Pokes updates, Full Tilt reborn, and volume challenge!

Thought I’d drop in with an update since it’s been a while…

Well, around 1 and a half months in and it’s already been interesting. Things were off to an amusing start on the first day when I accidentally registered in a $500 buy-in game misjudging it for a $100 game from my lobby display messing up. Unfortunately I bubbled in a coin flip scenario! Mehhhhhhhh….At least it wasn’t any higher! A $1k or $2k game would have been devastating.

First month review

All in all though, in spite of my volume sucking I managed decent profits relative to the hours/games I put in. I only managed slightly less than half of the hours and games I had set boasting an ROI of 10.9% at an average stake of around $60 and managing a profit of around $3200 before bonus/rakeback. With such a short sample, these numbers are pretty meaningless in a game with so much short term variance. I did put in way more time than anticipated working on my game off the tables (hard to say how much, maybe somewhere between 10 and 20 hours each week), and whilst it won’t help achieve short term volume goals it should help boost my ROI and expectation in the long run. I did at least meet my exercise goals and put in around 194 miles on the bike for the month so at least that was something.

Remember remember 6^th of November  

The start of last month also brought great news that Pokerstars had purchased Full tilt’s assets with intentions of making full pay-outs to ex-players. It has now been confirmed non-US players will be paid out in full on November 6^th. As a former full tilt player, I had my most profitable month in poker at the time right before it shut down last June and had around a $4k bankroll on there. I had more or less accepted I wouldn’t be seeing this money again when a deal broke through around four or five months ago. However, rumours then surfaced that Pokerstars were in the hunt to buy over and since they seemed like the last hope, it was good news they were able to strike a deal. Whilst this is great for my money and will be an excellent boost to my current bankroll, it’s hard to say how good it will be for online poker in the long run. Pokerstars running the two biggest sites in the industry means a complete monopoly giving them the ability to increase rake/worsen bonuses if they so choose so only time will tell what happens. Hopefully it’s not long before the Americans are allowed back on which would likely create a second poker boom and increase the number of profitable games running.

Volume challenge

Off the table work is essential and there’s always stuff you can do to improve, but the idea is your time becomes focused more towards playing once you have a lot of experience under your belt and have spent plenty of time off the tables. With that in mind, I’ve decided to challenge myself to reach 200k VPPs before the year is up, which means at my current pace (around 76k) I’ll have to grind my ass off and average around 9k per week. For some, this would be a walk in the park but it will be a challenge for me, especially since I’ve only managed 76k for the entire year to this point which really does suck although not really a surprise given I’ve only grinded part-time until now. The reward for reaching 200k pays $2.6k alone along with multiple FPP bonus prizes along the way, so should be a profitable proposition unless I lose everything at the tables which is unlikely but on a horrid run could happen. The other potential downside is I’ll likely have to play in some games that are –EV before rakeback or a breakeven proposition which will reduce my ROI and increase variance/stress levels. If I start losing a lot I’ll just need to make sure I’m exercising good bankroll management and playing within my limits so I’m not affected as much, with perhaps adding in extra lower stakes tables to account for that and make up VPPs. My plan will be to hit supernova before or on October 1^st and unless I do so I’ll be making life difficult for myself in the remaining months and the challenge may not have much merit.

That more or less wraps up everything for now, I’ll be updating in the next day or two with another hand analysis, so until then …Peace out