2010 Review: Enjoying the Benefits

2010 ended up being a fairly eventful year. I went into the year coming off a short break after reaching SNE through the heavy grind that was 2009. I felt like I probably wasn't going to chase SNE again during 2010, but didn't commit myself to a lower volume year until the beginning of February. I'm definitely very happy with my decision to not attempt to repeat.

When looking at the year as a whole, I'd say the biggest theme is that I was able to enjoy the benefits of my SNE grind of 2009. I had two great vacations: the Bahamas for the PCA, and Europe for EPT Monte Carlo. I was able to realize ~18k of tournament package equity by mincashing in the latter event. I broke my WCOOP ME entry down into several smaller tickets in September, and managed to turn a small profit converting equity to actual currency in that regard. Finally, the 5x FPP multiplier during the first 9 months of the year was fantastic, and you really do notice once it is gone.

In terms of volume, I put in a hair under 1.5 million hands in 2010 - right around 1 million less than I did last year. Despite the reduction in volume, I ended up only taking a little less money off the tables. This is because my winrate for the year was higher than it was in 2009 (which should be no surprise given the volume reduction), and that proportionally more of my volume was played at 200NL as well as midstakes. My total profit of the year exceeded that of 2009 by a decent amount, though to be fair a great deal of the equity I realized this year was "earned" through the 2009 grind (tournament package cashes, WCOOP cashes, extra FPP value from 5x multiplier etc).

The last significant piece to my year was that I started making videos for Cardrunners. They have been well received so far and I am looking forward to continuing my series heading into the new year.

A yearly graph and table are below, followed by a monthly breakdown of profit:



The Bottom Line:
January - $22,315.18
February - $20,125.64
March - $20,801.86
April and May - $39,987.80
June - $13,787.12
July - $14,821.25
August - $10,025.67
September - $19,597.69
October - $5513.99
November - $8225.48
December - $7893.67
-------------------------
$183,091.35 USD total profit.

Interestingly, over half my yearly profit came outside of pure table winnings. This is mostly due to the SNE equity I spoke of earlier combined with typical FPP value, though I also picked up some money through my video series, a couple of prop bets, and of course other bonuses.

Overall, I definitely feel that my winrate for the year was satisfactory and the results at midstakes were definitely nice. I ran well during the first couple months of the year, but ran into the opposite end of variance for much of the latter 9 months - you'll notice one ~150k break even stretch in the graph. Heading into 2011 I do not have much in the way of specific plans. If the game structure at Stars remains the same (as I would guess it will at this point), it is likely I'll split my volume between Stars and FTP, and perhaps even other sites. I also plan on playing some WSOP events in 2011 as well, so maybe I'll luckbox something. I definitely don't expect to have as profitable a year in 2011 as I did in 2010 - simply because I don't have the SNE equity waiting to turn into cash in my pocket. That being said, I do still think I've got a few more very profitable years as a pro left me, and it is exciting to see where poker is going to take me.

December Review - Paid Vacation

Quite a bit like last year I intentionally played very little poker in December. I needed to put in a hair over 15k VPPs worth of volume on Stars to reach my 600k milestone, and I knocked out the last bit tonight. I don't plan to play another hand until the new year.

It was kind of a swingy month, though that is likely mostly a function of the sample size being only 35k hands. I definitely could have run worse, so no complaints there. Given the game quality on Stars in December, a > 2ptBB winrate is respectable for sure.

Graph below:


The bottom line:
$2560.65 table winnings
+$866.49 FPP value (15473 VPPs * 3.5FPPs/VPP * 1.6c/FPP)
+$3600 milestone bonus ($4400 - $800 FPP value to purchase)
+$21.53 FTP rakeback
+$845 coaching
--------------------------------------------------------------
$7893.67 USD total profit. Absolutely satisfactory for my vacation month.

I'll be sure to sum up the entirety of 2010 in a review post shortly.

Make Sense Damn It!

Not much to report from the poker front as I'm barely playing during my "time off" month, though I did have a modestly successful 5k hand session on Friday. The games have definitely reached typical December level awfulness. Another 6k VPPs to go until my milestone hits and I'm done for 2010.

Regarding the title, I had a couple "wtf?" moments this week where I encountered things that just didn't make a whole lot of sense. The type of things that leave you wondering why the people responsible for the decision making at hand would possibly have thought it was a good idea. The first had to do with the Flames/Leafs game on Thursday, where the Flames played their best game of the year and utterly dominated Toronto. The game was great, but what I couldn't figure out was why it was being on aired on Sportsnet One, which is a new local specific sports channel which launched this year. This is the team with the largest fanbase in the league (Leafs) playing a fellow Canadian team they rarely see. To make matters more mind boggling, Hockey Night in Canada has recently taken a page from the NFL playbook and added Thursday games to their schedule for the latter half of the season. How CBC decided to show a different game I'll never know. To clarify, there isn't anything wrong at all with the SN1 broadcast, I'm actually quite partial to their commentators - but from a business standpoint it is burning money all around.

The second "wtf" moment came as I was playing through the Severnaya snow base level of the Goldeneye 007 remake for the Wii. At the very end of the level you come upon some bunker doors, and you need to jam two buttons quickly to successfully open them. My button jamming skills are formidable to say the least - I managed to drink the maximum number of soda cans back in Chrono Trigger after all. But the damn door just wouldn't open. I confirmed there was no specific sequence necessary (ie. alternating), it was a pure jam. I switched controllers with no luck. Finally, by mashing a classic controller against the ground I was able to get the doors open. Who playtested this thing and thought it was tuned properly?

Finally, some fairly discouraging news on the hockey front. It seems very likely that Flames center Daymond Langkow has played his last game in the NHL. Late last season he went down to a neck injury after taking a fluke slapshot his spinal cord, and it appears that almost a year later that the injury will turn out to be career ending. A very underrated player who was as tough as he was skilled, it's really sad to see a career end this way.

Deja Vu

Another week, another dominating Patriots win over a highly regarded team. Good stuff. I barely put in any volume on the weekend, but made some cash when I did play. A few of my hands were on FTP, as I was recruited to play a bit and join Cardrunners chat as part of the CR 5 year anniversary celebration. I had a 100NL table bearing my screen name on FTP for the duration, which was fun. Last week I finished work on a video talking about chasing SNE which should be coming out before the new year for Cardrunners members. There should be some beneficial content for anyone looking to improve their mass multitabling as well. Cataclysm has been neat thus far, and the reintroduction of moderately challenging 5 man content in WoW is nice.

Unfortunately it seems like I'm coming down with a cold, which isn't much fun. Maybe my immune system will run hot and pull off a miraculous comeback tomorrow, but outlook doesn't look good. Also, the US poker legislation that appeared to have a legit shot is now close to being dead in the water. This is extremely unfortunate, though we won't really know how bad it is for some time - and by then it'll probably be too late.

Patriots, How I Love Thee

I put in an unfortunately absymal 6k hands or so between Saturday and Sunday, leaving me barely better than breakeven over 11k hands so far this month. Not like an 11k BE stretch is anything to write home about, but it's a tad discouraging when after being so psyched about running a couple BIs above EV for a change the next session is double figures below AIEV. Another 20-25k or so hands on Stars this month to clear my milestone and I'll be done for the year though, which is a definite positive. I'll be putting in a little FTP volume this weekend as part of an FTP promotion.

Just minutes ago I finished the Lufia remake for the DS, and I'll sum it up as "it could have been worse". They could have easily spent less effort simply prettying up the original and had a better product, which also would have provided 30+ hours of entertainment, compared to the remake only being in the 15 hour range for an initial playthrough. But that said they easily could have butchered the intellectual property far worse so I'll take what I can get. I'll be going out to pick up my copy of Catacylsm tomorrow, so most of my gaming time will be of the MMO variety in the near future.

A few hours ago the Patriots finished up an absolute thumping of what a lot of people thought could be the best team in the NFL, the New York Jets. Man that was satisfying. With their stockpile of draftpicks and extremely young defense that should get much better with a little maturity, they should be damn scary in a couple years time - even if they don't win it all this year.

Here's my favorite hand from Saturday. It's not like I want to ever win a flip or 80/20, but maybe every third time someone decides they don't want to fold no pair no draw and stack off the bare gutter they pick up on the turn I could hold? I'd be fine with being drawing dead if his back door flush draw was live, but I even have that dead with bigger hearts. Oh, also note this was a Euro table so I actually lost around 1.4x the currency implied in the HH, but the FTR hand convertor won't take Euro hands.

PokerStars No-Limit Hold'em, $2.00 BB (6 handed)
Hero (BB) ($200)
UTG ($203)
MP ($207.15)
CO ($200)
Button ($217.55)
SB ($201)

Preflop: Hero is BB with J♥, Q♥
4 folds, SB bets $4, Hero calls $2

Flop: ($8) J♣, 6♥, Q♦ (2 players)
SB checks, Hero bets $6, SB calls $6

Turn: ($20) 2♠ (2 players)
SB bets $42, Hero raises to $190 (All-In), SB calls $148

River: ($400) 3♠ (2 players, 1 all-in)

Total pot: $400 | Rake: $2

Results:
SB had 4♥, 5♥ (straight, six high).
Hero had J♥, Q♥ (two pair, Queens and Jacks).
Outcome: $400 returned to SB

Impending Fun

Through November, I was a little surprised the overall game quality on Pokerstars hadn't deteriorated as much as I expected due to regulars grinding hard to clear their last milestone bonus/SNE etc. Today is the first Friday in December, and the games are terrible for a Friday. It was bound to happen eventually I guess. On the positive side, even though I haven't played much today so far I've run exceptionally well and am up a little over a dime in 3k hands or so. It's always nice for both the games to be great and run well, but I'd certainly prefer to run well playing in less than stellar games than run like ass with great tables! It didn't hurt that a very solid reg who steals a ton 4b/called QTo vs me in a CO vs BTN war. My JJ held.

As for the title, I have a ton of entertainment available to me over the next couple of months. Currently, I'm playing through a Lufia 2 remake for the DS, which despite horrible reviews is actually a moderately enjoyable game with some nostalgia bonuses. It is true they would have been far better off simply updating the original rather than changing next to everything, but what can you do. I have copies of FF1 for the PSP as well as Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep in my gaming backlog ready to go when I'm through with Lufia. WoW: Cataclysm also launches on Tuesday with the new expansion only content. The old world revamp has been great, and I expect the new stuff will be as well.

A couple days ago I dropped by EB and picked up a copy of the Goldeneye "re-envisioning" for the Wii. I haven't touched it, but plan to give it a go with a friend on Monday. Should be good times and I'm loving the golden gun colored controller that came with it. I also preordered three games at that time: Radiant Historia for the DS, Ys 1&2 Chronicles for the PSP, and the Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together remake for the PSP. All three of those games will be released in the next two and a half months, so I had better get playing or I'll have one hell of a backlog.

In addition to gaming, I have a lot of sports to watch coming up as well. The Patriots are looking good and should be making the playoffs. The Flames are well... trying their best - they won a spirited one tonight in a shootout against Minny (I'm loving Henrik Karlsson and his fist pumps). Perhaps even better, on new years one of the best hockey traditions begins - the World Junior Hockey Championships. Canada is going to have a fairly low profile team this year with respect to star power, but we're always something of a favorite.