The Cause & Effect Law & Poker

Poker is a merit based system of cause and effect. Your only focus should be on making correct decisions. Your decisions should not be effected by losing or winning money, but by simply doing what is mathematically and psychologically correct. In the final analysis, you will make money if you make more correct decisions than incorrect decisions.

Life is very much the same way. Everyone has a moral compass telling us what the correct moral decision is. If we allow our emotions to persuade us to make selfish decisions that are not aligned with our moral compass - that is an incorrect decision and will count against you in the game of life.

If you do not allow your emotions to change your correct decision making, eventually the balance will return and you will reap the benefits.

For example - in poker you can have a losing session (day), losing week, losing month, even a losing quarter. That means as you ride the roller coaster of poker, winning and losing money, at the end of the day, week, month, or quarter - you can be in the negative. That is called variance in poker. But if you continue to play correctly, making positive expected value decisions - you will eventually swing into the positive and at the end of the half year or full year - you will still end up making the average income you expected to make.

Any long term professional poker player understands what it means to play near perfectly (+EV) and still loose 10% of your money at the end of 3 months of play. You have to continue playing +EV regardless of your current down swing in order for things to swing back in your favor.

Life is the same. You can do all the right things based on your moral compass and still get hit in the face by life. Your dog dies, your car is totaled in an accident, you lose half your 401K value in a stock market crash, you get robbed and beat up, etc.

Many people, even of the strongest religious faith, lose faith in the law of Karma when their lives turn to crap.

"I did the right thing and I got the shaft - WTF?!"

Then they turn to making selfish immoral decisions figuring if they are going to get the shaft anyways, might as well get "Mine" while the getting is good.

This of course changes your future Karma and begins a self-fulfilling prophecy that did not need to occur.

In poker this is synonymous of going on tilt. You start playing foolishly, leaking chips to your non-tilting opponents. You start bluffing too much with too much money and start losing big time.

In life you increase your bad luck when you go on tilt.

In reality, when things are at their worse and you have faithfully been navigating the sea of life with your moral compass - that is when things are about to change for the better. When things are at their worse is when you need to be even more vigilant in your correct decisions because the tide is about to change. The storm cannot last forever.

In poker when the tide changes from variance to hot streak - you can not only make up your losses, but you can make a lot of profit and swing in the opposite direction. A negative $1000 quarter turns into a positive $3000 half year. When averaged out, you will realize you never lost $1000 - but you always were making $1500 a quarter. Then you realize your expected poker winnings over the long term is right on par. Your extreme winnings and extreme losings have evened out and you are still profitable.

Life is the same.

If only people understood cause and effect.

Going From Wal-Mart Employee To Professional Online Poker Player (or not)

If you can read this and understand it, then you are either ready to play online poker for money or you know for sure you should not play online poker for money.

Either way, you probably won't understand this unless you have played online poker for money for at least a few years.

Thus the irony.

I play online poker for money and completely understand everything in this article. I did NOT write this article, thus I have included a link to the person who did - please do click on the link and buy that man a beer for such a great article.

It references things without referencing them - like you understand them, such as Bankroll management, Rakeback, Big Bets per 100 hands (BB/100), etc.

But the humor makes this worth the read, even if you have no idea about some of the terminology. Rakeback? I had no idea I needed my back scratched!

The end is obviously true for many paths of life. If you manage to succeed leaving your crappy Wal-Mart job and start pulling in the big duckets - beware! That is where most people increase their debts to match their new incomes. Same reason lotterly winners are worse off in under 5 years. Rags to riches is not the whole story. The whole story is Rags To Riches To Rags.

Happy Reading!

http://www.spoonitnow.com/wordpress/how-to-stack-paper-to-the-ceiling-part-1/

How to Stack Paper to the Ceiling (Part 1)

If you don’t know what stacking paper to the ceiling means, feel free to reference the Urban Dictionary entry on the subject.

So suppose you’re a hobbyist player who makes their way to the not-so-dizzy heights of 25nl. You are a member of the working class, have a regular 9-5 job, and manage to put in 12 hours of play at the tables each week (along with another 3 hours of study each week), for an average of about 50 hours each month. You get in about 500 hands an hour, and make 2.5 ptbb/100 in winnings along with another 1 ptbb/100 in rakeback. You’re only able to study enough to keep up with the games getting tougher so that your win-rate stays the same at 25nl indefinitely. You have a super solid starting bankroll of about $1000.

Poker has become a side income for you that yields about $8.75 an hour total. This is on par with or maybe even slightly better than your hourly wage at your job, but you can’t quit your job for poker because of its shaky legal situation and other factors. This 50 hours of poker each month gives you about $437.50 extra on average before taxes, and we’ll say $333 a month after taxes because that’s close for most places in the USA for the working class and it’s a nice even number. So how can you use this extra $333 a month to stack paper to the ceiling?

After taxes this extra $333 a month is another $4000 a year. We’re going to assume that $1500 of this gets burned up in random expenses that your normal job can’t cover because you don’t have health or dental insurance, and your piece of shit car needs repairs. You add $1500 of the remaining money to your poker bankroll, and the $100o left over into a savings account as an emergency fund.

Now after one year of work, your poker bankroll has increased from a solid $1000 to $2500. You have $1000 in a savings account, and now something crazy happening in life isn’t going to completely destroy your ability to make money. You are one step closer to escaping the working class and financial freedom.

You decide it’s time for you to step your game up and invest time and money into the future of your poker game. You invest $500 of your poker bankroll into coaching and site subscriptions. You take your 15 hours of poker time each week and instead of playing 12 and studying 3, you decide you’re going to play 10 and study 5.

How to Stack Paper to the Ceiling (Part 2)

Your first 2 months you stay at 25nl, making on average your same 3.5 ptbb/100 after rakeback. At 40 hours a month, you make $700 profit in your first two months. In your second two months, you continue your study but your win-rate has raised to 4.0 ptbb/100 total after rakeback. During these second two months, you make $800 in profit. Your hard work is starting to pay small dividends, but you have to cash out $500 to pay for some unexpected expenses that came up. That leaves you with $1000 profit after four months, which you decide to invest as a stop-loss and move up to 50nl.

You decide to drop tables at 50nl and only get 400 hands an hour. Your rakeback also drops to 0.8 ptbb/100 because you hit the $3 cap on the rake more often now. So in your first month of 50nl, you get in 40 hours of play at 400 hands an hour for a total of 16,000 hands. You make $128 in rakeback, but in your first month of play you only make 1.5 ptbb/100 in winnings which is another $480. Rounding your rakeback down to $120 means you made $600 in May, the fifth month of your second year.

For the next three months, you continue playing fewer tables of 50nl getting 400 hands an hour. You have an average win-rate of 2.2 ptbb/100, which means after rakeback you made 3 ptbb/100, or $12 an hour. At around 40 hours of play a month, you make about another $1500 over these three months.

With four months left to go in your second year, you decide to move back up to the original number of tables you were playing at 25nl, and play out the rest of the year at 500 hands an hour making 3 ptbb/100 at 50nl after rakeback. At around 40 hours a month over 4 months, you make about $2500.

How to Stack Paper to the Ceiling (Part 3)

So over this second year, you’ve made an extra $6100. After taxes, that’s going to be about $4500, $500 of which you had to spend in the first part of the year on some unexpected expenses, and we’ll say you spent another $1000 on various dumb shit because you’re a working class Wal-Mart employee who isn’t used to having much money at all. Another $500 went to more coaching in the second half of the year. This leaves $2500 that you have to decide what to do with. You decide to put another $1000 in your savings account, bringing the total to $2000, and the other $1500 into your poker bankroll, bringing that total to $4000.

Now we’re going into year 3. At 500 hands an hour, you have improved to 3.5 ptbb/100 after rakeback at 50nl. For the entire year, you continue at 50nl studying on your own with a 10/5 split of playing to studying per week. The plan for this year is to build up some cushion in preparation for moving up in stakes. Over this year you make $8400, and get to keep about $6000 of it after taxes. You’ve spent $2000 of it on various things, and now you have $4000 to split up. You decide to invest $1000 of it in a better computer set-up, put $1000 of it in your savings account, and leave the other $2000 in your poker bankroll.

After three years you’ve made considerable progress. You have more than doubled your poker hourly win-rate, have a $6000 bankroll, along with $3000 in your savings account and a new computer set-up that allows you to increase your hands per hour to 600 without sacrificing playing strength.

Meanwhile you picked up an amazingly rare $1/hour in raises at Wal-Mart which barely would have allowed you to keep up with inflation and the increases in minimum wage.

How to Stack Paper to the Ceiling (Part 4)

Year four begins with you playing your normal game at 50nl, but you decide to spend $1000 of your poker bankroll on coaching and efforts to help you move up to 100nl after six months. Your win-rate averages 4 ptbb/100 after rakeback now, and you’re doing 600 hands an hour at 50nl. Six months of play at this win-rate getting 40 hours a month of play is about $5800.

At the beginning of July (the 7th month for those who can’t count on their fingers very quickly), you make the move to 100nl and get slapped like a bitch for two months, even though you drop tables and are only getting 400 hands/hour. You are a slightly losing player, only breaking even after rakeback. In the meantime, you decide to dedicate another $1000 to your coaching efforts over the last 6 months of year 4.

In the last four months of year four, you finally start winning at 100nl at an average of 2 ptbb/100 after rakeback. You make about $2600 over this time period, still working hard on your game, spending one-third of your poker time studying and getting coached.

Now year four comes to an end. You made $8400, which after taxes is about $6000 you get to keep. You spent $2000 on coaching, which leaves $4000 for you to do something with. You put half of it in your savings account, bringing that up to a staggering $5000, and half of it in your poker bankroll, giving you $8000 in your poker bankroll.

How to Stack Paper to the Ceiling (Part 5)

Going into year five, your escape from Wal-Mart feels close, but you have to show patience. You decide that you should play the entire year at 100nl and build up more of a cushion before you decide to figure out how you’re going to make your escape. You average 2.5 ptbb/100 after rakeback, and average 500 hands/hour over the course of the year at 100nl.

You maintain your 10/5 split of playing to studying, and continue getting coaching on a fairly regular basis from winning mid-stakes players. You manage to profit $12,000 from poker, pay $3000 of it in taxes, and have $8000 left over. You spent $2000 of that on coaching and other learning devices, which leaves you with $6000. You put $2000 of that in your online bankroll to make that an even $10,000, and put the remaining $4000 in your savings account, making that $9000.

So you start to make your plans to get out of the working class. You don’t want to play poker for the rest of your life, so you decide you should go to school for whatever. Before poker, you were barely living off about $1300 a month, so you decide that around $2000 a month (after taxes) would be plenty to live off of while going to school, not counting tuition and other fees associated with going to school.

You decide that if you were to play full time that you would dedicate 40 hours each week to poker. Of that time, 25 hours would be playing, and 15 hours would be studying and hand reviews and receiving coaching and all of that type of thing. If you maintain your current win-rate, you’ll get in about 100 hours of play each month which will give you about $2500 per month before taxes. You know that’s pretty close, but if you had a big downswing it could put some stress on things, so at this point you have options.

One option would be to take your shot now and quit your job. Another option, and a much better one at that, would be to spend another year or two at Wal-Mart or some other shitty low-paying job and spend time raising your win-rate and money reserves any more. This second option is much, much better because after you do that, there’s is virtually nothing that can touch you and pull you back into the working class again.

How to Stack Paper to the Ceiling (Part 6)

We’ve followed one path someone could take to try to use poker as a vehicle to escape the working class in parts 1-5. Now we’re going to look at some of the pitfalls of trying to do something like this, which are really pitfalls for anyone who are trying to build anything in similar situations.

Everyone has heard stories about how some poor bastard wins a large amount in the lottery, takes a 6-figure or 7-figure lump sum payment for his prize, and then five years later is back where he or she started, broke as hell. The question is how could someone who has lived off of less than $10 an hour for a long period of time possibly be given that much money and run through it all? The answer is really simple and is the basis of the biggest problems people will have with pulling something off like what I’ve described in parts 1-5 of this series. The answer is, simple and plain, that they buy lots and lots of stupid shit.

With that out of the way, let’s look at a slightly more intricate way of thinking about the same thing. Any person trying to undertake something like this has two things that matter for this discussion. The first thing that matters is an income, which is all of the money and resources combined that you’re given either through work or welfare or finding $20 in the mall on the ground. The second thing that matters is the total of your expenses. If you are exactly making ends meet, then your expenses equal your income.

The problem comes as part of our culture: when our income increases, we seem to automatically increase our expenses. We simply do not save money or plan for the future because we are too caught up in the allure of having things. Now these things could be a $1.50 drink at the store or a $1500 TV whenever the one we have is doing just fine.

So the biggest problem that people will face in trying to do something like this is that they will waste their money. In poker we often see new players spend enough of their bankrolls that they can’t continue to move up quickly, and this is a good example of that. In real life we often see or know of people who have tons of debt for a house that’s bigger than what they need, a car that’s newer and more expensive than what they need, or whatever dumb shit they’ve decided to waste their money on. Again, it’s the same thing.

If you want to make this type of thing work, you have to save up money. And you can’t save money if you’re spending it.

New Poker Strategy - Bankroll

Hello World!

I have been on a poker vacation for most of the last 3 months. No good reason - just did not feel like playing. At one point I almost completely cashed out my bankroll to pay some bills.

But my bankroll is back and I have sat down and penciled in some strategies for bankroll management and how to start paying myself an income from my poker.

Here are the basics.

1.
Bankroll requirement for a limit is 40 Buy-Ins.
For now my Buy-In consists of 70 big-blinds.

2.

I have a daily stop loss of 4 buy-ins.
That is actually a dollar amount equal to 4 buy-ins.

3.

If I am winning, I reset my daily stop loss for each buy in I am ahead.

For example; Let's say my bankroll is $1400, my buy-in is $35, and my stop loss is $140. If my bankroll goes down to $1260, I stop for the day. But if I win a buy-in right away, then I reset my daily stop loss based on a starting bankroll of $1435.

See how that works?

This way I do not limit my winning streak, but I do lock in my winnings if my luck starts to change. In the case where I win a buy-in and then lose 4 buy-ins, I would simply limit my losses.

4.

If I lose 10 buy-ins, I have to move down to the next lower limit. I have to play at that limit until I once again have 40 buy-ins for the next higher limit.

5.

I move up to the next limit - or what is called taking a shot - when all of the below is accomplished:

a. My bankroll is at least 40 buy-ins for the next higher limit
b. >10K hands played at the current limit
c. Equal or greater than 3 Big Bets/100 hands according to Poker Tracker 3.

6.

I will play 6 tables at a time.

a. 4 tables income will be reinvested in the poker bankroll
b. 2 tables incomes will be withdrawn bi-weekly as poker income.

8 These are the ways to increase poker income:

a. Play more hands per day/week/month
b. Play more tables at a time
c. Move up to the next limit
d. Take shots at tournaments (using Frequent Player Points?)

Currently I have 11K hands at $50NL. My BB/100 is 2. My bankroll is $1700.

So I am not ready to move up to $100NL.

In order to take a shot at $100NL I need to:

a. Increase my BB/100 to 3
b. Have a bankroll of $2800.

I may determine at a later date that the best I can do is 2BB/100 hands. If that is the case, then all I need to a bigger bankroll. But I want another 10K hands at $50NL before I assume 2BB/100 is going to be the best I can hope for.

As they say, as long as you are making a profit, you can play at that limit. The only determination will be where I can make the most money.

At $50NL, 6-tabling and averaging 3BB/100 hands - my 2 table profits will be about $50 per week.

Right now that extra $200 a month will help out a lot. We need to double our grocery budget which currently is at $250 per month. When I move up to $100 NL we will then have $400 a month. We also need to increase our spending money by $200 a month.

So $100NL is my first major goal - it will bring our monthly budget up to reality.

Then I plan to try to increase my monthly poker income to $1000 a month. $500 will go towards our monthly budget and the other $500 will go towards paying off our debt.

I now have the full version of poker tracker 3 - so I will continue to post cool graphs and updates as they come.

Keep checking back to see how this poker grind continues in 2010!

- Albino Smurf