Friday, January 29, 2016

Year in Review

The blog isn't dead, per say, I just haven't felt like writing.  I haven't felt like doing much of anything lately, but I do think I'm sort of getting there.  I took the time to roll my 2015 stats into my lifetime ones yesterday, and as usual found some interesting nuggets there in.  As Babar said, ship the nuggets

2015 was, I guess, the first losing year of my "career" (although to say I still do this as a career is obviously a misnomer.  I think I've played less than 1000 hours in the last 30 months).  Overall it breaks down like this:

472 hours, -$13577, -33.21 bets

So obviously I had some bet sizing issues.  Looks like I lost a little playing 1/2 (20 bets or so) and pretty badly at 60 (over 100 bets) in 120 hours or so.  Other than that it was pretty non-eventful with just not running very well (winning like 100 bets) in smaller games over 350 hours.  It appears I had a 7k downer in the Hustler 25 in 40 hours, which is somewhat noteworthy if not special.  It also appears I won 16 racks in the bike 20 in just over 100 hours, finishing the year winning 15/16 sessions.

Another fun tidbit....on April 26th I was up $8100 for the year through 335 hours.  So in the last 8 months of the year I logged less than 140 hours and lost almost $22k.  Solid work.

Trolling through all the data from my lifetime sheets it's tough not to put on the rose colored glasses and say "if only I knew now what I knew then" blah blah blah.  I have to admit it has been tempting to give it another go, at least lately.  I mean, in many ways I did poker "correctly", in that I treated it very much like a job and was super professional about it.  That could well be why I survived.  But in some other ways that's all wrong, since a ton of what you're supposed to get out of poker is not having a job, and I didn't really take advantage of that.  Thinking on it all now, what if I did move up by the casinos, didn't bother with trying to take shots at big games, and tried to make life as easy as possible.  There are a pair of games that run every day that I have beaten for around $50/hour (historically....stats from 2011 don't have a whole lot to do with anything today, but objectively these games are VERY soft).  What if I didn't have a schedule to stick to?  What if I played weekend evenings whenever I wanted?  I dunno....

The main reason my blog has slowed down is that I'm no longer comfortable with my life being a complete open book (both because I've changed my viewpoint, and some of the things just can't be blogged about....obviously I'd never put much of anything honest about my software career up here).  But I will admit that I've been hearing the advice of the experts a little more loudly than usual of late:

http://www.theonion.com/article/health-experts-recommend-standing-up-at-desk-leavi-37957