Taking a Shot: A Month in Review

I'm heading home for Thanksgiving tomorrow for about a week, so the month of November is basically wrapped. I'll probably play a little while I'm home, but nothing like what I've been doing the rest of the month. The numbers for month one of "Jesse plays poker on the internet" are extremely promising. I managed to log over 44K hands in 24 days, taking only one day completely off and in general booking over 2K hands a day during the week (days that I considered full time). I'm getting very good about keeping focused when I play and quitting when I feel like I might not be at my best, and that has led to my rate of play slowing over the course of the month. I've also found that just like in other endeavors of my life (developing software, playing sports, etc) most of what I'm going to accomplish for the day gets accomplished before 1pm. After that first initial spurt of productivity it gets harder and harder for me to maintain a high level of effort and focus. Obviously this was horrible for live play and is part of the reason moving down here was such a disaster for me. At Bay 101 I could show up at 10:30 and reasonably expect to be in a good game by 11am. Down here that just wasn't the case, and I think my results suffered for it. Playing at Commerce before 2pm was just silly, and realistically it makes way more sense to be a night owl down here than it ever did up north. Anyway....

The "lifestyle" has pros and cons, and if I'm going to continue it I'm going to have to make some changes/concessions to keep myself sane. It's fun to work from your dining room table; for a while. But try doing it 20 days in a row and things start to get a little bit dull. By nature I'm a social person, and I enjoy being around people (not necessarily the jerks you see at Commerce, but you get the jist). I've found myself seeking out as many social situations as possible and waiting almost anxiously for Danielle to come home for the day so that I can just have some normal interactions with someone. So I need to find some ways to get out of the house, and I'm going to start with a winter softball season in January and February. One thing I definitely don't miss is driving. My car has basically sat idle for an entire month, and I realized that that alone has saved me so so so much, and not just money either. I figure in 3.5 weeks I have avoided over 1000 miles of driving, which just off the cuff saves me several hundred dollars in gas/maintenance, 40+ hours of actual time, countless amounts of stress, and some unknown number of millimorts (let's face it, the last two years if suddenly one day you were told simply that "Jesse is dead" the odds that it happened while driving down the freeway would have been 10:1 in favor or better).

All in all I'd say the first month went substantially better than I expected, and even so good as to be deemed a success (honestly I thought it would be a failure). In terms of this being an actually viable way for me to make a living, well, we're not there yet, but we are certainly close. Here are some cold hard numbers about my actual play:

As I said, I logged 44K+ hands. Over half of those (23K) were logged at 2/4, at which I was simply not allowed to lose a hand under any circumstances. My WR for the month in those hands was 2.7 bets per 100 hands. The bulk of the rest of my hands (18K) were played at 3/6, at which I was quickly smoted every single time I put together anything that resembled a winning streak. In the 18K 3/6 hands I managed a WR of .2 bets per 100. The rest of my hands were played at 5/T and 1/2, but since we're only talking about 3K hands total it's not really worth reading anything into the results (for the record I lost about 20 bets at 5/T and won a little bit at 1/2). For those of you who don't want to piece all the math together to figure out how much I won, basically just go with "he played 23K hands of 2/4 and won 2.7 bets per 100 but broke even across all other games". That's basically accurate, and doesn't really net out a viable salary. However, there's a little more to it. First of all, rakeback. According to HEM my MGR number for the month is about $4400; I get 27% of that back, so we're talking something like $1200. Between playing during Happy Hour and my 2X points for black card status, my 44K hands resulting in me booking somewhere in the neighborhood of 80K full tilt points. The $5K bonus in the black card store sells for 1.1M points but involves a single MGR hit so let's say these are worth about $300. Then finally there is the Ironman program which is not completely dead; making Iron this month gets me a $100 bonus and 200 medals (which I think is basically worth like 10K more points so ok not really very much). The point is that when you add all this stuff up, I managed to make about $4K from the comfort of my home playing cheeseburger stakes in my very first month. Like I said....success. I ran hotter than the sun at 2/4, but also broke even over the 20K hands I played at other stakes. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that those two things basically cancel out to me running about average. If I can up the volume by 30% and up the effective stakes and WR by another 30% all of a sudden we're looking at me being able to make $6K/month without wearing pants. I could do worse. In closing, I will leave you with some pictures. First, all my hands: