Comments on: 2011 Poker Resolutions, Part 1: Make Money, Money!

By: foucault

foucault — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 14:55:36 +0000

In reply to zydee. I bet that's a common one. It's good to have some specific strategies for how you will go about doing that. Have you read Elements of Poker?

By: zydee

zydee — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 12:59:59 +0000

My poker resolution is to learn how to control my tilt problem. It is so bad now it is killing my winrate and self belief alot. I never used to be this bad and im not sure why it has gotten worse. I go back to work tomorrow for 3weeks so the only poker I will play is maybe the odd SnG to keep me sane because there are no suckouts in SnGs :). I used to take slow deep breaths when I was starting to feel tilted and before I played which calmed me down so I need to keep doing that and quiting where necessary until hopefully I get it to a point where I can control it.

GL for 2011 Andrew

By: foucault

foucault — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 14:31:46 +0000

In reply to Lin Sherman. I can definitely see how that would be an issue in live poker, and I would never consider live grinding for a living unless I were really hard-up and out of options. Online, I can pretty much always find things to play. I start at the top of the cash game lobby and just keep moving down from the biggest stakes games adding games and waiting lists when they look good. It's rare that I get all the way through the 2/4 games without seeing enough to fill my screen. If that happens, there's always Rush Poker or PLO. Certainly there are diminishing returns: my hourly rate during Hour 20 is not as good my hourly rate during the prime hours, but it's very rare that I can't find anything worth playing.

By: Lin Sherman

Lin Sherman — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 04:01:29 +0000

After doing this poker pro thing on and off full and part time for about forty years with varying degrees of success and failure, I still haven’t found what I consider a happy resolution to the dilemma of how to reconcile game selection with the need to put in enough hours to pay the bills.

The problem I’ve found with trying to put in a set number of hours is that it’s easy (for me, anyway) to wind up playing in bad games when you’re short on hours and/or money and/or shouldn’t be playing, and even easier to pass up on good games when you’re over your daily or weekly time quota.

I’m not opposed to the idea of shooting for a certain number of hours per day or week, and online poker makes this a lot easier to do, but even online, you can find yourself trying to grind out hours in tables full of clueful regulars, especially at the higher stakes. Good game selection can be difficult if you’re not also fairly flexible with your time.

For live game players, it’s even more problematic. During my Las Vegas years, I was a mid-stakes limit Hold’em specialist, but even in LV, the 20/40 and 30/60 games were mostly regulars and often not worth playing, especially during the week. The 40/80 at the Mirage was built around a couple of locals, and if one or both didn’t show up, the game usually wouldn’t go (and wasn’t worth playing if it did). One of the producers was an obstetrician, so you just never knew when he was going to be there. But when you got the phone call that Doc wanted to play, you had to tear yourself away from whatever you were doing and get your ass down there, because he was worth $1K per hour to the table, and you don’t find players like that very often.

A friend of mine once said that he thought playing poker was a good way to build wealth but a lousy way to make a living. I think maybe he was right.