December and 2008 Results

Something I've noticed happening to myself lately is that my life has lost a lot of boundaries and scheduling constraints. If it weren't for the NFL, it would honestly be pretty tough for me to keep track of the current day of the week. Consequently it didn't occur to me until just today that perhaps I should take a look at how exactly I did in December, my "professional period", and all of 2008. Admittedly I kind of new about where these numbers were going to come in, but taking a good hard look would be a good habit to get into:

December 2008

Here are the actual results, with session win/loss followed by cumulative winnings on each line:

1-Dec	20/40 Limit	Bay 101	1021	1021
2-Dec	6/12 Limit	Bay 101	-71	950
2-Dec	8/16 Limit	Bay 101	-96	854
2-Dec	20/40 Limit	Bay 101	174	1028
3-Dec	20/40 Limit	Garden City	1230	2258
4-Dec	15/30 Limit	Ajs	149	2407
4-Dec	6/12 Limit	Ajs	-54	2353
5-Dec	8/16 Limit	Bay 101	39	2392
5-Dec	20/40 Limit	Bay 101	881	3273
6-Dec	20/40 Limit	Bay 101	-1744	1529
6-Dec	Danielle	Bay 101	13	1542
8-Dec	8/16 Limit	Ocean's 11	-122	1420
8-Dec	20/40 Limit	Ocean's 11	-1473	-53
9-Dec	20/40 Limit	Ocean's 11	177	124
9-Dec	8/16 Limit	Ocean's 11	-214	-90
9-Dec	20/40 Limit	Ocean's 11	-55	-145
10-Dec	4/8 Limit	Ocean's 11	-20	-165
10-Dec	8/16 Limit	Ocean's 11	73	-92
10-Dec	4/8 Omaha	Ocean's 11	-33	-125
10-Dec	20/40 Limit	Ocean's 11	-197	-322
10-Dec	40/80 Limit	Ocean's 11	-374	-696
12-Dec	6/12 Limit	Oaks	-25	-721
12-Dec	15/30 Limit	Oaks	-130	-851
12-Dec	30/60 Limit	Oaks	-119	-970
12-Dec	30/60 Limit	Oaks	410	-560
13-Dec	20/40 Limit	Bay 101	-490	-1050
15-Dec	20/40 Limit	Bay 101	828	-222
16-Dec	20/40 Limit	Bay 101	645	423
17-Dec	20/40 Limit	Garden City	-50	373
17-Dec	40/80 Limit	Garden City	132	505
17-Dec	20/40 Limit	Garden City	238	743
18-Dec	20/40 Limit	Bay 101	-1386	-643
18-Dec	Yoda Stake	Bay 101	622	-21
19-Dec	20/40 Limit	Bay 101	508	487
20-Dec	15/30 Limit	Oaks	-60	427
20-Dec	30/60 Limit	Oaks	-3	424
20-Dec	6/12 Limit	Ajs	66	490
20-Dec	15/30 Limit	Ajs	-126	364
20-Dec	6/12 Limit	Ajs	-47	317
21-Dec	20/40 Limit	Garden City	35	352
21-Dec	40/80 Limit	Garden City	1564	1916
21-Dec	8/16 Limit	Bay 101	-248	1668
21-Dec	20/40 Limit	Bay 101	470	2138
21-Dec	40/80 Limit	Bay 101	1158	3296
21-Dec	20/40 Limit	Bay 101	157	3453
22-Dec	20/40 Limit	Garden City	-563	2890
22-Dec	Yoda Stake	Garden City	-101	2789
23-Dec	15/30 Limit	Oaks	-190	2599
23-Dec	30/60 Limit	Oaks	556	3155
30-Dec	20/40 Limit	Bay 101	203	3358
31-Dec	20/40 Limit	Bay 101	2664	6022

The month was setting up nicely to be an unmitigated disaster, since as you can see I was under water as late as the 18th. This was primarily due to the slobber-knocking I took on my 3 day trip to San Diego and Ocean's 11. Rest assured, I'll be back to reclaim those racks. With a 6 day trip home for the holidays looming, I was already preparing myself to accept an actual loss for the month. But between a massive win on Sunday the 21st (when I left a juicy Garden City 40/80 game because Hank sent me a text alerting me to Neil's presence in the Bay 101 20/40), and huge win on New Years Eve, I somehow managed to post a $6000 win. This game seems to be all about surviving the break even stretches between heaters.

All told I played 148.5 hours this month, with very minimal hours logged in small games (I did have one rough day at Ocean's where I spent 4 hours languishing in a combination of 2/3 NL, 4/8 Limit, 8/16 Limit, and eventually 4/8 O8). All told, it looks like all but 20 hours were at 20/40 or above, with 5 more hours accounted for by the Oaks 15/30 game. Given that I went home for 6 days, I think this number is excellent.

Professional Period and 2009

My "professional period" of this year started on August 1st. During that time my spreadsheet shows gambling winnings of $39,444, or just a shade under $8K/month. Obviously I'm quite happy with this result.

In the 7 months of 2008 that I had an actual job, I won somewhere around $10,000 (I have some entries not yet in my spreadsheet from Vegas and Reno trips), bringing my total winnings for the year to just around $50K.

My 20/40 win rate currently stands at $58.27/hour. When I quit my job that number was a scary $32/hour. My 2008 20/40 graph looks like this:


Yes I am an excel fish, but you can guess....money on the left, hours along the bottom. I totaled just under 900 hours of live 20/40 for the year, with the majority coming after August 1st.

In short, I am happy to report nothing but a complete success for my 5 months spent as a professional poker player. I still have no plans to look for work, and am really now just trying to decide how to go about playing more 30/60 and 40/80.

A Word on the Ads

Many of you have probably noticed that ads went up on my blog on New Year's Day. I decided to give this a shot, mainly because it makes me feel cool to have a website that enough people read that the space on it has non-zero value. Danielle helped me place them in such a way that they should be a minimal distraction to those reading (originally they were wider, which looked fine on my laptop....but it's a wide screen), and I've decided to stick to text-only ads for now. On the first full day the ads were up I earned a whopping 46 cents. I don't think I'm going to quit my day job :)

And in Closing: Marley and Me

Spoiler Alert: If you don't want to know what happens, stop reading now....

Marley and Me was probably the saddest movie I have ever seen. It's basically about a couple in their late twenties being all happy at first and getting a dog who chews lots of stuff and is really hard to deal with and then their lives not turning out as they planned and them feeling that they didn't accomplish as much as they'd like by the time they turned 40. And then the dog dies. That's it. It was very, very sad. When I got home from the movie and went to give my dog Tyson a big hug, I found him like so. Tyson, like Marley, is awesome.