Finally Booked A Win

Ship the $234.18 winning session - my first in weeks.

I played some heads up 1/2 on tables about to break and tables just being formed and ran good at this insanely high-variance game that I probably shouldn't have been playing given the fairly dire straits in which my bankroll finds itself after the past couple of weeks. I sat against opponents who displayed the classic fish signal of sitting with less than a full stack and thankfully got pretty good cards and was on the good side of some coolers. Unfortunately I still lost about $90 overall at 1/2, putting me almost exactly even over the 10,000 hands I've played at the stake, $600 away from the -3bi stoploss I set for myself.

In what seems to be emerging as a pattern, I did much better at NL100, booking a $320 win. The contrast between my results at NL100 and those at 1/2 is pretty stark when I look at the HEM report for each stake. I'm pretty sure I'm still running unsustainably good at NL100 and I hope I'm playing better at 1/2 than my results indicate.

Winning is nice but it's still kind of sigh-inducing to realize that if this hadn't happened, I'd still be down. As I have discussed previously in some depth on this blog, I'm still terrified that I'm only capable of winning when I'm on the good side of sick coolers where I get it in with two outs and get there. This is one of the hardest aspects of poker psychologically for me. I guess there's nothing I can do except try to make good decisions at all times and accept whatever things happen that I can't control. I hope someday I can consistently outplay people and crush even without running jet-engine hot.

STILL Losing

Just played another session and lost another $300. I quit after this happened and villain showed Jd8d. This hand is pretty much what the past couple of weeks have been like for me. People are pushing me around and I don't know how to deal with it.

I'm $700 away from my stoploss for 1/2. My bankroll has dipped below $6,000. I'm on smoldering lifetilt and I have no idea how I'm going to deal with whatever poker throws at me next. I feel totally lost and incompetent. I wish I knew what I had to do to start winning again.

Still Losing; How to Improve?

Played again today and lost $600. I've lost $2,200 over the past 8,000 hands, cutting my profit for the month down to roughly $900. Same old story - everyone's calling me down, everyone's playing back at me, I'm bricking all my draws in big pots but can't manage to build a decent sized pot for the hands where I hit, blah blah blah blah bla

I still feel like I'm mostly playing well and making good decisions, but I feel ridiculous dismissing an 11-buyin downswing over 8,000 hands as just variance. Whatever it is, it's psychologically pretty painful and I hope it turns around soon. God, I hate thinking about how hard I'm going to have to grind to win back those 11 buyins and how long it's going to take before I'm out of the hole. My total lifetime profit from 1/2 has dropped to around $400, and I'm getting perilously close to my -$600 stoploss for the stake. I've never had to move down before, and being a mere 5 buyins away from having to do so sucks a lot.

During times like this, I frequently wish I had a coach or at least a membership to CardRunners so I could try to glean some insight from proven winning players at these levels. I'm getting to the point in my poker career where a CardRunners account might conceivably be able to pay for itself - it's $400 a year and I can start to imagine the things I learn saving me at least 2 buyins over the course of a year playing 1/2. But it's not quite clear to me that I wouldn't be able to learn the same things just by reading articles and forum posts and chatting, and I'm also afraid that it would end up being like a gym membership where I've paid for it as a resource but, out of sloth, I never actually utilize it. So I'm not going to pull the trigger yet.

Another interesting and kind of funny thing preventing me from dropping four hundo on a CR membership is that I've already lost so much at the tables that $400 would represent a nontrivial hit to my bankroll. Of course, when I'm winning, I don't want to spend money on a CR membership either because I feel like I don't need it - I'm winning on my own right? Heh.

Every now and then you hear about some sick baller who joined CR as struggling small stakes players and is now making six figs crushing the games, but I'm always skeptical as to how big of a factor CR really was in the growth of players like that. I strongly suspect that anyone who is capable of making six figs playing poker would have gone on to enjoy great success even without CR.

If a CR membership is borderline-worth-it, then there's no way getting actual human coaching can possibly be worth it. Anyone good enough to give me worthwhile advice for 1/2 is good enough to beat 1/2 and is therefore good enough to charge an hourly rate way above what I can afford. I can't imagine that over the course of an hour of coaching, anyone would be able to give me enough advice to justify paying him $300 or whatever exorbitant price those guys charge to sweat you. Over the course of that hour we would be lucky to see one interesting spot and whatever advice he would give me about it would probably be worth something like 0.0000047 BB/100 in the long run and I just don't see it being worth it.

I'm definitely not satisfied with the rate at which I'm improving as a player, and obviously I'm extremely dissastisfied with my results over the past few weeks, but for now, at least in the short term, I think I'm going to stick with just reading books, reading the free CardRunners blogs, and trying to get input about difficult spots from forums and chat.

I Did It

Today marks a momentous accomplishment in my poker career - for the first time ever, I lost one thousand dollars in one day at the tables.

This sucks. I look forward to the day when a grand is less than one buyin for me and I don't have to sweat four-fig downswings. Hopefully, that day actually comes.

Out Of My Depth

I have no idea how I'm supposed to win at NL100 when villains are capable of doing things like this. I have this guy drawing dead and he is somehow able to make this sick bluff and show me As4s after I fold and show my AA. How can he possibly do this? Does my range really look that weak after I barrel on that terrifying turn? Am I giving him too much credit after he checkraises that terrifying turn? What the fuck?

Part of me thinks that I need to more aware of spots where I can do this to people on superscary cards, but part of me thinks that nobody else at NL100 on Cake will make the fold I made. Short of taking meticulous notes on every hand I see every villain play and doing deep analysis to figure out who of them is capable of folding, I don't see what I can do about this.

I really hope this guy is just a fish who stumbled upon an incredibly sick play but I can't shake the feeling that IT IS I WHO AM THE FISH...

Am I Insane?

Just played a little 267-hand session and lost $278.60. Love that -$1/hand lossrate.

One of the most personally frustrating things about poker for me is my horrible tendency to make the same fairly obvious and very expensive mistakes over and over. I seem to have some sort of poker learning disability that prevents me from learning from my own past mistakes. For example, this hand highlights probably the biggest and most persistent leak in my entire game, which is my inability to fold one pair on late streets when it's clearly no good.

Villain there is a huge fish but there is still almost no way my aces are ever good on this river. I lose to any heart. I lose to any 9. I lose to QJ, QT, JT, and even weird random AK that might get played like this by a fish. He is almost never betting when I check there with anything that I'm beating. He checks behind nearly all of the time even with his AQ with no heart or KQ with no heart or KK with no heart or Q7 with no heart or whatever I'm desperately hoping he has when I call. Welp, seeya later, $100! No idea why I keep doing this to myself. There's a quote that I've seen attributed to Albert Einstein and Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Edison and a whole host of other smart people from across history that goes something like "the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results." Am I insane?

This was another expensive failure that I just inflicted upon myself. I pick up a little suited 1-gapper in the small blind here and 3bet a TAGgish player who I suspect is opening pretty wide from the button. I get called, which is bad for me - 3betting light and getting flatcalled by a player in position is a spot where I'm still pretty uncomfortable. On the flop I think his range is mostly AK, AQ, JJ, and TT, with possibly some AA-QQ and 99 in there as well. I flop the ol' gutshot with backdoor straight flush draw and bet trying to represent AK and fold out everything except his AK/KK/AA and possibly some bluffcatching pairs if he doesn't believe me, but he calls. I'm even more uncomfortable here and am quickly losing confidence in my ability to range him accurately any more.

I think the turn is actually a good card for me, giving me a bunch of flush outs without sullying my 4 outs to a straight, but at this point I'm thinking that he's defined his hand within a pretty narrow range of pairs and now possibly trips and I don't think I have much fold equity on this turn against the range of hand that call my flop bet. I was debating between (1) checking and giving up if he bets, and (2) overbet-shoving trying to push him off his weaker bluffcatching hands and get it in with decent equity against AK, but I timed out and got auto-checked by Cake's horrible software that doesn't allow you to request extra time in cash games. In retrospect, checking might not be terrible because with his AK he might try to make a small valuebet hoping to get called by TT-AA that I have trouble laying down, and I might be able to call getting good implied odds and stacking him if I hit my well-disguised straight or backdoor flush. This didn't occur to me at the time, and I have no idea if it's analytically sound. I would love anyone's input on what the correct play is here.

He checks behind on this turn, which I don't think gives me any more information about his range. Obviously I miss on the river. I check basically because I still really think his range is dominated by AK here and I really don't want to put any more money into this pot. In retrospect, a play consider here might be to bet some amount like $23, because I think he has a lot of trouble calling that with QQ or worse and I can easily fold to his shove if he has AK or AA. But I just don't know if he has worse than AK often enough here to make that play profitable. Again, I would love anyone's input on the best way to play this river.

As you can see, he checked behind again on the river and showed up with a hand that I hadn't even considered in his range. This is more or less the worst thing that can happen in poker and basically tells me that I severely fucked up this hand. Whenever this happens, it basically makes me feel like a complete novice, like I know nothing about poker and need to start over from the beginning.

And that's more or less how this entire session made me feel. Nothing I was trying was working, everyone was playing back at me, I felt like I was getting pushed around by everyone, and I just couldn't stop bleeding money. It's a pretty discouraging feeling, especially compounded with the despair that comes from knowing that your most expensive mistakes are ones you should know better than to make, and not knowing why you still keep making them.

McRib is Back

After hearing me talk about how often I eat at McDonalds these days since it's the closest and cheapest food option to my school, my parents started sending me McDonalds gift cards ("Arch Cards") during exam periods. Each card is accompanied by a note reminding me that the purpose of this gift is to make it unnecessary for me to cook during exam periods, thereby saving me time that I should spend studying harder. Let's hear it for Asian parents.

Seldom do I actually use up the entire balance of the gift card by the end of exams, so I usually have some money left on the card that I can use for lunch for the first few weeks of the following semester. Yesterday, I visited McDonalds and saw to my delight that the McRib was back on the menu.

The McRib was one of my favorite items on the McDonalds menu and I was pretty disappointed when it was removed from the regular menu a few years ago and transformed into a limited-time promotional item. I can see the business logic behind this, since the McRib was probably one of the weaker-selling items and making it a special limited-time thing probably boosts sales during the brief periods when it's available while eliminating the costs that would be associated with having it on the menu year-round, but I really liked the McRib was sad to see it go. I've somehow missed all of the limited-time promotions and as of yesterday morning, the last time I'd had a McRib was in high school.

So obviously I had a three-McRib lunch yesterday. I ate at about 1:30pm and was pretty ecstatic that McRib was going to be part of my life again, even if just for a limited time at participating McDonalds locations. But around 4:00pm, I started feeling...digestively unsettled. I have a pretty weak constitution in general so this isn't terribly uncommon and I usually deal with it just by forcing out a few burps and farts and basically walking it out and praying for no vomiting or diarrhea. But by 5:00pm it became very clear that this low-intensity approach wasn't going to be sufficient. I really wanted to just tough it out and survive through my 6pm-9pm class, but that just wasn't going to happen. I managed to grind out a miserable walk home, where I was very careful to stay within 3-second sprint distance of a trash can at all times.

As I stumbled into the lobby of my building, I was reminded that one of the elevators in our building is out of order, leaving only one functional elevator to serve the entire building. I cursed the world as I sat hunched over waiting for it; it was stopped on the 13th floor, then it went up to the 18th floor, then on its way down it had to stop at the 6th floor, then obviously it had to go to the basement before finally stopping at the ground floor to pick me up. Fuck my building.

So finally I'm able to burst through the door of my apartment, tear off my clothes, and collapse into a vomiting heap in front of my toilet. McRib does not taste as good coming up as it does going down. Vomiting sucks. The horrible bitter metallic taste of your digestive enzymes in the back of your throat is bad, but the worst part for me is always the dry heaves, when I can never decide whether to let them keep going and basically suffocate myself in the hope that I can force out a little extra load of puke, or to suppress them in search of relief from the pain. In between bouts of this, I was seized by attacks of liquid shits that were actually not really that bad in terms of intensity, but the odor certainly wasn't helping the vomit situation.

I've had plenty of stomach illnesses before, but never anything like this. By roughly 6pm, I was laid out on the floor of my apartment basically unable to move. The pins-and-needles numbness that had started with the first bout of vomiting had grown into full-blown spastic cramping palsy. It was pretty terrifying to be laying there and watching my hands and feet involuntarily twist around into weird abnormal angles and cramp up excruciatingly. I was pretty sure that I needed medical attention at this point because I was obviously extremely dehydrated and there was no way I was going to be able to keep down any fluids I drank. So I was able to crawl over to the heap of my clothes, dig my phone out of my pocket, and call an ambulance.

By the time the ambulance got to my apartment, I was literally moaning in agony as every muscle in my body was slowly and painfully inching toward full flexion. When the paramedics lifted me into the wheelchair, I looked down at my legs and saw them literally straighten out and lift up into the air completely on their own. And again the fucking elevator - I had to wait for like 5 minutes sitting there in that wheelchair with the paramedics because it just wouldn't fucking come.

Even after we finally got to the emergency room, it took me like 20 minutes to get triaged and another two hours or so before a nurse could even give me an IV and anti-nausea medicine. This entire time I was in pretty serious pain and was basically involuntarily making a huge scene in the ER waiting room with my flailing spastic limbs and grunting and begging for water. Frenzied thoughts raced in and out of my head about whether or not this was a breach of duty by the hospital and how I probably wouldn't even have a tort remedy for this because the standard of care in emergency rooms is just so shitty, and how I hope Obamacare allows me to get an IV immediately if this ever happens again.

About three hours after this I was finally able to see a doctor, who basically just told the nurses to keep giving me IV fluids until my blood pressure climbed back up into normal range. The nurse also helped me control my breathing, which sucked a lot and felt basically like I was holding my breath at the end of a marathon, but seemed to help with the cramping and palsy in my extremities.

I had weird feverish dreams about being a character in an RPG and fighting some sort of evil knight who didn't have very many hit points but had tons of armor so none of my attacks did much damage. I woke up this morning feeling still pretty awful but way better than last night. BP was normal, muscular control had returned, and I didn't feel like I was in any danger of vomiting. I'm back home now with instructions not to eat any heavy foods (as if there were any danger of that happening) and to rest for the next few days.

I've recently learned that two girls I know made out at a bar last night and I missed it because of this. I'm also going to have to miss a giant free food event tonight and a party tonight that I had been hoping to attend.

It's hard to make a strong causal connection between the McRib and my illness, even though circumstantially it seems obvious. I could easily just have rubbed my nose with a hand that was on a handrail that some sick person also used, or whatever. I'm pretty sure I don't have any sort of tort remedy against McDonalds for this - too hard to prove causation and probably no res ipsa available because the injury itself doesn't necessarily support an inference of negligence. I'm hesitant to blame the McRib, but I definitely won't be eating another one for a long time, possibly ever.

Sick Basketball Rungood and Poker-Applicable Lessons

One of the non-poker things I do is coach college intramural sports teams composed of a group of my old college friends who are still in college. IM sports are taken pretty seriously at my alma mater and I am proud to say that we have been pretty successful so far in the 2009-2010 year, winning all-undergrad championships in both the mens division and coed division in flag football. We issued challenges to the champions of the grad student leagues but unfortunately due to weather conditions and time constraints our dreams of postseason bowl game glory had to be postponed indefinitely.

The guys told me they wanted to try running the triangle offense in basketball this year so I bought a copy of Tex Winter's book on the triangle and studied it for an average of about an hour a day over winter break, about 20 hours total. This is probably more time than I've spent studying for literally any academic class I've ever taken in my life. These guys are my friends and doing my part, however small, to help them succeed just feels like way stronger of an imperative on my time than studying Regulation A limited offering exemptions to the reporting requirements of the Securities Act of 1933.

Sadly, the old bit of folk wisdom about the triangle being nearly impossible to teach or learn within a reasonable period of time is more or less proving true and as the complexities of the offense become more and more apparent, the guys seem to be losing interest in running it. Welp.

Anyway, league play began last week and unfortunately we started the season with a tough loss to a team against which I think we have a pretty solid edge. We played pretty awful defense all game, giving up tons of open shots, and ran really bad with our own shooting and ended up losing a game where I think we are something like a 65-35 favorite.

Last night we had our second game of the season against probably the strongest team in our league. We were missing our second best player and we figured ourselves to be pretty bad dogs in this spot, but far from drawing dead. Well, as if to make up for last week, we came out shooting hotter than the sun and built a 15-point lead within the first ten minutes of the game and held for game. We basically did to these guys what the team that beat us last week did to us - played smart, patient basketball, taking advantage of the seams in their passive 2-3 zone defense with aggressive shooting, taking calculated risks in order to invite the variance in our favor that we knew we would need to win, and building an early advantage that ended up putting a better team in an uncomfortable and unfamiliar situation where they were psychologically weakest.

Basically, we ran really good, but our entire gameplan was keyed toward maximizing the possible potential benefits of running good and inviting rungood in crucial spots where we could leverage it best if it occurred. Thinking about the factors that went into our win last night, I couldn't help but recall the advice that tournament poker players often repeat about success in tournaments (yep, here comes the implausible weak poker tie-in for this post). I don't really know anything about tournament play, but it seems like I constantly hear about the importance of taking risks to accumulate chips early in order to survive potentially costlier late-game variance, the importance of identifying the weaknesses in other players' games and pushing thin edges, and coming to terms with the reality that in order to win giant variancetrap situations like MTTs, you will have to get lucky. Competitive sports games are some of the biggest variancetraps of all, so it's not surprising that a lot of the same insights are applicable. For more on this topic, I would suggest reading this excellent post by nachos on the badbeatscrew blog.

Looking over that post reminds me of another way I've tried to link poker wisdom with sports, and that is my ongoing quest not to be results-oriented in possibly the most results-oriented subculture of which I am a part. Whenever I'm talking to my team about strategy, I always try to emphasize being process-oriented and decision-oriented, and focusing on making the play that gives us the best chance of winning regardless of whether or not it ends up being successful as a matter of fact. One of my heroes with respect to this is Shane Battier, who has been my favorite NBA player ever since I read that famous New York Times Magazine article by Michael Lewis from about a year ago about his approach to basketball. Battier's whole approach to defending sick monsters like Kobe who are +ev in literally every spot is to spend hours analyzing their games to find the particular spots in which they are the least +ev and orient his entire game to forcing them into those spots. A good percentage of the time, Kobe will still drop 30 on him, but he is okay with that as long as he knows that he forced Kobe into comparatively bad spots all game long. This is the most he can do, and even if he loses he can be confident in the knowledge that he played optimally.

One final thing - Malcolm Gladwell wrote an article about the full court press for the New Yorker a few months ago in which he concluded that a weaker team can gain an advantage over a stronger team by using the full court press. Like lots of things that he writes, this is a really cool and interesting idea on its face, but pretty much everyone I know who knows anything about basketball agrees that it is wrong.

The basic idea of the press is to exploit poor ballhandling and ball movement in the open court, poor conditioning, and psychological weakness and unpreparedness in the face of an aggressive nonstandard strategy. These are huge leaks that are common in lots of weak teams but nearly no strong teams. Gladwell's main example for how the press is a good tool for weak teams to employ against strong teams was how the worst team in a middle school girls league used it to beat all the best middle school girls teams. The problem with his reasoning is that even the best middle school girls team is pretty bad in absolute terms, and can be expected to suffer from the embarassing defects that make the press effective.

Even at the college intramural level, a fairly good percentage of teams are good enough to render the press ineffective. At every level of play beyond middle school girls, the press is primarily a tool used by good teams to push their edge and minimize variance against bad teams. As Tex Winter writes and I paraphrase, the press is basically an insult to the team being pressed. Toward the beginning of the season, I was hoping that we would run into some team during the season that had read the Gladwell article and was going to try to run the press against us so that we could punish them for this insult.

This ended up being way longer than I thought it was going to be - congratulations if you somehow made it all the way to the end of this. Depending on what people want, I can post more or less about sports in the future. Please comment if you can.

The Losses Hurt More Than the Wins Feel Good

For the last week of December and the first two weeks of January, I went on the heater of my life and won $3,100 in the span of 4,000 hands. This is a pretty remarkable hot streak. But over the past week, I've played roughly another 4,500 hands and lost $800. Overall, for the month so far, I've played about 8,500 hands and booked $2,300 of profit - unquestionably a great month for a small stakes player. But this brief stretch of losing over the past few days has had a pretty disproportionate effect on my psychological state.

I initially suspect that part of it is just the size of the numbers in absolute dollar terms. The idea of losing $800 without any context is pretty jarring, especially for a lifenit like me. $800 is almost a full month's rent. It is almost as much money as I spend on food in a full year. Losing this amount of money feels awful when I think of it in those terms. So what if I try to think about in terms of buyins rather than dollars? If I frame losing $800 in terms of buyins at 1/2, it's just a 4 buyin downswing. Downswings of 4 buyins are pretty routine for anyone who puts in any real volume at poker, including myself.

I know this to be true on an intellectual level and I know that it should provide some measure of comfort to me and help me dismiss this heretofore brief and mild downswing as not being a big deal. But I still feel pretty awful about it. And it's same type of awfulness that I felt back when I was grinding away at NL20 and lost $80. This suggests to me that the actual dollar amounts are not really that big of a deal, and that I'm good enough at divorcing the ideas of real world money and poker bankroll that it isn't really an issue for me.

Losing sucks and winning is fun. This is obvious not only in poker but in every endeavor where it's possible to win or lose. I have been a winning player overall, especially this month. It would seem to stand to reason that looking back on this month, I should be more happy than sad, but right now this doesn't seem to be the case. A 5,000-hand breakeven stretch has me feeling pretty down. Why, given that I know I am still up more than $2,000 for the month?

Thinking back to my state of mind at the peak of my heater, I felt pretty ecstatic and giddy, but the magnitude of that happiness was definitely less than the magnitude of my unhappiness right now while going through a downswing of vastly lesser magnitude than my heater. It seems to be that psychologically, for me, losing hurts more than winning feels good.

Part of this could be due to the nature of my wins and losses. My massive heater was fueled by a combination of (1) playing with lots really bad players who were not online poker regulars and who decided to play over the holidays and ended up just spewing away tons of money into my waiting hands, and (2) getting really card-lucky both by having strong enough hands to stack off against these fish and by hitting nearly all of my draw. These are things that are basically totally outside my control and are totally inapposite to the question of whether or not I am actually a good poker player. For example, take a look at one of my biggest wins during that period. This is a hand where I just happened to be in the right place at the right time against some idiot who was begging for someone to take his money. Witness also this gem, where I get it in as a 3:1 dog, get there on the turn, and also manage to dodge his ten outs to a boat or quads on the river.

On the other hand, my losses over the past week have been largely from spots where I've stupidly called people down with weak one-pair hands and stupidly tried to shove people off obviously strong hands while holding nothing. These are things that are totally within my own control, and are the very essence of the question of whether or not I am actually a good poker player. To illustrate, take a look at this disaster, wherein I idiotically pay someone off with second pair on the river, or this trainwreck, wherein, playing against a tough regular, I ignore an incredibly strong turn call and shove on a river that helps every hand but mine.

This demonstrates to me that all of my wins have simply been the results of incredible dumb luck and all of my losses have been caused by my own terrible play and bad decisionmaking. This is largely why I feel so bad. I'm not doing anything special or brilliant that's resulting in my wins. I'm not making spectacular, sick plays - I'm just getting really good cards. But my losses are mostly due to massive blunders that I can't possibly honestly dismiss as mere bad luck. The psychological effect of this is to undermine my confidence in my ability to win at this game in the long run, as time goes to infinity and the cards end up treating everyone equally. If the only way I can win is by running like Usain Bolt, how am I going to avoid going broke when luck equalizes?

I believe the reason these small routine downswings inspire such dread in me is that they tap into my deep-rooted fear of being a losing player in the long run. Every time I swing down, I'm terrified that the long run has finally arrived.

My Poker Story, Part II

So between roughly late 2006 and early 2009, I played almost no poker. The old home games I used to go to had more or less dried up and got together maybe once every few months. Poker basically stopped being a part of my life until the fateful 2009 World Series of Poker.

The main thing that brought me back to poker in June 2009 was Leo Wolpert winning the $10k heads up tournament at the 2009 WSOP. I knew Leo from collegiate quiz bowl circuit, having played quiz bowl for Chicago during some of the years he had been playing for Michigan and Virginia. In fact, I had actually played poker against him several times in games organized around quiz bowl tournaments. I have a pretty vivid memory of one particular night when he was in Chicago for quiz bowl and played in a $20 buy-in one-table tournament at a quiz bowler's apartment. I remember playing a hand against him and trying to bluff him with a low pair and getting called and hitting my two-outer to bust him out, and then watching him fire up his laptop and start playing online, where he had won $200 by the time I myself busted. I also have good memories of going to Maryland for a quiz bowl tournament and being the least drunk person at the end of a post-tournament hotel room drinkathon and driving Leo and several others to someone's house because there weren't enough beds in the hotel room for everyone. Good times.

Anyway, Leo shipped a half a milli and his huge amazing win got lots of attention in the internet communities that I frequent. I decided that I would give online poker another shot and see what happened. After doing some research, I chose to play on Cake because of the higher default rakeback rate and because the internet forum posts I had read suggested that the player base was worse than that of the major sites. I probably could have researched more thoroughly because while this may have been true in early 2007, it's not really true any more and the regs on Cake are just as nitty as the regs anywhere else.

So in June 2009, I deposited $100 on Cake and decided that I would take a legitimate shot at becoming a winning online poker player. Well, my first night playing, I got sick of 3-tabling NL4 after half an hour and sat with half my roll at an NL50 table and got it in pre AK vs KK. Guess that's the end of th...BOOYAKA ACE ON THE FLOP, ship a 50% jump in my bankroll. Even though I ended up sucking out, this hand scared me straight and I began taking bankroll management much more seriously. To this day, I pride myself on being one of the most responsible (ie nittiest) bankroll managers I know.

For a couple of months, I just grinded NL4 and freerolls. I played about 10,000 hands of NL4, which at the time I thought was a massive sample but which I now realize is basically nothing, and my winrate was almost 10 BB/100. Basically I was killing the game, which isn't surprising given how uniformly bad the players at nanostakes tend to be. I also was able to bink a few freerolls and after a few months I few myself rolled for moving up to NL10.

This was all during the summer of 2009. I remember going through the on-campus interview process (which used to be how most law students at my law school got their lucrative big law firm jobs, but which this year was a huge trainwreck for a lot of people and may never be what it once was; I may eventually post more of my thoughts on the future of the legal profession and my future in the legal profession) and going to the mock courtroom in the downtime between interviews to grind NL10. Over a sample of 36,000 hands I maintained a fairly solid winrate of 4.5 BB/100, and with the help of rakeback I soon found myself rolled for NL20.

I played about 47,000 hands of NL20 and was only able to beat it for a miserable 1.2 BB/100. I suspect a good deal of this was just running bad, but I do think the skill leap between NL10 and NL20 is considerable. A lot of higher stakes players would scoff at that statement but I think there's a sort of point of inflection in the graph of poker difficulty between NL10 and NL20 and NL20 (or I guess NL25 on Pokerstars and Full Tilt) is the first stake level where you mostly find people who are serious about poker and know what they're doing, as opposed to clueless bad players. It's possible that I just feel this way because of my own idiosyncratic experiences struggling to beat NL20.

In mid-November of 2009 I had about $1,500 in my Cake account and finally decided to sack up and deposit and move up to NL50 and grind out my deposit bonus. This had been my plan all along, but it was still difficult to do because a long stretch of barely beating NL20 had damaged my confidence. But with the encouragement of the other regulars in #smallstakes, I found the courage to tackle "the fifty," as it's called. As soon as I moved up, I immediately went on an incredible heater and made about $800 in my first 10,000 hands. I avoided any major runbad through the month of December and by the holidays found myself with more than $3,000 in my bankroll.

The tables, even on a small site like Cake, were just so good over the holidays that I decided to take a few shots at NL100 and even 1/2 in late December. I ran 7 buy-ins under EV over my first 3,000 hands of NL100 but only ended up down about $90, while I ran about a buy-in over EV in 700 hands of 1/2 during the same period.

That brings us to 2010. I've continued playing at NL100 and 1/2, mostly 1/2, into the new year and have had amazing success that I like to think is due to superior play, but is likely just absurd rungood. Over the past two weeks, I've played about 5,000 hands of 1/2 and have enjoyed a winrate of about 7 BB/100. In that same period, I've played about 2,000 hands of NL100 and have enjoyed a winrate of 11 BB/100. I've watched my bankroll balloon to nearly $7,000, and the tail of end of this, the heater of my life, is where I stand today. My hope is that I continue running good and playing good and consolidate my wins and establish myself permanently at these stake levels.

My Poker Story, Part I

In the internet poker community, it is customary upon introducing yourself to provide your "poker story," the story of your poker life thus far. The first few posts of this blog are going to be my poker story. It is going to be extremely long and I won't finish it in one sitting so I'm splitting it into parts.

My first contact with poker was a handheld five-card-draw video game that my dad gave me when we lived in Nevada. I think he bought it with comp points from some casino. He also got a handheld blackjack video game, but I think I spent more time with the poker one. It was a pretty standard video poker game where you played five card draw and got paid a certain amount if you had a pair of jacks or better. I don't remember the payouts so I couldn't say whether or not the game was +ev, but I do remember going busto countless times employing a strategy of just holding onto any pair or high card higher than a J and drawing trying to pair my high card or improve to two pair or trips or a boat. Six-year-old me had no concept of drawing to straights or flushes.

My parents eventually took that game away from me and I forgot about poker until college. One day I walked into the common area of my dorm and saw a bunch of my housemates playing poker. I basically sneered at them because I initially thought of it as simple gambling and thought they were just shuffling money amongst themselves randomly. But over the course of the year, I became more and more curious about the game and eventually I was convinced to sit at this $0.10/$0.20 no-limit texas hold 'em game with maximum buy-in of $10. Having basically no idea what I was doing, I broke even over my first several sessions. As I played, I began to realize that there was room for skill in this game and that application of skill could potentially be profitable.

My first poker teacher was a housemate of mine from San Diego who started the house game and claimed to have experience playing in casinos in California. He introduced me to the basic fundamental concepts of starting hand strength and being selective about which hands to play and playing aggressively with strong hands. I know that he also played online. This was during the golden age of PartyPoker and the post-Moneymaker poker boom. In retrospect, I'm skeptical of his tales of casino glory given that he spent hours and hours playing microstakes home games with us clowns, but I guess it's not unthinkable.

Playing what I thought was solid TAG poker but what I now realize was weak-tight meganit poker, I eked out wins in that game against my housemates who were playing recreationally.

In addition to the regular house game, I discovered a weekly tournament that was organized by some better players from across campus that usually had a $10 or $20 buyin and paid the top 4 or 5 out of 15-20 entrants. I was incredibly nervous the first time I ever played in this tournament, but I somehow binked first and thought I was rich with my $90 win. With my adrenaline pumping from the win, I promptly sat at a side game for unthinkable $0.25/$0.50 stakes and spewed it all away.

Over the course of college I continued to play in these home games. I often wonder how objectively hard these games were. I definitely frequently felt like I was in over my head against some of the other players, and I know that many of them ended up going pro or semi-pro and making five and six figures online and in Vegas. I sometimes suspect that those college games were some of the toughest I've ever played.

During this period, I investigated online poker and deposited a few times on some Party skins, but my basic pattern was to sign up for an account and deposit $50 and sit with my entire deposit at one table of NL50 and go busto within a few days, and then try to grind freerolls until I scraped up enough money to redeposit. I repeated this cycle maybe 3 or 4 times before giving up on online poker for the time being.

As most of the regulars from the home games I was playing graduated or dropped out to go to Vegas, the games became less and less frequent and by the time I finished college and started law school, I had more or less forgotten about poker.

Introduction and Statement of Purpose

Hello. I am Secret Asian Man. I came up with this name back in like 1999 when I was in high school and thought it was the most brilliant thing ever. I have since realized that it is a pretty obvious and not very clever pun, but I have registered for a lot of internet things under that name and it is how a lot of my internet friends know me so I am keeping it.

I am 23 years old. My parents immigrated from China and I was born in the United States and grew up mostly in New England. I came to Chicago for college and stayed for law school. My main interest other than law school is poker and I expect a fairly large portion of the content of this blog to be about poker.

I spend a lot of time in the #smallstakes IRC channel on synirc and a while ago some of the regulars there started their own blog site and didn't give me an account. So now I'm starting my own blog. Screw those jerks.

However, I also intened to post about non-poker things in my life, like law school, martial arts, sports, being poor, being lonely, being depressed, and trying to get my life together.