Quest of a Closet Poker Player

I took down CC’s Thursday Bash last night with a torrid display of card rack syndrome combined with playing fairly well, a brutal combination. I even took out Team Never Tilt in it’s entirety as reported by last week’s winner Shane.

This is the second post in a series exploring a key question for me right now: am I better because of poker? The criteria I will use in looking at this question include all parts of my life:

• Spiritual
• Financial
• Career
• Physical Fitness
• Marital Relationship
• Parent
• Intellectual
• Friendship
• Psychological

Yesterday’s first post was a look at my spiritual life. Today, we tackle my financial health. In examining poker and finances, I’ll look at a few key metrics: my bankroll, other poker earnings, our other income, and our net worth. 2006 was a year of poker stability, the first year since actively playing that I didn’t lose money. My win for the year was fairly modest, and it included a $2k entry fee into a WSOP event (which although it came out of my bankroll, I treated it as a gift to me). Prior to 2006, I had been a winning player in live LHE and a losing player online. I’d reloaded several times and continually went bust online. 2006 was the first time I didn’t have to reload online, and my bankroll grew gradually. Having said that, I’ve never used poker winnings as a revenue stream. I don’t win $2-5k a month or anything, and I don’t cash out regularly. My poker bankroll is my own slush fund, and my primary objective is not to go bust as I don’t want to reload again. While my recent bad few sessions look bad, my online bankroll sits at $1.7k.

2006 was a year where poker writing revenue became significant for me. This revenue came in three forms: being paid for my blog to be at PokerWorks, being paid to write articles for PokerWorks, and covering the WSOP for PokerWorks and PokerStars. Linda invited me to join PokerWorks along with Michael Craig, and it was a humbling invitation. I’ve worked very hard to justify being paid for this blog as I’d never done any affiliate advertising or anything when this was on blogspot. My blog has always been more for me than anything else, and I’ve tried to come up with creative things to build more traffic here to justify being paid to be at PokerWorks. CC’s Partner Contest is an example of that, taking $1k of my funds to bankroll other players.

Writing articles for PokerWorks has been a bit of a mixed bag for me. I’m paid by the drink and basically have written three types of articles: topical (including a few strategy pieces), tourney coverage, and interviews. The tourney coverage is a time consuming effort for me, but I think I’ve developed at least into a competent writer of these. The interviews are my pride and joy. I think I’m a good interviewer, and I try to get into some depth with a person. Interviews take four-six hours for me to do on average including research, logistics, conducting the interview, transcribing the tapes, then finalizing the article. I’m paid a fair fee for these compared to other poker outlets (from what I can understand), but it isn’t really a moneymaker for me compared to the amount of time it takes me to do these.

Finally, the WSOP. Overall, the World Series was a good revenue source for me when I was invited to cover it for both PokerWorks and PokerStars (for the Main Event). It is a ton of work, at least for me. As I’m not a natural journalist, I don’t think I was too efficient doing this, and I consistently would get to bed around 4:30 in the morning then return to the Rio by 11:00 to nab my work area (first come first serve every day). My participation in 2007 is a bit up in the air. It still has alot to do with the dynamics of the poker economy.

Our other income and net worth, on the surface, shouldn’t have anything to do with poker. I’m including it because of the amount of time I spend each day on poker. It is a significant amount of time for me. 2006 was a decent year for us in income, but having my China project postponed then cancelled was a significant blow for me as I’d allocated the time. When you are a one-man band (which I’ve become again), you can’t afford to have these types of thing occur. The very troubling thing that I’ll get to when I look at my career and poker’s impact is that my income is less than it was when I left the corporate world and certainly much less than if I’d stayed in the corporate world. Our net worth grew some in 2006 but not in a big, significant way.

So am I better financially because of poker?  My best assessment is that playing poker is a hobby that doesn’t cost me anything, and that my involvement in poker has created additional revenue opportunities.  I haven’t been able to find a way to really exploit poker; for example, I made an attempt to sell my consulting services to the WSOP and Harrah’s without success.  I’ve also looked into the possibility of a book of interviews, but it looks like that won’t be promising either.

Next week, I’ll look at my career, how poker has entered into it, and what the next five-ten years hold for me.  Sweetie is going away for the weekend, and I’ll have the boys here.  Soccer practice starts this coming week, and All-In’s team has a whopping 25 players on it.  This is an 8v8 3rd-4th grade boys league, and because of the huge turnout for our team we’ll be splitting into two squads for games:  an A team (playing a 4th grade schedule) and a B team (playing a 3rd grade schedule).  I’m also coaching the Big Guy’s 5th-7th grade boys team, and that will be a different kind of challenge.  It is 11v11, and we have 14 on the team (which is I think three-five too few).  It will be another difficult season as half the team is returning and half the team sounds like they’ve barely played.  I have alot of work to do preparing for All-In’s practices and talent evaluation as I want to be fair in how we divide the squads.  I’m holding a Boot Camp on Sunday, so I’ll have a better sense of where the players are after this.

Have a great weekend, and thanks for stopping by.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 2nd, 2007 at 8:40 am and is filed under Uncategorized.