never let me down again

hello world. what’s been going on so far in the ’11, you ask?

well, january & february i’ve been mostly playing online. full tilt’s double guarantee multi entry week was a huge grind; i was definitely glad i’d spent some weeks leading up to that working on my multitabling, because otherwise i wouldn’t have been able to take full advantage. with my new 32″ monitor i’m comfortable doing 6 tables, but that’s pretty much the limit for my visual attention. my eyes have been hurting a lot lately due to the long hours i’ve been putting in online. for the last two weeks i’ve played pretty much all day every day (anywhere from 8-16 hours). yesterday i was doing my usual sunday grind but almost felt i needed to stop after a few hours because of how much my eyes and head were hurting. i struggled through it, and even managed to go deep in a couple things, but it is way not optimal to be playing under those conditions. i don’t want to overexert myself, so i decided not to play online today, and might instead go play a tournament at the card club tonight. i haven’t played live in about two weeks and i’m really itching to!

i’ve played two or three live tournaments in the last few weeks, again with no success. it’s becoming a kind of vicious cycle because i almost always turn a profit when i play live cash, but then i go and blow it on live MTTs, where i have yet to make the money. in my online play i am a huge bankroll management nit; i will almost never play tournaments for more than 1% of my bankroll, and the average tourns i grind online at the moment are the $11 MTTs, which is something like 1/3 of a % of my bankroll. i think this has allowed me to survive through a couple of really bad downswings i’ve taken. but the drawback is, without taking any shots i’m not playing tournaments where i have a chance to have a REALLY big score. i want to get my bankroll to at least 10k before i even think of taking shots at the $200 sunday majors or FTOPSes, for example. and even then that would be a big shot.

however, my live ‘bankroll’ is a total shitshow of a joke. i do not actually have a live bankroll. i have money i make at the cash tables which i then use to play MTTs. there are pretty much no live tournaments in this area that you can enter for under $100; if i wanted to apply proper BR management techniques i’d need a live roll of $10k to play $100 tournaments! which, of course, i don’t have. basically, i need to HAVE a big live cash before i’ll have anything resembling a roll. if i ship one of the nightlies for $3 or 4K, that will be a nice start! so that needs to happen pretty soon because right now i’m stuck chasing my own tail, taking two steps forward and two steps back.

some friends have suggested i stop playing the horrendously-structured live tourns at the card club and just stick to the cash games, where i am clearly profitable. this might be a good idea. but i don’t know if i can do that; i just love tournaments too much. once i went to the card club on a tournament night with the intention of NOT playing but instead sitting at the cash table, in order to take advantage of the tournament bustouts who inevitably sit down at the cash game on mega tilt and spew brilliantly. but while i was waiting for my seat, i saw all the tourn regs heading to the tournament area, the donk nits who fold themselves down to 2 bb so they can get to the final table and chop it 10 ways, and i was like fuck this! i HAVE to play the tournament!

and the thing is, i pretty much only have to win one or two of these live tournaments to pay for all the buyins i’ve lost so far. i think i’m insanely +EV against the field; i guess the main question is whether the structure renders the whole thing a more or less pointless endeavor, and whether it would be better to save my money for tournaments with non-absurd structures. the thing is, tourns like that are not common here in the bay area. they require travel to reno, or tahoe (or LA and vegas obv), and travel+hotel costs are going to add on a few hundred $ on top of whatever the buyins for the tournaments are. so it’s a trade off. neither option is optimal.

there is one series i will definitely be playing: i have made my accommodations to attend the nevada ladies poker championship in mid-march, which i’m very much looking forward to. there are three tournaments as well as some brunches and seminars and other ditzy ladies things :) but staying at the peppermill is going to add $300 to my costs, not to mention gas/food/etc; put together that’s probably equal to the amount of all the tournament buyins! so basically in order to justify traveling to a tournament, i need to think i’m going to be TWICE as much +EV (er if that makes sense?) than playing a tournament that does not require travel costs. so.. yeah. i don’t know. like i say, my main goal is just to win something, anything, so that i have a viable roll to begin my live career from.

there is also the option of seeking out backing for live tournaments, which i think i definitely would have to do if i wanted to play any WSOP events this summer. right now i’m just beginning to even consider the idea, and i haven’t approached anyone about it. i hear horror stories about players being stuck in makeup for years, so i don’t know if i’d want to enter into a long-term arrangement like that. but on the other hand i have no live results to date, so it’s unlikely anyone would want to buy large %s of my action for individual tourns/series or stake me on a tourn by tourn basis. so yeah, right now it’s something i am beginning to research heavily, and that i’ll be thinking about more seriously in the next few months. if anyone has any thoughts/suggestions/advice on staking issues, please post in the comments, i’d love to hear from anyone with experience in this area!

hmm, so. live tourns are expensive, i can’t seem to win them, and i have no roll. writing about that made me a little depressed to be honest. there are only so many times i can let myself down before i am going to get too discouraged with poker and go be a boring scientist or something. perhaps a stop at happy hour before tonight’s tourn is in order! wish me luck :)

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One Response to never let me down again

  1. Steve says:

    Good luck and play your game. I am considering stopping my tournament play as well since I need more money in the bankroll. The only game we have in town are 2-20 and 2-40. I would prefer something less but they won’t do it around here. I like the Wildhorse in Oregon since they have a 2-5 no limit. That game comes up 3 times a year when they have their tournaments. Hang in there and do well.

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