Hitting the Tournament Leaderboard and a Big Win

Yesterday I started my mini quest to win the Pokerstars weekly tournament leader board (TLB) by playing as many $12, 180 entrant tournaments as possible. I ran into a little difficulty early both in terms of luck and logistics. It turns out that around 9 am the tournaments in question only go off about every 15 minutes so it's impossible to play the volume that I'd hoped. But I made up some of the slack by playing in a few other tournaments which turned out to be a VERY good idea.

I ended up playing 21 of the 180 player tournaments and had 4 money finishes and 1 final table, but the most significant result by far came in an $11 tournament that started with 1,870 players. I played in this tournament because it had 10 minute limits so while it would be slower than the turbo 180 player flavor, it would be much faster than a normal tournament with 15 minute limits. Also in going for TLB points it makes sense to play against the weaker competition at the low levels.

I had a fair run of luck to start and when we got down to about 60 people (remember we started with almost 1,900 so 60 left is pretty far into it) my chip stack was about 2/3 of average. I caught a few breaks, made some good plays and before I knew it we were down to two tables. I caught some more breaks, busted a few people and found that with 14 players left I was in 2nd place overall and the chip leader at my table with about 300,000 chips (we started the tournament with 1,500 so this was a real accomplishment).

This is when I really went to work. No one else at my table had more than 200,000 and they were all doing whatever they could to just survive to the final table. I raised about half of the hands, gradually accumulated chips and ground down my opponents. I knew I couldn't go broke on any one hand and I had to do whatever I could to make it to the top few spots. 18-10th places only paid $140 and 9th was a paltry $250 while 4th was over $1,000, 3rd was $1,550, 2nd was $2,500 and 1st was $4,100. Clearly it's worth taking some chances for a shot a the top spots.

When we got down to 9 players I was in 3rd place and I did my best to keep the pressure on my opponents who were all trying to hang on since every time a player was eliminated they'd be guarenteed an extra few hundred dollars.

My chips stack went up and down a little more than I'd like, but when we made it to 6 handed I caught a MAJOR break. I was in the small blind with about 500,000 chips, the short stack was on the button with about 120,000 chips and the big stack was in the big blind with 700,000 chips. The blinds were something like 15,000/30,000 and the short stack moved all in from the button. I had JJ and moved all in over the top. The big stack instantly called and I figured I was screwed. Sure enough he had AA. SHIT!

The other player had 33 and I thinking about the fact that at least I'd finish in fifth (which paid about $900) if we both went broke. Then...BOOM! J on the flop! I was up to 1.2 million in chips and in total control. The player who I'd just crippled went broke on the next hand and we were down to 3 players.

We played 3 handed for what felt like forever. Myself and one of the other players wanted to make a deal and split up the remaining prize money based on chip count (if you e-mail support they'll come to the table and make any deal official and handle the money), but the third player wasn't interested.

In fact the third player was totally nuts. On one hand he just called in the small blind (the blinds were 25,000/50,000) and I moved all in for 550,000 in the big blind with A8. He instantly called with J7! Luckily I won that hand, but I wanted to lock up as much money as I could rather than play 3 handed for some serious bucks against a totally unpredictable opponent.

He was so unpredictable that I just decided to be crazy aggressive when I got a good hand and hoped he made a mistake. At one point I had about 1,000,000, the nut job had about 1,100,000 and the other guy had about 600,000. The blinds were still 25,000/50,000 and I was first to act. I picked up 77 and moved all in. Normally this would be a major over bet (in this case it was certainly a minor over bet), but I thought he might call with a weak ace or an under pair (he'd risked all of his chips earlier with KT so it wasn't too much of a stretch).

It turned out that he did have a pair and sadly it was 88. He called, I swore and I knew I was pretty much done. The flop came with 3 spades and I had the 7 of spades (while my opponent had no spades) which brought a glimmer of hope. And then the turn came a 4th spade! AH HA! Take that you bastard! The river was a 7 (which I didn't need) and I took down the pot. I busted him a few hands later.

Now it was time to talk deal. We e-mailed support and a person showed up at the table in less than a minute. I'm pretty sure as a supernova my e-mails are flagged and I get priority service because that is just amazing.

After a little back and forth we agreed to a split roughly based on chip count and since I had most of the chips I got most of the money. My end was $3,620!!!!! That's some serious dough for an $11 investment!

We had to play it out for TLB points and I won that part too. I picked up about 900 points for that one tournament and at the end of the day found myself in 7th place on the weekly TLB about 700 points out of 1st! Today I'm continuing to generate more points and I like my chances of winning the TLB. I have until the end of Saturday and I'll keep you posted on my progress.

Also WCOOP starts tomorrow at noon pacific with $215 NL Hold 'em 6-handed. I'll certainly let you know what happens as far as that goes.

Hijacking the Pokerstars Tournament Leader Board

Bear with me through a little background here, because the point of this post is VERY interesting (I think). Pokerstars has a weekly, monthly, and yearly tournament leader board (TLB) where the names of the players who have consistently done well in multitable tournaments are proudly displayed. While the monthly and yearly contests inexplicably have no prizes, the weekly winner gets a chance to play one of the "Team Pokerstars" celebrities (usually one of the 4 former world champions that endorse Pokerstars) heads up for a minimum of $1,000. If the celebrity wins the money carries over to the next week where another $1,000 is added. This continues until the TLB player wins and takes the cash.

So how do results in tournaments turn into the points with which the players are ranked on the TLB? It's really quite simple. Actually it's not. They use this ridiculous formula which spits out a point value for any result in the top 15% of finishers (I'll explain more below so don't bother trying to figure out what's going on with the formula).

Points = 10 * [sqrt(n)/sqrt(k)] * [1+log(b+0.25)]

Where:

n is the number of entrants
k is the place of finish (k=1 for the first-place finisher, and so on)
b is the buy-in amount in dollars (excluding administrative fee). For freerolls the buy-in is $0, and for FPP tournaments 1 FPP is counted as $0.05.

Basically what's going on is they use the tournament buy-in, the number of entrants and your finishing place to determine how many points you get. Bigger buy in or more entrants means more points.

You might think that since the best players play for the most money, buy in should be weighted most heavily. After all if you really want to know who the best players are, the best way to figure that out is to look at who has the best results at the highest levels. But it turns out that the effect of all those square roots and and logs is to make buy in much less significant than you might think. If it was linear you'd get 10 times as many points for winning a 100 player $200 buy in tournament than you would winning a 100 player $20 tournament. In fact you get 330 points for the former and 230 points for the latter. Clearly buy in is barely a factor at all.


The number of entrants makes a big impact, but it's also similarly deflated by the math. You get 230 for that 100 player $20 tournament, but you'd only get 729 for a $20 tournament with 1,000 players.

The place you finish is the last factor variable that determines how many points you get and while there's a drop off from 1st on down it's also not as big as you might guess. In our same $20 100 player tournament you'd get 230 for 1st, 163 for 2nd, 73 for 10th and 59 for 15th (out of the top 15% is zero).

If you put it all together you can see that the most important thing is to have a shit load of finishes in the top 15%.

So what does all this mean and what's the point? Well the point is if I play a slew of those $12 180 player turbo tournaments that I kicked ass in last Sunday I should be able to win the tournament leader board almost every week!

Pokerstars offers a little calculator that you can use to determine how many points you'd get for a given result in a given tournament and I looked at how many points every place in the top 15% (or the top 27 spots) generates. If I were to play 180 tournaments in a week and finish in places 1-27 exactly one time each I'd accumulate 2484 points. I'm certain I could do this much.

The tournaments take about an hour and 45 minutes to play to conclusion, but of course that's only if you take them all the way to the end. Conservatively, I would say on average each one might take me 45 minutes. So playing 6 at a time I could play 72 in an 8 hour day. But there's a little delay getting into 6 tournaments and a little down time at the end while you're waiting for your final tournaments to end and while they seem to be starting every 10 minutes there aren't as many as I want just waiting to be played so we'll call it 60 a day.

So if I play 60 a day, 6 days a week we've got 360 tournaments. If I was dead on average in terms of skill level (which we sure as hell know I'm not) and I had an average run of luck I'd generate 4968 points. The winner of the weekly TLB last week only had 3,293 points! In fact the person who had the most points in the entire month of August only had 6,980 points.

I suspect that since I'll usually be the absolute best and certainly always in the top 5 of the 180 players playing I can do quite a bit better than the average number of points I used for my calculations above.

So what now? Well this week the TLB leader from last week is playing the heads up match for $3,000. If he loses it means that next week, this weeks TLB winner will be playing for $4,000. Right now the weeks leader has 2,600 points, but what happens every week is the top players in the Sunday Million ($215 buy in, 7,000 players is a lot of points) jump to the top of the leader board and don't go much further. I've got about 1,000 points just from screwing around on Sunday and I've got 4 days left in the week, so I might go for it this week.

If everything I've calculated is correct I should be able to win almost every week until they stop running the $12 180 player tournaments or change the system. If either is the case I'll no doubt gain some degree of fame from the whole thing. At the very least I'm going to go balls to the wall tomorrow and see how many I can play and what my results are. I won another $500 today so I'm feeling pretty good about my play.

It's About Time!

A week ago my Pokerstars account was on total fumes and I was making plans to get my hands on some cash so I could switch to playing in person for a while. Then I actually ran into some good luck!

On Saturday I won about $700 playing a mix of SNG's and cash games and on Sunday I was planning to watch football all day and play a few low limit multitables. I saw that they just started running these turbo (meaning they have 5 minute limits and go three times as fast as the normal 15 minute limit tournaments) $12 buy in tournaments that start as soon as 180 players sign up.

One of these was going off about every 15 minutes and I thought they would be perfect since they were going to be low stress and require limited if any concentration. I was hoping to win something like $50 or $100. Nothing major, but enough money to pay for a dinner out. Anything would be a bonus since it felt like a day off sitting on the couch.

In the first one I played I dominated from the start (I'm great at beating players who totally suck) and when we made it to the money (with 18 players left) I was in 2nd place. I navigated my way through the rest of the field and found myself with a small chip lead playing three handed. I figured I'd have a good chance to finish it off, but with blinds of 5000/10,000 and only 270,000 chips total in play I knew it would be a bit of a crap shoot.

Before I knew it I lost two hands and I was out! Crap! 3rd place paid $235 which is a ton considering I only had to risk $12 to get it, but 2nd was about $400 and 1st paid $600 so I was still a little disappointed.

But all was not lost. I was in another tournament of the exact same style that I'd started about 45 minutes later. I picked up some good hands and made some strong plays and before I knew it I was in the chip lead with about 30 players left. Once again I made it to the final table and before I knew it I was playing 3 handed again! I thought to myself "I am going to be crazy pissed if I finish in third again!"

At one point I was forced to risk all of my chips on a marginal hand, but I managed to get the cards I needed and survive. Luckily I was up against two weak passive players and I managed to grind them into dust with little difficulty. By the time we were down to 2 players I had a 6 to 1 chip advantage and finished off my last opponent in about 5 hands.

But there's more! I made a third final table finishing in 8th place in my next attempt! If poker was all luck and everyone had an equal chance, the odds of finishing 1st, 3rd (or better) and 8th (or better) in three consecutive 180 player tournaments would be 1 in 243,000. It blows my mind that whenever the courts are called on to determine if poker is a game of luck or a game of skill the judges always listen to the one moron who says it's all luck and ignores the 4 experts who say it's skill. It makes me sick.

I actually managed to cash in 3 other tournaments of different styles including finishing 60th out of 1370 in a $55 tournament. This is all good for my confidence (and my bankroll) as we get closer to the WCOOP which starts on Friday. I know it's been a few weeks since my last post and I've been posting less often, but I'll be putting up plenty of details about my WCOOP results.

Today I kept the good streak rolling picking up at least another $700 (I'm still in a few multitables, but even if I go broke in all of them I'll still be ahead at least that much). Hopefully tomorrow will be another good day.

The New Plan for September

I didn't play hand of poker during the stretch from August 5th to the August 19th. This is the longest I've gone without playing poker in the 7 years that I've been playing poker seriously. For those of you who may not have heard the reason why was my wife Jen and I had our first child (Peyton Wesley Huff) on August 9th (you can get all the details and look at pictures on our other blog www.thehuffs.wordpress.com).

I got back to work playing 3/4 days last week and started back with full time this week. So far I've had mixed results. The past few days I've ditched the cash games gone back to playing single table Sit-n-go tournaments (SNG's) which were my bread and butter for years. While I haven't exactly been smoking the competition I've done OK and at least I've felt in control and like I've been making good decisions.

And now, I have a plan! It's critical to have a plan when things haven't been going as well as you'd like. If nothing else having a plan will keep you from thinking "ACK! WHAT THE HELL AM I GOING TO DO!" If the plan doesn't work you come up with a new plan and keep trying until something else works.

My latest plan is to play sixty-five $60 SNG's a day (which should take about 8 hours playing 6 at a time), 20 days next month, which amounts to 1,300 tournaments. I know for a fact that pokerstars will give me 115,050 FPP's for my efforts which will be worth $1,835. If I can make another $2.50 per tournament that will be another $3,250 which along with the FPP money is enough to pay the bills. If I can make $4-$5 per tournament like I think I should realistically be able to do then there will be a few thousand bucks left over for a rainy day.

It sounds so easy when I think about it that way. Of course I am my own biggest enemy sometimes and the only reason why some of my past plans have failed. If I start to do really well early on I have a tendency to lose motivation to play enough volume and if I do really poorly I get frustrated and playing becomes torturous. I'm hoping to have a steady, solid winning month and if I don't I'm going to do my best to hurdle my classic pitfalls.

Another thing that could change the plan is the WCOOP which starts on September 14th and runs through the 30th. I'm still working out how many events I'm going to play (probably 5-8) and if I happen to do really well I'll probably scrap the latest SNG plan since I'll be swimming in dough.

A Trip to the Oaks

Yesterday my good friend Jake and I made a trip to the Oaks to play a little low limit ($6/$12 limit) hold'em. We've made similar trips about once a month since the beginning of this year with the main purpose being to bull shit and have a few drinks. I am, however, undefeated on these trips so far and even though it's small stakes the wins are starting to add up.

What's amazing to me is how soft the games at the Oaks have gotten. I used to play $6/$12 at the Oaks when I was 21 and still dealing cards for a living. Back then there were a few nut jobs who would come in from time to time, but in general most of the players were OK if not good. In fact there were a few people who would qualify as semi pros (people who count on poker winnings for a significant piece of their income, but have another main source of income). Of course I still dominated, but it took a great deal of advanced strategy and concentration.

Now that we're in the post poker boom days there are two or three times as many players in general and it seems like almost none of them have a clue what they're doing. Players who would have been squashed and busted in no time 6 years ago find themselves winning without much difficulty.

So yesterday when Jake and I took our seats as they started a new $6/$12 game on table 10, we liked our chances of winning. As the day progressed it was as if the table was slightly tilted in our direction and all of the chips we're slowly flowing down into our stacks. After 6 hours we both found ourselves ahead over $500 (a sizable win for that limit) with huge towers of chips in front of us while all of the other players in the game were looking forlornly at the their tiny stacks. Even if they're only $2 chips it's nice to be at the cashier hoping the people in front of you will speed it up because the weight of all the chips you're holding is starting to bother you.

Also I have to say congrats to Jake on the biggest poker win of his life (I think his previous best was somewhere in the $300 range). Jake and I actually started playing poker at the exact same time back in August of 2000 in the Cloyne home game. That game and the long drives out to Cache Creek (an Indian casino about 100 miles from here where you only have to be 18 to play) are how we became such good friends.

Sadly Jake's poker career got sidetracked by a classic pitfall: going to class in college. Jake fell deeper into that hole when he spent the following years going to law school after he finished his undergrad degree. While he was going down that non traditional road, I of course did what every guidance counselor I'd ever had told me to do: stay out until all hours of the night associating with lowlifes while pursuing a job at which almost everyone fails that comes with no benefits and no guaranteed income! Stupid, stupid Jake.

In other news it took less than 36 hours for my $3,700 from Neteller to hit my bank account. Like I said before the timing on that couldn't have been better. I was planning on getting back to work today, but after picking up $500 on what I was planning as a day off, I think I'm going to spend another day unwinding and get back on the horse tomorrow.

Good News and Bad News

I feel like most of my posts have been bad news lately so that's what I'll start with. I'm continuing to struggle and the more and more time that goes by without any progress in the winning department the more I'm starting to panic. I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong, but I'm sure it doesn't help that my confidence is approaching an all time low.

Taking emotion out of the picture is critical for playing your best and I'm doing a terrible job of controlling mine. Every time something significantly bad happens to me I'm getting upset and believe me, you can't play a few thousand hands a day without a boatload of bad stuff happening.

I tried shifting gears a little today and played a combination of about a dozen SNG's and multitable tournaments in addition to some cash games. I lost at everything.

I think the stress of these past few weeks along with the anticipation of having a baby any day now is really catching up with me. I'm starting to feel tense all the time. I've been pretty good about exercising and I think that's helping a little, but I'm really just not feeling great.

Now for the good news which requires a little background! One of the major effects of the anti gambling legislation from last September was the end of Neteller in the US. Neteller was the main intermediary between the banks and the gambling websites. With Neteller not only could you move money from your bank to the websites and vice versa electronically, but it also made it easy to move money between various websites. Also once you had your bank account verified you could make instant (I'm talking 60 seconds) deposits to any and every gambling website, even if you'd never used that site before. To my recollection in 2006 they processed over 5 billion dollars in transactions, 80% of which were for US customers.

Even though the law passed in September of 2006, the shit didn't hit the fan until January of this year. Pending legal action against the top Neteller executives (who had been charged with money laundering) somehow the US government froze most of their assets even though they are an international company. With no warning the company instantly stopped serving US customers and put all deposits, withdrawals, and transfers on hold indefinitely.

I had about $3,700 in my Neteller account when all of this happened. At the time I wasn't upset or worried at all, because they weren't really forthcoming about what was going on. I knew they fired about 3/4 of their workforce in one day so I figured there was going to be some delay in the processing. As the days turned into weeks I sent a few e-mails and basically got the reply that they still had my money and didn't know how long it was going to be before I got it. As the weeks turned into months I pretty much forgot about that money and figured if I ever got it back I'd be happy, but if I didn't it wouldn't be the end of the world.

Today, seemingly out of nowhere, I got the following e-mail:

The NETELLER Plc Group has announced that the distribution of funds to its US members will begin on July 30, 2007.

You are receiving this e-mail because our records reflect that you are a US member who may request funds from NETELLER. As of July 30, you will be able to make a request for funds on NETELLER’s website by signing in to your account. In the meantime, you should visit our online FAQs for more information about the distribution plan.

Please note that US members will not be able to request funds from the NETELLER website after January 26.

I caught this e-mail about 60 seconds after it had been sent and figuring that everyone and their mother would soon be logging on to their account to request their money I instantly signed on (luckily I knew where I'd written my log in info - you need a 12 digit account number, a 6 digit ID, and a password to log in so there was no way I could have remembered it) and requested my withdrawal. I'm hoping that they're going to process the requests in the order that they were received.

I got a little conflicting info on how long it will be before I actually get my money. At one point they said three business days, but they also said they'd be sending 94 million dollars to an untold number of US customers and there might be delays. Regardless it looks like I've got $3,700 coming to me in the next week or two. The timing couldn't be better!

I think I'm going to take a few days off. I just feel totally lost at the tables and I'm hoping a short break will allow me to cool off a little and somehow straighten myself out.

Good News for Online Poker

Usually I like to write about whatever topic I've come up with for my entry and then tell you about my recent results. Today I'm going to lead with results. I finally had a reasonable winning day and picked up a little over $600 over the course of 2,500 hands. Normally this would be nothing more than a par for the course win, but since I've really had my ass handed to me over the past few weeks, it felt a little sweeter.

Now on to the good news for online poker. I'd read here and there recently that there were a few bills in the house having to do with online poker. More specifically, having to do with licensing and regulating online poker so it would be legal to own and operate a poker site based in the U.S. I didn't know too much about them, other than the fact that the first was introduced in April and that no matter what they said they were a potential massive blessing for all of Huffland.

Today I got an e-mail from 2004 World Champion Greg Raymer (actually it was from Pokerstars, but it had his name on it) which said the following:

I am writing to you on behalf of the Poker Players Alliance (PPA) because we need your help. Congress is currently considering a bill which would clarify the legality of online poker in the United States by creating a regulatory and licensing framework. Please join me in supporting the "Internet Gambling Regulation and Enforcement Act".

The early support of many Congressional Representatives is crucial to the success of this bill. Please call your Representative Fortney Stark today in his Washington, D.C office 202-225-5065. Ask him to cosponsor H.R. 2046 before the August Congressional recess.

Your support is vital. Please take a moment and call today. If you wish to read more about this bill, or to get more information about the Poker Players Alliance, please visit www.pokerplayersalliance.org Thank you for your time, and your support of poker in the United States.

Sincerely,

Greg Raymer PPA Board of Directors WSOP 2004 World Champion and Member of Team PokerStars

I also got a similar e-mail from someone at full tilt and I wouldn't be surprised if I get a few more from other websites. The best news is that there's a chance that the bill could be making it's way through congress before the August recess!!! I thought it would be closer to a year before anything at all would happen so this is great news.

More good news is that the Poker Players Alliance is gaining strength everyday. About a year ago there were fewer than 100,000 members and currently there are over 615,000. I'm hoping that this group (of which I am a member) is going to become a significant lobbying force (former senator Al D'Amato is the chairman).

If you're interested in doing me a favor you can go to the PPA website and right in the middle they have a button you can click on to write your congressperson. If you click on it you'll find three links: one for each of two house resolutions and one where you can thank your congressperson for protecting your rights. Click on one or both of the links regarding the HR's and it will prompt you to enter your zip code so they can have the letter sent to your specific congressperson. Once you enter your zip code you can read over the letter that will be sent in your name, enter your address and e-mail and through the magic of the internet this message will zip off to a congressperson who represents you! For those of you without scruples (Cough, Brain Ridgeway, Cough) you might want to see about sending a pie or some other kind of bribe to add a little weight to your message.

I'm not sure what impact this might have, but it couldn't hurt and if you're anything but a total dunce (Cough, Ridgeway, Cough) it should take you about 3 minutes. I've heard in the past that for every letter that Time magazine gets they assume that 10,000 people have the same thoughts as the letter writer. Of course an electronically generated form letter is going to have about 1% of the impact of a snail mail letter, but I figured I'd ask for your help anyway.

Why would it be such a big deal for there to be fully licensed, legal and regulated poker in the US, you ask? Well let me tell you. First and foremost it would pump literally BILLIONS of dollars into play. The vast majority of people aren't willing to trust a company based in some country they've barely heard of with their money. They think (correctly) that if they website wanted to screw them over and take their money they'd have no recourse. If all of a sudden the MGM corporation opens a poker site they know that their money is safe.

Maybe more importantly the websites could advertise and tell people how awesome it is to be able to play poker in their own home for any amount of money from pennies to hundreds of thousands of dollars 24 hours a day 7 days a week 365 days a year.

The number of new players will skyrocket. People love to gamble, they love to compete and they love to think that they are better than other people at something that matters. Online poker gives people the chance to do all of those things. Of course all of these new players, no matter how smart or how good they think they are, will have 7 years less experience than I do. It will be like a bunch of dudes with swords charging at me when I'm holding one of those machine guns with the six spinning barrels that former Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura used in Predator and current California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger used in Terminator 2.

Another benefit will be increased competition between the poker sites. Right now there are only a few big websites and while they have some level of competition it's not anything close to what we'd see if the American floodgates opened. Dozens of websites would offer crazy promotions as they clawed for market share and I would take advantage of all of them.

At a minimum it would be worth an extra $5,000 a month to me for these bills to go through congress. I'm drooling just thinking about it.

Still Struggling

Yesterday I was determined to have a winning day. I dropped down a limit where playing for half the stakes I was hoping to run over the weaker players. I lost a few significant hands as soon as I sat down and spent the entire day playing from behind. Normally in a full day I try to play 3,000 hands. When that mark came and I found myself losing about $100 I decided to keep playing to try to book any kind of win. Around hand 4200 I found myself ahead $7 (yep, seven dollars) and I was prepared to quit. But I got a few good hands which I had to play right after. I lost them as well as a few others and by the time hand 4500 rolled around I was behind about $300 with nothing left in the tank. At that point I'd been playing a new hand (which might require a half dozen decisions or more) every 8.8 seconds for 11 hours (It actually took 12 hours because I took an hour for lunch). That's a real mental workout.

4,500 hands is a ton of hands. To put it in perspective, imagine that you had a fairly serious home game with your friends. Every Saturday you get together and play for 5 hours and since you're all paying attention, but you don't have a professional dealer it takes 3 minutes on average to play each hand. Remember someone has to shuffle and deal the cards every time in addition to playing out the hand. In this scenario you're looking at 20 hands an hour (if you played like they do on TV or in the movies it would be more like 10 hands an hour). If you never missed a Saturday (or a hand) it would take you more than 10 months to play 4,500 hands.

In the main event of the WSOP the winner of the main event played around 3,000 hands by my estimation after a week and a half of starting at noon and going until after 2 am on a daily basis.

The point is 4,500 hands is a long time in the poker world and as someone who had been a poker pro for 4 years now, I should be able to beat a bunch of second rate players over the course of 4,500 hands with any run of cards that isn't totally fucked. With the exception of maybe the first or second time I ever lost $300 in a day (6+ years ago), this was the most disappointing $300 loss I can remember. Even though it wasn't a major amount of money it still felt like a crushing defeat.

I played at the lower limit again today and after about 2,500 hands I managed to win $17. The good news is at least I broke my losing streak. The bad news is at that rate it's going to take me 82 days (with no days off) to get back what I lost in the preceding two days.

Actually the best news is that one of my strengths in bounce back. While I might be really feeling it after a big loss (or a string of losses), by the next morning I'm almost always back in a good frame of mind. That's probably because despite any complaining I might do about bad luck I have about as good a life and any reasonable person could ever hope for.

What It's Like

Imagine that you have a normal office job (this won't be so hard for some of you). You like your job and you feel like you do it pretty well (this will be more of a stretch for a few of you :). When you show your boss (Mr. Bossy) your work he tells you what a great job you've been doing. You are proud of your work.

Then one day you come into work and for no reason at all things have drastically changed. You feel like your work is the same, but when you show it to your boss he tells you it's crap. You are surprised, but are willing to accept that maybe you had an off day. So you work harder. But, still your Mr. Bossy isn't happy at all with your work. You try even harder, but if anything the results are even worse. To add insult to injury you notice that one of your coworkers Mick Moron who you were sure would be fired any day is getting loads of praise from Mr. Bossy. The company is going to give him a big raise and a promotion even though you know for a fact that your work is much better than his.

"Well," you think. "This is hard to put up with, but at least I'm still getting paid." WRONG! When you look at your check you discover that the company claims they've over paid you so not only are you not getting paid for the past two weeks, you now owe them $5,000! It sure seems like it would be hard to go back to work the next day when you have no idea if it's going to be fine and you're going to get paid or if it's going to be miserable and it's going to cost you even more.

In March 2006 I lost just over $11,000. I had one day where I actually won $10,000 and somehow I lost $21,000 over the other 30 days. That was by far the worst run of my poker career and certainly not a month I'd like to relive. These past two weeks have been the second worst run of my career. I sat down today after taking a few days off to try to regroup, feeling like I'd be fine with a break even day. Instead I lost $1,100. I can't remember the last time I was this frustrated.

A Comment Response

My friend Mike left an interesting comment after my last post which read:

Hey Dave,

I think you probably know more about this than I do, but I'm pretty sure that it's statistically valid for "luck" to clump into cycles. Regardless of skill I think it would be impossible for any professional to play full time without slipping into the occasional slump. Even the top players in the world.

So, hopefully you can stay focused on your long term results. As long as you are able to reach your overall goals, I assume it's part of any up and down profession to save up during the feast and draw on that during the famine.

In the meantime, I wonder if any pros consider it a good idea to switch gears a little during apparent downturns? Maybe play some limit so that bad beats aren't so costly? Or play some tournaments which limit your risk to a fixed amount while offering you better payoffs for hitting? Maybe not big MTTs but a two or three table SnG? Even just for a day or two to break the rhythm a little, to a layman like me it seems worth considering. Is there a prevailing wisdom about that?

It's certainly true that every poker pro goes into slumps and part of the job is peaks and valleys. What's interesting is the people who we think of as "The best players in the world" have enormous swings in their fortunes because they're playing big multi table tournaments. These guys will probably have 9 or 10 losing months every year, but their wining months in most years will be so big that they more than make up for all the losing. I've had 3 losing months in my 48 as a poker pro and all of them have come on the heals of some major winning months. In every case I took some extra chances and more drastic risks in an effort to hit it big and it ended up costing me. I don't feel the least bit bad about it though, because part of improving is testing your limits.

As far as feast and famine goes, I feel like I've done a good, but not great job of putting away my winnings for a rainy day. It's hard to not spend a little more when you've been winning like crazy because it feels like it's going to continue that way forever. But I have been smart enough to never make any major purchases just because I had a big win (with the exception of my wife's engagement ring).

As far as switching gears goes, I think whenever you've been losing it's important to go back to whatever it is that you do best. I'm sure some people would wonder why wouldn't a pro always play what he was best at. The issue there is, the form of poker that's makes you the most money isn't always the one that's the most fun. The problem I'm having is I'm not sure what my best bet is anymore. I used to think it was SNG's, but my results over my last few thousand SNG's aren't great. On the other hand my NL cash game numbers over the past 4 months are very good, but I just can't seem to make it work lately. I can say for sure that I need to avoid the fluctuations with multi table tournaments (even though that's what I enjoy the most) and I have no business playing limit cash games for any serious amount of money online.

What's interesting is other good players go through phases where they play different games at different limits as well. If other pros decide that they're going to play 8-10 $2/$4 blind NL cash games every day at the same times as me for a month, even though I'll end up playing against well over a hundred opponents every day, having those two or three guys in all of my games (you can't dodge them if they're in every game!) can severely impact my bottom line. On the other hand if they all decide for whatever reason to all of a sudden start playing tournaments or bigger or smaller games, instantly my expectation goes up.

I decided to take today off to relax and regroup. Happily, since I've had a few nice months recently the immediate reserves we're topped off so even if I break even or lose a little bit for the rest of the month we won't have to dip in the major back up reserves which are all in the stock market.