Monday 8 September 2008

Poker Sponsorship

After 50,000 hands and long deliberation I have decided to go ahead with a sponsorship deal at Badbeat.com. I've always been tempted by getting paid to play but I figured taking 50% of my winnings was too much when I'm earning 2.6bb/100 (Yeah I know that's shit). Things have been drying up a bit as I've been seeing my girlfriend and not really having enough time to play right now. The idea is to leave my $1300 in PokerStars to mature (with the rising $ and the weakening £) so that I can withdraw it in a few months for extra £££. 

I had a session today with a mentor from Badbeat.com and after an hour of watching (and with some empirical evidence of my winnings) he decided to set me off at a $800 daily loss limit. Holy smokes I said to myself! I've never had that sort of money to play with on a regular basis. He wants me to play 4 tables of NL100 and then to slowly ween me onto 6max :s. 

Well hopefully it's going to go as well as NL50 has gone and that way I can turn semi-professional for my Uni career. Now that would be nice! Poker sponsorship here I come!

Monday 1 September 2008

Poker - The Grind of Your Life

Poker is a grind. An absolute grind. You can't get away from it and you will probably end up only make a handful of big blinds every hour.

Last night I was playing 6 tables on PokerStars and suffered a huge swing of bad variance costing me 4 buyins. I then further tilted off more money. I woke up today fresh (and sober) and totally regret tilting off an extra 2 buyins last night. In poker you can't afford to lose a buyin from bad play because it will cost you A LOT of time to grind it back. Here's a graph of my play, the two deep downswings are bad variance + a bit of tilt on top. The upswings are when I'm running good and not making any mistakes.

After playing 33,000 hands I have made something like 3bb/100. You have to set aside a lot of time if you want to try and make profit from poker. Obviously I'm not pro and therefore I won't necessarily be making as much as possible but 3bb/100 isn't far off normal. Just a horrible grind:

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