Wednesday, January 23, 2013

Living it little and large


David and I both won packages for UKIPT Edinburgh and although we tried to get Stars to give us t$ for one, they were having none of it so we ended up with two hotel rooms worth over a grand for a week. The upside of this inflexibility was it meant we not only got to live like rich people for a week, we also got to be generous benefactors to two of our friends. Mrs Doke didn't fancy it much (the only other time we were there was for a 100 km race around Herriott Watt university, and we stayed near the campus, out past the less salubrious part of Edinburgh made famous by Trainspotting) so in my case I shared with (Oh My God It's) Jason Tompkins, while David elected to bring along a non poker friend, the ridiculously talented photographer Rob O'Connor. David claims that when he informed me of this, I responded with "It will be good to be able to spend time with someone that isn't you". My recollection is it was more a case of me saying it would be good to have a non poker companion so we wouldn't just talk about poker hands. In any case, Rob was an astute choice as he knew Edinburgh  well and his aesthetic sense meant we followed him along to some great places we would never have found alone (history suggests that on most away trips, we spend nearly all our time in poker rooms, hotel rooms, coffee shops and bars talking about flops and turns).

One of the twists of variance is that if you take a group of poker friends, it rarely hits them all the same way at the same time. The more usual scenario with three or four poker amigos will be that one will be riding on the crest of a wave while the other two hang on grimly to the underbelly of a downswing (I'm talking about live poker here: online is a different affair where thanks to increased volume everything evens itself out that much quicker). In our group, Jason has had the most amazing twelve months live (a High Roller win and a couple of high profile WSOP and EPT final tables) while David and myself have spent a lot of time in hotel rooms, coffee shops and bars this past year. Add in Jason's recent third in the Milly and it is not surprising that the first thing a lot of people wanted to talk to either me or David about was Jason. It's always nice to be able to talk about a friend's success and Jason deserves all the adulation he is receiving at the moment.

The egregious rates the Balmoral wanted to charge us for Internet access (75 quid for the week) meant no online grinding option. I think Stars are missing a trick by allowing this to happen (I imagine they could use their bargaining muscle to get a better deal, or if it comes to it, just pick up the tab....I'm pretty sure most people staying in the hotel for the UKIPT would have contributed more than 75 quid in rake if allowed to over the week).

My own assault on the main event was a bit of a non event. I toiled away for much of day 1 drifting back from starting stack until I got lucky with jacks. After I opened, the big blind defended. He check called a J43 flop and check raised the turn (a ten). At this stage I figured I had either set over setted the poor man, or he was playing aces or kings unconventionally again (in an earlier hand, he had flatted aces on the button after an open, a raise and a call) and stuck the lot in. He had aces and I doubled to 22k. A table move to a dark corner of the back room (I have never had such trouble seeing my own cards) late in the day saw me crash back down to 5k after two unfortunate incidents (a flopped set losing to a runner runner flush which I had to squint to see, and aces to j9o on a j high flop with no nine on it). A few reships late in the day saw me pushing back towards health with over 9k, and two in the first orbit on day 2 got me up past 15k again. Then an hour without cards or spots meant getting it in with nines and no fold equity over a loose early raiser. He had kjo and won the flip.

I played a couple of side events and got deepish but no cigar (I was 7th in a High Roller sat with 5 paid). So lots of time for hotel rooms, coffee shops and bars, and sightseeing. Highlight was the Camera Obscura that Rob ushered us along to, where he took this photo I like, an illustration of the mirror opposite swings you will have to deal with in poker friendships where one friend is living it large on the upside of variance while the other hunkers on the downswing.


A few years ago, my oldest son came to me for career advice. Like a lot of oldest sons his initial thoughts were to follow in his old man's footsteps. I didn't want to go into specifics (Be a fireman!). I certainly kept it to myself that I thought following me into a career in technology (at the time: this was before I learned to click buttons profitably) was not a good choice for him (I was already bored of it, and my son is a lot more idealistic than I am). Instead, I just pointed out that when I thought back to jobs I had held and projects I had worked on down the years, my memories focused not on how much money I had been paid but on the work I had done and the people I had done it with. In the same way, I think I will look back on trips like these and forget the runner runner flushes but remember the hilarity of David Kilmartin Lappin slipping on ice and being dumped unceremoniously on his rear to the considerable amusement of myself and Jason, the great meal and chat we had with Kevin Williams, Jamie Burland, Neil Raine, Jabracada and a few of the other up and coming English poker talents, and all the other great people we ran into like brothers Willie and Dod (who won the 300 side and fted the 6 max), and one of my most favourite people Chihao Tsang (who had a deep run all the way to day 3 of the main). We had a whiskey back in the hotel afterwards with *Jabra, a very interesting guy who has the potential to have a very big future in poker. I always see these trips away as a chance to spend some time with people I wouldn't normally run into in a tournament in Ireland. We also shared a cab to the airport with Kevin Killeen and Fintan Hand, two of the young Irish crop of up and coming online beasts who are approaching the game professionally in a way that seems right to me and more likely to lead to long term success.

The day may come when I decide to do what many (Mrs. Doke included) would consider the sensible thing and withdraw from live poker to focus entirely on clicking buttons, but as long as there's fire in my belly to go out and give it my best shot to land the big one, as long as there's me believing I can compete with anyone and as long as there's young players to meet and exchange ideas and interesting chats with, and as long as there's guys like Rob O'Connor willing to act as personal tour guide to a couple of inward looking poker players, that day won't come soon.



Next up is Deauville for my first EPT in almost two years. Mrs. Doke is really looking forward to this one, and so am I.


* I don't normally do footnotes (in fact I think this is the first ever in this blog) but for anyone wondering on why I insist on calling Tom Hall by his online name, it's because that's what he is called in my life. I see him maybe 100 times a day on Stars (usually winning a flip against me) and maybe 5 times a year in person. I know he thinks of me similarly (when he ran into me in the hotel corridor for the first time last week, the words that came out of his mouth were "Hello SlowDoke"). That might seem odd or even sad to live players of my generation but that's just the way it is. I think of it as similar to the fact that when I refer to a friend who is successful in the entertainment world, I nearly always use his stage name rather than his real name. Oddly enough, nobody seems to find that strange or unusual.

Thursday, January 10, 2013

Keeping sending the begging letters out

OK, let's get the live unpleasantness out of the way first. My WPT main event campaign never really got going. Shortly after sitting down my phone beeped with a text from a friend at a nearby table informing me that the gentleman to my immediate left was a top notch cash player. He put me in my box pretty quickly, 3 betting me at will and forcing me to either be prepared to play a higher variance style than I'm comfortable with in the early stages (getting involved in 4 betting wars with junk) or to tighten up. I went with the latter option but the deck did not reward my patience or discipline. I made a big fold on the river (with a set) having invested a good chunk of my stack already (I actually had the third best hand), and then lost most of what was left with AJ on a JJ5 board. Then when I finally found a good reshoving spot (KQs over a serial raiser), I ran into Phil Baker's aces in the big blind. I was miles ahead of the opener's range (he had shown up with 53 already in a similar spot) so it was a spot I had to take. Some days there's just nothing you can do and this felt like one of them.

If anything my exit from the CPT side event felt worse. A combination of a rather curious structure (no antes until after the 400/800 level) and the table (a couple of livewires like George McMahon who don't consider folding a sensible option most of the time  just behind) meant I decided quickly that tight was right early on. Accordingly I spent a few hours folding mainly punctuated by winning the odd pot to edge up from starting stack only to get the lot in pre with aces versus tens just as it started to get interesting. The rather sombre nature of this paragraph is a clue to the fact that this didn't end well for me.

There's no point getting upset or downbeat though as in the big picture no one tournament really matters all that much. All I or any player can do is keep trying and getting into position to get lucky. Next up for me is UKIPT Edinburgh, and then EPT Deauville. I've taken the more sensible route of selling some of my Deauville action even though I'm feeling particularly confident about my first EPT in almost 2 years. I personally believe the slow structure and field composition of EPTs suit me and there is some evidence to support this. I have cashed at most EPTs I have attended and had my deepest ever run in the last one I played (in Berlin in 2011, where I also final tabled a side event). Anyone interested in a sweat, I still have a few per cent left (it's €69 for one per cent).

Most of my friends were no luckier in Citywest. Smidge, Nick Newport and Lappin all made day 2 but were early casualties.

It was nice to run into a few people I hadn't seen in a while. Particularly nice to run into Tom Kitt as it gave us a chance to clear up an unpleasant misunderstanding in person and I was very relieved we were able to do so. There are quite a few people in poker that it wouldn't bother me in the slightest if I never had to speak to them again, but Tom isn't one of them. Tom is one of the most likeable people on the Irish scene and I'm delighted to see he's been going well online recently (this is being written just a couple of hours after he took down the main Nightly on Stars France).

Speaking of online, I've been going along nicely recently. No particularly big binks, but just a nice steady upward graph. Poker is an odd game in that in the short term variance obscures ability, and luck trumps skill. It's too easy to focus on the outlier results, the big binks, the ones that make the headlines. It might seem that the key to success is to bink big, but the bottom line is that in the long run, your profit will converge with the number of tables you play multiplied by your edge on each table (measured in ROI). So essentially you are just being paid a flat rate per table (if you play your best). That's true whether you take the high variance road of large tournaments with thousands of runners (and if you do, it's a bumpy road and you better be able to handle the downswings as well as those moments of glory when you bink big) or the less glamourous low variance road of smaller games with less runners.

On the bink front, it was a great weekend for the Firm, with Jason Tompkins coming third in the Million and Daragh Davey notching up his biggest ever score after coming second in the Stars France major. Maybe the most impressive thing about young Master Davey is that about 12 hours after his big bink, he was grinding the unfashionable (but immensely profitable) $4 Super Tuesday 3x turbos.


The title of this entry is from one of my favourite jokes as a kid. The full version went that after winning the lottery, a miser was asked what he would do about the begging letters. "Keep sending them out" was his response. This is a good analogy for poker: no matter how big you bink in this game, if you want to keep making money and survive as a profitable professional player, you have to keep sending out the begging letters. Young Master Davey has that one sussed.




Friday, January 4, 2013

Gazing into the navel of 2012


On a night out in town before Xmas that was essentially the Firm's Office party, my friend and business partner David suddenly asked me what I had achieved in poker in 2012 that I hadn't before. As I struggled to come up with one, he supplied the answer...staking.

The fact that my strongest poker memories for 2012 as the year draws to a close are all railing friends or stakees on final tables (Jason's WSOP and EPT, Smidge's UKIPT and EMOP, David's EMOP and Daragh and Jaymo on countless online final tables) pretty much makes the point that while it hasn't been a bad year for me in poker, it has been a pretty non-descript and lowkey one, devoid of major final tables live or Major binks online. So while this review won't have the highpoints of last year's, let's look back at my year to see what conclusions I can draw and lessons I can learn.

Live
There's no nice way to put this: 2012 was by far the worst year live of my poker career to date. That's not to say I lost money doing it. I have basically broken even, but only because I sold significant action for my WSOP campaign, I was sponsored or bought into a couple of events and I swapped well (in particular with that wily old dog Mick Mccloskey who once again this year crushed the Irish live scene). Taking the more straightforward approach of comparing the total of my live buyins this year with the total of live cashes reveals the truth that for the first time since I started, I was a losing player live last year.

It's a good thing this downswing came 5 years into my career rather than at the very start when I was less familiar with the concept of variance. In all I played less than 100 live tourneys this year. That's about 3 nights online, and I've had much longer downswings online in my time. While I have continued to cash almost as often as I have through my career and even won a live tournament this year, you can't choose which events to run well in and in a sense I have run well in the "wrong" tourneys. There's no denying I've run badly at the crucial point in the big games: for example, when my aces were all in against queens preflop in the WSOP main event, it was essentially for over $50k in equity, so had they held it could very well have made my year live.

That said, I can't just notch it all down to variance and absolve myself from responsibility. While I feel I have played as well as I can in patches during the year (and I certainly gave all the big events my utmost) there have been times in small turbo side events where I have essentially been on autopilot while amusing myself on my Iphone. Jason suggested to me recently that I might benefit from his more selective approach to live tournaments and while I have always prided myself on my ability to play my best in side events, I may have reached a point in my career where it's counter productive to be taking to the field too often, so to speak.

Over the course of my career, I've gone back and forth on the issue of how different live and online poker are. In the beginning I saw them as two separate disciplines requiring different skillsets. Then as I reached a point in my career where essentially I was an online player who also played a bit live, and I was having considerable success in online
 mtts, I started to wonder if I might be exagerrating these differences, and if the fact that I seemed to be a better online player might indicate that I should just play my "online game" live. I have now reached a point where I feel I may have taken this too far, and I'm no longer adjusting adequately to live players when I play live. I don't think online players can just show up at live events, play their normal game, and expect to succeed. You have to work at the particular skills that live poker demands, or rather I do. So one of my new year's resolutions is to put more work into my live game. Before I knew how to play the game technically, I got a long way purely from reading people well. As I improved technically, I depended less on those skills and more on "Well, I have hand A in position B and the effective stack is C big blinds so the most profitable play long term is D" thinking. This is basically what good online players do as it gets the money in the long run and prevents you from being exploitable. However, the problem with doing that live is that (ubnlike online) there is no real long run in any meaningful sense of the word, and the fact that you can see and be seen by your opponents live adds a considerable dimension to live play. A good observant player who reads and manipulates opponents well can gain a much bigger edge from these live skills than knowing the profitable push fold hands. I think I read people well naturally: I just have to allow myself the opportunity to do so. I've also started watching more poker to practise my reading skills. I'm confident this more balanced approach to live will pay dividends in 2013, hopefully starting in the next few weeks with WPT Dublin, UKIPT Edinburgh and EPT Deauville.

Online
For the fourth year in a row, the vast majority of my income came from online mtts, and for the fourth year in a row I believe I am one of the most profitable Irish players in online mtts. However, my profit this year is down almost 20% on the last two years, despite the fact I increased my volume, so like a lot of Irish people I basically worked more last year for less. However, I'm not going to complain about it as it is still a very healthy livelihood and I'm lucky to be able to earn it doing something I love. Most mtters would agree that last year was a tougher year for us all. I also feel I've run badly on Sundays. I had no major Sunday binks this year and essentially this is the difference between this year and 2010 and 2011. The fact I can have a very profitable year without any major scores is heartening at least.

One area I need to sharpen up on in 2013 is game selection. 2012 was the first year when I didn't more or less uniformly crush on every site I played on: this year the profit came almost entirely from Stars, the French sites, Ipoker and Irish Eyes (Cake). I either won or lost small on the other sites. The point is I need to be more clinical in identifying which structures, sites and field compositions I have the biggest edge in, and stick to those. Historically much of my profit has come from satellites and low runner rebuys on less glamourous networks. These are less glamourous and don't tend to show up on PocketFives or OPR but this game is about making the money, not the top of some artificial ranking system. So in 2013 I intend to concentrate more on these. It's already started paying dividends as I binked two EPT Deauville satellites.

Staking
I started 2012 as something of a staking neophyte and ended it as the person in Ireland most heavily involved in staking. It has been a learning curve and while it has been successful overall for me, it's not the "free money" a lot of people seem to suspect. First, as Jono warned me at the start, you have to allow for "breakage" (for every few staked players that make you money there will be at least one who loses). Second, the time commitment is a lot more than I initially expected, both for administration and coaching. I'm pretty sure that if I took the amount of money I made in 2012 from staking, and divided by the number of hours I put into it, I'd get a much lower number than my online hourly rate (or my coaching rate). That's not the point though. If I wanted to make the most money possible in any given year from poker, I'd just stay in, and do nothing other than grind online. That might seem like a recipe for short term success, but sounds like a recipe for burnout. I think the big reason why I've managed to maintain my enthusiasm and love for poker going for 5 years to the point that I start every day looking forward to my job is I have continually found ways to keep it interesting for myself, whether it's writing this blog, talking to other players, posting on forums, chasing virtual badges, travelling or more recently staking. If I can help other similar minded people to achieve their potential and make a career as happy as the one I've made for myself in poker, that's a big plus in my book too.

My staking involvement is likely to expand further in 2013 in conjunction with my partners in The Firm. I don't want to pre-empt anything (there are a few major developments in the pipeline) so I'll leave it at that for now.

Other
I'm delighted to be continuing my role with Irish Eyes. It's been a trying year for Irish Eyes due to events entirely outside our control. With the demise of what was Entraction, the obvious alternative was simply to move to a new network. I for one am glad Irish Eyes decided instead to go for an offering which allows Irish Eyes customers to play on several different networks. I genuinely think this is the future for all non-Stars sites. Recreational players have the chance to try different rooms and more games, and players like myself who already play on all the different sites have the hassle and cost of moving money around greatly reduced. As an experiment, I recently moved €100 around the sites on my old accounts. It took 7 weeks and when it got back to my Neteller account it was just under €85 (after having been hit by ubiquitous forex charges at every port of call). I did the same thing last week on Irish Eyes (moved the money around, moved it between the different sites, then back off to Neteller): it took a few days and the full €100 arrived back.

When David asked what I had achieved in poker in 2012 that I hadn't before, I could have answered "Won a couple of awards!" While I do subscribe to the view that the only awards that really matter in poker are the Benjamins, it was nice to be recognised for this blog at the Irish Poker Awards. It's even nicer when people take the trouble to tell me in person at tournaments or whereever how much they enjoy this blog. 5 years and almost 400 entries on, it's getting harder to think of new stuff to say, or new ways to say it, so in 2013 I may be slightly more selective. Rather than just thinking "It's Monday, better put up a new blog" it's probably better if I wait until I have something I think is worth blogging about. I think my blogs in 2012 were similar to my live tourney performances: at times as good as they could possibly be (given that it's me doing them), but at other times phoned in.

Thanks to everyone who has read this far and shown interest in my blog and continuing poker career in 2012. May we all have a 2013 to look back on with pride.


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