The Bat Cave

Volume Goals

play 1800 live hours

1800 is 150 live hours a month. Technically, I should be striving to play 160 hours a month, but considering how much time I spent playing online poker and studying poker, 1800 live hours is plenty. I met this goal by playing just shy of 1818 live hours of poker last year.

play less than 33% of live cash game hours at $8/$16 or lower

The gist of this goal is to put my days of playing lower stakes limit hold’em behind me. I spent way too much time at the $4/$8 level and I didn’t want to repeat the same mistake. Fortunately, $15/$30 was going regularly during the first half of 2018 and PLO has become a twice a week game. The $15/$30 sort of fizzled for a bit late in the summer, but seems to be making a comeback. I spent less than 25% of my live cash games hours at $8/$16 and lower. To be exact, 20% of my hours were in $8/$16 and 3.9% were in $6/$12 and lower. That means almost 75% of my cash game volume was at $15/$30 or higher (and I consider the PLO games to be in this category). That’s a good place to be.

play 500 hours of PLO (online and live)

Altogether I played 620 hours of PLO in 2018, with 377 hours in online cash games, 180 in live cash games, and just over 60 hours in tournaments. In addition, I played 17.5 hours of Big O and 121 hours of limit Omaha 8 or Better.

play one mixed game session a month

I wanted to play in more mixed games last year and I suppose I did, so I guess I achieved my goal, but I find myself a bit unsatisfied. I played 270 hours of poker in games that were non-Hold’em and non-Omaha. However, I only played 36 hours in home mixed games and that’s really where I wanted to increase my volume. In fact, I haven’t played in a home game since May of 2018 when I’d ideally like to do so at least once a month. I also played 55 mixed game hours in casinos, plus another 114 hours in tournaments. Lastly, in December I was introduced to an online training site that specializes in mixed games and logged an additional 64 hours of mixed game training in the last month alone. All in all, I put in substantially more hours here than my goal, but I’d like to play in more home games.

take more shots

I am notably nitty with my bankroll and my goal here was to step outside of my comfort zone a little bit more in 2018. I can’t really say I did that too much. I played just over 48 hours in $30/$60 or higher, but only 8 of those hours were at the $40/$80 level. $30/$60 is still in my wheelhouse, so really it’s just the 8 hours where I was legitimately shot-taking and my one Hold’em session was cut very short on account of all the pain from losing so much money so fast. I did play first tournament buy-in of more than $1500 though and it was the $10k Main Event!

play at least one online tournament a week

My goal was 52 online tournaments and I wound up playing 234 of them.

play a bigger WSOP schedule

Previously, the most events I played in a series was five tournaments in the 2017 WSOP. This past year I played in 10 WSOP events, plus 2 daily deep stacks at the Rio and another 10 non-WSOP events for 22 tournaments total during the summer.

play 100 hours of NLHE cash (online and live)

I played 61 hours in NL cash games with 41 of them coming online and only 20 live. Maybe some day I’ll round out my rather diverse repertoire by including the most popular form of poker in the world, but no limit Hold’em is still the last game I’m looking to play when I walk into a casino.

Win Rate Goals

1.25 big bets per hour at $15/$30 limit Hold’em

I remember when I started writing my 2018 Poker Goals, I thought I might be reaching to hit 1.25 BB/HR because I started the year off so poorly at this limit. Well, I sure turned that around, finishing at an absurd 1.96 BB/HR in the game I put by far the most volume in. It’s probably worth noting that I play with an Overs button basically 100% of the time they are in action, so a decent amount of these hours were played with multiple opponents playing $25/$50 with me and a handful of times the whole table had buttons.

1 BB/HR at $20/$40 (and higher) LHE

My struggles in bigger games were pretty well documented last year, but my volume was also way down. The presence of a regular $15/$30 game locally meant that I rarely made the trip to Renton in 2018 and I wound up playing a mere 93 hours of $20/$40 LHE and only 61 of them were at Fortune. Altogether I played only 127 hours at $20/$40, $30/$60 and $40/$80. Compare that to 2017 when I played almost 200 hours just at Fortune. I finished at -1.1 BB/HR at $20/$40 and up (for limit Hold’em) and I didn’t book my first win at Fortune until early September. Gross.

1.25 BB/HR at $8/$16 (and lower) LHE

I thought this number could see a lot of variance due to low volume, but I actually finished pretty close to my goal at 1.05 BB/HR.

$50/HR at $1/$3/$5 PLO

This was basically a goal just for the PLO game at Palace because of the weird blind structure with a $3 big blind but it’s $5 to see the flop. My goal for the year was to run half as good as I did in 2017 ($100/HR) because I thought my previous results were probably unsustainable. Well, I finished 2018 at $86/HR in the same game, so who knows… maybe it isn’t unreasonable to be winning this much.

10 bb/HR in live PLO

My goal was to make 10 big blinds per hour in live PLO games outside of Palace but I ended up playing only 4 hours in such games and lost a grand total of $1!

1 bb/HR in online $0.25/$0.50 6-max PLO

I got crushed in this exact game in 2017 (to the tune of -26 big blinds per hour!) so I really just wanted to finish 2018 in the green. I did! I put in the second most hours at this PLO limit and finished at 3 bb/HR. I still don’t think that’s particularly good but compared to 2017, it’s a massive step forward.

5 bb/HR in online PLO

I barely met this goal, finishing at 5.37 bb/HR for all my online PLO volume. While I met my goal at the $50 6-max level, I put most of my volume in at the $100 6-max and finished at -7.7 bb/HR there. I put in my third most hours at $50 full ring and that’s where my overall number got a boost by posting a rate of 36 bb/HR.

10 bb/HR in any no limit Hold’em cash game

I finished at a measly 1.5 bb/HR here over a low amount of volume. I did post a 5.6 bb/HR rate online in the bulk of my hours, so that’s something.

50% ROI in live tournaments

2018 felt like a borderline disaster in tournament poker, mostly because I cashed just 3 of 22 tournaments over a long, brutal summer and went 0 for 10 in WSOP events, including a $10,000 brick in the Main. Plus, my three cashes were all small, with my biggest cash being just slightly bigger than my average buy in for the entire summer. Ugh. It was just all pain. I did, however, finally have a breakthrough year in the Muckleshoot Classic series, finishing 1st for $20k in a $300 no limit Hold’em tournament, cashing five times total, and winning Player of the Series in the spring for an additional $6k. I also finished 1st in my first ever Big O tournament for $4900 at Chinook Winds in Oregon. Those three scores basically saved my year and I managed to avoid my first losing year of tournament poker ever by posting an 11% ROI in 2018.

30% ROI in online tournaments

I finished 2018 with a 70% ROI in online tournaments. Some other notable stats: I cashed in 49 of 234 total tournaments (20%) with 9 1st place finishes and 5 runner-ups – that means I finished 1st or 2nd almost 29% of the time I cashed. That’s pretty sick. My biggest score was a 1st of 166 in a
$100 Rattlesnake Open event on Global Poker for $3600. That win got me a cool write up in PokerNews.

Mixed Games

I didn’t make a win rate goal for mixed games, but I played enough hours in them that it’s worth noting: I finished at 0.47 BB/HR overall but 1.17 BB/HR in live games.

Life Goals

-reach a new bankroll peak
-clear credit card debt
-pay off final student loan
-visit a new MLB stadium
-play poker in a new part of the U.S.
-meditate every day
-do yoga twice a week
-run/jog more
-lift twice a week
-drink more water, drink less soda
-eat better and smarter, less fast food
-bring my average blood sugar below 150
-bring my A1C below 7
-less distractions
-no toxic chatting/arguing/debating
-keep blogging about poker
-read Jared Tendler’s books
-study mix games
-watch at least two vlogs a week
-read about mindfulness/meditation

I’m not going to go through these one by one. I think I did get healthier in 2018, but not as much as I would like. I went to the gym more than in years past, but not consistently and while I was doing yoga and meditation pretty consistently in the first half of the year, I was done with both by the end of summer. I played poker in Oklahoma and Mississippi for the first time. We went to MLB games at Minute Maid Park in Houston and Globe Life Park in Arlington, both in Texas. My studying was pretty good in 2018, but I could be more consistent and organized. I never picked Tendler’s mental game books back up and I clearly need to. I also did not reach a new bankroll peak despite having another very good year of playing poker. Lots of room for improvement in just about everything here. I did keep up a consistent blog though. Yay!

Top 5 Sessions of 2018
1. +$6754 in 16 hours of $15/$30 at Palace
2. +$3690 in 6.5 hours of PLO at Palace
3. +$3429 in 4 hours of $30/$60 7 Card Stud at Bellagio
4. +$2820 in 8 hours of $15/$30 at Palace
5. +$2795 in 10.5 hours of $15/$30 at Palace

Worst 5 Sessions of 2018
1. -$2253 in 2 hours of $40/$80 at Commerce
2. -$2226 in 6.25 hours of $20/$40 at Fortune
3. -$2135 in 5 hours of $20/$40 at Fortune
4. -$1976 in 9.5 hours of $20/$40 Omaha 8/B at Muckleshoot
5. -$1714 in 11.5 hours of $10/$20 (with button straddles) at Palace