I started my dedicated poker bankroll in October of 2008, more than 10 years ago now. I guess that more or less marks the point at which I started taking my poker games seriously. Since then there have been many high and low points. Here are a few examples:
Biggest win. A few years ago I played in a cash game at Sky City Casino. I bought in for $100 and came out a few hours later with about $600. However, this was a casual game, not played using my poker bankroll, so it doesn't really count. My best bankroll result was from a tournament played during the Clubs NZ North Island Championships. I won $620 after splitting the prize pool with one other player. The buy-in was $40 so that makes for a tidy $580 profit. This is way ahead of my other big cashes, which mostly sit at around $200 to $300.
Biggest loss. Most of the games I play in have a reasonably modest buy-in so the potential losses are limited. But I tried my hand at a few casino cash games a couple of years ago, buying in for $180 each time. I had mixed results from these games but the worst result came in the very first game when I busted out and lost my $180 buy-in with top pair/top kicker against a flopped two pair.
Biggest lesson. I've done a lot of reading about poker over the last ten or so years but the most important lesson has come fairly recently. On reading Dan Harrington's books on tournament and cash game strategy I've finally realised how important the odds are in making decisions. In the end it all comes down whether or not the pot odds are better than the odds being offered. In other words whether you are facing a positive expected value situation or not. It's taken a long, long time but I've finally realised that you win at poker by taking bets where the odds are in your favour and by making bets that give your opponent unfavourable odds.
Longest downswing. Taking a look at my profit/loss graph for the last ten years I see that I've had a number of downswings that have interrupted the otherwise upward flow of the line. There was one that started in October 2014, recovered a little early the following year, then levelled out until August before starting to climb again. This was nearly a year of poor results. But the worst drop is the one that I am currently experiencing. My bankroll decreased steadily from August 2017 through to June 2018. This was followed by a brief increase then another steeper drop until February this year. So that amounts to nearly 18 months of losses. I had a small increase in April but then it started dropping again. I'm about 78% sure that this is a temporary state of affairs, but only time will tell.
Biggest hand. The biggest hand I've ever had was a long time ago. This was at a home game of Texas Hold'em where I hit a ten high straight flush. The only other straight flush I've ever had was a couple of years later at a pub game where I had one that was five high. After thousands of hours of play since then the best I've been able to manage is to hit quads from time to time.
Most Memorable Bad Beat (subtitle: 'My best bad beat story'). This happened a couple of years ago in a live tournament. I raised pre-flop with AK and got a couple of callers. The flop was A K 7. I bet a significant amount and was called by a notorious calling station. The turn was a 2 and we both ended up all-in. She turned over 7 2. She'd called my pre-fop raise with the worst hand in poker, then called my flop bet, almost certain that she was behind, with bottom pair and no draw. You know how this story ends, right? The river was a 2.
Worst game type. I've tried a number of different game types over the years but no-limit Texas Hold'em tournaments and ring games have been the only ones that I've had any success in. It's hard to say which of the others has been the worst to play. Sit and Go tournaments started out well but they have now descended into the realm of poker unplayability. Fixed limit ring games and pot limit Omaha were both pretty awful games to play. But I think that Seven Card Stud takes the prize. No matter how hard I tried I just could not get my head around this game. The six months or so I spent playing this game was a massive waste of my precious poker-playing time. Never again.
Dodgiest live game. Playing in pub and club games that are run by amateurs has its problems. Some of them are run in a less than professional manner and a few don't appear to be entirely honest. There's a club here in Auckland that runs regular games and some of their procedures can be lacking in transparency. At least one person has told me that he's seen players end up with more chips than they should have after the colour-up. But the worst example of crooked dealings I've seen was in a local NPPL game where the organiser coloured up and members of her family who were also playing ended up with suspiciously large chip stacks. I've heard other stories about this same person from time to time. She now runs a game not far from where I currently play on Friday nights. Needless to say, I'll never play in that game.
Biggest field in a live game. Most of the tournaments I play in involve 20 to 30 players but I've occasionally played in bigger fields. The Interclub tournament that I play every month now has a field of around 40 but it used to be higher. We used to have up to 11 tables so there must have been at least 70 players involved. But the biggest tournament I've been involved in is the annual Clubs New Zealand Tournament. The most recent one was just a few weeks ago in Hamilton. The Friday night game featured a field of about 144 players, then on Saturday there was a total of 200 players involved.
Best Website. I've looked at plenty of poker websites through the years but I've tended to drift from one to the other taking advice on particular topics wherever I could find out. But the one site that really stood out was Poker School Online. It has a wealth of information on poker strategy set out in a step by step format that appeals to me.
Best YouTube channel. Honourable mention goes to Gripsed.com's tournament tutorials but I really enjoy watching the School of Cards videos. They cover a variety of topics mostly to do with the psychology of poker. Highly recommended.
Best Book. I've read a few poker books but for me the books by Dan Harrington really outshine the rest. The two volumes of Harrington on Hold'em go into great detail on tournament strategy, from the opening stages through to heads up play, covering hand selection, calculating pot odds, blind/stack ratio and a whole lot more. The sample hands at the end of each chapter, where the reader is invited to make decisions as an actual hand unfolds, are particularly useful. Sometime soon I'm going to get a copy of the third volume, which consists entirely of sample exercises, and work my way through that. The two books on cash games are written in a similar way and are also recommended reading.
Best article. The best article on poker strategy I've ever come across was when I was looking for advice on coping with my recent downswing. There was an article on the Poker Listings website called 'How to Win at Poker: It's About Decisions, Not Results' by Arthur Reber. I found this article to be incredibly useful, so much so that it's bookmarked on my phone and I've re-read it multiple times.
Goal not Achieved. It would have been nice to have been able to get into a strip poker game with Jessica Alba but that was probably not a realistic goal. So that leaves winning Sit and Go games as my goal yet to be achieved. These games have been bugging me for years. It wouldn't have been such a problem if I hadn't had such good results early in my poker career. But since then it's just been a long downhill ride with this game type, despite my best efforts. So Sit and Go tournaments are on the back burner now; in fact they may have fallen off the back of the stove.
Goal Achieved. From time to time I've listed my poker goals in this blog. Of those goals that I've managed to achieve there are three that stand out. Opening up a dedicated bank account for my poker bankroll was one; a step that confirmed my competence in playing the game. The second was playing in the Sky City Casino Deep Stack Tournament a few years back. Although I'd listed playing in a big buy-in tournament as a goal, I never realistically expected it to happen, so that was a big achievement for me. But as good as that was, I'm happiest about the fact that I've managed to turn the 50/50 tournament at the Onehunga Club into a viable event. I've been trying for a few years to kick-start this tourney and now it's reached the point where I'm regularly getting three to four tables of players. Even though I haven't cashed for a while, this is exactly the type of tournament I like to play in, so I intend to keep running it for the foreseeable future.
Biggest Disappointment. The one thing that's missing from my poker schedule is live ring games. I just love to play in cashies but the only ones available to me are the $300 buy-in games at the casino. I have tried playing short-stacked in these games a few times recently but with a notable lack of success. The other option would be to find a local game at a lower buy-in but the only ones I know of are Omaha games and the Texas Hold'em players only want to play tournaments. Oh well, maybe one day.
Light Bulb Moment. There have been a couple of times when I've adopted some aspect of overall strategy that has turned out to be crucial to my success. The first of these was when I adopted Chris Fergusson's bankroll management plan. I've been sticking to these rules for years now and they have proved very effective in keeping me on the right side of the profit/loss ledger. But I think that adopting game selection principals has been even more important. Over the last few years I've been regularly checking my results and using that information to decide which games I should be playing and, even more importantly, which games I should be dropping. Nothing is more important than game selection. Nothing.
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