When it comes to sports related zealotry days don't get much worse than today. The Canadian Junior Team blows a 3-0 lead heading into the third period in the Gold Medal game of the WJHC, losing to Russia in what has got to be the biggest meltdown in the last twenty years of Canadian hockey. The Flames then lose to the Canucks in a fairly uninspired effort.
At least my brief poker session was reasonably profitable despite getting two sets in against gutters and losing both. Somehow I managed to fade a flush draw with one card to come holding a set and then had a spazzy BE reg bet/3b then call a shove on a paired flop with a flush draw against my boat. I'm hoping to put in 6k hands worth of volume tomorrow and then 20k between Friday and Saturday in what will be my first consecutive days of any sort of grind of 2011. Game quality on Stars does seem to have improved somewhat compared to December, though a bunch of my volume may end up getting played elsewhere this year depending on a few factors. It certainly would be nice to get 2011 off to a start similar to 2010!
Thursday, January 6, 2011
Tuesday, December 28, 2010
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.
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.
Monday, December 27, 2010
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.
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.
Saturday, December 18, 2010
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.
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.
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