...I get up, go to work, go home, fix dinner, read a book (either on poker, small business, physics, or Zen Buddhism), and go to sleep.  Rinse and repeat.  The only thing I like about weekends is the fact that I don't have to work.  The only problem is I don't have anything planned for the weekends because (1.) I don't have any friends I can hang out with, (2.) no girlfriend, (3.) I can't even think of a 3 because, I don't know, there's a lot of things, though.  I try to keep myself busy over the weekends, though, because if I'm not, then I'll get depressed.  Not that it matters because I'm depressed as it is, I just like to keep it suppressed so I don't have to deal with the real issues of my sad pathetic life.  What will it take so I can be happy and content with my life?  A girlfriend would be a nice start!  I remember the last girlfriend I had.  At that time, I was more broke than I am now, but I remember being happy and content with life.  I didn't care how much money I had, what kind of car I drove, or the kind of clothes I wore.  Everything was great, I was going to transfer over to CSU Hayward, study music, get a bachelors degree and a teaching credential, find a job at a nice school in a really cool town, bla bla bla, etc.  Then she drops me like a wet noodle and my life goes to shit.  How about that, huh?  Okay, I'm all worked up now, I'm too mad and depressed to write anymore.  Plus you are probably tired of my bitching and ranting about my sucky-ass life.  I'll spare you the rest of my problems for the time being.  I'm going to bed.

A Similarity Between Poker and Mother Nature

    Let me share with you a striking revelation I've had this past night regarding a theory about the direction of poker.  More specifically about the survivability of modern day professional poker players.

    Poker pros are most often referred to as sharks, but I like to think of them more as a land predator such as a tiger, lion or cheetah.  These predators born in their natural environment are akin to the likes of Doyle Brunson, Chip Reese, Barry Greenstein, Freddy Deeb, and Men Nguyen just to name a few.  These players lives fell into a series of events that led them to their career in poker where they learned the game through logic and experience.  Poker has changed quite a bit through the years and these cats were able to adapt to it.  They had to or else they die from lack of prey.  Let's take, for example, when holdem and 7-stud became legal in California.  The availability of draw and lowball games began to dry up as more people started playing stud and holdem.  Pros who only played draw or lowball would have to adapt to the newly legalized games or else their profits would dry up.  In a sense, it's like following a migrating herd to ensure a sustainability in sustenance.

    Now let me tell you that all this is just history that has proven itself in relation to the laws of nature.  What my main concern about the pros of today is that they have been raised in the wrong environment.  They have been raised in a place where the prey is abundant and plentiful and all in one concentrated geographic region.  Now remembering back from that old college or high school biology class, what happens when there is an abundance of prey?  The prey get attacked by even more predators!  In a time when there are more people playing poker than ever before, pros seem to be popping up like hotcakes!  Any time you watch ESPN or the WPT, they're always doing a bio on some new 21 year old Joe Schmoe internet pro no one has ever heard of.  This huge increase in pros poses a problem, especially in no limit holdem.  As all the dead money from all the amateur players move up the poker food chain, their cash will be depleted and will no longer be able to play as much, if at all.  The increase of predators will decrease the amount of prey and will in-turn decrease the amount of predators.

    I assume most poker pros are intelligent enough to adapt, but I think once the poker boom settles down, quite a few pros will, by nature, be forced to call it quits and go find some "real work."

Setting Aside Time to Play/Study

Finally, I got promoted at my work! I'm still a temp right now, but they will soon hire me on giving me a raise and a cash bonus. I will be able to pay off my doctor bills with my bonus (it will be a pretty hefty sum by my standards). With my finances improving, this will set aside the need for a second job. Along with my promotion, they adjusted my hours so I am no longer working 7-3:30. Instead, I am working 8-4:30. Even though it's just an hour difference, it makes all the difference! On days where I have to go to the chiropractor (3 days per week), I don't get home until about 5:15 to 5:30PM. Then, I have to figure out what I'm going to do for dinner...whether I'm going to cook something or just find a fast meal. If I cook, I usually have to go to the market first and buy stuff. By the time I'm done cooking and sitting down and eating, it's about 8:00PM. By then it's too late to even sit down and start a session of poker online.

My days are pretty much limited to the times I don't go to the chiropractor, which are tuesday and thursday. I'd like to make room for Wednesday, because that's when the games get really juicy because of all the WPT fans logging on and pissing their money away on hands they saw win on TV. I also have the weekends free as well so I guess I have plenty of time to play each week. I figure I can play 20+ hours a week if I'm just consistant in disciplining myself to sit down and play on those days.

Running bad sucks. It just sucks! Maybe FullTilt is not the best site to play at to make money. Most of the time the tables are so tight, you're basically paying the house to sit down and fold. Currently I'm observing the action over at Doyle's Room. It looks like the tables are a lot looser than at FullTilt.

I do have good news, though. No, I didn't save a bunch of money on my car insurance by switching to Geiko! Actually I won a tournament I run with a bunch of my friends. This wasn't just any tournament, though. This was the tournament! What we do is play a series of ten tournaments in which we recieve points. Basically the higher you finish, the more points you get. If you finish in the money, you get extra points. Once we play our series of ten tournaments, we hold a final event in the series. How the point system plays out in our final event is this...the more points you have, the more chips you have added to your initial stack. I ended up third in overall points which was very nice for me! Even nicer was winning the final event! The final event is where the big money is at because in every event in the series, a points fee is added to the buy-in. These fees are saved to add to the pot for the final event. Each event is a $10 buy-in plus a $1 points fee. After all 10 events there is around $100 saved up from the points fees. The final event is a $15 buy-in. That will put the final event pot around $300. I took down 1st place and $149. I was very pleased with my play that night. I like the system we set up because it evens out the luck factor in our final events.

Anyway, I'll try my abilities over at Doyle's Room for the time being and see if I can make a better profit than at FullTilt. Also, another thing I'd like to mention is that looking at my records, I don't think I've played enough hours to worry too much about my play. One thing I would like to see more of is consistent winning sessions. Right now my winning/losing sessions look like they are based on me flipping a coin. I have a total of 178 hours of play logged which is great, but unfortunately that is from 4 months of play. That should be about 2 months of play. Clearly I need to be putting in more hours per week. So out of a month's worth of full time work, I'm down $122.23. That sucks! It's discouraging to say the least, but I'm not going to give up. I'll try out Doyle's Room and see what happens. Wish me success!