The Bat Cave

I’ve been giving serious thought to discontinuing the poker blog. Obviously, my volume of posts has been way down from when I was doing this very regularly and there are a number of reasons for this. First off, I started a bad trend when I came up with the idea of live blogging my sessions. It drastically increased traffic to my blog, but it also put pressure on me to keep providing consistent content and sometimes that can be very hard to do because not every poker session is all that interesting. Sometimes you get killed and sometimes you run super hot, but that doesn’t mean you play a bunch of pots worth writing about. “And here I had pocket aces and they held up.” Cool. Also, I have found that PLO doesn’t work as a live blog. I just need to take notes and talk about the hands later. And actually, I think that’s the point I’m at with limit Hold’em as well. I feel like I’ve done a fine job of coming up with good content while I’m playing, but sometimes I feel like I’m really forcing it.

And that’s the thing… I’m writing all this shit while I’m playing. That is just dumb. And for what? I don’t benefit from this in any way other than providing free entertainment to whoever wants to read it. I guess there’s some satisfaction in that, but not enough to shift my entire focus while I’m doing what is supposed to be my job. With that said, going forward, I won’t be doing live blogs of my cash game sessions because my focus needs to be on the game and playing as well as I can. Maybe once in a while, I’ll do a throwback live blog, but don’t expect them going forward. However, I will still provide live updates of my progress in any tournaments I play. I plan to take notes and post hands after my sessions, but I’m not really sure how I’m going to implement that yet. Maybe as a once a week post with how all my sessions went? I dunno.

Another reason I’ve kind of lost some interest in this is because a number of my opponents read my blog and some of them are making adjustments before my eyes and implementing my own strategies against me. This is probably a dilemma for any poker writer, but those people are at least making money selling books or writing articles. I’m sure that helps offset the annoyance of making your opposition better. So what’s a better use of my time? Writing free strategy advice that people that play with me can use to help their games or doing my own studying away from the tables and improving my game instead?

When I started doing regular poker content, my goal was to give insight on what it’s like to play mid-stakes poker for a living. I feel like I’ve done a decent job of doing that and that will be my focus going forward as far as my writing goes.

So yeah… sorry about all that. I’m sure some of you will be upset by this news, but devoting so much time to this just doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. I will still provide regular poker content, it just won’t be nearly as consistent as it has been the last 18 months or so.

I did wind up finishing April with my second losing month of 2019. It’s been a pretty middling year so far, mostly because I haven’t had a meaningful cash in a tournament yet. My cash game numbers have actually been really good so far.

This past week, my wife actually lit me up about my lack of volume recently and this wasn’t news to me, but I decided to dig into it anyway, just to see how I’ve been slacking. Here are some volume comparisons over the first four months of the last two years.

2018 live cash game volume (January through April): 632.75 hours
2019 live cash game volume (January through April): 412.75 hours
2018 Global Poker volume (Jan thru Apr): 270.25 hours
2019 Global Poker volume (Jan thru Apr): 188.5 hours
2018 live tournament volume (Jan thru Apr): 97.5 hours
2019 live tournament volume (Jan thru Apr): 111.25 hours

I don’t need to do any calculations here. I can eyeball those numbers and see that my volume is down almost 33% across the board. That’s insane. No. It’s pathetic. I know the biggest reasons are because the 15/30 game is going once a week and PLO has dried up, but that’s no excuse to just quit doing my job. I need to be in there playing 8/16 if I have to. My $22/hour lifetime win rate in that game isn’t anything to sneeze at. I can pay plenty of bills with that kind of income. And if I don’t want to play 8/16, I just need to head up to Fortune and play in that 20/40 game no matter how bad I think it is because here’s the thing: what one person thinks is a bad lineup, someone else out there thinks is a gold mine. I’ve heard people say the Palace 15/30 game isn’t that good and I look around the table and wonder wtf they are talking about. It’s an amazing game and I’ll make Fortune my next amazing game if I have to. I have a $33.62/hour lifetime win rate in that 20/40 game there and I’m sure I can do much better than that if I played regularly. I had planned to increase my volume there this year and so far I have logged a total of 9 hours at Fortune in 2019. There’s no reason I shouldn’t be making at least one appearance a week… so you know what? I’m going to start doing that.

I have felt inspired in May so far. Granted, I’ve already taken 3 of 7 days off, but I played 17+ hours of 15/30 this weekend and won $1200+ over two sessions and I forced myself to go play a full 8/16 session last night and booked a decent win. I took today off to go to the movies and make dinner, but I imagine I’ll put in 40+ hours over the next four days before celebrating Mother’s Day with my parents on Sunday.

My WSOP schedule is mostly finalized. I’m not exactly sure what day I will be headed down there, but I’m pretty much a lock to play the $1500 8-Game Mix, the Milly Maker or $1500 7 Card Stud, the $600 PLO Deep Stack or the $1500 Stud 8/Better, the $1500 Monster Stack, the $1500 Limit Hold’em, the $10k Main Event, and the $3k H.O.R.S.E. I’ve sold out the tournament package I came up with and I’ve also sold out my action for the Main Event – all amongst my close friends – but I still have another 15-20% I’d be willing to sell for the $3k H.O.R.S.E. if anyone wants a piece. Hit me up on Facebook or email at maccent17@gmail.com. My markup is 12%. Also, I will be playing some events on the fly if I don’t advance deep in the events I know I’m playing, so if you want me to hit you up for random pieces, let me know.

I will keep notes on my sessions this week and hopefully play enough fun hands to have something to talk about next week.