Side bet that I WILL ship

So I'm in a TLB race next week on AP. Three of us are putting up $333 so there's gonna be basically a 1k pool. There's basically very little chance that I won't win this. One of the guys is getting a 1.5:1 handicap but he still doesn't play high enough to compensate for this. Nor do I think he'll play the type of crazy volume that I think I will. The other guy is really good, but I think I can play more volume than him. I'm pretty confident...now its just a matter of me putting in the hours and shipping it.

If you want to follow my progress you can do so in this thread.

Ship it one time...

I'm currently 13 of 177 at the second break of the AP 60k Sunday tourney. First takes down over 15k. That would be sooooo nice. I just reached Elite VIP at AP so now I'm pretty much gonna have enough Absolute Reward Points to buy into the Saturday 150k and the Sunday 60k for free every week. Nice! I'll update as the night goes on...unless something catastrophic happens and I just completely forget.

JUUUUUUUUUNNNNNNNNEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I played 1000 SNGs last month. I won about $2850. I've played about 150 SNGs this month. I've won about $2850. Go figure. I'm glad April is over!

HHHHHHHHHokay

May is over. Exhale. I HATED poker last month. I played exactly 1000 SNGs in May for a profit of just under 3k. That's WAAAAAAAYYY below average. For the year I have an ROI of ~16.5%. If I had run normal that would have been a profit of 7260. Plus, I was bubble boy in the MATH this week when I made a completely idiotic resteal against TripJax. There were 5 of usI had T30k with about 100k in play and 15 people left. After that I lost every single race. It was just absolutely disgusting. That was a great way to cap off the month :). Basically, since my last post I took an AMAZING trip to Texas, and then, since I unexpectedly had no internet while down there for five days, I played about 350 SNGs (so that I could avoid paying kurokitty $500) in the final four days of the month. On Absolute, with no turbos and not a ton of traffic, that's a TON of poker. Ugh. Glad that's over.

On the bright side, the trip to Texas was an awesome experience. I've never been to a mountainous region and southwest Texas definitely fit the bill. We went to Big Bend National Park and basically spent a day hiking through the mountains and throwing rocks at Mexico. I'm not a big nature buff, but this was some cool stuff.

Just incredible views all around...















Well, that's really I have for ya. I'm almost through two chapters of the book. An excerpt will very likely be posted early next week.

SNG Bankroll Requirements

I'm going to answer a question that was asked by kurokitty. If anyone else has random SNG questions or just general questions I'll probably be willing to dedicate a post to it since my life is generally boring and finding a lot of topics to write about is a challenge.

Note: specific questions are good...questions like "what is your SNG strategy?" obviously are not answerable in one post

kurokitty: What are your 'roll requirements for SNGs, how many buy-ins do you need?

Well, its actually a somewhat complicated question. Its a little bit differnt for every person. For me, its very simple. I like to have 100 buyins at all times because I expect a large portion of my income to come from poker.

How many buyins YOU need to play SNGs is dependent on a few factors:
1. What is your ROI?
2. Are you willing to move down during a downswing?
3. Is your bankroll replaceable if you go busto?

The higher your ROI, the smaller your bankroll can be. If you're beating a game for a sustained 20% then you can probably get away with having 50 buyins. If you're beating a game for 5% or less you probably should keep about 200 buyins. Of course, if you're willing to move down then you can keep whatever roll you want as long as you're disciplined enough to move down when needed and not take shots outside your roll. If you can replace your roll (and you're a winning player of course) then I think it can be appropriate to take shots on occasion.

Basically, if you're looking to play recreationally, you can get away with 50 pretty easily, but if you're going to play professionally, I'd recommend at least 100 buyins. I'm beating the 44s on Absolute Poker for about a 17% ROI (that's DESTROYING the game) and I'm still keeping 100 buyins. Could I get away with less? Yeah probably, but when I went 3 for 56 a couple weeks ago I would have been basically broke if I had 50 buyins. Now, those kind of runs are basically unheard of (easily the worst run I've ever had), but if you play long enough they're going to happen. That's just variance.

Hope this is helpful for everyone.

What a week!

Sooooooooooooooooo...between a Cubs game (I hate the White Sox!!!), a friend's graduation, and helping a roommate moving out of the house, this has been an interesting week...haven't had much of a chance to play poker though. That's unfortunate. I've got some serious work to do if I don't want to end up $500 in debt to kurokitty which I will if I don't get to 1,000 games this month. I'm not to worried about it, but the end of the month might not be an incredibly social one for me :) I really didn't pick the best month to do this...its kind of a crazy month for me, but I'm happy that I'm forcing myself to play more. I feel like my poker tolerance is growing. 6 months ago it was pretty crazy for me to sit down and play more than 15 games in one setting without losing focus. Now sessions of 40+ games where I feel like I'm not losing focus or playing anything less than my A game are common. That makes me feel like I'm making progress. Really I guess that's the main reason I'm trying to play so much.

Anyhow, its been a pretty decent week even though today was pretty horrible. Can't really complain too much.

Today: 53 $44 sngs played, -$496

May: 500 $44 sngs played, +$2156

2007: 2184 $44 sngs played, +$16052

What's this? 2 winning days in a row?

Today: 34 $44 sngs played, +$520

May: 348 $44 sngs played, +$1912

2007: 2066 $44 sngs played, +$16052

Today was a great day.