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.