Quest of a Closet Poker Player

As many of you who have followed me know, I’ve had wild fluctuations with my online bankroll. After a -$1900 day in February and a -$1300 day in March, I stared at $34.69 on FullTilt and $206 on PokerStars. So what do you do?

I must admit, it was a humbling experience to go through what I’d gone through several times before, crashing my online bankroll; only this time, I hung on the edge of the cliff by my fingernails. I still had a big cash bankroll ($4k or so), but I’d gone from getting up to $10k to looking up to half of that. I didn’t feel like moving any of my cash bankroll to online, so what did I do and where am I now?

• Drop in stakes This seems fairly logical, but believe me it wasn’t easy to do. With my FullTilt bankroll, I had to head to the micro-stakes tables just to try and survive. And believe me, it wasn’t an easy thing to always do. I jumped back up with my PokerStars when I could, getting to $5/10 LHE if a table looked ripe.
• Return to what brung you At my core, I’m a LHE player, and that is where I headed. $1/2 LHE and $2/4 LHE is where I’ve been for the most part, and $5/10 LHE or below is the game of choice at Stars.
• Search for tables more If I can’t find a good table, I’ll more often than not head to even lighter NLHE tables.
• Quit having as much fun I haven’t made the MATH for awhile, and I’m not to be found at the Mook or Al’s Riverchasers.  I used to really enjoy playing in both Hoy’s and Mook’s tourney, have taken down the MATH a couple times, have never taken the Mook down.  Well, you have to prioritize when your bankroll is light, and I just haven’t been able to justify putting much into blogger tourneys.  I might hit the Mook tonight, but I just have to protect my bankroll in lower variance endeavors.
• Be content I’m setting smaller, more attainable goals during a session and not trying to pull off a miracle like tripling up from my buy-in.  I’m booking more small wins and working hard to avoid large losses.
• Don’t play as much  This may not make as much sense as some of the others, but it is about trying to stay more focused when playing and avoid being indifferent during play.  I tend to work too much when playing, get too bored too quickly and multi-task too much.  This is a major problem for me online.  When I’ve tried to only play, it is actually uncomfortable for me to do so.  I don’t know if this is common or just me.
• Throw hourly rate out the window  Look, I don’t play online to supplement my income.  I play to compete, and the measurement system is my bankroll.  Should I play to supplement my income?  I don’t know.  I’ve spent a ton of time on poker, so you would logically think I should be able to win consistently and make $x per month.  If hourly rate was important, then I should send some of my cash bankroll to the sites and reload.  I have decided not to shrug my shoulders and let it ride at one table but instead to see if I can methodically grow my bankroll.  Not even to build it back, but to build it.

The results:  FullTilt ($213) and PokerStars ($745), and I’m closing in on $1k total.  I’m not even as much focused on the $1k to be honest.  I’ve been more focused at growing the FullTilt roll than playing higher with the Stars.  I’ve done that through LHE and some small stakes in NLHE and PLHE.

On a not very related subject:  For those of you who aren’t familiar with the Ram Vaswani/Phil Ivey golf match (where Vaswani lost $1.4M to Ivey), here are a few links:

Negreanu on the match

Barny Boatman post at Hendon

Vaswani responds at Hendon

Barry Greenstein and the 2+2 thread (see his post below)

“It is hard or me to believe how gullible the people on here and on the Hendonmob forum are. Someone trying to get out of a debt comes up with a reason not to pay, and so many of you bought it.

1. Phil never lied to them. And he didn’t shoot better than he said he would. He putted well, but hit the ball worse. He shot in the 90’s as expected.

2. Erick Lindgren gave Phil 10 shots during the summer. He now gives Phil 8 shots. They played even in a nine-hole TV match in Australia, and Erick clobbered Phil. When Mark and Ram asked Erick if they ever played even, he admitted they had, but he made sure that Ram knew that he was a much better golfer than Phil. That conveniently got left out of Ram’s post.

3. Mark and Ram beat Phil five times in a row. The last time was in Barcelona where Phil lost six of the first seven holes and then walked off the course. Ram says Phil lost only $34,000, which is hard to do playing in increments of three different $10,000 bets per hole. (Two individual bets and a team bet.) Ram forgot to mention that the reason they are not much ahead of Phil is that Phil won most of the money back at Chinese Poker.

4. After they played the first nine holes in Australia, they made a small adjustment in the match, and Ram and Mark asked for a contract. (A contract means no more adjustments while in Austrailia.) They continued for a total of 72 holes. (Mark didn’t finish the last nine.) At what point, should they have taken responsibility for their loss? Or is it OK to play to try to win money back, and not pay if you lose?

6. Except for nine holes where Mark parred seven holes, as expected, since he is nearly a scratch golfer, I don’t think Mark shot less than 45, where his average was expected to be 38. And Ram, who was supposed to be better than Phil, was having trouble breaking 100 for 18 holes.

7. If $140,000 had been won instead of $1,400,000, the money would have been paid and a new match would have been negotiated. As Benny Binion once said, “I usually find that people are honorable as long as they can afford to be.”

8. I was not brought in as an arbitrator or to fight Phil’s battles. Phil wanted me to show up because he said, “You’re never going to believe what they have to say. Their whole argument is that since they didn’t realize they were clear underdogs in the match, the match should be voided.”

9. Phil usually tells me about his matches. I invariably tell him he is an underdog. He always says he likes to win as the underdog by being tougher under pressure, and if he loses he will practice and get better and eventually win the money back.

10. The reason Phil has never defended himself is that he is a private person, and he didn’t even know these forums existed until I told him about what was being posted. I have a feeling Phil may have someting to say or write once this is settled.

I can’t believe that this thread has gotten so big, starting from a false hypothesis.

Barry”

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 25th, 2007 at 1:39 pm and is filed under Uncategorized.