Time Out

   You got to lose,
   You can't win all the time,
   Well I know pretty baby,
   I see trouble coming down the line.        George Thorougood and the Destroyers

   Well it's Wednesday night, but unlike many many previous  Wednesdays, I'm not playing poker. After celebrating playing over a thousand hours of poker in my last post, I am now taking a break from all poker play. It's amazing how quickly things can change over the course of a few weeks.
   I mentioned in my last post that my bankroll hit an all-time high in mid-April, but since then things have taken a turn for the worse. The 'flat patch' that I was in has turned into a sudden steep downturn. Since the beginning of May I've cashed very seldom in SitnGos (3 thirds and 1 first in the last twenty games) and as a result I've had the first losing month since November of last year. As Texas Holdem SitnGos are my strongest game, this is a bit of a worry. I can't help thinking back to this time last year when my results started to decline and continued on a downward spiral through to November ('Midwinter Nosedive', 23 July 2012). I don't want that to happen again.

   But the problem is not so much the string of losses as the nature of those losses. As far as I can tell, I haven't altered my basic game-plan, but I just keep getting beaten. I seem to have been suffering an incredible run of bad cards and when I do get good cards I hit nothing, or some-one else has something better, or some fool calls with rags and draws out on me on the river. Now this sort of thing happens all the time in poker, but it seems to have been happening to me non-stop over the last few weeks. All this has led to a great deal of frustration, and the more frustrated I get, the more I make bad decisions, which just leads to more frustration.
   Playing Seven Card Stud hasn't helped in all this either. Although I knew it would be difficult learning a new game and although I am playing at the absolute lowest level to minimise any losses, my frustration has only increased every time I play this game. I thought that Pot Limit Omaha was a game invented by Satan himself, but it may be that Seven Card Stud is his true favourite. The game seems to be specifically designed to minimise the value of starting hands and to encourage players to draw all the way to seventh street (the seventh and final card). The vast majority of winning hands are made on seventh street and it's ABSOLUTELY DRIVING ME NUTS!
   As a result, I've been increasingly playing on tilt. I go into a SitnGo session with the knowledge that my recent results have been poor and consequentially, I'm desperate to win. Then, when something bad happens I'm thinking 'here we go again' and I start playing recklessly. It all came to a head a few days ago when I played in two SitnGos. In the first I suffered a bad beat to an inferior hand and decided to just push all in pre-flop whenever I got a halfway decent hand. I was thinking, 'come on, call this you jerks!' Of course I got knocked out early. Then in the second game I persisted in betting 3/4 of the pot on bottom pair and a gut-shot (inside) straight draw on every betting round. I simply refused to give credit to the calling player for a decent hand and got beaten out of most of my chips by top pair. Well duh! After that I decided to take a step back and take a couple of deep breaths.
   I took some time to take a look at my records and see if I could find a reason for this loss of form. So far, I've found nothing. I've been playing at the same level, on the same site, and often against the same players for some months. I don't think my play has become predictable, and I don't think I was playing any differently when this decline started. As far as I can tell, I've just hit a rough patch: a run of bad luck.

   So it's time to call a time out. The expert consensus seems to be, when things are running badly, take a break. Trying to play through a rough patch is not generally recommended. So I've decided to give poker-playing a rest for a while. As I came to this decision on May 22nd and the winter solstice is on June 22nd, I thought a month-long break might be appropriate. I've already lasted a whole week without playing any poker, so that's a good start.
   However, I don't think it's possible for me to stop thinking about poker. I'll use the time to read up on SitnGo strategy to see if I can pick up any useful advice. I've already checked out a couple of interesting websites: www.cardschat.com and www.suntzupoker.com . Both these sites recommend a SitnGo strategy that is pretty similar to the one I'm already using. I've also found a book at the local library that might be useful. So I'll take a look at that and spend some time looking through some of the other stuff that I've printed off from time to time but never really taken a good look at. At this stage, I'm planning to make my last poker-less week completely poker-free. No study, no planning, no nothing. I've got a big family event coming up in that week, so that should be suitably distracting.
   Then, come the shortest day, it's back into the fray  refreshed, rested and ready for anything. That's my theory anyway.
  
  

1000 Hours

  Anyway you'll never know the many times I've tried
  And still they lead me back to the long and winding road           The Beatles

   Five years ago the only poker game that I was involved in was an occasional home game among friends, played at my place. This game was played five or six times per year, so I was playing maybe 30 hours of poker per year. By this stage we had already added Texas Holdem to our list of games, having seen it played on TV on ESPN. It was seeing this TV coverage, with its cast of poker professionals,  that really got me thinking about the game and how it was played. So sometime around the end of the year I went down to the local library and borrowed a couple of  "beginners' guides". 
   I don't remember the name of that first poker book (I think it was written by Ken Warren), but it was something of a revelation to me. I came to realise that there were certain basic principals to successful poker play, based on simple mathematical concepts. By applying these principals correctly, you could become a winning player and there were even people who made a living out of playing poker! This book also pointed out the importance of two things: bankroll management and record-keeping. So I set about applying some of the things I'd learned, starting with record-keeping. I got a notebook and started writing down the details of the games I played in, including the type of game, my bankroll balance, the amount won or lost, and the hours played.
   The first game that I recorded was played on Saturday 11th October 2008, at 7.30pm. This was a five-handed home game, dealer's choice, with a betting limit of $1-$5. I went in with $80 and broke even, coming out with the same amount. I played for 5 1/2 hours. There were many games to follow that and when I'd filled up my notebook I graduated to an exercise book and started drawing up tables and recording results for particular game types separately from the overall totals. It all got rather complicated but I could never complain about not having enough information about my games. If anything, I was suffering from information overload.
   There are only two other entries for that year; one more home game and my first ever casino game, played on Christmas eve. In 2009 things changed a bit. The year was book-ended by visits to the casino. I'd got into the habit of playing a few No Limit Texas Holdem cash games at the casino during the Christmas holidays. Meanwhile, the home games continued, and I also played a few other games at a local pool club. By the end of that year I'd played a total of 82 hours since my records started and was ahead by a handful of dollars (no, nowhere near a fistful).
   I played a lot more in 2010. This was the year when I discovered the Friday night Texas Holdem Tournament at the Phoenix Tavern. My regular home game fizzled out in March and was replaced by a regular visit to the Friday night tournament. This game cost $20 to play in ($10 buy-in, $10 re-buy or add-on), and my bankroll started moving into negative territory, $20 at a time. It wasn't until October that I had my first win, by which time I was several hundred dollars in the red. I had enough wins after that to reduce the deficit, and by the last game of the year (Christmas Eve again) I had almost got back into the black. At this stage I'd played 178 hours of poker.
   2011 started out much the same as the previous year, but then I started playing online. My first ever online poker game was on February 8th, playing in a Texas Holdem ring game on Fulltilt Poker. From that point on I was playing at least once per week online, first on Fulltilt, then on 888 Poker. And I was still playing in the live tournament every couple of weeks up until October when they stopped playing. By the end of the year I'd played another 250 hours of poker, taking my total to over 400 hours. Considering I was playing 30 hours annually a few years before, this was a huge increase. Poker was starting to take over my life.
   By March of 2012 I was playing exclusively online and had hit the 500 hours mark. At this point I considered something I had read in that same poker book several years previously. The author had pointed out that poker is not for everyone; that some people just didn't have the knack for it. He suggested that if the reader was still not a winning player by the time they'd played 500 hours, then maybe poker wasn't for them; maybe they should take up macramé, or topiary or something. At this point my results were not very good. Although I was ahead, it was not by much, and my win rate was barely above zero. Not a great result for 500 hours of play. So I did consider giving up and taking up the trombone. Briefly. Very briefly. Actually, I was hooked on poker and was probably never going to give it up. Maybe if I'd used up all my poker reserves and had to start paying back into my bankroll I would have considered it. Maybe.
   Now, fourteen months later, I've just passed the one thousand hours mark. So the first 500 hours took me nearly 3 1/2 years; the second 500 took just over a year. My bankroll has got healthier in that time too. Although my balance dipped into negative territory in the middle of last year (see 'Mid-Winter Nosedive'), it recovered around the beginning of this year and has been more or less climbing ever since. In fact my poker stake hit an all-time high in the middle of April, although it's dropped back a bit since then. Since I started concentrating on SitnGos things have been looking up. But it's still very much a learning curve, and every game presents a new challenge. That's the great thing about this game; after 1000 hours of play there is plenty still to learn.
   Now that I've reached this milestone, I can look forward to the next one: 2000 hours?  5000 hours?  Actually, I've set myself some more modest goals, some things that should be achievable in the short to medium term. These include:
   *Moving up to the next level in 7 Card Stud (if I can manage a few wins at the current level)
   *Moving up a level in SitnGos (I just have to get out of my current flat patch)
   *Making a withdrawal from the 888 poker site
   *Playing multiple online games
   *Getting back into a live game (got to get my bankroll up a little higher first).
 And of course there's always the goal of increasing my poker stake. Maybe the next milestone I should be aiming for is a $1000 bankroll...
    I'll keep you posted.