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2024 Poker Results

May 18, 2025

I’ve been sitting on this for months and seeing as how I leave for the 2025 WSOP in 9 days, I should probably try to publish before I go or this will never see the light of day.

Live Cash Games

I played 1255 hours of live cash in 2024 – a massive 29% increase over my volume in 2023. My primary game was 20/40 Limit Hold’em again, with 45% of my cash game hours coming in that exact game – a slight decrease compared to 2023. I played 20.5% of my live cash hours in 1/3 NL, 22% in 2/5 or 3/5 NL, 6% in 4/8 LHE (playing mostly with my girlfriend), and just below 2.5% in various mix games.

In all, I played a lot more NL cash (43%) compared to last year (28%) as almost all my studying centered around NL cash and I finally ended the massive downswing I was having in the 3/5 NL streets. From January 11th, 2023 to April 22nd, 2024, I played 40 sessions of 3/5 and lost a shade over $15k – or an average of $380 every time I stepped in the casino for an appalling hourly of -$94.22/hour. I only played 161 hours over that entire stretch, which is basically an epically bad month stretched out over the course of 15+ months. In fact, on average, I was only playing about 10 hours of 3/5 a month as I was going through this beat down. It’s honestly scary how severely the game can turn on you sometimes. Here’s to hoping I’ll never have a 3/5 stretch like this again. Probably wishful thinking.

Fortunately, the doom switch flipped. From April 23rd on, I crushed 3/5, running at a $143/hour clip for the rest of the year and finishing 2024 at an absurd $105/hour in a game with a $300 cap bet. Crazy shit.

As a result of my return to glory in the 3/5 streets, I cut back my volume in 20/40 limit and started playing more at Aces. The 3/5 games in Lakewood got a bit stronger after Palace moved to a new building and became Aces, plus the 20/40 game at Fortune actually seems to be drying up a bit. It used to be very common to have two 20/40s running, but now it seems kind of rare and there were nights I’d look and they didn’t even have one game going at 3 PM so I just went to Aces instead. I like staying sharp in both variants, so I’ll keep bouncing back and forth between where I seem to have the hot hand, but I do think focusing on NL cash is a more useful skill set going forward.

Win Rates

20/40 LHE: 1.5 big bets per hour

3/5 NL: 21 big blinds per hour

All Limit Hold’em: 1.74 big bets per hour

All NL: 18.69 big blinds per hour

Overall Hourly: +$60.30/hour

Top 5 Sessions

+$5890 @ Fortune in 20/40 LHE

+$5165 @ Aces in 3/5 NL

+$4403 @ Fortune in 20/40 LHE

+$3735 @ Fortune in 20/40 LHE

+$3682 @ Aces in 3/5 NL

Bottom 5 Sessions

-$3032 @ Fortune in 20/40 LHE

-$2701 @ Aces in 3/5 NL

-$2665 @ Fortune in 20/40 LHE

-$2641 @ Aces in 3/5 NL

-$2101 @ Fortune in 20/40 LHE

Note: Looking through all my sessions to find the best and worst of the year, I had a startling discovery. Obviously, I could feel the doom switch had flipped in 3/5 NL games, but I didn’t quite realize how blessed I have been this year. All five of my worst sessions of the year happened before May. In fact, the last 8 months of the year were completely devoid of disaster. I didn’t have a single losing session of even $1500 after April. That. Is. CRAZY. It’s pretty easy to recognize when you are running well overall, but it’s also pretty easy to overlook the fact that you are basically never running bad. Even in long stretches of positive variance, I have big losing sessions, but that just wasn’t the case for most of last year. As such, it’s not too surprising that 2024 is the first time since 2017 that I had less than two losing months and only the second time since 2012 (when I had zero).

Another Note: Last year I did the impossible and won 32 straight sessions of 20/40 at Fortune so I was curious what my longest streak in 2024 was. Looks like I had an 8 session winning streak and two 6 session winning streaks. Nothing even remotely close to what happened in 2024. On the flip side, my longest losing streak was three straight sessions and I did that twice.

2024 WSOP

Once again, I failed to write about my WSOP after my trip, so it’s going to be tough to recall a lot of the specifics of what happened. I bricked the $600 2-7 Triple Draw at Wynn for my first event of the summer, but I cashed my first three WSOP events, including a very deep run to 20th place in the $1500 Omaha 8 or Better for $8100. I also min cashed the $1500 Limit Hold’em and the $1500 Badugi, plus another min cash in the $240 Triple Draw Mix at Orleans so I was up six $1500 buy-ins right off the bat.

And then I lasted 5 minutes in the WSOP $1000 Bounty, my first NL event of the summer. I actually found this hand history in my group chat, so here goes. It was the second hand I got dealt and I was in the big blind during the 200/300/300 level. Middle position opened to 700, the button called, and I defended with 76 offsuit. The flop was a beautiful looking 762 rainbow. I checked, MP bet 800, the button made it 2100, and I 3-bet to 7000 (I don’t remember what starting stacks were, but I’d guess 25k-30k), MP pretty quickly went all in and the button went into what looked like a legitimately pained tank and came out of it with a call. Both guys were giving off recreational vibes, so I expected to be up against two overpairs here way too often to consider folding, plus my hand heavily blocked sets. I called off my tournament life and MP ended up having 77 (button had JJ) and I was drawing dead and in shock and out of a freezeout before 11 AM. LOL.

This was the start of a nasty stretch where I busted two bullets in the $800 Deep Stack NL, two bullets in the $1500 2-7 Triple Draw, and then had forward momentum in every two hour stretch of the $3000 6-Max Limit Hold’em (my signature event IMO) until Calvin Anderson wrecked me in the last two levels of the night playing like an absolute maniac and winning every showdown against me, no matter how ludicrous his hand was. I remember seeing him a few days later and I was like “what the fuck, dude?” I consider myself quite an expert at Limit Hold’em, but Calvin Anderson is a much better poker player than I am and I didn’t understand what the hell he was doing and he basically said he was just clicking buttons lol. Then I busted a $1500 NL in less than 90 minutes and the $1500 HORSE with like ten minutes before bagging Day 1. And just like that, my great start to the 2024 WSOP was completely wiped out. That’s how it goes sometimes. A lot of the time really.

I ended the losing streak with a min cash in an $800 NL Deep Stack and then I reluctantly played the $1500 Razz and had one of my quickest exits in a WSOP limit event, busting just a tad over 3.5 hours in.

My next event was the $1500 Monster Stack in which I made a very deep run and busted in possibly the most heartbreaking fashion of my entire poker career, all aspects considered. We were pretty deep on Day 3 with around 150 players left out of a field that started with 8700+ and I had a well above average chip stack when this hand came up: Blinds are 40k/80k/80k and I have somewhere around 3M on the button. Under the gun opens to 160k, known Brazilian player on my right calls in the CO, and I look down at A3 clubs. I decided to call in this spot, but my friends and I have discussed it at length and have determined that with 40ish bigs, it’s probably best to 3-bet squeeze as a bluff or just fold here. Both blinds decided to tag along and suddenly we were seeing a bloated pot 5-ways deep in the Monster Stack. And it was a pretty good one: 542 with two hearts! I think it’s safe to say I flopped the nuts unless the big blind defended with a hand like 63 suited. It checks to the Brazilian on my right and he fires 235k. Action is on me. There is already a million chips in the pot. We are 150 spots away from a million dollars real cash up top and over 98% of the field is out. This is a big spot. Slow playing here 5-ways seems ludicrous. There’s a flush draw out and any Ace, three or six is an action killer. I make it 700k. The small blind goes into a very deep and pained tank. I can tell he has a monstrous decision to make and when he comes out of it he decides to say the words, “all in.” Folds back to me. I know he doesn’t have me beat. But am I excited about what’s happening? Hell no. He almost certainly doesn’t have two pair, so if he wants to put all the chips in, he has at least nine outs here and we have a massive sweat on our hands for a top 5 stack in the tournament. Plus, he has me covered. Folds back to me. Gulp. I call. I snap show and he’s in disbelief, tabling a set of deuces, but he can barely start to digest the magnitude of his misfortunate before the dealer pairs the board with a 5 on the turn and I am out of the tournament.

Yup. How cool would it have been to have a top 10 stack with 150 left and $1M for 1st, in position to make a serious run to a final table? Devastating. Just devasting. I did cash for $9200 as a minor consolation prize.

That was my last tournament of my first trip to WSOP and even though my friend Jared was making a deep Day 2 run in the $2k NL and I had 2% of him, I was pretty excited to get home and take a break.

And then my guy went ahead and won the whole damn tournament and got himself a bracelet, the first of its kind in the Team Torch inner circle. I have become friends with some people that have won bracelets before I really knew them well, but it is quite a different feeling to see someone you are close friends with actually become a WSOP champ. Big regrets not sticking around to see it happen live, but also, zero regrets, because you never know what kind of butterfly effect that might have had. Fuck yeah, Jared, more to come.

Congrats to Jared Kingery after his first WSOP win in Event #44: $2,000 No-Limit Hold'em for $410,359! #wsop2024

Read the recap here:https://t.co/XZ24nqCnIO pic.twitter.com/wMN4Y5E1YR
— WSOP – World Series of Poker (@WSOP) June 20, 2024

I flew back to Vegas in early July to play the Main Event for the fourth time. Before doing so, I bricked a $1k NL in a pathetic 90 minutes (and I’m guessing I didn’t re-enter because the line to get a seat after signing up was outrageous). A few days later, I got a 3x cash in the $800 NL Deep Stack. And then on to the Main Event. Sadly, I only remember one hand from last year’s Main and it was a doozy, but a) the details are a bit fuzzy now and b) I’m embarrassed to share it. I made my deepest run yet in the Main Event, fizzling out in the last level of Day 2, setting a new personal record by several minutes. I min-cashed a $600 NL deep stack after that and busted a $700 TORSE at the Golden Nugget for my final bullet of the summer.

Final WSOP results:

18 Bullets
7 Cashes
-$3405 (damn, those $10k bricks hurt)

I got to experience something else cool during last year’s WSOP. One of my friends is coached by Brian Kim, one of the best NL tournament players in the world and as BK was making his deep run in the Main Event, he was looking for someone to watch the broadcast and send him every hand history. My friend asked if I’d be interested and said I’d be compensated, so I obliged and I was sending Brian hand histories the last two days of the Main Event, up until he busted in 7th place for over $1,000,000 in spectacular fashion. Obviously, I wasn’t the first thing on Brian’s mind after he busted out, so when his bust out hand came up, I had no idea he was out yet and I captured my live reaction as the hand was going down.

Tournament Results

In all of 2024, I fired 53 bullets and cashed 15 times. I got 2nd in the $520 NL at Little Creek and 8th in a NL event at Chinook Winds in the Spring for decent scores. I headed back to Chinook Winds in July and got 2nd in their $400 NL for $10k. I made two final tables in the fall series at Little Creek – a 5th in the $520 NL and 2nd in the Main Event… again… this time for $15k. It’s the third time I’ve lost heads up for a Little Creek title in an 18 month span. I also lost heads up for a title there in 2018. Talk about always being the bridesmaid. I closed the year out by bricking 12 bullets in a row, including a brutal 0 for 9 showing at the Wynn in their December series. Overall, I finished +$15k in tourneys for the year, despite losing over $13k in Vegas alone. God bless Little Creek and Chinook Winds.

Updated Lifetime ROIs:

Overall: 33%
Overall (excluding WSOP Main Events): 60%
WSOP: -4%
WSOP (excluding Main Event): 38%
NLH (excluding WSOP Main Event): 150%
HORSE: 49%
Omaha 8/B: 56%
Limit Hold’em: -23%
All Other Mixed Games: -47%

Thanks to an increase in cash game hours and very good results in them, plus a solid year of tournament poker, 2024 actually ended up being my most profitable year I’ve ever had. Hoping to run it back in 2025!

Posted in poker | Tagged art, gambling, gambling for a living, photography, poker, poker strategy, Poker Tournaments, professional gambling, professional poker, summer, texas hold em, travel | Leave a Comment »

Fortune $499 Promo Day 1 (LIVE BLOG)

April 23, 2024

I’m off to an unexpected start in my journey this week. My thoughts of starting my day at 9 AM were mostly Fantasy but for whatever reason I seem anxious to get back in action because I woke up at 6 AM this morning and couldn’t fall back asleep so here I am walking into Fortune just after 9 AM. I can’t say I feel well rested or fresh so it could be challenging to play 12+ hours today, especially if I’m not having a good session.

All 15 tables were full by 9 AM and lists for the smaller games are already off the chart on the app. Fortunately, the 20/40 list is short. Unfortunately, the game will probably be pretty bad for most of the day. I’m guessing decent regs are going to populate the game and weaker players are going to be mostly locked out.

I am officially on the list at 9:15 AM. Let’s see how long it takes for me to get in a game. I’m currently 4th up for 20/40, 3rd up for 3/5, 9th up for 8/16, and 20+ deep for both 4/8 and 1/3. With only two 3/5 games going and no one that just got here likely to leave any time soon, I could still be waiting for quite some time.

I’m going to be blogging my progress sporadically throughout the day, so check back in every few hours or so for an update.

11:00 AM: Officially in action at 3/5 after a 1 hour and 45 minute wait. I am currently 3rd up for 20/40 and I am not excited to be playing 3/5 until I’m in. Let’s hope I can avoid disaster while I’m here.

11:27 AM: All tables are full and lists are officially off the charts:

12:00 PM: Nothing too exciting yet. Picked up QQ a couple times and won smallish pots both times. Lost a smallish pot calling a bluff on turn and picking him off again when he made second pair. Up like $30 – only $9770 to go! First up for 20/40 now.

1:30 PM: Still waiting for 20/40. Oof. Pretty good last 90 minutes. I had a pot where I got 3-bet to $165 after opening to $35 with AKo in a straddle pot. I started the hand with a little over $600, so I 4-bet to $465 and got a fold. My biggest pot was a KQ open and 5-way action to K93 rainbow. I bet $55 and only button called. Turn was 4x and I bet $115 and he called again. River paired the 9 and I checked to my opponent, he bet around $150ish and I snap-called and beat his K6. Currently up $600ish three hours in.

3:00 PM: I made it! Started fourth up for 20/40 and it only took me 4.75 hours to get in the game. Not looking forward to the waits in the days to come. I finished 3/5 +$860 and I’d say that’s a pretty great result. Brand new to 20/40 but I already won a tiny pot with KK so that’s a huge improvement over my last session in this game.

4:30 PM: Decent start to 20/40. Standard hands so far, winning with most of my best hands. Up about 1k for the day.

6:00 PM: I was swinging down for a bit but then I won a big blind vs blind pot when I had AJ vs J9 on JT84A and got multiple bets on turn. I got the same player again a few hands later with 76dd on the button and flopped a flush vs his Ad that made top pair on the river and paid off two big bets there. This game is actually much better than I was anticipating. Five of the biggest regulars either didn’t show up and passed on their seat, so that was a nice surprise. Currently up $1320 for the day. This is the kind of progress you love to see:

8:30 PM: Ah, I forgot how boring it is to try and write about limit Hold’em hands as I’m playing. It has been going well today. Very little negative turbulence so far. Hopefully I’m not jinxing it. I’m up over 2k now.

12:30 AM: Good lord I am tilted. It’s been a miserable last 4 hours. I had a steady climb all day for ten hours straight and this is how my night ends:

Very frustrating. I don’t feel like I was playing leaky or bad or anything, I just started losing every hand – running KK into AA, JJ into KK, 77 into 99 – that sort of thing. But the last pot I played I can only blame on fatigue and a total lack of awareness. Two players limp, I raise with J9cc and we go multiway to a flop of 962. I’m in seat 7 and I get called by s5 and s6. The turn pairs the 9, I bet and only s5 calls. The river is a 7 and he folds when I bet. The dealer says, “show it if you want to,” and I toss my cards in face down and say, “I wish I could show that one,” and then he pushes the pot to seat 2 and I’m like WTF IS GOING ON. Apparently s2 called me on the river. I never even knew he was in the hand! I didn’t look his direction once. I obviously had the best hand and flushed almost $500 down the toilet at the tail end of a horrendous finish to my day. UNBELIEVABLE. I cannot fucking believe I just did that.

Anyways, I finish Day 1 +$1000. Mega disappointing, but I’m 10% of the way to my goal. Back at it tomorrow by 11 AM at the latest I’d say.

FUCK!

Posted in poker | Tagged gambling, gambling for a living, limit hold em, poker, poker strategy, professional gambling, professional poker, texas hold em | Leave a Comment »

Marathon Poker Week: $499 High Hands @ Fortune Every 15 Minutes

April 22, 2024

This is going to be a massive week of poker for me. Fortune is giving away $373,000 in High Hand money over the next week and I plan to get more than my fair share of it. The actual promotion is $499 every 15 minutes and goes from 9 AM tomorrow until 3 AM next Tuesday morning. Absolutely wild. And I’m so here for it.

As it stands, I am currently stuck a shade under $6k for the month of April. It’s been a miserable month for me. I had a good mini-session of 3/5 at Fortune and I’ve been enjoying playing 1/3 lately, so I made the mistake of testing my never-ending streak of unbelievable bad luck in 3/5 at Palace/Aces.

Notable Hand #1: Zinky opens to $20 from MP, cutoff and button call, and I look down at KK in the small blind. I make it $135 and only the button calls. Flop is Q64 rainbow and I make a small bet of $60 and my opponent essentially snap calls. The turn pairs the 6 and I bet $150 and again the button calls almost immediately. The river is a 7 and I shove for my remaining $235. Now my opponent goes into the tank. We are about 2 minutes deep when he asks for a count. At this point, I was 70% sure I was doubling up, 15% thinking he might fold, and 15% remembering that I haven’t won a significant pot in the Aces 3/5 game in like a year and wondering how I would react if I somehow didn’t have the best hand here. Finally, this fucking piece of absolute dog shit puts in the call and turns over 77. I WAS SEEING RED. I don’t know this dude at all so I don’t know what the fuck this was about. There is no logical strategic explanation for his thought processes here, so he either did it on purpose or he’s a special kind of moron. With all the accumulated tilt from this game over the past year, I was having a hard time keeping my emotions in check. I wanted to slam this dude’s face into the table. Losing the hand as it played out was brutal enough, but the savage slow roll on top of it just couldn’t be real life. There was a list for the game, so I disappeared for about thirty minutes and I’d be lying if part of me didn’t hope I was picked up before I got back so I could leave.

Notable Hand #2: Unfortunately, that didn’t happen. I got moved to the main game and reloaded. I had a bit over $1K when this next hand came up. I opened to $20 UTG with 77, Bone called UTG1, another player called in MP, and a very nitty player tried to make it $95 on the button. Somehow he put a green chip from another establishment into the pot, however, and the raise was only to $70. I can’t say for sure if this made a difference in me calling, but it certainly made it easier. We all came along. The flop was a favorable looking A75 with two hearts. It checked to the button and he bet $60. I decided to flat for a few reasons: a) this is a very small bet and if the button doesn’t have an ace, he’s not going to put any more money into the pot and b) AA is very much in the button’s range (whereas hands like AQo are probably not) and is certainly a hand he would make a tiny bet with. I know this is a dangerous way to play this hand, but I was going to take my chances and see what happened. I got a nice surprise when one of the other players made it $260 to go, the button just called (which he probably would not do with AA), and now I made it $560 to go with what I was sure was the best hand. The other player was puzzled, but ended up folding and the button called. He might have AK here, but I was pretty sure he had an ace high flush draw and still a tiny bit concerned it could be AA. The turn was the 2 of hearts and with only $450 remaining and the off chance he had AxKh, I bet $300 and he snap put me all in and I called, saying, ” I hope it’s a flush.” He did indeed have exactly the AKhh and the river didn’t fill me up and I was down another $1000.

Nothing too crazy about that hand other than the fake $25 chip that may or may not have been the difference between me calling pre or not lol. Otherwise, it’s just a standard big spot cooler that I am never on the right side of in this game. The rest of my session didn’t go any better and I ended up losing over $2600.

I followed that nightmare session up with my worst cash game day of poker ever, losing a combined $3514 between 1/3 and 20/40 at Fortune last week.

So I have a goal for this High Hand promotion. I want to play at least 60 hours and I want to win $10,000. Is that absolutely stupid? Of course! Is it realistic? Hell no! Is it in the realm of potential outcomes? You’re damn right it is.

My plan is to play Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday and TBD on Sunday or Monday or both. I’m hoping to be in a game by noon each day and the plan is to play until at least midnight. The only day I know I’m taking off for sure is Thursday. I want to be at Fortune by 10 AM most days and hopefully don’t have to wait longer than a couple hours if I do that.

There are 120 players in action if the room is full which I imagine it will be most of the time during the promo. That makes everyone’s fair share of the promotion $16.63 an hour. But I’ll be playing limit games which are not only substantially faster than 1/3 and 3/5, but also get to showdown more frequently. I’ll make a bold assumption that my fair share of the HH promo is closer to $20/hour. So if I actually put in the 60 hours, my HH expectation is somewhere around +$1200. Let’s hope to do much better than that! I don’t plan to do much detailed hand histories, but I think it would be fun to blog my progress during this promo, so check back for that.

Posted in poker | Tagged gambling, gambling for a living, limit hold em, poker, poker strategy, professional gambling, professional poker, texas hold em | Leave a Comment »

2023 Poker Results

April 14, 2024

Live Cash Games

I played 967 hours of live cash in 2023 – a 13% decrease from my volume in 2022. My primary game was 20/40 Limit Hold’em, with 53% of my cash game hours coming in that exact game – a massive increase over the 9.5% I played in 2022. I played 9.5% of my live cash hours in 1/3 NL, 18.5% in 2/5 or 3/5 NL, 12.2% in other stakes of LHE, and just below 6% in various mix games.

I played 74 hours of NL cash in January and booked a small loss in those games. Even though I rebounded nicely in February in only 33 hours, I only played more than 26 hours of NL cash in a single month for the rest of the year. I won almost $8k in 22 hours of a private New York City uncapped NL cash game but it admittedly played bigger than I was comfortable with and I only ended up playing twice out of the eight times the game ran while I was in the city.

Too frequently, I would show up at Palace during the week to play 3/5 and the game would be dead by like 9 PM. It started not being worth my time and I started going to Fortune instead and played 20/40 almost exclusively for the remainder of the year.

Also, this hand in March pretty much killed my spirit:

I think I was stuck at Palace for the year after that session and I never recovered, booking my first ever losing year at my most profitable casino of all-time.

Win Rates

20/40 LHE: 2.33 big bets per hour

3/5 NL: -6.58 big blinds per hour

3/5 NL (including 2/5 NL NYC game): 2.45 big blinds per hour

All Limit Hold’em: 2.1 big bets per hour

All NL: 1.78 big blinds per hour

Live Mix Games: 2.88 big bets per hour (tiny sample)

Overall Hourly: +$53.91/hour

Top 5 Sessions

+$5400 @ Private NYC game in 2/5 uncapped NL

+$3390 @ Fortune in 20/40 LHE

+$3100 @ Fortune in 20/40 LHE

+$2988 @ Fortune in 20/40 LHE

+$2707 @ Fortune in 20/40 LHE

Bottom 5 Sessions

-$2910 @ Fortune in 20/40 LHE

-$2760 @ Fortune in 20/40 LHE

-$2439 @ Fortune in 20/40 LHE

-$2328 @ Bellagio in 40/80 LHE

-$2286 @ Fortune in 20/40 LHE

2023 WSOP

I’m writing this in April 2024 and I played my last tourney in Vegas on July 5th of last year, so I’m not going to be able to get into much detail about each event. I wrote about a lot of it here (it wasn’t pretty) already anyway and I only played eight more bullets after that post (and I cashed none of them). It was a purely miserable WSOP for me. The only notable thing that happened in the last two weeks I was in Vegas was that I got to play with one of the most accomplished battle rappers of all-time – The Saurus – during the Colossus and we chopped it up about rap music for several hours. He was super cool and down to earth and I had a great time talking to him, but then he put me all in after I opened under the gun, I snapped him off with AJ, he showed AT, and, much like the rest of the summer, that was the last hand I played in the tournament. I also played the Main Event for the fourth time and failed to make Day 3 for the fourth time.

All in all, my 2023 WSOP was about as miserable as I’ve ever been playing poker. Altogether, I fired 23 bullets in live tourneys and managed only two min-cashes. I only added one WSOP cash to my resume (a 70th in the $1500 Limit Hold’em) and my only other cash of the summer I miraculously squeaked into the money in an $800 8-Game tourney at Aria. All in all, I lost almost $32k in live tourneys, plus an additional $1500+ going 0-4 in online tourneys on WSOP.com.

I played less than 9 hours of cash games while I was in Vegas. I had a good 20/40 mix session my first day in Vegas and then got slaughtered in 90 minutes of play in 40/80 at Bellagio. I played cash three times and rage quit twice. Just a pathetic performance overall.

I did a lot of damage to my psyche and my bankroll during this Series. I think mentally and financially the end of the 2023 WSOP is the lowest I’ve ever been in my professional poker playing career. I was seriously questioning if this was still what I wanted to do with my life and wondering whether I could even justify it financially anymore. I’ve managed to survive to this point, but I’m a long way from being in the clear and feeling truly comfortable gambling for a living.

The Fortune Streak

It was sometime around late April last year when I realized I was doing something incredible that I was completely unaware of. I had just finished my fourth straight 20/40 session of +$2000 or better and I wondered when the last time I lost in that game was. I went back through my records and saw that I had won 14 sessions in a row. My mind was blown. But little did I know, my streak was just getting started. I put together four more winning sessions and had my streak at 18 straight heading to the WSOP.

I got back to it on July 11th and went +$935, +$2988, and +$1802 in my first three sessions back. Streak at 21 straight. My next session was the cheapest win of the whole stretch; I booked a +$71 in 4.5 hours of play because the game broke at 9:30 PM. That was the first time it dawned on me that this crazy streak could come to an end simply because the game broke. That would be a really shitty way for it to end. Alas, that would be the shortest session I played during the whole streak while I was aware of it and the game breaking never ended up being a real threat to ending what I had going on. My next seven wins wouldn’t be cheap ones: I averaged +$1909 per session and brought my win streak to 29 in a row. I played one more session and booked a +$750 to bring my streak to a remarkable 30 straight wins in 20/40 at Fortune before heading back to New York City to visit my girlfriend for five weeks.

It’s kind of weird to have an epic streak going where I didn’t play for 5+ weeks not once, but TWICE while it was going on, but here we are. I returned to Fortune over a month later and won $602 over 6.5+ hours. A few days later, I booked a paltry +$181 in exactly 8 hours to bring my streak to 32 straight wins. My next session would be the longest I played while I knew the streak was going… because I was losing. I started off poorly and never recovered, finally giving up just shy of 2 AM still down a couple racks. I had got in the habit of posting about my streak on social media and people were starting to talk to me about it in public, sometimes while I was playing, and that was kind of awkward, so I was somewhat relieved when it finally ended. Also, the longer it continued, the more preposterous and unbelievable it started to feel to report the next win. I feel like I would’ve stopped believing someone else around win #15. This kind of thing just didn’t seem possible to me.

Let’s dig a little deeper into the numbers.

The streak started on February 2nd and didn’t end until September 23rd. I played 32 sessions and won every single time for a total of +$43,564. That was good for a $184.50/hour wage and 4.61 BB/hour during the streak. I played 236+ hours and averaged 7.38 hours a session.

Prior to this streak, my lifetime hourly in the Fortune 20/40 game was a respectable $44.10/hour. By the end of the streak, my lifetime hourly was up to $86.24/hour.

Prior to this streak, my longest win streak in the game was 8 straight sessions. My second longest streak was four straight sessions. Since the streak ended, my longest streak is six straight wins, which I’ve done twice. My post-streak hourly has been a respectable $47.94/hour.

Needless to say, this streak happened when I needed it the most and is pretty much the only reason I didn’t have to get a day job again… yet. That hasn’t stopped me from thinking about other sources of income, but at the end of the day, my floor in 20/40 is $40+ an hour and I’m not sure what I could do for work that I enjoy while still making that kind of money.

Let’s talk about how impossible 32 straight wins is. This is going to be some rough math, but it should still illustrate just how crazy this all was. Before my streak started, I won 58% of my 20/40 sessions at Fortune. If I trim out my fluky, shorter sessions, I won at a 62% clip. All other things being equal, the likelihood that I win two sessions in a row is (.62*.62) or 38.4%. The likelihood I win three sessions in a row is (.62*.62*.62) or 23.8%. My previous longest streak was 8 straight and the likelihood of that happening is just a shade over 2%. Do you see where this is going? My streak was at 14 straight when I realized what was going on and by that point the likelihood of that was 1/10th of 1%! I don’t know exactly what .62 to the 32nd power but it’s expressed like this: 2.27265788e-7. Let’s just say it’s microscopic. It’s not just a once in a lifetime type thing, but once in many lifetimes I imagine. Just absolutely wild.

On the flip side, the longest losing streak I’ve ever had in this game is five straight and I’ve done that twice. Based on the numbers I reported earlier, all other things considered equal, the likelihood of me losing five times in a row in this game is a shade under 1%. Pretty wild that I’m twice as likely to win 8 sessions in a row than I am to lose five in a row. Numbers are fun.

Tournament Results

I fired 42 bullets and managed only six cashes the entire year. I took 2nd in the Main Event at Little Creek for just under $13K and then I cashed my next tournament at Wildhorse in April. I busted four events in a row before min-cashing the $1500 LHE at WSOP. Then I managed just one min-cash over my next 26 bullets. I finished with a -55% ROI for the year and my worst year of tournament poker ever. I did manage a 12% ROI in online events.

Updated Lifetime ROIs:

Overall: 35%
Overall (excluding WSOP Main Events): 61%
WSOP: -3%
WSOP (excluding Main Event): 40%
NLH: 74%
NLH (excluding WSOP Main Event): 160%
HORSE: 61%
Omaha 8/B: 27%
Limit Hold’em: -27%
All Other Mixed Games: -46%

Overall, it was a pretty disastrous year for me. Cash games went well, but I went way too hard at WSOP and put myself in a precarious position financially. I didn’t help myself by playing less than 1000 hours of live cash. Realistically, I should be approaching 1500 every year and not playing enough is one of my biggest leaks as a professional poker player. Also, my expenses are just way too high. Diabetes supplies cost me around $10k a year and I’m paying $300 a month on top of that for health insurance. When I look at my income, and look at my expenses, and look at my bankroll, it’s a pretty worrisome combination. I’ve already talked to Aces about getting a part-time job there, but I decided it doesn’t make much sense to pursue until after the 2024 WSOP, but don’t be surprised if you see me working there in fall of this year. Poker is still my best source of income, but I need to think about other means of earning.

Posted in poker | Tagged gambling, gambling for a living, poker, poker strategy, Poker Tournaments, professional gambling, professional poker, texas hold em | Leave a Comment »

World Series of Absolute Misery

June 18, 2023

You always know it’s possible to go on a cold stretch when it comes to tournament poker – I’ve certainly done it many times – but having it happen during the World Series of Poker when I’m playing my biggest schedule ever has been extremely brutal. I’m writing this on June 18th. I’ve played 15 bullets across 14 tournaments and I’ve managed just two min-cashes. In a nutshell, this is how it looks so far:

Both times I cashed a tournament, I busted a bigger tournament for more than I profited on the same day… so I actually haven’t had a single winning day in the month of June. I’ve only played cash games twice this month and those sessions went not well and extremely awful – not that I gave myself much of a chance. I played 3.5 hours the first session and about an hour the second one and both times the accumulated tilt of a bad Series overwhelmed me to the point where I didn’t feel like playing anymore.

I’ve made Day 2 in four WSOP mixed events, but I think I’ve only had one day since I’ve been here where I felt like I ran even close to above average and that was on Day 1 of Limit Hold’em. I had some bad levels at the end of the night in that one, but most of the day I was building a stack. That hasn’t happened in any other tournament this year. Everything else has been a struggle and any time I’ve had some momentum going, I haven’t been able to maintain it.

All my Day 2s have been absolute shit.

In Limit Hold’em, I 3-bet all in with the KQ and Pads 4-bet behind me. The flop came K83 with two diamonds and Patrick Leonard (Pads on Pads) bet the flop and turn and his opponent called both times. On the river, they both checked and I figured that meant I was tripling up, but the early position player was going for the trap trap trap line with 88 and I was somewhat surprisingly out of the tournament.

In Badugi, I didn’t bag a very big stack but I found myself in a crazy pot early on in Day 2. Middle position opened, the button called, Daniel Weinman 3-bet from the small blind, and I looked down at A53x. I decided to go with a 4-bet to see if I can get either of the dudes out behind me. It’s rare for people to fold in limit games once they’ve put in multiple bets preflop, but it can certainly happen in Badugi. For instance, if the middle position player opened with a bad queen high Badugi, he should just fold here. We are always pushing equity against the button, so we are indifferent on whether he puts more money in or not. Weinman obviously has at least a good 3-card dugi, so it’s probably a fair fight with him. Anyways, everyone calls. Weinman draws one, I draw one, the middle position player stands pat, and the button draws two. I don’t improve and we check to the pat player, he bets, and we all call. Same exact draws as the first time: one, one, pat, two. We all check to the pat player and he bets and we all call again. And then something crazy happens: Weinman draws one, I draw one, and out of nowhere for no reason at all the player that has been pat the whole time suddenly decides to draw a card. It blew my mind. I looked at Daniel Weinman and I could tell his mind was blown too. This was an amazing result. There’s a chance Weinman had a better 3-card hand than me, but there was also a good chance I had the best hand and now that this guy broke his Badugi, I might be a favorite to win this massive pot. I actually reduced to A43 on my last draw, but didn’t make a Badugi. Everyone checked to the button and he bet. Weinman folded so I torched another big bet just in case this dude was trying to steal a monster pot with a bluff. Unfortunately he made a 97 Badugi and won the pot. Before the river action there was 180k in the pot which was well more than average stack at this point. Instead of sitting on 200k+ and cruising to the money, I had 30k or so and was out shortly afterwards.

Razz was a pure nightmare. My worst limit showing of the summer so far. I couldn’t win when I had the best draw, I couldn’t win when I made a 7, I lost when I check-raised 7th with a 6, my bluffs all got picked off and the one time I made a wheel I was all in on 3rd street. Nothing but pain.

I lost all my chips in Razz hands in the $1500 8-Game as well. By the time I busted the 8-Game I was feeling like I wasn’t capable of winning a Razz hand. In fact, when I was mega short in the Aria 8-Game a few days later on the bubble, I came back from break with 4-5 hands of NL Hold’em and I was curious what the next game was going to be…

SHOCK

Somehow Razz didn’t kill me in that one. But I dwindled so low that I posted my big blind in limit Hold’em with one big blind behind on the stone bubble and had to defend Q3 offsuit vs a raise and a call. I was pretty delighted to see the 733 and that triple up helped me mincash my second tournament of the summer.

My Day 2 of the $1500 2-7 Triple Draw was more pain. I started the day with a below average stack but plenty enough to spin it up and make a run. The first hand I played, I opened 742 and the big blind defended. We both drew two. I improved to 7542 and she check-called my bet. She drew two again and I drew one. I made 97542 and this time she check-raised me. My hand is not great but since I was still drawing and she was a card behind, I thought she might check-raise worse pat hands or break ones that were slightly better, so I decided to 3-bet. If she called and pat, I could consider breaking my hand and draw to a 7. If she 4-bet, I could call and break. Fortunately, she called and broke her hand. Huge victory! She checked dark on the last draw and I snap checked behind. She turned over a 7 and had 6542 down. Unreal. She told me she broke a 96 so she had me beat and I got her to break the best hand. And my reward: losing the pot anyway. I was extremely short after that, so naturally I made a wheel after one draw when I was already all in. I got short again after I got dealt a pat 97653 vs a CO open and they ended up making an 8 on the last draw. I made an 86 on my all in hand on the second draw and had to fade a one card draw on the last draw to double, but he made a 7 and I was out in the first level of the day.

This reminds me of a key pot that I played (poorly) late in the Aria 8-Game mix. The button was short stacked and opened in 2-7 Triple Draw. I defended with 733xx, figuring I could fold if I brick the first draw and continue if I improve. I do improve to 743 on the first draw and check-call a bet. I catch a king and a jack and he’s all in for half a big bet so I call even though my hand and draw are pretty damn bad. I draw two and he draws one. I turn my cards over one by one to show him what he needs to beat: a deuce and a six! Unbelievable. I botch this hand completely and end up making #2 (76432) to knock my opponent out and win a key pot for myself… unless… he shows 7432 and rips over a 5 to make a wheel. Even when I play bad and get incredibly lucky and make the second nuts… I still can’t win.

I had a really good table draw in the $1500 NL Monster Stack and even though I was floating just below starting stack most of the day, I felt really good about my chances of accumulating chips because no one seemed capable of challenging me for the position of Table Captain. I was about 4.5 hours in when the spot I was waiting for came up. Someone limped in early position for 600, the next player made it 1600, one other player called, I defended the QJ of spades in the big blind, and the limper called also. The flop was QJ7 rainbow and I decided to donk lead 3500 since the pot was multiway. I didn’t want hands like TT or AK or AJ to check behind and if he had KK or AA, I figured I was going to get it all with this line. Sure enough, the limper calls and the preflop raiser does raise it up… to 7500. I fist-pump rip it in for 40k and high five all my friends in the group chat and then the dude snap calls and turns over QQ and I’m dead to running jacks. In retrospect, his flop raise sizing is mega sus (so small it should raise alarm bells), but my hand is way too good to ever consider folding and you never know what random, somewhat inexperienced players are capable of doing. Maybe he makes this raise size with AA or KK or AQ (but probably not). Just like that, I was out.

I was going to skip Monster Stack Day 1B because I was over it and also because I didn’t want to be trapped on the strip if I busted early due to the parade for the Golden Knights Stanley Cup win. But against my better judgment and after much badgering from my friends…

Monster Stack Day 1B I did accumulate some chips, getting my 50k up to around 80k. I ended up getting moved to a pretty tough table though through pure magic bad luck. My table broke and the seat card I was given had a player in it already. So the floor person just had me follow them and sat me at the first open seat they saw. Chaos. I somehow managed to play nearly ten hours without winning with a single pocket pair. My medium pairs (99-JJ) were all in tough preflop spots and my small and medium pairs all whiffed. I was pretty short with about 20 minutes left in the day when the hi-jack opened to 5500, the cutoff 3-bet to 15k, and I looked down at two red kings on the button. I ripped my last 30k knowing I’m always getting called. The cutoff turns over black JJ and I’m 80% to more than double up. The flop comes quite bad – three spades – the turn is another spade and I’m completely dead and my night is over (and it took me over an hour to get out of the parking garage at 1 AM anyway).

I was going to take today off, but I heard I could put money on WSOP.com with PayPal and play a $500 bracelet event. That sounded fun so I did that and I was doing okay up until late registration ended. About 100 spots off the money, this happened:

I picked up some pots without confrontation after that and then about 50 spots off the money, this happened:

And… I was out. After the tournament, I thought I’d dabble in cash for a bit and then this happened:

I’m not going to lie. I’m in a lot of pain. I sold 30-45% of myself in everything from the jump and as the Series goes on, I’ve sold more and more of myself. Despite that, June 2023 is already the worst month of my career by a long shot. I have two small cashes across what is now sixteen total bullets for a total of -$14,420. I’ve only played nine hours of cash since I’ve been here but I’ve managed to lose another $1848 doing that also. There is still plenty of time to turn things around, but I’m losing more and more willpower by the day and there’s only so much damage I’m willing to do to my bankroll before I call it quits. In the big picture, this 2 for 16 showing is completely normal, but this is the biggest schedule I’ve ever played and I’ve put a substantial portion of my bankroll at risk. You always know a bad run like this is possible, but you really hope it doesn’t happen during the most critical stretch of your poker career.

This next week I’ll be playing the $1500 HORSE on Tuesday, the $1500 Super Turbo Bounty NL on Wednesday, the $2500 Triple Draw Mix on Thursday, the $1500 Millionaire Maker on Friday, the $1500 Stud 8 on Saturday, and… the tournament I’m most excited about: the $3000 6-max Limit Hold’em on Sunday. If this next week goes poorly as well, I’ll be taking a break until the Main Event and heading to New York City for the first time in my life to visit my girlfriend because she’s out there trying to do big things for her career right now. If I do that and then don’t make a deep run in the Main, that will be it for my 2023 WSOP. I’ll go home early and lick my wounds and spend the next year getting ready to show and prove in 2024.

It can be hard to celebrate other people’s wins when you’re drowning in your own misery, but I would be a shit friend if I didn’t mention my buddy Eric Trexler (Godzilla when I used to blog regularly with nicknames) making a sick ass run to 2nd place for a $300k score in the second biggest field for a live tournament of all-time (interestingly, my friend and Team Torch member Jared took 2nd in the biggest live field of all-time). If you have a PokerGo subscription you can watch ET boss it the fuck up at the final table and I think it might even be free on YouTube. It’s a must watch. He put on an absolute show. Here are some fun videos I took while railing him:

Anyways, let’s hope I have much better things to report next time I make an update. STOP THE BLEEDING!

Posted in poker | Tagged gambling, gambling for a living, limit hold em, no limit hold em, poker, poker strategy, Poker Tournaments, professional gambling, professional poker, texas hold em, world series of poker | 1 Comment »

2023 First Half Poker Highlights

June 6, 2023

Welp, if I don’t post this in the next hour or so then it’s probably never going to happen since my WSOP technically kicks off in 2.5 hours. I just figured I’d post something about how my 2023 has gone leading up to the World Series.

I think the most notable change for me so far this year is that I have transitioned back to Limit Hold’em. In 2022, 74% of my live cash hours were in NL and only 15% in LHE. In 2023, I’m at 42% NL and 49.5% LHE – but that split is even more drastic over the last few months with 67% of my live hours being in LHE since April 1st.

It makes sense though. NL has been going poorly and LHE has been going, uh, spectacularly. The results have certainly been part of it, but also the 3/5 games at Palace have largely dried up during the week. Sure, it still gets off the ground pretty much every day, but it gets really weak in the evening and frequently breaks long before I’m ready to quit playing for the day. This has led to me thinking I’m better off just going to Fortune and playing 20/40 there. Interestingly, when I was driving down to Vegas last Friday, Palace somehow had three 3/5 games going. That blows my mind. 3/5 is actually pretty steady on Fridays and Saturdays – and I was playing there on Fridays every week at first, but my doom switch is fully activated – I won on my first 3/5 Friday session of the year and I haven’t won again since. I’ve only played three Friday sessions at Palace since the end of January though but they have all gone miserably: -$1499, -$1356, -$1542. All told, I’m down over $5500 on Fridays at Palace this year – on what is supposed to be my best day of the week there. Granted, this is a 44.5 hour sample size we are talking about here – barely a week’s worth of full-time play – so this is all just noise, but I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t some accumulated tilt going on and I have found myself preferring to play 20/40 at Fortune on Fridays the last few months. So yes, the sample size is tiny, but when I get back from Vegas in late July, I’ll be able to say I haven’t won at Palace on a Friday in almost seven months and that sounds pretty fun and dramatic, right?

Also, this one pot I’m about to share is the difference between me being breakeven at Palace in 2023 and me being a solid winner:

Worst cash game beat of my life

I feel like things at Palace have gone poorly overall, but when I filter Fridays out of the equation, my results actually look pretty reasonable: $72/hour @ 3/5 and $20/hour @ 1/3. The problem is the 3/5 tends to be fragile on other days of the week and I really don’t want to play a ton of 1/3 but smaller games have accounted for almost half my hours when I do show up to Palace Monday through Thursday. It’s just become increasingly hard for me to walk into Palace these days. I think 1/3 would be far more tolerable if they increased the maximum buy-in to at least $500, but still, I’d much rather play 20/40.

Yes, my love of Limit Hold’em has returned. I mean, it never really left. I’ve always enjoyed playing 20/40 over playing 1/3 or 3/5 whenever I go to Fortune. I just enjoy the pace of the game so much more. Yes, NL is far more complex and mistakes from opponents are far more costly, but I just love the bang bang bang pace of playing limit games.

I knew I was having a really good year at Fortune, but I didn’t know exactly how good until I strung together four +$2k sessions in a row and lost that streak by booking a +$549 and wondered how long it had been since I actually had a losing 20/40 session. I was astonished to discover I was at 15 winning sessions in a row! I’ve played a ton of Limit Hold’em in my life and I’ve never come close to that kind of winning streak before. I was shocked. I’d guess that the absolute best streak I’ve ever gone on is probably like 9 or 10 wins in a row but certainly nothing like this. Variance is just so high in Limit Hold’em. Looking at my lifetime results and filtering out sessions of less than 5 hours, I lose about 4 out of every 10 sessions I play. That’s losing nearly half the time I show up to play so stringing together 15 consecutive wins is unheard of. I haven’t lost at Fortune in over four months! It’s crazy!

There was some luck involved here. I didn’t know this was happening so there were a couple times during the streak when the game broke after 2 or 3 hours and I happened to be winning at the time. At least one other time, I was summoned home early and happened to be winning. Since I’ve become aware of this streak, I’ve had three more wins, putting my streak at 18 wins in a row heading to WSOP. Now that I am aware of the streak, I do feel like I’d consider it still in tact if the game broke after two hours and I was losing. That would be a shitty way to “lose” it. Likewise, I don’t feel like I can quit after three hours when I’m winning just to keep the streak alive. I’d say six hours is probably the minimum number of hours I’d like to play for qualification. Also, this streak is specific to Fortune 20/40. I lost at Last Frontier in La Center earlier this month and I’ll certainly be playing some 20/40 in Vegas during the WSOP.

Overall, I’m somehow running at 3.64 big bets per hour in 20/40 at Fortune in 2023 and 4.32 big bets per hour during the streak. So yeah, kind of hard to talk myself into playing at Palace when I’ve been making almost $150 an hour at Fortune this year. It’s been awesome, but this isn’t real life. My LHE win rates always level out between 1.25 and 1.5 big bets per hour annually, so I’ll eventually come back down to earth, but I’ve also never had a streak like this before so my 2023 20/40 win rate will almost certainly be bigger than it ever has been before.

Pretty insane stuff. Note: I know it says 19 of 19 there, but one of those sessions was split up because the feeder game broke and I jumped in something else while I waited for the main game. Streak is at 18.

Pre-WSOP, tournaments have gone well for me so far. I’ve only played eight tourneys across parts of four different series that I mostly didn’t partake in. I have 3 cashes with my best one coming in the Main Event of the Little Creek series in March, finishing 2nd of 77 for a nearly $13k score, which actually cracks my top 5 of all time. I thought I was pretty much a lock to win it when I got heads up with an older woman that looked like a doppelgänger of my own mom, but she pretty much owned me heads up… by having the best hand every time. She played better than I thought she was going to, but I don’t think I lose very often if the cards are even remotely cooperative.

Anyways, that finish has me sitting on a sexy ROI of 191% for the year as I head into a WSOP that is going to drastically change that number one way or the other.

One last thing, someone posted a brutal / hilarious comment on my last music post. Here it is:

Love your blog man. But the music/movie lists are kinda brutal. Maybe you should make a second blog? A list of your top 20 most watched actors for the year?? Lol come on man. Give us that poker/life content. No one cares what you’re listening to, sorry.
Poogs

I mean… ouch. But also, message received. I don’t think it’s necessarily true that NO ONE cares about that stuff, but it is true that very few people seem to. I still think it’s fun to track for my own personal amusement though, so if you’re ever curious about my music stats and what I’m listening to, I’ve created a page I will update every month or two with that information, but the only posts I make on music from now on will either be album reviews (which I seem to be done with) or a year end write up. Check out my music stats here: Music Stats.

2023 WSOP Schedule

May 5, 2023

We are officially less than a month away from the next World Series of Poker. This is going to be by far the most important WSOP of my poker career. I’m planning on playing my biggest schedule ever and there is really no reason for me not to be in Vegas for seven weeks straight. My girlfriend is moving to New York City for 3-4 months this summer for her own work and she’s taking Kirby with her. I’ll have no one to telling me to come home and no one and no dogs at home I’m excited to get back to. No excuses. I’m really excited, but I’m going to spend this next month making sure I’m mentally prepared for what’s ahead.

That’s a daunting schedule I have down there. The thought of whiffing everything is pretty scary, but I’m here for it. Unlike in previous years, I will be trying to play a lot more no limit hold’em tournaments. I love playing mix game tourneys, but I’ve put in FAR more work on my NL hold’em game over the past few years than anything else and it’s no surprise that four of my top five all-time cashes are NL hold’em as it’s by far the most popular variant of poker and thus creates the biggest fields and prize pools. So why I’ve mostly been avoiding those events at the WSOP the past half decade is a mystery to everyone, including myself. I guess I’m just more comfortable playing limit games, but if Covid did anything positive for me, it certainly forced me to start focusing on NL hold’em and I feel like I have exponentially improved at it since 2020.

I will also be playing very few non-WSOP events. I want to give myself the best chance to win a bracelet so I’m thinking at least 80% of my volume will be in bracelet events. I only I have a handful of tourneys that aren’t at WSOP down there and almost all of them are bigger mix events. Maybe it will work out that I end up playing a bigger off site NL tourney, but what I really want to avoid is committing myself to multiple day events that aren’t WSOP.

It would be an absolute disaster if I played every event on this schedule below. I should be making deep runs in some events and missing others, but this is just every event I’m legitimately interested in while I’m down there. Events in purple are my must plays on those days if I’m not advancing in something else already. I’ll also noted some BIs in yellow highlighter because they are my biggest events of the series and I’m selling more action than normal for those particular ones. I’m sold out of the majority of my WSOP package but I may sell more of the bigger BIs if I am doing poorly. I will reach out to people I’m pretty sure want action if that ends up being the case.

Hopefully it’s a huge summer! Leggo.

2022 Poker Results

January 3, 2023

Crazy. I was looking for my 2021 results post for reference and I couldn’t find it. Did I never post one? Sheesh. Just my 2021 WSOP results? I’ll be damned. I could spend some time talking about how 2022 was a transition year for me, but ya’ll already know that by now. Let’s just get into the numbers.

Live Cash Games

I played 1101.5 hours of live cash in 2022. My primary game was 3/5 no limit Hold’em, with roughly 55% of my live hours coming in that exact game. I played 15.6% of my hours in 1/3 NL games and 9.5% in 20/40 limit Hold’em. No other specific game accounted for even 4% of my live cash hours. Pre-pandemic – and for as long as I’ve been playing poker pretty much – I probably played 95% of my live hours in limit Hold’em games. In 2022, limit Hold’em accounted for 15% of my total cash game hours and no limit Hold’em took up 74% of my volume. It has been quite the shift. I’ve enjoyed the transition – especially financially – but I actually want to play more limit Hold’em in 2023.

Win Rates

3/5 NL: 16 big blinds per hour (7.52 bb/hr in 2021)
1/3 NL: -5.33 big blinds per hour (18.7 bb/hr in 2021)
20/40 LHE: 2.97 big bets per hour (1.45 BB/hr in 2021)

All no limit Hold’em: 9.86 big blinds per hour (14.81 bb/hr in 2021)
All limit Hold’em: 2.89 big bets per hour (1.3 BB/hr in 2021)
Non-Hold’em cash games: -$21.21 per hour** ($11.19/hr in 2021)

**Mixed games made up only 10% of my live cash hours and I’m not sure how to best express how well or bad I did. Overall, I lost money – and a decent amount. Some of the games had no limit or pot limit mixed in, so expressing my win rate in big bets isn’t super accurate. Basically, my year in live mix games can be summed up like this: I did well in home games; I did well in the 10/20 HORSE game when Little Creek was running that; I did poorly the few times I played 10/20 O8 at Palace; I got crushed over two sessions in a 30/60 mix game in Houston.

Top 5 Sessions

+$5808 at Fortune in 20/40 LHE
+$4390 at Bellagio in 40/80 LHE
+$2921 at Palace in 3/5 NL
+$2870 at Palace in 3/5 NL
+$2742 at Palace in 3/5 NL

Bottom 5 Sessions

-$3900 at private game in 5/10 NL
-$3329 at Palace in 3/5 NL
-$2675 at private game in 5/10 NL
-$2400 at Prime Social in 30/60 Mix
-$2324 at Palace in 3/5 NL
-$2215 at private game in 5/10 NL
-$2084 at Palace in 3/5 NL

Notes:

-That 20/40 session at Fortune was not only my best session of the year, but it was also my second best cash game session of all-time.
-My pain threshold found new levels this year. I’d never lost more than $2300 in a single session before 2022 and then I went it did it five times just last year.
-I included more than 5 sessions for my bottom because three of those results were in private cash games that I’m staked in. While they technically count when looking at my overall performance, they don’t affect my bottom line nearly as much as sessions where I have 100% of myself.
-Ignoring the private game results, the -$2400 in the 30/60 Mix was a record worst loss for me at the time – and then I demolished that mark with the -$3329 in 3/5 @ Palace. Good times!

Live Tournaments

I played 330+ hours across 47 entries in live tournaments in 2022. I managed a mere 7 cashes for a paltry 14% rate of finishing in the money. I made trips to Houston, Vegas, Lincoln City, Sacramento, and Pendleton – and I only had one winning trip the whole year. But it was a big one. I took 1st of 388 entrants in the Lincoln City Main Event for around $52,000 – a career high tournament score. Thanks to that win I finished the year with over $66k in cashes versus $46k in entry fees and a 44% ROI for 2022. After never having a losing year of tournament poker in my life, I booked losses for 2019, 2020, and 2021, but managed to snap that cold streak this year. Sort of. Without my big win, I would have had BY FAR my worst year of tournament poker ever. Tournament poker is funny that way – one score can change EVERYTHING. Also, even though I ended up regretting it, not playing the $10K Main Event helped my end of year numbers, as bricking a tournament that is over 10x my average buy-in has a huge effect on my final numbers and is largely why I had a losing 2019 and 2021 in poker tournaments.

Top 5 Cashes

$50,174 1st of 388 at Chinook Winds in $600+$200 NLH Main Event
$4440 19th of 471 at WSOP in $1500 Stud 8 or Better
$3900 28th of 522 at WSOP in $1500 Limit Hold’em
$3700 8th of 269 at Wynn in $600 Omaha 8 or Better
$1525 30th of 407 at Wynn in $600 PLO Turbo

Career Numbers (since summer of 2013)

ROI: 55%
ROI (excluding WSOP Main Event): 83%
ROI at WSOP: 57%
ROI at WSOP (excluding Main Event): 122%
ROI in NLH: 100%
ROI in HORSE: 93%
ROI in O8: 38%
ROI in all other games: -33%
ROI in entries of $2500+: -63% (2 cashes/9 entries)

WSOP cashes: 20
Current GPI Ranking: 3526th
Washington All-Time Money List Ranking: 72nd

The Hand That Won Me $50k

It’s been over three months since I won the Main Event in Lincoln City, so this hand history might be a little fuzzy. But it was something like this: we were already pretty deep in the tournament – in the money already with maybe 3 to 5 tables left. I had heaps. Both my opponents in this hand had heaps. I think I started with something like 900k and they both had me covered. We were all well above average chip stacks. I think the blinds were 5k/10k with a 10k big blind ante and I was in the big blind with 77. Under the gun opened to 20k, the very next player called, and it folded to me and I defended the big blind.

The flop was 987 with two diamonds. Pretty nice. I check, the preflop raiser checks, and I believe the next guy bet 40k. This is obviously an extremely wet board. Our first instinct is to raise and be willing to put all the money in the pot. However, this board also absolutely smacks this player’s range as well. 99, 88, and JT suited are all hands I can see him flatting an under the gun open with from early position. He can also have some overpairs – like TT-QQ – some big diamond draws, and some straight draws. I end up deciding to check-call to keep things under control and see what develops on the turn. The preflop opener folds.

The turn card is perfect for our hand. It’s an offsuit four. None of the draws get there, but it also doesn’t really change the dynamic we had on the flop. I check and he bets 100k. I think about raising here also, but again elect to go with check-call.

The river pairs the four. What else could we want? Quads? I strongly consider leading out, but after giving it a lot of thought, I end up checking again. He bets 200k. It seems like I have an automatic jam here but the more I thought about it, the more I couldn’t come up with hands that he was likely to call with that I could beat. JT was about the only one. I thought my opponent was a sharp dude, so I didn’t think he would call a jam with hands like TT+. If he was blasting off with a busted draw he obviously wasn’t calling with those hands (and he probably wouldn’t bet this sizing on the river either). So if he’s only calling with JT suited, 99 and 88, that’s six combos of full houses and four combos of straights. I shouldn’t have to do that math for anyone to know that jamming would be bad in this scenario. I didn’t see the merit in going all in and finally said, “this is probably a mega nit roll but…” and put out the calling chips. He turned over 99 for the nut full house and I continued on with a stack that was still well above average.

I’ve talked about this hand a lot with my friends and I still can’t explain exactly why I played it the way I did. Sometimes your instincts are going off for a reason. I’ve learned that not trusting my instincts is usually to my own detriment and trusting them in this exact spot absolutely saved my tournament life and allowed me to go on to make the biggest tourney score of my life.

From 8-1 Underdog to Champion

Sometimes when I go really deep in tournaments, I start fantasizing about winning the whole thing, particularly in bracelet events, but during this Chinook Winds Main Event run, the thought never really crossed my mind until the first big pot I won during heads up (although I did have a brief moment after that 77 vs 99 hand where I wondered if destiny was calling). The guy I was playing against was applying tons of pressure at the final table and doing most of the heavy lifting. I was basically just sitting there watching everyone else get bullied and knocked out by him, so when I did make it to heads up play, he had a MASSIVE chip lead and I was rather content that I was probably going to finish 2nd.

And then he opened his button and I defended with the 98 offsuit. The flop was 822 and I checked it to him. I can’t remember blinds or stack sizes but he made a c-bet and I decided to jam on him since a pair of 8s wasn’t exactly the kind of hand I was looking to check-call down with on the majority of runouts. He snap-called and I figured I was drawing to two outs. I rolled my hand and he was immediately disappointed because he thought I had him outkicked. But then he turned over his hand and was even more disappointed: he had 75 offsuit. In a stunning development, he turned zero equity and I quickly had a full double with a mediocre pair with a mediocre kicker and absolutely no sweat.

A few hands later, he raised his button and I defended with the 86 offsuit. The flop was pretty solid: T97. I checked, he bet 200k, and I raised it to 650k, he called. The turn was an unfortunate 6 and I decided to check it over to my guy since he had shown a tendency to attack weakness and overbluff. He obliged with a bet and I merely called. The river was a blank and I again checked it over to him and he didn’t disappoint by jamming for several times the size of the pot. I didn’t play my hand this way to fold to this kind of player, so I snap called and all he could produce was K3. We were pretty close in chip count at his point, but when the dust settled, we realized I had him covered and that was it. My biggest tournament win of all-time.

A Note About Volume

Altogether I played 1432 hours of live poker in 2022. That number is up from 1206 hours in 2021, but I only played 13 hours outside home games during the first three months of 2021. The rest of that year, I played an average of 123 hours a month. In 2022, I only averaged 119 hours a month. Somehow I went from being married to not being married and played less poker. Huh.

I addressed this problem of mine in a previous blog and I made a bet with a couple friends that I could play 320 hours of live poker over the last two months of 2022. It was a lock. I had trips to Pendleton and Vegas planned. And I still fell almost 30 hours short. Amazing. Granted, we didn’t bet enough for me to care about losing, but damn! That’s embarrassing! I think a reasonable goal for 2023 is to play 1600+ hours. That’s about 30 hours a week and since I plan on studying WAY more in 2023 and that number still represents a 15% increase in volume, it feels like a fair challenge.

2023 Goals

-Play more limit Hold’em at 20/40+ stakes

-Maintain my win rate at 3/5 locally

-Get out of makeup with my cash game backer

-Show a profit at 5/10+ NL

-Travel somewhere I’ve never been before

-Play more live mix games

-Play more live NLH tournaments

-Play WSOP Main Event

-Play 1600+ hours on the live felt

-Study at least 2 hours a week

-Teach my girlfriend how to play and get her in 4/8 games by spring

-Have my best year ever in poker

Overall, I’m pretty happy with my results in 2022. I wish I would have played more. I wish I played the Main Event. My cash game results were great and my tourney win added some nice cushion to my bankroll. After three mediocre years, I’m back to the level of success I enjoyed from 2016 to 2018. I fully expect 2023 to be my best year yet.

Hands of the Week: November 2022 Week 1

November 5, 2022

I’m not sure if this is going to be a thing, but I like the idea of it and I thought my blog was more fun when I was creating characters via nicknames and posting humorous hand histories. Plus, I think it’s good for me to write on a near daily basis and typing out my critical hands from each session is a good way to keep that muscle strong. Will I do it though? Who knows. I generally have 2-3 hours from the time I get home from the gym in the morning until the time I start getting ready to play poker for the day. I have other things I like to do during those hours, but fitting in 30-45 minutes of writing should be doable. We’ll see, I guess.

Before I delve into my most notable pots of the week, I need to announce an important milestone I achieved last month. For years, I had a pain threshold of about -$2000 for any given session. I’ve been playing 15/30+ and 3/5 PLO regularly since at least 2017 and until this year the biggest loss I’d ever taken in a single session was -$2300. That is absurd. Actually, it’s embarrassing. For whatever reason, my brain would start to malfunction around -$2k and if I couldn’t immediately right the ship, I basically always decided to quit. I’ve mentioned this before, but this year things have changed. I had a 40/80 session in Vegas where I was stuck over $4k before making a big enough comeback to not set a new loss record. I’ve been stuck more than $2300 on multiple occasions in 2022, but pretty much always worked my way out of it. Back in March when I was in Houston playing a 30/60 Mix game, I finally set a new career bottom of -$2400. So I’ve been pushing myself further and further this year and not losing my composure when I find myself stuck heaps. And it finally happened. I annihilated my previous worst loss with a -$3329 3/5 NL session at Palace last month. And it felt kind of good. Well, not really. I was having a losing month all of October and finally booked a huge win on the 22nd to get me in the green for the first time in October, but I followed that up with this massive loss in my very next session and ended up having my second losing month of 2022. I lost $235 playing 1/3 NL on that same day so in total my single-day cash game loss record is now -$3564. Good times.

I have one more amusing anecdote before I get to the hands. I have a sickness. I absolutely love torturing 4/8 limit players while I wait for a seat in whatever game I’m planning to play for the day. I play hyper-aggressive and for some reason the testosterone and emotional levels are heightened at the 4/8 level – a lot of people at these stakes get their feelings hurt when they lose, especially to someone playing in a manner they don’t approve of. I’m probably a bully for feeling this way, but I enjoy being the person getting them riled up. And it’s not like I’m in there giving my chips away. I play super laggro preflop, but after the flop, I’m cutting throats. I know what’s going on. I generally always know what they have and they never know what I have. I know who is playing with their emotions and who is basically never bluffing no matter how much of a maniac they think I am. I find it incredibly fun and I’m always a tad disappointed when I get called for my real game. People love to say that 4/8 is unbeatable – especially in this day and age where $8 to $9 out of every pot goes to rake, PSJ and tips – but a seasoned mid-to-high stakes limit vet should have a massive skill edge and it should be enough to overcome those immense odds. I started playing for a living in October 2016 and since then I’ve logged 265 hours in 4/8 LHE while waiting for something else and I’ve won over 2 big bets an hour in those games. Yes, I know that’s a very small sample size – less than two months of full-time play spread out over 6+ years – but I think it’s harder to win over a bunch of micro sessions than it would be to win while playing long sessions. I dunno… I just find a lot of joy in mauling small stakes players for 30 minutes or so and then being like, “see ya later!” I think what I’m trying to say is… I HAVE PROBLEMS.

Tuesday, November 1st – 3/5 @ Palace

This is what 1/3 NL games are like at Palace. Someone limps, someone else makes it $15, a third player calls and I make it $70 on the button with AQo. The first limper and the original raiser both call. The first limper has nearly half his stack in the pot now. The flop is JJ4 and the limper jams for $125 or so and the other player snap calls. I snap fold. They show KK and… KK. So to recap, the preflop action was uncapped. I put in the last raise with AQ and two players with KK decided to just call instead of jamming on me. What could go wrong?

Apparently there’s a new player in town flexing his bankroll on anyone that cares to listen. He’s rich. He has all the money. He gives no fucks. Etc, etc. Legend has it he played so aggressive and ran so pure that he built up a 7k stack in 1/3 one night. Hard to believe, but it’s what I heard. Well not before I saw this dude for the first time. He sat down in my 1/3 game and immediately started throwing chips around and making absurd bets. He came over to 3/5 when the second game started and the first hand he got dealt he made it $100 under the gun and showed KQ suited when no one called his raise. I was obviously looking to play a big one with this dude and I wasn’t planning on folding a good hand, so when I looked down at QQ during the second orbit, I made it $25 on his big blind (a little extra to make sure all future bets were bigger) and he didn’t let me down by making it $100. QQ might as well be AA against this guy, so I made it $400 which capped the preflop betting and of course he tried to put his whole stack in. I told him the betting was capped preflop but he could bet another $300 dark for the flop, so he did that and I raised that and we ended up getting it all in. The board ran out a bunch of middle cards that ended up making a one card straight so I figured I was going to end up losing this pot a lot, but the Poker Gods gave this maniac AA anyway and I shipped him over $1000 on the first hand I played. As he was raking in my entire stack he asked me if I tipped the dealer and I somehow hit him with a playful “you didn’t see me do it?” as I was having visions of the building collapsing down on him. Then this dude proceeded to play almost zero hands over the next hour and eventually moved down to 1/3. Da fuq?

The hi-jack opens to $20, someone calls on the button, and I make it $130 from the small blind with two kings. Only the button calls and we see a flop of AKT with two clubs. This is the kind of board I’m trying to get stacks in on so I bet $200, he obliges by making it $500 and we end up getting it in for his whole stack of $650 or so. He snap rolls QJ and before I can even digest my terrible luck, the dealer burns and turns a ten and I end up winning a big pot.

How to play AK 101: some dude raises to $25 after a limper, I make it $120 from the small blind with JJ and this dude folds AK face up. I give him some shit for being such a wimp.

Literally two hands later, two players limp in, I make it $30 with AK, the second limper re-pops it to $230, I make it $530 and we get the $150 he has left in on the flop and he ends up winning with 99 unimproved. I look at the dude from the previous hand and say, “THAT’S HOW YOU PLAY ACE KING.”

I open $20 under the gun with AsQx and the whole table calls. That means eight of us see the Q86 two spade flop and while that is certainly an above average flop for me, I send it around to see what seven other players have to say about it first. It checks to a later position we have nicknamed Lambo on account of the fact that he drives a Lamborghini to play poker and he goes all in for $130. Part-Time was in the big blind and he makes it $330. I’m not in love with this development but I think my hand is too good to even think about folding and Part-Time has a pretty clear isolation raise here with any above average showdown hand. I call his raise and everyone else folds. The turn is the jack of spades and when Part-Time checks to me, I put the pressure on with a max bet of $300. I don’t necessarily think I have the best hand here but I do have the nut spade blocker and the nut flush draw – not to mention top pair top kicker – and Part-Time is capable of folding two pair here. He does fold and I make aces up on the river and that’s a better hand than Lambo is able to produce.

Session Results: -$126 in 1/3; +$1389 in 3/5

Wednesday, November 2nd – 1/3, 3/5, and 10/20 O8 @ Palace

This felt like a waste of a day. A day after having two full 3/5 games with a list, the lone 3/5 game on Wednesday was dead by 6 PM. I had a mediocre 3/5 session before transferring to 10/20 O8 which seemed like a reasonable idea since I’m playing an O8 tourney this week in Pendleton. I played bad and ran bad and then the game got short and I was still incapable of showing down a piece of any pot. I like to experiment with a loose-aggressive style as I’m sure it’s the best way to accumulate chips in this variant but I find that my O8 hand reading skills aren’t good enough yet to get away with it. I’ve also discovered that limit O8 might be the least stimulating game for me these days. The pace is mega slow, the pots are almost always split, and I feel like I have to be a nut-peddler to win in it. That shit is BORING and I’m not good enough yet to play a more exciting style. I decided to play 1/3 when the feeder game broke rather than move to the main game. I was pretty tuned out for the night and didn’t note any hands there either and ended up calling it at the very early time of 10:30 PM.

Session Results: +$268 in 3/5; -$499 in O8; -$238 in 1/3

Thursday, November 3rd – 20/40 @ Fortune

Because I spend the vast majority of my live cash game hours playing no limit these days, I basically always play 20/40 limit Hold’em when I go to Fortune. My hourly in that game is less than it is in 3/5 and Fortune almost always has amazing game selection with 3+ tables of 3/5 going on a regular basis, but I ENJOY playing limit. I find the pace of play refreshing and I feel almost zero stress playing it, plus I think it’s important that I keep those skills sharp since I play so many limit mixed tournaments.

I only noted a few hands from this session. In the first one, Patton (fka FanBoy) – as in this brow looks so much like Patton Oswalt that someone stopped him at the WSOP last year and said, “Patton?” – opens from the cutoff and I 3-bet the ATcc from the small blind. Patton flats and we see a flop of A96. I bet and Patton calls. My alarm bells are going off. I know he has a stronger hand than me. I’m not sure how, but I know he’s raising me on the turn. We see a 5 and I check-call. The river is a beautiful offsuit ten and now I feel confident putting in a check-raise… that is, until he says, “if you got it you got it,” and 3-bets me. I can fold here. He’s not 3-betting A9 and he’s not bluffing. But I didn’t think about any of that in the moment and snap called to see a set of aces. SHOCK.

Let’s try that again: Patton opens from the cutoff and I 3-bet AQ from the small blind and he flats. The flop is AQx and he calls my flop bet. The turn is an ace, giving me the nuts and he calls again. The river is a 7 and he finally springs to life with a raise. God bless him. I 3-bet and Patton calls with what he says was AK. My hand ends up holding for the second high hand.

I open with AK and see a 3-way flop of A96 with two hearts. It checks to me, I bet, and Bulletproof check-raises me from the big blind. I re-raise and he calls. The turn pairs the ace and he check-raises me again. I feel like this would be an overplay from anything worse than AQ, so I give him credit for maybe having a boat and just call. The river is the 3 of hearts and I call his bet and he shocks my face off by showing me K8 of hearts for a rivered flush. Patton is sitting next to me and I show him my hand and say, “what is going on here?” Bulletproof sees my hand and asks why I didn’t re-raise the turn and I’m like, “Brow, I didn’t know I was in a leveling war.”

This was a frustrating session. The games were mega juiced and I was immediately stuck over $1000. I bottomed out at -$1500 and clawed back all the way to a little bit of sugar before going on another big downswing as my night was nearing its close and I felt nauseous having to leave such a good game.

Session Results: -$178 in 3/5/; -$975 in 20/40

Thursday, November 4th – 3/5 @ Palace

My first key pot of this session I decided to 3-bet an under the gun raiser with the QJ offsuit on the button because he looked like someone I could bully. He called and we saw a flop of 953 rainbow. He checks and the dealer immediately tries to burn and turn even though I haven’t done anything yet. I stop her, but the burn is already off and she leaves it there. Shock. What could go wrong with that? I end up betting $60 and get called. Of course she tries to burn and turn again. I stop her and tell her the burn is already off and save the hand for the second time. She turns over the correct card, a ten, and now my opponent donks $125 into me. The turn did open up a heart draw, but I’m not sure what’s going on here. This is a weird line no matter what he has, and I’m starting to think this isn’t a player I want to be bluffing, so I just call and try to realize my equity. 8x on the river. BINK. He disappoints me with a check and I figure I’m not going to get called here, but I max bet anyways and he pays it off relatively quickly. I give the dealer a little bit of shit about needing that board to come out exactly the way it was supposed to.

I’m struggling to get anything going for a while after that and I’ve been doing a ton of check folding on the flop after being the preflight aggressor. A couple players limp in and I jack it up to $30 with T8 of spades and two players call, including the big blind. The flop is K86 with two spades and I decide this is a good board to check-raise since everyone has been so bet happy when I check after raising preflop. The big blind obliges with a $50 bet and the limper calls. I make it $175 to go and they both call. Welp, I guess I’m gonna need to make something. The turn is helpful, but not great: an offsuit 9. I could certainly bomb it here and maybe I should. I don’t expect to get raised on that card very often and my hand can stand a raise anyway. I decide to check though and the big blind bets $200. We both call. The river is an offsuit ace and I check-fold to a $300 bet and the big blind ends up showing AK.

I raise to $30 with KTo and get some callers. The flop is Q9x and I c-bet $30 and one player calls out of position. I turn pure with an offsuit jack and my opponent continues with the pleasant surprises by leading into me for $100. I make it $400 and he calls. The river is an action-killing ten, but that doesn’t stop him from giving me another $300 even though it looked like he knew he had no business calling. At this point, I’ve gone from being down $800 or so in this session to being up about $1000.

I raise some limpers with two red tens and get two callers. The flop comes K82 with two diamonds and this is a spot that I’ll check back a decent amount of time, but I decide to go with a small sizing of $30 and Hit&Run (a nickname that has aged somewhat poorly IMO) makes it $125 from the big blind. I give some thought to folding here, but I know he’s capable of raising with diamonds and possibly even middle pair, so I take a card off to see what happens on the turn. I do have the ten of diamonds and that blocks some of his bluffs, but it also gives me some equity against his kings when the turn card is a diamond. Instead, I turn a set and we know that’s the absolute nuts. He bets $200 and I make it $500. He says something about how good my kicker is and this makes me rather convinced that he has a king. He ends up calling and then bets $300 with like $75 behind when the river comes the jack of clubs. I snap-raise the rest of his stack and he puts the call in and rolls over Q9 of diamonds for one of the more shocking showdown losses I’ve seen in quite some time. I just never, ever thought I’m losing on this run out.

I’m playing later than usual and I’m pretty shell shocked from that last hand. I thought I was going to be up several thousand and here I am nearing the end of my session close to even again. Someone opens to $20, there’s a call or two, and I call on the button with J9 of clubs. The flop is K92 with two diamonds and one club. It checks to the guy on my right and he makes a small bet of $20. I decide to take charge of this hand and make it $80. That clears everyone else and he calls. The turn is the deuce of clubs, so I pick up a flush draw. He checks to me and I make a blocker size bet of $50 rather than checking behind. I don’t think I’m getting raised very often and I want to put a little more money in vs diamond draws, plus I feel like I’m setting a cheap showdown price if I ended up bricking the river rather than checking back and letting him decide how much to bet on the river. The river is a glorious 6 of clubs and I go for a chunky $250 and he ends up calling it off. I roll my hand like it’s the nuts and on in horror after I table the J9 of fucking spades. Unfortunately, his bluff-catcher is the K3 of hearts and I end up losing another pot that I thought I’m never ever losing. Can’t remember the last time I forgot what I had like that.

Session Results: +$150 in 1/3; +$429 in 3/5

Sigh. That’s a lot of writing. The only way this continues being a thing is if I’m able to write about each session after it happens and not try to do it all at once like I just did. Hope y’all enjoy!

Posted in poker | Tagged gambling, gambling for a living, no limit hold em, poker, poker strategy, professional gambling, professional poker, texas hold em | Leave a Comment »

The Biggest Leak In My Poker Game (and other “fun” stats)

October 21, 2022

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately – not about what my biggest leak is but about the thing I’ve come to realize is my biggest leak. It’s something that has come up over and over and over again throughout my poker career. I keep trying to come up with ways to fix it and it just never happens. And the funny thing about this massive leak? It wasn’t a problem when I had a day job. And it makes zero sense why that is the case.

I have a feeling this might come across a tad arrogant, but it’s the truth. Nothing else I do costs me more money than this one particular leak. I know I don’t play perfect poker. I have other issues that need to be addressed and would certainly improve my win rate. Paying attention and staying focused while I’m playing is a huge one. I’m legit terrible at that. But it’s not as damaging to my bottom line as what I’m about to share. Neither are any consistent technical mistakes I make while playing. Without a doubt, the number one biggest leak in my game, that unquestionably costs me more money than anything else… is… DRUMROLL… not playing enough poker.

I’ve been using the session tracker on my phone since July of 2014, which means I have over 8 years of poker data to filter through. I created a spreadsheet that has every month since then and how many hours I’ve played in each month. That’s 98 months since I started tracking, but I only played two full months in 2020 because of Covid and I missed the first three months of 2021 for the same reason. So that’s 85 months of potentially full-time play since I started using this particular session tracker. As a full-time poker player, there is no reason for me not to be playing 40 hours a week or 160 hours a month. Sure, things will come up here and there, but at the end of the month, I should typically be very close to that 160 number if I’m doing my job as often as I should be. So in those 85 months, how many times have I actually hit that 160 hour threshold? Answer: 14. That means that 83% of the time, I fail to hit my 160 hours. It’s also worth noting that 5 of the 14 times I did reach 160 hours, it was because I was playing in The World Series of Poker. So in the 79 non-WSOP non-Covid months, I’ve hit 160+ hours less than 11% of the time. Absolutely pathetic.

Here’s a breakdown of my average monthly volume by year:

2014: 71 hours/month
2015: 124
2016: 132 (went pro in October)
2017: 144
2018: 152
2019: 142
2020: 114 (January and February only)
2021: 124 (April through December)
2022: 115 (through September)

As you can see, that’s a considerable number of hours I’m missing out on. Even in the year I played the most poker (2018), I was coming up an average of 8 hours short each month – or basically taking an extra day off a month. In 2018, I was making $62.54 an hour in cash games. So in the year I played the most poker since I’ve gone pro, I still left over $6000 on the table. On the other end of the spectrum, I’ve shorted myself an average of 45 hours a month in 2022. I’m making $79/hour at 3/5 NL this year, so if I put in all those extra hours at 3/5 and ran at my 2022 hourly over that span, I’ve cost myself ***wait for it*** $32,000!!! Just this year. Absolutely sickening stuff. I’m not going to do the math on all those other years, but I’m sure it’s plenty disturbing. It wouldn’t surprise me if I’ve cost myself around $100,000 since 2016 just by not playing as much as I should be.

I don’t know why this is so hard for me. But it’s extremely hard. It’s not like I hit 50 hours here and there but then come up short in some other week. I never hit 40 hours in a week. Ever. Unless I’m out of town. If I go somewhere for a tournament series, I am definitely capable of hitting my goal. But otherwise? Naw. Never happens. If you look at my numbers for the last three years, I might not even be averaging 30 hours a week over that span. Pathetic.

I’m not sure what the best solution is. I probably have to force myself to work five days a week. Most of my sessions are 8+ hours. I’m consistent with that at least. If I play five days, hitting 40 hours should be easy. If I take three days off, I have to average 10 hours a session and that’s pretty dicey. I basically never step foot in a casino to play cash games before 4 PM and I generally like to quit by 1 AM so I can stay motivated to hit the gym in the mornings. So most days I’m gonna play less than 9 hours. In all likelihood, if I’m going to consistently hit 40 hours a week, I need to be playing at least five sessions.

Ideally, I’d like to try my hardest to hit 320 hours over the last two months of this year. That might be a tall ask with Thanksgiving, my girl’s birthday, Christmas, and New Year’s Eve all occurring during that span, but I’m gonna do it, dammit. It’s already too late for October, unless I just go marathon monster mode and I know that’s not going to happen. Next year, I’d like to get my volume back up to at least 150 hours a month. Those are my goals.

But yeah, not playing enough poker has to be my biggest leak as a player. I don’t play mistake-free poker. There’s plenty still to learn. I don’t pay nearly enough attention. But I doubt there’s anything one thing I consistently do that has cost me tens of thousands of dollars like not putting my volume in has.

Since I’m in the mood for digging into stats and looking at my tracker, I might as well post some other interesting numbers.

Lifetime Tournament Numbers:

ROI in live No Limit Hold’em Tournaments: 112% (180 tourneys)

ROI in live NLH Tourneys (excluding Main Event): 224% (177)

ROI in live Omaha 8 or Better Tournaments: 34% (30)

ROI in live HORSE Tournaments: 111% (36)

ROI in live non-NLH, non-O8, non-HORSE Tournaments: -31% (51)

ROI on ACR: -3% (1617)

ROI on Bovada: -46% (98)

ROI on Ignition: -12% (332)

ROI on Global Poker: 41% (628)

ROI on WSOP.com: 110% (14)

2022 Cash Game Numbers:

2022 3/5 hourly: $78.27

2022 1/3 hourly: -$21.84

2022 20/40 hourly: $70.77

Posted in poker | Tagged gambling, gambling for a living, limit hold em, poker, poker strategy, Poker Tournaments, professional gambling, professional poker, texas hold em | 1 Comment »

The Bat Cave

Posts Tagged ‘texas hold em’

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