So what did you think?
It looks like about 30 people have downloaded my video as of right now. What did you think? Which hands did you question? Granted, the session was fairly straight forward, but I can think of at least two hands that were pretty non-standard so pipe up. If you have a question or comment, be sure to note the time in minutes/seconds in the video where the hand occured.
I've already talked to a few of you who downloaded it and I appreciate the feedback, but if you're some random world wide web traveller and you downloaded my vid, toss me a bone and give me some feedback :-)
I haven't updated my current profit progress yet this month. I'm going to wait until the month is over to give a full report, but I'm on the verge of my best month ever, thanks to a particular non-poker tracker enabled website. As a result my graph won't look too fancy, but the cashier page of my poker account does.
Later,
Aaron
A birthday gift from me to you
I found this pretty sweet etch-a-sketch image to the left here. Summed up the point of this blog post pretty well!
Today is my birfday. I'm the big 2-6, which is practically ancient in today's online poker world where your latest high stakes pro is rounding out their teenage years.
So for my birfday, I decided I would give you guys a gift from me in the form of a video of me playing and commentating a 4 table session of 2/4nl on pokerstars.
You can download and watch it here. (right-click, save as)
I might spend a few minutes later getting it so the video is embeded into the browser, but i figure most others will find a way to circumvent it anyway and download it to their PC, so whatever.
So as I mentioned at the end of my video, I'm going to start offering some personal poker coaching services. I plan on charging between $100-$200 per hour and I'm willing to coach anything up to 3/6nl. I'll have to talk with them, but it's possible I'll be joining the 3-bet.net crew, which if you're not interested in having me as a coach, you should definitely contact them as they have multiple very qualified people.
I had a coaching session with a friend of mine this week where we spent several hours of him watching me play and me watching him play and just general discussion. I think it was mutually beneficial as it allows me to fully process concepts to verbalize them as well as forcing me to articulate the "why's" that are often just brushed off as "gut instinct". I'm pretty sure he found it useful to learn a few tricks and considerations that he hadn't yet implemented.
Also since I'm not programming these days, I'll have some extra time during the day to take a student or two under my wing.
Anyone else love these career builder commercials with the chimps? They're funny because they're true... wow office life is annoying.
Enough about the chimps...either contact 3-bet.net or contact me directly if you're interested in having a poker coach. I can provide references of people I have coached and I'm certain that they would recommend me. If you want more information on my coaching or 3-bet.net feel free to email me or post a comment here.
Let me know what you think of the video and if there are any hands you disagree with.
Good luck,
Aaron
Been a while...
Sorry for the lack of updates...
Been a long time since I've made an update and sure enough there's a lot that's been going on...
Right now I'm sitting in the Milwaukee airport waiting on my delayed flight to Madison to visit my uncle for a few days. I probably won't be getting too many hands in until Sunday or Monday, but thankfully I've had a decent second week of January that has helped erase some of the bad runs I've been on over the previous 6 weeks, so I don't mind taking some time "off" from poker.
I'm over half way through my first month of being a "poker pro." I'm not sure how long I'll stay on this path but for the time being I'm just trying to get the money while I can. There have been some developments that appear to have hasten the exit of the largest online e-wallet, Neteller, from the US online gambling market. More on that later...
So as for being a poker pro, the lifestyle has been nice, although I really haven't settled into a routine yet. I've done a fair bit of travelling and there have been a lot of things to take care of with our new house that I haven't been able to settle into any sort of set schedule, which I think I'll need to do soon. After Missy and I got back from Mobile from the GMAC Bowl (Southern Miss won btw, 28-7 domination) I tried to start settling into the poker pro lifestyle. It wasn't hard to get used to wearing pajama pants, t-shirt, slippers all day instead of the classic khaki, button-up shirt, brown shoes I've been used to for the last 5-6 years of my professional life. Ever since interning back in Springfield, IL at a consulting firm (LRS, where I'd later work), "business casual" has been the dress code. When playing cards for a living, it's been nice to put the emphasis on the casual so I can get down to business :-)
So as the days have passed since we got back from Mobile, my nights have gotten later and later... At the time of this writing, my daily routine goes about like this: Wake up at about 10:30am, stumble into the office to check my email and take a quick glance at cardrunners and 2+2. Then I'll head downstairs for some breakfast, usually cereal and maybe some yogurt and head back upstairs to get back on the computer and check out 2+2 or analyze hands in pokertracker from the night before. Usually looking at the big pots won and lost to see if I could maximize or minimize anything in those hands. While doing that I finish breakfast and chat with some friends on AIM.
After an hour or so of that I'll fire up some tables and see what the games look like. Usually there are fewer games and they aren't quite as juicy as at night, but between the 3 sites I'm regularly playing, I can usually find 4-6 good tables. I'll play for a couple hours and then take a break around 3:00 for lunch. Lunch usually consists of a sandwich or some leftovers from dinner the night before. While I eat I'll usually watch a cardrunners video. After that's done I'll usually either clean up around the house, play some WoW, run any errands, or just hang out until Missy gets home around 5.
From there I hang out with her and eat dinner until she goes to bed around midnight, which is when the real work begins. Typically the games are the best late at night so thats when I'll put in the bulk of my hands and usually play a solid 3-4+ hours of 4-8 tables before I go to bed between 3 and 4am. After I get in bed I'll check out the DVR for any recorded shows such as High Stakes Poker (on GSN, new season started on Monday) or Poker After Dark (on NBC, a surprisingly good show).
So that's it. As I expected, I really "work" as much if not more as I would at a job, but in the case of poker it's something that doesn't come as easy as programming. Poker is definitely more "fun" but also more stressful. I felt like at my last few contracts I could stay up late into the night playing cards and drag my ass into work and still perform at a high level. Poker definitely takes more study, more drive, more discipline...but that's the part I like, and if you're good and determined, you'll reap the rewards. The same cannot necessarily be said in the business world, or at minimum, the time it takes to achieve the rewards is much longer term.
Ok so now for the big news in online poker. It looks like neteller is going to pull out of the US market sooner than we expected. Apparently two of their primary shareholders are being arrested by the US government because the government says they make a business out of "laundering" money from US consumers to online gambling sites. I guess it's technically true but no one views it as "laundering" in the Al Capone sense of the word. We're just poker players that want an extra level of abstraction from our bank accounts to the poker sites...ugh. Stupid fucking US Government at it again....So you can read about the arrests and the resulting Neteller statement. Basically the gist of it all is that neteller is no longer providing the service of transferring US player funds from their accounts to gambling sites. Your money is safe to withdraw, but it wont be sent from Neteller to the sites. Thankfully since I'm not stuck in a cube listening to managers drone on about task codes, I was able to make some timely deposits and withdraws from the sites I play to keep myself in a good position before the Neteller collapse.
So now that Neteller is out of the picture, that puts a severe cramp in the style of your typical online gambler...which spells trouble for the pros and regulars as it becomes harder for joe blow to get their money into the poker sites. As with all the legislation and now this neteller news, the problem obviously won't be my ability to play, it's the ability of the low, mid, and high stakes fish that deposit a few hundred or thousand to blow... all that money eventually filters up the poker food chain, eventually to the highest stakes and the best players. While I'm not at the highest point right now, 5/10nl being my normal game is in the upper middle and many of the top players do play these stakes when running bad in their normal 25/50 or 10/20 game... so it's easy to see how the games can (and will) likely get worse as a result of this change.
So the moral of the story is I'm not ready to toss away my life as a programmer for the long haul, but I am happy that I'm in a position where I can quite my job to take advantage of online poker while I can without much worry of getting another programming position.
I'll try to update again soon.
Good luck,
Aaron
Gone to the GMAC Bowl
Gone down to Mobile, Alabama for the GMAC Bowl. Dad coaches down at Southern Miss and his boys are playing Ohio U. So far Conference USA has given a poor showing in bowl games, and the MAC is up something like 8-2 in MAC vs Conf USA in bowls, so watch on ESPN Sunday night at 7pm and root on those Golden Eagles!
Probably won't update the blog til next week. I plan on making a long post with my goals for this year and thoughts on playing professionally...so keep an eye out.
Later,
Aaron
Year end review - 2006
The year 2006 was an interesting year to say the least. So much happened, yet there's a lot still to come. My growth as a professional, a poker player, and most importantly a person was significant in the last 12 months.
A year ago at this time I was finishing up 8 months straight on the road travelling for work and getting ready to start another out of town contract. I was heading towards my 2nd full year of dating Missy. My mom was still working away as a doctor down in Mississippi, sis was starting her second semester at Marshall University, and Dad was ready to get back into college football coaching.
As far as poker, I was working hard being a SSNL grinder in my spare time playing .50/1nl and $1/$2nl full ring and 6max, dreaming of the days I'd hopefully be good enough to compete at mid and high stakes. Ask me last January, and I'd have said playing $5/$10nl would be mostly a pipe dream...half heartedly of course. I knew I would make it someday, just not sure when. With a lot of hard work and coaching, I made it in the 4th quarter of this year.
Poker went through quite a metamorphisis as well this year as well. The online gambling "ban" really shook things up and there were times where I really thought online poker was doomed. Thankfully, the degenerate gamblers still persist and tens of thousands of players are still online stacking their virtual chips. The bad news, of course, is that the competition is so much tougher than it was a year ago at all but the smallest stakes. Players are getting better. TV ratings for tournament poker are declining and there isn't as much "fresh meat" as there was a year ago. Things aren't all doom and gloom though. Like anything in nature, poker is about survival of the fittest. Play has shifted to be quite a bit more aggressive than it was. A year ago, 5-bet all in bluff pushing preflop was virtually non-existant, or at least, very few were doing it. Now it's fairly common. The LAG style is the new black.
Party Poker pulling out of the USA took literally millions of dollars of potential profits out of the hands of the Party Poker regulars. Many, including myself, have gone through long dry spots after the party fish were no longer plentiful and jumping into our boats. October 13th, Friday the 13th, (when Party left the US) was a historic date in online poker and who knows how much potential money I lost because of it. A true shame.
So at this time, Full Tilt Poker and PokerStars are the new big kids on the block. It doesn't appear that will change anytime soon. It's sort of crazy that we're in a lull where the games aren't as juicy as they've been in the past few years, yet simultaneously there are more and more ultra nosebleed stakes running consistently. Anywhere from 100/200 to 300/600nl on FTP is running quite often...mostly with the same old crew including Phil Ivey, SBrugby, Ozzy, Durr, OMGClayAiken and the occasional whale such as Skywalker (who is rumored to be Charles Barkley).
Anyway, we're at an interesting time in the online poker timeline. It won't be much longer until the banks will start enforcing the legislation created back in October. That will be the next test of the survivability of online poker. Neteller is pulling out of the US whenever the banks start enforcing the legislation (supposedly 6-9 months from last Oct), so we'll have to see if another online funds transfer service will pop up and take over that market. Party Poker was a punch to the gut, hopefully neteller leaving won't be the knockout blow. I'm fairly confident, one way or another, online poker is here to stay. How profitable the games will be is another story.
Ok enough rambling and time for some graphs. Here's my final graph for the month of December. There's $3,000 profit missing off this graph as I took a shot at 25/50nl when a huge fish was there and 2+2's tcorbin took 1/2 my action. Well I dropped $6k that's reflected on this graph (around hand 32,000) but he reimbursed me $3,000 of it. So final tally of the month was just a hair under $10,000. If it wasn't for a final week rally, I could have easily been break even or worse this month. I can confidently say December 2006 was the most extreme combination of playing well and running horribly I've had in my poker career. It can (and will) get worse, but I felt like I played excellent poker in December, yet my results were pretty awful.
As for the final year recap, I played 345,421 hands of poker and made $103,612 (includes $3k from above). All the hands are reflected here on these two graphs. The first graph is 01/01/2006 through 06/30/2006. Most of the play there was .50/1nl through 2/4nl. The second graph shows 07/01/2006 through 12/31/2006 where most of the playw as from 2/4nl through 5/10nl.
So there you have it. My 2006 has ended as a poker player with me being a regular at 5/10nl on FTP and PS and smoked my goal of $30,000 profit set in January 2006. In my 2006 personal life I got engaged to Missy, my rock to lean on and the love of my life and we bought a house together. In 2006 my professional life has come to a close with the conclusion of my first independent programming contract.
I'm excited to see what's in store for 2007 and I hope you "holla" at me and check out my blog to see how it's going.
Happy New Year!
Aaron
