Torched

Well it finally happened.  Like, it was bound to sooner or later to be honest.  I wasn't going to blog about it, but doing so and closing out my books on the issue really helps me put the whole experience behind me, so here we go.  I got obliterated in the white chip game yesterday.  The actual loss only ended up being 43 bets, but halfway through the 13 hour marathon session I was up almost that much, so in truth I think the trip down was around 75 bets (what would normally be a 6 racker in a 4 chip 8 chip game).  All the typically bad stuff had to happen, and eventually at just before 2am I had to quit the game because I decided my play had deteriorated to the point that I was at best a small winner in the game, even though there was still an absolute whale and another fish that I've seen entire 40/80 games built around in the game.  My ability to focus was shot (I'd been at the casino for almost 18 hours at that point), and regardless of stakes any time you go on a trip down the ladder like that you really do just need to quit.  My table image was completely shot, and I wasn't taking time to make the best possible decisions in hands, and my ability to make my pet "lol live pro" soul read folds had been almost completely neutralized.  As usual with some or even most of the hands you just end up in the most retarded spots you possibly can range-wise (I made three crying calls with river full houses and guess what lost all three...stuff like 99 vs TT on a 444 flop, you know the drill), and with others you just get sucked out on violently (4 way 3 bet pot, I have AA, board reads K22 and I get to put in 3 bets against 44, river 4 she just donks right out...JJ vs Q9 on QQJ-A-A).  I mean, it's a combination of anything.  You get 3-bet by J7s and get to cap with with AQo 3 ways and can't win, same guy flops a nut flush against your over pair, blah blah blah.

Lots of weird stuff happened throughout the 8 hours I lost the 75 bets.  This guy who never ever sits above 1/2 sat, and everyone was shocked, and his aces got cracked on like the 3rd hand and he lobbied for 45 minutes like he always does and bitched and moaned and tapped the glass and eventually booked a $4k win playing like a complete tool shed (slow playing full houses, missing tons of value).  This long time high stakes pro went on stone cold monologue tilt after I 3-bet her with K8s saying stuff like "I have plenty of chips to burn, you want to burn chips, we'll burn chips together" and then proceeded to play every hand for 30 minutes straight.  To quote a wise man "the wheels were off the bus" but it didn't matter, when I stopped out at 2am she had $60k in front of her, our fortunes after her rant differing by some preposterous fraction of my entire net worth.  To be clear, I 3-bet the K8s because I had seen her iso 3-bet the whale, from the SB no less, with 98o.  Nine.  Eight.  Off.  OOP.  So I mean really, at that point all bets are void (a quick poker cruncher run shows K8s has 48.5% equity vs a 43% 3-betting range, which is the point at which it auto-includes the 98o...and that would be for cold-capping the freaking hand...in this cause I just 3-bet her which had to be correct).  I've realized something about these high stakes regulars;  there is no joking with them, no busting their chops, no trying to be one of the guys.  They believe they are the cool kids and anybody who hasn't paid his dues is going to get no respect what so ever.  In short, they do everything they can to make sure you know they feel superior to you.  It's pretty tough to adjust to at first, and my natural inclination to make small talk and be friendly really gets me into trouble once in a while.  Like, I can't really describe it accurately, but there are just a few of them who will never ever ever give you credit for saying anything funny or interesting whatsoever, and always treat you like a social outcast.  Honestly the lengths to which they go to make you look like a little kid or whatever are pretty laughable and transparent.  Whatever, it's fine, that's the way they want to do business that's fine with me.

So yeah, that about sums it up.  I played 27 hours in two days and am not sure how I feel about the result.  Like of course if I'd stayed til 2am and booked even a $5k win, or played all night or whatever, I'd be happier about it.  It was actually pretty sad that I had to stop out, but it is what it is.  Honestly if you quit every time you went on a 75 bet down tick for the rest of your life you probably wouldn't really be costing yourself much if any money.  So that's what I did.  I'm taking today off for mental health purposes, which is a shame since I'm supposed to leave for Vegas tomorrow for ANOTHER bachelor party (with basically the same group of guys from last weekend), but it's fine really.  I'm pooped and just won't play well if I go in today, so a day with the dogs it is.  The whole thing is weird, in exactly the same way as the original massive win was.  It doesn't really matter.  Objectively, it just doesn't change the way I'm supposed to do business.  Now subjectively it certainly changes the way I feel, and could have an effect on my confidence and therefore game selection decisions in the future, but honestly it just doesn't actually matter.  It's hard to believe I can say that, but it's true, which is why the longer I go past the event the closer to normal I'm feeling.  Which I guess speaks volumes about how far I've come.

Milestones

Well, not really, but it's always good to have goals and I hit some milestones on the way to two of mine recently.  Yesterday I logged my 1000th hour of the year, which puts me on pace to crush not only my goal of 1800, but also my all time season record.  And in somewhat more important (although decidedly less controllable) news, I am currently bouncing around the plus 600 bet line for the year.  That's just swell, honestly.  I don't have any illusions of being a bet per hour winner, at least not given how many hours I play, and my stated (I suppose privately) goal for the year is to win 1000 bets.  I've probably mentioned this before, but I just don't think an entire bet per hour is possible in the current environment unless you are extremely picky about what games you sit in (and therefore don't grind anywhere near the hours I'm planning to put in).  The rake is just so high, and the truly great games just move so slowly, that I don't really think you can do it.  I suppose a dedicated 20/40 (or even 40/80) grinder who consistently played in the overnight commerce games could probably pull it off, but honestly we will never know because even if somebody does it for 3000 hours straight that honestly wouldn't mean very much about anything (their actual win rate being that high in the past, or their win rate being that high in the future).  So like I said I'm super happy to win like half to three quarters of a bet per hour.

And I guess that's about it.  I'm going out of town for the (long weekend) and feel like I could use the rest.  I haven't taken a day off since May 28th!

Happy Father's Day!

I've made it a habit the last few years of sending a simple "Happy Father's Day" text to all my friends who are proud papas.  The trouble is it's getting pretty difficult to remember everyone;  I'm sure I missed a few, so hopefully this will catch them.  Happy Father's Day everyone!

Today was one of those days that makes you want to come back tomorrow.  I played for 6.5 hours in amazing games, bad stuff happened all around me (the 3rd 40 got started DOA, then fired up for 20 minutes, then broke.  the second 60 started, which promptly broke the second 40, 20 minutes after I'd moved from the second 40 to the first.  then the second 60 broke, so they restarted the second 40.  which then broke again), but just not to me.  If I had ace king I turned a king, and if I was beat I lost the minimum.  It was grand.

I put another notch in my oh-fer belt taking pieces of friends in the WSOP, with howmany failing to cash the $10k HORSE event.  He actually headed in to day two 12th of 152 remaining players or something pretty impressive, but in these limit events the blinds go up and up and up and pretty soon you have 3 times a starting stack but only 15 bets and that's often all she wrote.  I did enjoy reading about the stud eight hand where danny negs made a 9 high flush and a 76 and got scoopie doo'ed...I'm not sure why it just seems like he has probably run pretty good in his life, except that time Gus Hansen dinged him for like $300k in one hand on high stakes poker (google it).

The next three weeks are pretty ugly for me schedule wise, with an east coast trip for a bachelor party, then theoretically a 4 day weekend in vegas (for another bachelor party) followed immediately by another 4 day weekend in vegas (for the two plus two meetup).  We'll see how long I'm actually out there for those two events, but I wouldn't want to disappoint leo doc by not basking in his hospitality :)

Tax Loophole

I think I just figured out something pretty cool.  If it's actually accurate, I'm both shocked nobody has ever told me about it before and annoyed that I didn't come up with it sooner, especially since I basically already did it once a few years ago.  Here's the basic idea.

There are two classes of retirement accounts available to most Americans.  Both classes allow for tax free growth of assets, and the rules on when you can withdraw the money vary a little from one specific account to the next, but they'are all pretty much the same with one major distinction.  In the first type, you fund the account with post tax dollars.  A Roth IRA is an example of this type of account.  If your income is low enough (which has never been a problem for me in the past lol) you can contribute $5K/year into the thing.  Many years from now when you withdraw the money it won't be taxed, since you already paid your share before you ever put it in the account.  The second type of account is funded with "pre tax" dollars.  A 401k is an example of this type, and most people with real jobs know how these work.  You make contributions throughout the year that come directly off your paycheck, BEFORE your taxes are calculated.  So if you make $50K, but contribute $5K to the 401K, your taxable income at the end of the year is only $45K.

This is all well and good, and a lot of people discuss which one is better for you based on a couple of obvious parameters (if you think taxes are going to go up or down, and if you think your income will be higher or lower than it is now in retirement).  But what a lot of people don't know is that if you have both types of accounts you can choose (with some restrictions) exactly which year you "roll over" the balance from the second type (pre tax money) to the first (post tax money).  By doing so, you get to control what year you pay the taxes in.  I actually already did this once back in 2010, when I basically made no money whatsoever and had $30K or something sitting in my old Oracle 401K account.  I rolled it over into my roth and paid taxes at an extremely low rate (since the rollover was like 75% of my income or something ridiculous).  At the time I kind of just thought that was a one time thing and yay good for me, but recently I realized it doesn't have to be.  As a self employed person I am eligible to open and contribute to a SEP IRA;  this account is basically a replacement for the fact that I don't have access to my employer's 401k.  I can contribute up to 25% of my net income (up to I believe $50K), which will come off my taxable income (except for self employment tax, which I still have to pay on it, I think) and therefore reduce my tax liability.

At this point anybody who is still following along (and I can't fault you if you're not) has to be saying "so what, Jesse?  It doesn't really matter that much which year you pay the taxes in, does it?"   For a normal person, that would be true.  But for a professional poker player with an extremely variable income, it most certainly is not.  If you are a cash game pro for 10 years you are bound to have good years, great ones, and terrible ones.  If you take care to contribute as much as you can to the SEP in the boon years, then rollover the balance in lean years (you can do the rollover any year you make less than $100K), your tax savings could be quite large.  If you take into account the possibility of a large tournament score shooting your income into the middling 6 figures, or quitting cards to "go back to school" and having a near zero income year, they could be flat out massive.  But even without those two events (which are both extremely unlikely for yours truly), it's still worth doing.  Suppose you play the mid stakes games around LA and have a good year where you post $120K, then follow it up with a $40K clunker.  If you contributed 25% of the $120k to a SEP, you'd avoid paying taxes "from" $120K down to $90K.  Then in the next year when you rolled it over, the taxes would be incurred "from" $40k up to $70k.  Obviously the more extreme the swings in income, the more useful this trick is, but the basic idea is sound.  I even asked my tax guy, and he said it's a great idea.  So there you have it, tax advice for the professional grinder.

There is No Theme

Lot of stuff going on, none of it actually that important.  Yesterday I posted what I think was the biggest loss of my life, playing 1/2 with this super fishy and perhaps high on more than life lady who couldn't stay in her seat for more than 5 hands in a row.  Blah blah blah, couldn't win a hand, lost 2 or 3 racks, then she evaporated (after lobbying 2 laps, coming back to the table in the CO, waiting til her blinds, playing the big and small, then missing all her free hands and lobbying 3 more laps after that) and I played 60 for a bit and got dusted off also and  when it was all over I was missing $8K.  I went home feeling completely fine about it, which was just sorta weird.  Contrast that with today, where I played 60 and won a bunch, then played 40 and immediately won I don't even know how much like 4 or 5 racks, then checked traffic at 2:15 hoping to take an early out mental health day (I mean really, who wouldn't go home up $7K the day after the biggest loss of his life?  what sane person wouldn't give himself that piece of mind?) but the five was already closed so I stayed and torched off every penny I was up in the 40.  I still went home up quite a bit (like $2k or something) but it felt way way worse than the previous day when I'd actually lost a ton.  So that's the way poker fucks with you, or at least one of the ways, which is just weird.  I mean, I know it's just me being stupid, but I can't make the feeling not happen.  Strange.

I'm spraying off chunks left and right taking pieces of people in the WSOP.  Some all of them are one offs (10% of numbnuts in the $5k LHE, 1/3rd of a buddy in the $1500 FR LHE) and some of them are package deals (10% of allstart over the entire series), but they all have something in common; zero cashes.  Alas, I'm hoping allstart can get the magic luck box rolling, otherwise when all is said and done it's not gonna look very pretty.  Of course he could just run super deep in the main event and that'd make everything awesome, but I'd rather be free-rolling at that point if at all possible.

There was more I wanted to say...oh yeah, I've made some stunningly terrible decisions and mistakes in the past 48 hours, but it looks like I'll get away with them pretty much scott free.  One involves loaning money, which is often a horrible idea but as DosEquis told me yesterday "you're never going to get somebody totally buried in a game if you don't take chances like that from time to time" and well I took a chance and it worked out.  The other was deciding to pay attention to the radio while hanging up my phone in traffic and rear ending a highlander this morning.  Nothing serious, I almost got stopped, I have insurance obviously, but jeeze what a dumbass thing to do.  I haven't been in many traffic accidents that were my fault in life, and was doing great for like 5 years running and I'm just pissed off at myself for not paying more attention.  Like, to be honest it's shocking I hadn't done it sooner or been smashed into myself by now given how much time I spend driving around in high traffic situations, but still...it sucked.

And in closing...I is unbarred!  That's right, I just got the word yesterday that I'm officially welcome back at the Bike.  I don't know if I'll go back or not, but it's at least nice to have the option.  So that's about that, I suppose.  A special shout out and good luck to Death Donkey, who went out of his way to send me a super duper long email about my successful white chip shot and what it meant and how I should handle it, and therefore was rewarded by a stroke from the run good stick and a final table in the LHE shootout.