Here’s the links to this week’s music:

http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/rootsrebel-surfacing/

http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/artemis-auralei/

Poker-wise it’s been stagnant due to work commitments. I don’t have anything this week and I’ve completed the lockdown of the cashier and sessions graphs on HEM, so now I’m going to try played without the knowledge of losing money in mind (I’ve found it works, I don’t rage-tilt when I’m down a lot because I dont know it, and ended up some sessions as a result).

I updated my podcast as well (iTunes/streaming). This week I:

• Talked about the LAPC and Shooting Star tournaments, as well as UB’s WSOP qualifying and Pokerstar’s SCOOP series
• Used a unicorn_lord hand for the hand of the week
• Discussed the idea of specialization v. branching out for the grinding player
• Went over my NBC Heads-up picks and guessed at a champion in my new News Analysis segment
• Ranted about the tendency for the media to prop up the “baller lifestyle” players as the only people in my age group that play poker in another new segment “Old Man Spartan”
• Briefly touched on my $1k-$10k challenge.

Next week’s topic is going to be Satellites. I hope to start talking game strategy soon enough, but I want to wait until I have enough (winning) hands under my belt to be able to speak with some authority.

Also, as promised, the links to the music I played this week:

http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/charlieb-transport/
http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/harvey-otherwake/

I’ve reached a point in my “poker career” where I really need to figure out whether I’m going to do this for a living or whether its just going to be a hobby for a while longer. Some of this comes from the fact that as a graduate student I exist on stipends, loans, and grants, and such things tend to dry up in the summer when there is no school. As such, barring getting an internship somewhere (computer programming companies are rather soulness down here, and my lack of a journalism background potentially cripples my chances of a PR internship), I need to figure out if poker can be a solid income. So after crunching a lot of numbers…I’ve determined that if I can get a bankroll of $10000 by the end of May, I can probably presume that I can get through the summer making about as much money per hour as any internship would provide, and reassess after then. I tried starting this plan in the beginning of Feburary, but a whole host of issues from the mundane to the “YOU ARE NOT PREPARED” variety left me with little more than I started with at the end of the month, with no where near as much playtime as I had initially expected.

So…here was the plan I had:

• Starting yesterday, I have a goal of how much money I should hope to make by the end of the week. I can’t (or at least will try not to) look at my cashier or my session/graph on HEM. This goal is of course not set in stone, I have to account for the runbad possibilities, but it sets up a good benchmark in order for me to expect to accomplish my goal by the end of May.
• I have a rigid BR management system that will have me focusing on limit cash games for quite a while, then when I get enough money I can take shots at small buy-in MTTs (the exception being the “Lessons with the Bear” tourney which, while slighly outside my bankroll, is has too much of an extra incentive to pass up)
• That BR system and goal list might be released if anyone is interested in my BR scheme, but needless to say it has me reaching the $5/$10 level roughly when I’ll need it to maintain a 1.5 BB/100 winrate and still meet my weekly goals.
• As the title suggests, I’m hoping to get from $1000 to $10000 in 3 months, not exactly the easiest task since I have to start at 100FL for the first little while.

The second part of this challenge is increasing my “presence” within the poker community. I don’t mean you’ll see my face plastered all over the place, my goal is to get a large amount of that continuing education through my peers that I think I’m lacking right now (I am the shark amongst my friends…which I know is just like saying I’m the biggest fish in my pond.) Here’s what I hope to do on that end:

• Read up on some of the strategy in the library of poker books I have, and some of the strategy posts on 2+2.
• Get really active in the strategy and hand forums on Pokerroad…mostly because its a friendlier community than 2+2
• Try to apply what I’m learned by trying to teach it back. This is partially covered by the activity in the forums, but if people are interested in getting a group together to talk about poker (like through a skype conference or whatever) maybe that can be set up.
• Use my poker podcast (check the link in my sig!) as a sort of audio blog of this challenge, bringing up points I’ve found important along the journey as well as key concepts that I think growing players might overlook.
• Finally…update the forum post on the PR forums and the cross-post on my blog.

Ideally I won’t come off looking like a total moron, but that’s the risk I’m clearly going to take by posting this in a public place. I’ll be playing on Pokerstars (no rakeback I know but hopefully at some point the FPPs will add up to get me some bonuses + stellar rewards) so if you want to play me I’ll be on the 100FL tables until proven otherwise.

Wish me luck!
Spartan

I’ll be at Harrah’s Rincon in San Diego from Feburary 28th-March 2nd trying to earn my way to a WSOP-C event. I’m milking a free two night stay, and I plan to put a lot of hours at the table in those two days. Feel free to find me at the tables if your are in San Diego, and best of luck to you while you are there (so long as you aren’t sitting at my table, then may you have the 2nd best luck).

Happy Mardi Gras!

So when I was asked if I might be able to bring something extra to a book that a fellow poker player is writing, I obviously had to think about it. It could have just been a courtesy gesture, but I honestly took it seriously because I feel the need to branch my name out there while I have the time to do so. There are two non-poker-hand poker related skills I definitely can say I’m good at:

• Bankroll Management
• Planning and Long Term Goals

These skills are clearly underrepresented in terms of how they are presented to the average poker player. BR management has always been #1 on my list because you hear far more “he came from nothing by risking a lot stories” than “he followed a sound strategy that managed the money he had so he’d be where he is today.” People like the quick fix, and unless you are in the 1% that can beat the risk or are on a life-heater, you are probably better off with a management scheme. Planning and long term goals stem from my CS background more than anything else, but obviously apply to poker. If you don’t pseudo-code your programs, you are likely to be spending much more time fixing the bugs and re-working your program than you would if you just planned ahead of time. Same goes for poker, if you plan your sessions and your life accordingly, you won’t have to spend 3x the amount of time fixing the screw-ups that come with bad planning.

So yeah, I guess I probably do have a couple things I could say. Whether they’ve already been said, well, I’ve got no clue. But I’ll pitch the idea soon enough (hell, I’m pitching it now). In the meantime, I’m off to play some live poker at the local Harrah’s here in San Diego, here’s hoping for a good session.

My goal then is to slowly but surely increase my hours until I’m playing a solid 2 3-hour sessions 8-tabling the SnGs or 6-tabling the cash games. The 3-hour cap will only including that I stop replenishing table at the 2:40-ish mark, but you get the idea. I have “solved” the boredom-so-let’s-surf-the-internet issue with more tables, but I think I need to add even more because, well, I can, quite easily. I was amazing how easily it was to make decisions in SnGs, cause they really boil down to push/fold anyway, no matter what, so unless I’m getting a stampede of AA, KK and QQ in the beginning, I probably couldn’t fold fast enough.

We will see how it goes. I’m gonna shoot for 5-tabling totaling 20 tournaments tomorrow and eventually settle on a 8-tabling totaling 50 tournaments. Hoping to get that settled within a week.

As I mentioned before, hopefully I can get a second person on board here and maybe even a site to point to this podcast in the near future, of course all of this assumes that the content doesn’t 100% blow. Be sure to check out my podcast by going to the iTunes music store or you can stream it here and feel free to give it a review either at this blog, my email (spartanfox@gmail.com), or in iTunes (hopefully a positive one).

Links to what sites I got my info from this week:

• News: Pokernews
• HotW: 2+2 uNL Forums
• Victory Poker
• Intro “Dropping out of School” By: Brad Sucks / CC BY-NC-SA 1.0
• Music “Thirst” By: Atomic Opera / CC BY-NC-SA 1.0

1. Never deposit again.
2. Don’t go broke ever again.

I can’t say I’ve gone totally bust-o since I’ve started taking this seriously, but I have definitely lost bankrolls of varying sizes from $20-$100 before, so losing $1450 would be…umm, how shall we say, bad. As I’ve probably stated before, I have until the end of this semester (mid-May) to prove I can earn a stable-ish income in poker in order to keep it up. My earlier post has suggested that I have a backup to the tables, but it won’t be a feasible source either until later this year, so I definitely need to make this run long. So coming up on the heels of my bankroll management lesson, its time I show what I have planned for my next two months.

The goal is to get from $1000-$10000 on Pstars by 3/31/10. After this, I can probably grind 100NL for $1k-$1.5k a month (assuming 2 BB/100 this would require I play 25k-35k hands) and that coupled with PStars VIP rewards and bonuses I can get by for the time being. Lofty goal? Yep, certainly. Hard? Hell yea. But why not? I’ve got my back against the wall, with the possibility of having to deal with corporate America (again) looming close. So without further ado, here is a chart of my plans for this to work.

Its pretty clear some of this requires some explanation. First the starting point: for cash games I can start playing when I reach 50 buy-ins, for SnGs I can start playing when I reach 65 buy-ins. Why am I starting with such a conservative number? Well first, I wish to allow for variance, which will inevitably happen as the skill level ramps up. Secondly, as I stated in the video, this is the most risk adverse of the three options, or the option that you should take if you are trying to establish a “pro” income. This should still help me build my bankroll, and while it won’t be as quickly as others may like, since I will be multi-tabling between 3-8 tables at all times, I allow multiple tables to have multiple buy-ins of cushion between them.

The range section also deserves some explanation:

• For cash games, the range is from 30-90 buyins.
• For Sit-N-Gos, the range is from 40-100 buyins.

The lower bound is self explanatory. The lower bound is my “drop down” point, if I ever reach this level after playing a set of sit-n-gos or cash games, my next session must drop down to the appropriate level. No questions, no concerns. If I fall below $640, I will have to play $11 regular SnGs and stick to 10NL. A drop in value can come with a drop in both cash and SnG limits, and both will certainly apply. The upper bound is there because I dont think the starting value should be a hard cap. If for whatever reason I think the games are particular juicy in the $60 SnG and I have $5200, I don’t have to go up to $78 6-max games, I can keep playing the $60 SnGs. But if I have $6000 at that point, I’m gonna need a very good reason to stick at that table level. In 99% of cases I will default to the new stake if I hit the hard cap, the starting level is sort of a soft cap.

Notice how I didn’t say anything about MTTs which includes any multi-table SnGs. This is a hard, no-change, no-nonsense limit; I must have 100 buy-ins in order to play any tournament, and that includes the rake. No justifying “well I have a $1000, so a $10+1 tourney is good because the rake doesnt matter” Yea…it does. This accounts for the obvious huge chance you’ll bust in these, but does allow for the occasional stab. If I win, awesome, if not, it was at most a 1% hit, which isn’t too bad. I also didn’t include limit games (holdem, HORSE, stud, etc), but for that you can just assume that if I am playing 10NL then if you go up two steps to 50FL then the buy-in amount is roughly equivalent (I have 2000 big bets in this scenario at this point, and I realize that’s huge, but I don’t expect to do too much limit unless I’m learning a game, in which case I don’t expect to win in the short run.)

So there you have it. Practicing what I preach. I don’t really plan on announcing how I’m doing all that often, but if I hit major milestones I’ll be sure to mention it here. This just gives you a good idea on how to create an all-encompassing bankroll strategy.

EDIT: Out of pure curiousity, I was wondering if there was a decent “benchmark” I would expect to get a reasonable increase in money to hit 10k by the end of March. Surprisingly, I found it with little to no effort:

• $45/day for 16 days
• $90/day for 12 days
• $180/day for 12 days
• $360/day for 14 days

This is on the average, of course I expect at least one losing day, but on the average i should be getting $45/day for the first 16 days, $90/day for the next 12, etc. The surprising part is that if I follow my bankroll management, this is entirely possible and somewhat reasonable (remember: a 1st place profit in the $16 turbos is ~3x the buy-in, or $51, and likewise the profit of a $109 Turbo is $341.)