2019 has been a rough year for me, professionally. I feel like I mostly coasted through my first 2+ years gambling for a living. Buoyed by a huge summer at the 2016 World Series of Poker, I had what is still easily my best year of poker in 2016 and that allowed me to quit my day job in October of that year. I followed that amazing year up by making just over 80% of my 2016 poker net profit in both 2017 and 2018 – numbers I’m extremely happy with considering the stakes I play regularly and a home state that isn’t really a prime poker location. Of course, in 2017 I had a $45k score at the WSOP and in 2018 I took 1st in a tournament at the Muckleshoot Spring Classic and then won Player of the Series – good for a combined ~$26k profit in just a few days. So in each of the previous three years, I’ve had huge tournament success (for the stakes I play and the volume I put in) that really gave my overall profits a huge boost at the end of the year.
I didn’t get that boost this year. I did make a nice run in the $2500 Omaha 8/Stud 8 tourney at the WSOP, finishing 12th for around $12.5k, but that was my only good score of the entire year and I ended up having the first losing year of tournament poker that I think I’ve ever had. I certainly haven’t had a losing year of tourney poker since I started keeping meticulous records in 2011. Even going back to my drinking days during the pre-Black Friday era, I don’t think I ever had a losing year in tournaments. My thing back then was I would always have really nice tournament scores online and then blow all my profits back playing cash games when I was drunk. I can’t even tell you how many times I woke up from a night of drinking with $0 in my online poker accounts. It was like clockwork.
I’m not a tournament player though so it’s not like I can rely on big tourney scores as part of my annual income. I play a decent amount of events during the LAPC and WSOP (plus a few others throughout the year), but even in the big series, I play very few events compared to people that probably consider themselves tournament regulars. Obviously these big scores are great when they happen – and I’ve proven I can find them with decent frequency considering my volume – but they aren’t reliable and when you factor tournament wins into my last four years, the results play a pretty significant factor in my overall numbers (positively the first three years and negatively this year). I’ll get more into my actual tournament results later.
So yeah… I didn’t get that extra boost and that’s fine. What’s unfortunate is that I also combined it with a subpar cash game year. This has been somewhat documented already, but I’ll get into it in more detail later.
Considering all this, the second half of 2019 was the first time in years that I really wondered about my sustainability of playing poker for a living. Sure, my results were pretty lukewarm and that’s part of it, but the biggest reason I started to feel this way is because of what has happened to the poker scene where I live. I talked about it a bit in my last post, but I’ll recap here: my game of preference is mid-stakes (15/30 – 40/80) Limit Hold’em and those games are really dying in the Puget Sound area. The Fortune 20/40 only goes a few times a week now and only gets one table these days and the Palace 15/30 has really dried up over the last month. The 8/16 games at Palace are as good as ever, but I’ve put in thousands of hours in that game and it seems like $22/hour is about what I can expect to make in the long run. That’s not the worst. I mean, how can you complain about making $20+/hour doing something you really enjoy (and yes, I really do enjoy Limit Hold’em!) I know I can beat bigger games though. I’ve played as high as 50/100 and I’ve always felt like I was a favorite to win money in the long run in any game I’ve played. I’ve encountered plenty of players I think are better than me, but I’ve never really felt outclassed in a game I was sitting in. Even if I was only a 0.5 BB/hr winner at the 40/80 level – and nothing in my history suggests I can’t do at least that well – that’s still $40 an hour! That’s certainly a lot more attractive than playing 8/16 most of the time.
So what’s the answer? Move? Not going to happen. We just bought a house we love a year ago and we both really enjoy living in the Pacific Northwest. Travel more? I guess I have to. I honestly don’t feel like I travel that much considering the job I have, but then I look at my Trip Report for 2019 and see that I spent almost 20% of the year in another state, away from my wife. Plus, we want to start a family eventually and it’s hard to imagine that my time travelling would increase if and when we bring kids into the picture.
I guess it is what it is. I don’t think I have an answer. I suppose I have to just hope that the local scene somehow builds back up to my liking, or I transition to other games (No Limit cash), or online poker comes back, or I win a big enough tournament that I don’t have to really worry about it for a while… or… I get a day job again? Or… I just have to find contentment living at my absolute floor as a poker player.
That’s the battle going forward, but let’s get into my results from last year.
Live Cash Games
I played just over 1400 hours in live cash games and finished with an overall hourly that I’m okay with, but not thrilled about. The main reason I’m lukewarm on my hourly is because of my well-documented meager results at Palace last year. I spent over 65% of my total live cash game hours at Palace and produced my worst hourly in five years of full-time play there. I played 117 hours in home games and booked a $29/hr win rate in those gatherings. And then there are my “road” stats. Basically, any casino not located within a 30 mile is radius is considered a “road” casino in my eyes. I consider places like Palace, Muckleshoot, Red Dragon, and Fortune as “home” casinos, but something like Last Frontier, which is a 2+ hour drive each way and will usually require an overnight stay, is considered a “road” casino and certainly any poker room in another state is. Anyways, my hourly on the road in 2019 was a whopping $100/hr. After filtering out the few hours of big bet poker I played on the road, I’m left with a 1.97 BB/hr win rate in the limit games. Insane… especially considering the fact that I’m almost always playing bigger stakes when I’m travelling. In fact, my winnings on the road accounted for 63% of my live cash game profit in just 20% of the total hours. At least I ran good when it mattered most. Shrug.
My win rates at various limits and games (50 hours minimum):
40/80 LHE: 1.98 BB/hr
20/40 LHE: 1.90 BB/hr
15/30 LHE: 0.33 BB/hr
8/16 LHE: 1.02 BB/hr
20/40 Mix: 1.36 BB/hr
15/30 Mix: 0.36 BB/hr
1/3 PLO: -$4.16/hr
20/40 or higher: 1.28 BB/hr
8/16 to 12/24: 1.34 BB/hr
5/10 and lower: 4.72 BB/hr (LOL – only 57 hours though)
All live limit games: 1.22 BB/hr (over ~87% of my total live hours)
Live limit Hold’em games: 1.1 BB/hr
Live limit Mix games: 1.32 BB/hr
All live big bet games: -1.68 big blinds per hour
5 Biggest Wins:
+$5515 in $40/$80 LHE @ Bellagio
+$5035 in $40/$80 LHE @ The Bike
+$3789 in $1/$3/$5 PLO @ Palace
+$3430 in $8/$16 LHE (!!!) @ Palace
+$3186 in $50/$100 Mix @ The Bike
5 Biggest Losses:
-$2177 in $40/$80 LHE @ Bellagio (in < 2 hours!)
-$2089 in $15/$30 LHE @ Palace
-$2060 in $40/$80 LHE @ The Bike
-$1875 in $15/$30 LHE @ Palace
-$1857 in $20/$40 LO8 @ Muckleshoot
Live Tournaments
As noted previously, I had my first losing year of tournament poker. I only played 43 live tournaments last year, cashed in 10 of them (23%) and produced a -43% ROI. I had an average buy in of $790, but if you remove the Main Event ($10k buy in) from those numbers, the ABI drops down to $571. Of course, whiffing in a $10k event when your ABI is < $600 can have a traumatic effect on overall results. The Main accounted for 68% of my tournament losses and removing it from my results bumps my ROI up to -20%.
Unfortunately, four of my ten cashes happened at All Star Lanes and Palace in small local tournaments. I won both tournaments I played at All Star last year and made the final table of the Palace monthly two of the three times I played it.
That means I had six cashes in the other 37 tournaments (16%) I played last year and this is what I would consider my tournament drop zone – buy ins ranging from $350 to $1500. Filtering out the small local tourneys, I started my year off by bricking in 19 straight tournaments, even though I did cash the first event I played (I was in two bullets and still booked a loss). I guess the bright side is that I had a decent year from that point on, cashing in 6 of the last 18 tourneys I played for a 29% ROI.
Here are those six cashes:
21st of 219 in $400 8-Game @ Orleans for $860
12th of 401 in $2500 Stud 8/Omaha 8 @ WSOP for $10,600
6th of 55 in $550 Triple Stud @ Binions for $1280
21st of 342 in $800 NL Main Event @ Chinook Winds for $2320
6th of 88 in $400 Omaha 8 @ LA Poker Open for $1435
9th of 89 in $400 NL @ Muckleshoot for $980
Basically, I did one cool thing all year in a poker tournament. On the bright side, I made my third legitimate run at a bracelet in four years and that really makes me feel like I’m going to snag one someday.
Online Cash Games
Disclaimer: Online poker is a pretty grey area in many states in the U.S. and a black area in the state of Washington. Global Poker found a loophole in the system to make it “legal,” but even they eventually stopped allowing Washington state residents to engage in their Sweeps Cash model. With that said, the results I’m about to post were real on Global Poker, but results for any other site are just for play money. However, if I’m going to practice playing poker, I’m going to practice by playing my A-Game as much as I can and I’ll continue to use dollar signs when talking about my results in order to stay consistent.
In all, I played a shade over 700 hours in online cash games, but it should be noted that the actual amount of time spent playing is probably considerably less since I frequently play multiple tables at the same time and one hour at three tables would be considered three hours of play in my records. My results in 2019 were bad, basically because I got absolutely annihilated on a site that specializes in mix games. I actually quit the site three different times last year and at multiple points I was convinced that something was amiss; like I was being cheated in some way. While I don’t think I’m an expert at mix games, it was hard for me to swallow that I could possibly be this bad. I’ve certainly never had any problems winning in live mix games. It seemed like insane things were happening to me on a constant basis. I just couldn’t believe it. But I also realized my mind sounded like every losing poker player that wants to blame what’s happening on anything but themselves. Ultimately, I think it was just a lot of noise: horrible bad luck over a short period, especially when I was “taking shots.” And yes, I wasn’t as good as I thought I was and the player pool seems to be much stronger than average, even at the lower stakes.
Since I’m on this topic, I’ll go ahead and break down my online mix game results. 70% of my online cash game volume were in these mix games and I really did get killed. It is almost all limit mix games, but I did sprinkle in a few big bet hours so I’ll go ahead and filter those out since they didn’t have much of an effect on my overall results here. In all, I played 480+ hours in limit mix games and lost at a whopping -1.27 BB/hr clip! That’s a large enough sample that it’s legitimately worrisome. I wasn’t thinking about quitting multiple times for no reason!
I was able to find a bright side though. I played 36 hours at the 15/30 level (“shot-taking” stakes for me online) and ran at -5.44 BB/hr over that extremely small sample. However, that small sample had a extraordinary effect on my overall results: 64% of my total losses came in 7% of my total hours. I was still losing at nearly 1 BB/hr in the smaller games, but over my last 200 hours at those levels, I was only losing at -0.54 BB/hr. That gives me reason for hope and makes me think that I’m getting better, or at least the games are getting better. I’ve definitely seen an influx of new players in January and the games have been as good as they’ve ever been. It’s not like this is my first time paying tuition in poker. It kind of sucks to get throttled while you learn, but I feel like it’s worth it in the long run. At least for me.
My results on the other sites were much better. I ran at 1.26 BB/hr in limit games and 11.46 big blinds per hour in big bet games. I continued to improve in online PLO games, bumping my win rate up to 7.32 big blinds per hour – much better than the -25 bb/hr I was logging a couple years ago. Still, it was a pretty small sample size so I’m not going to celebrate too much.
Overall, it was a pretty bad year for online cash games because I did so poorly in the mix games.
Online Tournaments
I liked playing tournaments on Global Poker because they were soft and I didn’t have to plan an entire day around them. If I happened to be home around 5 PM on a day off, I could get in 5-6 decent tournaments and have a chance to go deep in all of them without having to play past 10 PM. But Global iced Washington players in June and the tournaments on ACR are so long that I basically never play them – I played ten online tournaments total over the last five months of the entire year. This kind of sucks because while I rarely target live No Limit Hold’em tournaments, I was playing them regularly enough online that I didn’t feel like I was completely out of practice when I did play a live one. Now though… I’m just never playing any No Limit Hold’em. Oddly enough, I played the 5th Sunday tourney at Muckleshoot in December and made the final table, so I guess I haven’t completely lost it.
In all, I played 117 online tournaments with an ABI of $24 and cashed in 29 of them – good for an ROI of 23%. It looks like I won four MTTs on Global before I got locked out and I took 1st of 498 in a $5.50 NL tourney on ACR for $473.25 and that was my biggest online cash of the year.
Life Goals
In 2019, I wanted to start exercising regularly and meditate every day.
We moved in January and I signed up for the LA Fitness that’s just a few minutes from our house and I figured that would leave me with no excuse to not go to the gym. I did start going pretty regularly before completely falling off a cliff during the WSOP (I gymed twice in 5+ weeks while I was there) and had to start all over again when I got back. I feel like I want to lift weights a bare minimum of three times a week, but I think four is really my happy place. Over the last six months of the year, I lifted this many times a month:
July: 10x
August: 10x
September: 9x
October: 11x
November: 5x (I was sick for 2+ weeks)
December: 16x
It basically took me all year, but I feel like I’m in a really good groove now. Some of the progress I’ve made is mind-boggling to me. When I was in high school, I never weighed more than 140 pounds and I don’t think I’ve ever benched my body weight in my entire life. If I ever put up 160 lbs on bench press in my life, I don’t remember doing it. It seemed like I would always be really underweight but over the last few years it finally happened: I’m on a scale looking down at 195 pounds now. This extra weight has obviously helped my bench press numbers, but I was still pretty shocked when I put up 185 lbs in early December. And then yesterday I put up 225 lbs. Wut.
When I started lifting in January of last year, I had a day for shoulders and I couldn’t even get through my routine because I was in so much pain. I didn’t know if it was pain from soreness or if I was actually injured, but it sure felt like the latter. I started doing standing barbell shoulder press with just the barbell (45 lbs) and I couldn’t even finish my reps. My shoulders were unbelievably weak. Now my 12 rep max for that lift is 85 lbs – almost double what I couldn’t even do when I started! That’s just crazy to me and it makes me feel really good about the progress I’ve made and the effort I’ve put in.
I suck at meditating. I really want this to work for me, but it’s a struggle. I meditated a tad over 50% of the days in 2019, but I didn’t have much consistency. I hit a stretch of 27 straight days in July, but I rarely string 4+ days in a row together otherwise. I did finish 2019 strong and continued a stretch of 31 days well into January, but I finally missed a day and now I’ve meditated once in the last five days and it feels like I’m starting all over again. But but but. One of these days I want to be so consistent and routine with this that it’s just a habit and hopefully I can really start reaping the benefits of doing it every day.
And that’s my 2019. I’ve never been so excited to put a year behind me. I’m heading to the LAPC next week and I’ll post a schedule of the events I’m planning to play before I go. I’ll probably also post my movie reviews and music stuff for the month before I head down because I won’t have time to do it while I’m down there.
Here’s to 2020!
