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."
Monday, September 12, 2005
Sunday, September 11, 2005
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!
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!
Thursday, August 04, 2005
Running Bad
For almost a month now my results have diminished greatly. I'm trying desperately to figure out if it's my play that is suffering or if I'm just running bad. I'm using the same strategy that's kept me winning early on, but now my aggressive style is just being run over constantly. I've almost hit my overall break even point on my bankroll. Once I hit that mark I will move from the .50/1 tables back to the .25/.50 tables to keep my bankroll alive. I'd bitch about all my bad luck I seem to collect, but what good would it do? I guess I'll just have to bite my lip and plow through this cycle of bad luck the best I can.
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