Winning Again Yields Plans For Real Profits

[shipitfish]

I have not kept up this journal as well as I would have liked during this interesting phase of my poker career. My last post indicated I had been staked. This act gave me an amazing boost of confidence. Not only did it allow me to play the high-end of low limit games ($1/$2 blind NL/PL and $5/$10 limit), but it made me deeply aware that there are people out there who have watched me play and think that I am a valuable investment as a poker player. Such an act can do wonders for one's confidence at the table!

So, in the two weeks I've been staked, I've netted $1,435, $470 of which goes to my backer. I've been playing each night for a few hours, about 30% at local NYC clubs, and 70% online.

My primary thought as I play is to remind myself how fragile winning is. I tell myself that I can ruin it by not playing my best game every time I start playing, but that should I keep playing my best game, the losses won't matter because they'll be minimized. More than anything, though, I want to keep one key thing in my mind from these two weeks: a clear memory of what it's like to win, so that I can use it for visualization the next time I lose. (Private joke to nick_marden: it will be the vase on the table!)

---

I firmly believe that I know how to beat these games on a regular basis. My results for the couple thousand hands I've played the past two weeks show it. Indeed, my old results show that I was a winning player before at these limits throughout the past year and a half. I can beat these games, and the bulk of the losses were, according to my records, due to what might be reasonable swings when I took shots at higher limits. Either way, moving up didn't treat me well, either because of bad luck or bad play at those limits.

So, what's the upshot of that? I plan to stick at the $5/$10 and $1/$2 level for a while. A memory of something that Mike Caro wrote once cinched it for me. Caro pointed out first the obvious: that cash game play is different from tournament play, because in a tournament, you are required to move up stakes regardless of your bankroll. You have to take your shot at the higher limit whether you like it or not.

Then, he pointed out an interesting parallel phenomenon. He said that in hanging around card rooms for many years, he's seen that many people are playing a giant tournament in slow motion, again and again. He's watch players move from mini-stakes of $1/$2 and $2/$4, up to $5/$10, $6/$12, $10/$20. As these players get a bit higher, they crash and burn. They take some huge losses at the higher stakes. They eventually go broke, and drop back down. Sometimes that process takes weeks, sometimes months, or sometimes years. But, Caro argues, if you wouldn't do this with your cash in a single session (keep moving up every hour until you went broke), why should you do it across many sessions?

People have egos; they don't want to be seen playing $5/$10 if they used to play $20/$40. But poker players know that an unreasonable ego is a liability. Who cares what limit you play? Play the best game you can afford, and be careful about games you don't think you can beat.

I am sure right now there is a $20/$40 or a $30/$60 game being spread somewhere that I can beat. I'm sure somewhere, right now, there's a $2/$4 game being spread that I can't beat. roryk has a point that it was silly for me to play baby limits if I know I can beat something higher. He's right in one sense: you shouldn't waste hours in the lower limit game when you could have much better EV playing higher. But, the other side of that question is pacing yourself. Life is not a poker tournament; even your poker life shouldn't be one giant tournament. I don't want, on my dying day, to have my entire bankroll heads up with someone hoping to take everything he has. It's a tautology that you can't take your bankroll with you when you die, but that's precisely the reason not to have every winning poker dollar go back into the bankroll for the hopes of moving up later.

What I want to do now is reward my investor as agreed, and then reward myself with some profits. I want to do it regularly. I did it once out of necessity for the NYC apartment, but apart from paying for nicer hotel rooms on poker trips, I've never really pulled from my bankroll serious profits. I can't point to things I own and say: "poker bought that".

For right now, since I'm paying my investor his profits, all my winnings go back into the bankroll. However, I want to think about a new plan when that investment period is done. I am sure that 100% of winnings won't go back to the bankroll. I deserve some profit-taking, and not just for poker trips. So, over the coming months, I plan to develop a poker business plan that rewards my wife and me for my excellent play, rather than just rewarding that guy in the $20/$40 or $30/$60 game waiting for a $5/$10 player to take his shot at the wrong time.