$1.5K in 1 Month: Day 1

[MEbenhoe]

Day One – August 7, 2004:

You must act as if the goal were infinitely far off
-Eugen Herrigel, Zen in the Art of Archery

As I made my way into the first day of this month long journey, this quote resounded in my brain. You’re not going to do it all in the first day I told myself. With this in mind I resolved to play fewer hours today than the approximate 4 hours I’ll need to play per day to meet my 125 hour goal. This actually isn’t that much of a deviation from my normal playing patterns. Generally on the weekends I play fewer hours than on weekdays. I find the games surprisingly better on weekdays and plan to play a few extra hours during the week to make up for my lost hours today and most likely tomorrow. The main reason however is that with a results oriented goal like this I wanted to avoid two very likely scenarios that could arise. First, I didn’t want to put too much focus on the first day of this quest making it almost into a do-or-die type scenario. The other reason being that I wanted to avoid the classic first day flop that many can easily fall into, setting a bad tone for the whole quest. All I really wanted to do was play a couple hours of solid poker today and hopefully put myself into the black. For those of you who missed my announcement of this quest, my goal is to play 125 hours of $2/$4 single table hold em over the next month and make $1500 doing this.

I played a 45 minute session in the morning after eating breakfast. This was a pretty uneventful session in which the biggest hand I won was catching an UTG raiser who had QQ with my pocket Kings. The betting, which was capped pre flop and on the flop with a third very loose caller on my left in the hand, slowed to a halt when an overcard Ace on the turn killed all aggression in this pot. I had put the UTG raiser on a hand such as AK, AQ, or another high pocket pair, and wasn’t too sure of the third players possible hands having never played with him before. So when this ace turned up it took the wind out of my sails. Whether or not I played this hand right in allowing the turn and river to go by without betting is debatable, however the checks all around made me pretty confident that I had won the hand, which I momentarily found out I had. This session ended with me up $29.

In the early afternoon I played a 1 hour 15 minute session. I found myself at a very loose an aggressive table for this session. Players were routinely raising with hands such as J9s from early/middle position and were then cold called by hands such as 85s. As you might guess my chip stack went through a few wild swings in this session. I had AA twice during this session; once taking down a pretty decent sized pot when I flopped a set, and the other time losing to a player in the SB who called my 3 bet on the button with a T9o. He then caught his straight on 4th street, and I’m glad to say I made the correct read and dumped my hand here. All in all I was able to withstand the swings in this game and ended this session up $15.37.

I think of today as a pretty nice start to my month long journey and was able to accomplish all that I wanted to. While I’m not quite on my $50/day pace, my hourly rate is actually above what I’ll need to complete this quest, although what can you really tell from one day anyways?

Day One: $44.37
Total of Goal to Date: $44.37/$1500
Hours Logged: 2
Total Hours to Date: 2
Hourly Average to Date: $22.18

[augie00]

Looking forward to future posts. Any reason why you only play one table at once? You'll be able to reach your goal much easier by playing as many tables as possible.

[MEbenhoe]

One reason I wont multi table during this challenge is that part of the purpose is to see if I can keep up a 3 BB/hr win rate over this time period at a single table. Also, I'm still working on becoming proficient at doing the whole multi table thing, my monitor isnt too great for more than 2 tables anyways. So for the time being I plan on sticking to a single table and will eventually work my way into multi tabling.

[Blarg]

Good luck on your quest! These are always among the most fun posts to read.

[Festus22]

If your monitor is poor, I would definitely invest in an upgrade. Multi-tabling is just too profitable to not take advantage of.

My suggestion is do what I do and open 2 $0.5/1 tables and 1 $2/4. Devote around 90% of your focus on the 2/4 table. Two tables of 0.5/1 is extremely easy to beat for an extra $5/hr on total auto-pilot. Just a thought on keeping some spare change rolling in while not compromising your concentration.

[Lost Wages]

Are you playing 10 handed tables?

Lost Wages

[MEbenhoe]

Yes

[Lost Wages]

You might want to check your math.

125 hours * 60 hands/hour = 7500 hands

$1500/7500 hands = $0.20/hand = $20/100 hands = 5BB/100 hands (at $2/$4)

You original post suggested a win rate of ~3BB/100 hands. I think that somewhere along the line that got converted to 3BB/hour.

Lost Wages

[boring chris]

this is absolutely doable. But, like the others, I suggest multi-tabling. My monitor sucks too but when I changed my resolution to 1600x1400 it worked wonders. I now always have 3-4 tables up and my profit rate goes way up. In turn, it allows you to be slightly tighter (therefore more solid in general) with your starting hands cause you will never get impatient waiting for a starting hand. Your mind is constantly working and it allows you to really build up (for lack of a better term) "mental" momentum. You need a larger BR for it, but it is definately worth it. If you are a solid player and you are multi-tabling, you will meet your goal without a problem.

-chris

[MEbenhoe]

I had always said 3 BB/hr because, being mostly a live player, I dont think in BB/100. Someone told me along the way that this equated to 6 BB/100 because its generally 50 hands per hour at an online table. I still very much believe that this is a win rate that can be done at the small stakes tables online, and hopefully some time I'll be able to follow through on this and find out for real.