Breaking down a simple hand against a donkey...

Date: Tue, Sep 8, 2009 Professional Internet

It's been a while since I posted any in depth poker strategy analysis so I figured I'd take a simple hand and quantify exactly why we make a hero call, instead of just qualitatively saying "call because thanks to the experience of playing 100,000s of hands against players like this, a call is profitable". As a poker player, it's good to sometimes theoretically and mathematically prove your intuitions to make sure you're sub-conscience is working like it should, and your confidence is deserved.

*NOTE* - If you're not a poker player, it's probably not worth your time to read this analysis as you most likely won't understand some of the terminology. I did my best to keep things as elementary as possible, but it's still not the easiest to follow for the weekend gambler.

http://www.pokerhand.org/?4672083

So the BB is a bad player who over the ~50 hands we’ve played, has shown a propensity to bluff. I open 55 on the button, he calls. Flop is not great for me, a good one to check back against a player who is most certainly not folding the flop enough to make betting my whole range profitable. So if we’re going to start plucking out hands to check back, 55 would be one of the first candidates. Easy decision. Turn gives me a flush draw and a straight draw, he leads out for 2/3 pot, and I call. Nothing too interesting thus far. River pairs the Q, and he bets 2/3 pot. At this point, our hand is not very good. But even those experienced players with the least bit of mathematical understanding of the game will have intuitions that this may be a spot for a hero call. Let’s look at the situation with some numbers.

In this case, ranges are very clear cut with thresholds offering no overlap, yielding a situation where the theoretical answers are essentially perfectly applicable. What I mean by this is that I will never have a hand that is better than a simple bluff-catcher, given that I would have played all of those hands differently on prior streets. Also, villain’s line resembles plenty of nutty hands (hands that have my bluff-catching range beat) within his range. He also never bets a worse hand than mine for value. Thus, ranges are clear-cut.

Villain bets 20 to win 28. So if he is unable to assume that I am the type of player to call too much or too fold too much, (ie. To stray too far from the optimal calling frequency with my bluff-catchers), his goal should be to bluff here with an optimal bluffing frequency that should make me indifferent towards calling or folding my bluff-catchers. Or in other words, his goal is to make the value of calling with 55 equal to the value of folding with 55. So let’s look at my decision:

X*(28 + 20) + (1-X)*(-20) = 0 --> X = 29.4%

This equation yields the optimal bluffing frequency, X. It’s stating that X% of the time, villain is bluffing and I will win the $20 pot plus his $28 bet. But the rest of the time, (1-X)%, he is NOT bluffing and I will lose my $20 bet. So if we make the overall value of these two instances the same, we can solve for X, the optimal bluffing frequency. X = 29.4%.

To summarize, if villain manages to distribute his range for betting the river in such a way so that 29.4% of the time he is bluffing, and 70.6% of the time he is betting for value with a hand that always beats our bluff-catchers, he is essentially impossible to exploit and he is maximizing his value against a player with which he has little information on exploitable tendencies. Of course, if he knew I was either a calling station or that I folded too much, he would adjust his range accordingly. And subsequently, if I know that he is a bluffmonkey and that his X > 29.4%, I adjust accordingly and call with the majority of my bluff-catching range because they will offer a profit in the long-run.

Now here’s where things get interesting. The river offered a card that paired the board, and significantly decreased the number of combinations of hands that our villain bet the turn with, and can also bet the river with for value. The majority of these bad players are simply just not good enough to bet this river with a hand like 98 because their absolute hand strength is not strong enough. So what happens is that their bluffing range is often times heavily outweighing their valuebetting range, and thus they are bluffing too much. A player not value-betting worse than QX here must realize that this implies that they do not have many combinations of hands with which they can bet for value, as a ratio of their overall range. Thus, if they only have Y combinations of value hands, they should recognize that they can only have roughly 3 bluffing hands for every 7 value hands as a result of their optimal bluffing frequency of 29.4%. So if they only have 14 combos of value hands, they can only have 6 combinations of bluffing hands. Given that this villain is the type to fire a bet on this turn often as a bluff or semi-bluff (as a result of me showing “weakness” by checking back the flop), he arrives at this river with a ton of hands (namely, missed draws) that will be inclined to fire a bluff to win, as they most likely cannot win the hand otherwise. This puts the villain in a situation where he either makes the optimal play of “giving up” with the majority of these bluffs, or follow through with these bluffs and hope that he’s playing a player not good enough to recognize how unbalanced his river range will be. So my call with 55 was actually fairly standard against this type of player.

However, note that there are also many bad players who are bad in a totally different type of way. They are more on the passive side of judgment, and will not bet this turn as a bluff or semi-bluff with a very high frequency. Now, these players arrive at this river with a much more evenly distributed range given that they have far less hands with which they *need* to bluff the river with in order to win the hand. Thus, their overall bluffing frequency can be closer to optimal, making this a difficult decision with 55, or any bluff-catcher for that matter. The good news is, this problem only happens a small % of the time, given that the majority of times this hand gets played like this with this flop on this board, he will check the turn and generally be easy to play against.

The correct adjustment for villain in this spot if he were a good player would be to recognize that he needs to bet thinner for value on this river if he wants to be able to bluff it (which he does, thanks to having a lot of hands that get to the river that need to bluff to win the pot.) It’s a good example of a spot where the villain should be aware of the fact that bluffing with all of his hands he can potentially bluff with will almost certainly be too much bluffing given the way the hand was played out. So to achieve balance, he most likely needs to give up with a good portion of his prior bluffing range, while making sure to valuebet 8X+. This would be a far tougher opponent to play against. But the good news is that players that are not likely to bluff the turn much are also not likely to bluff the river much, making our bluff-catchers (such as 55) an easy fold. Either way, both types of players are easy to play against, just in very contrasting ways.

This is a good exercise to show the value in playing a balanced strategy against a player that is good enough to recognize significant imbalances. What can often times be confusing and/or frustrating for some players as they learn the game from a theoretical standpoint is when and where to apply such concepts. In this particular hand against this opponent, it is clearly in our best interest to exploit his overwelmingly imbalanced ranges. If roles were reversed and we were playing ourselves, it becomes necessary not only to evaluate our opponent's imbalances, but additionally, (and arguably, more importantly), to evaluate our own ranges making sure that he's not able to find many opportune imbalances.

Confused yet? Just keep playing... :)

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Part Two of my WSOP '09 Trip Report

Date: Fri, Aug 7, 2009 Professional Internet

So I guess I’ll kick off Part 2 with the cash game hands I promised. They’re not all that interesting, but hopefully they’re at least pseudo-entertaining for some readers.

1) 5/10NL, $2000 effective stacks

Folded to me in the SB and I open to $30 with T7dd, BB calls.

Flop: Kd Jc 9d (pot=$60)
Bet $45, BB calls.

Turn: Qh (pot=$150)
Bet $115, BB raises to $300, I call.

River: 4d (pot=$750)
I check, BB bets $600, I shove all-in, he snapcalls with A3dd.

This was obviously a pretty deflating hand. The problem is that I have the Td so for him to have one of the higher flushes, he would have had to raise the turn without the straight but with the flush draw. This is a pretty bad/strange line for him, figuring that all those flush draws play a ton better as floats against my turn bet. But hey, that’s the beauty of live poker. People are bad, and that means you can never rule out them having the nuts on the river no matter how badly/weirdly they’ve played them up to that point. I was completely aware of this at the moment, and genuinely tanked about whether to shove or just flat his river bet. I felt like he had ATo and would call a decent portion of the time, combined with the fact that he’s almost as likely to have raised the turn with a smaller bare flush draw than he would with the nut flush draw. And there’s the outside chance that he decides to call me down with just a T.

2) I open to $50 from the button after the CO posts $10, and just the BB calls.

Flop: Jd 9d 5c (pot=$115)
Check, Check.

Turn: 7c (pot=$115)
Check, I bet $75, Call.

River: 4d (pot=$265)
BB bets $180, I call. BB shows 44.

I really don’t think I can raise this river the way his range is represented. Regardless of what he has with his river bet, it’s played quite strangely. And strangely played hands are often bluffs/nuts, not one-pair/2-pair type hands that would consider calling a river raise.

3) EP limps, MP limps, CO opens to $55, I make it $170 OTB, SB makes it $475, I fold AKo. He later claims he had KK and I believed him. Fairly standard but man do I hate laying down big hands in live poker. Might not see it again for hours!

4) MP opens for $50, LP calls, I call with KQcc in SB, BB calls.

Flop: Kd 2d 2c (pot=$200)
I check, BB checks, MP bets $125, CO raises to $375, I puke and fold. They somehow get it in and MP wins with A2ss, and to my surprise, nitty CO showed KJhh.

Okay, enough with the boring cash game hands, time for the Main Event report. I’m sure you’re dying to know how I managed to bust from the big one so early on Day 1!

So we started with T30,000 and 50/100 blinds which was a fantastic structure. Much to my surprise/disappointment, my table was playing significantly tougher than the 5/10NL cash games I’d been playing at the Rio. There was very seldom limping and not a whole lot of passive fishiness. That’s not to say it was tough, but I wasn’t going to be fed chips on a silver platter.

I managed to run my stack up to T48,000 at the first break, a great start. Back from the break, I was down to T44,000 after missing a draw in a small pot when this hand occurred:

1) Blinds 100/200

I open KJo to T600 from MP, CO calls, BUTTON calls, BB calls.

Flop: Kc 8d 7d (pot=T2500)
BB checks, I bet T1400, CO calls, BUTTON and BB fold.

Turn: Jh (pot=T5300)
I check, CO bets T3300, I call.

River: 7h (pot=T11900)
I check, CO bets T9000, I call. CO shows T9cc.

This hand obviously sucked. There were a ton of draws on the flop that would fire the turn regardless of whether they hit or not (he happened to have one of the three combinations among 20+ combinations that did hit). And I was pretty certain that he was the type to follow through with bluffs, regardless of whether the river was a good scare card or not. And there is always the outside chance the he is getting some value out of a hand like KX. Blah, down to T31,000.

2) Blinds 100/200

*WARNING* For those readers with weak stomachs, do not read any further!

After hand (1), I probably gave off a tilt-vibe to the rest of the table as I was visibly upset with the hand and proceeded to get hit with the deck and so I was probably viewed as spite-raising and being overly aggressive. I had just cold 4bet VILLAIN with AA a few hands prior to this one.

VILLAIN opens to T600 from UTG+2, I 3bet AA to T1800 from the CO, he calls.

Flop: Kd 4s 3c (pot=T3900)
VILLAIN checks, I bet T2100, VILLAIN raises to T6000, I call.

Now, here’s the read on VILLAIN. Essentially, he’s a Dutch maniac. He won a bracelet during this series in a Limit Hold’em Event and a warning from a friend confirmed my already looming suspicions of his aggressive nature. He’s definitely check-raising this flop with much more than the 6 combos of 44/33 that beat me. And I’m fairly certain that those are the only hands that are beating me here as he is most likely folding K4/K3s preflop. So I’m not happy about his raise, but I’m more than prepared to put on my seatbelt and call.

Turn: Jh (pot=T15,900)
VILLAIN bets T9000, I call.

The turn card is pretty good for me, it really doesn’t complete a whole lot of anything for him. Although, the counterpoint is that it might slow him down if he’s on a bluff with a straightdraw. My gut told me it wouldn’t.

River: 6c (pot=T33900)
VILLAIN bets T14200 (all-in), I tank a bit and call. VILLAIN proudly shows 75cc.
I realize that shoving the turn was an option, but its a spot where villain is way ahead or way behind and also inclined to bluff the river so it doesn't make that much sense to shove the turn, although stacksizes may have indicated otherwise had I been more acute in realizing the river bet would be <1/2pot. I just felt like at this point in the day, he was really ready to make some moves and exploit the fact that nobody at the table seemed to be willing to play a big pot and risk their tournament life so early on day 1. I was confident that along with the 6 combinations of sets that he’s check-raising the flop with, there were also 20+ combinations of wheeldraws/straightdraws/air that he was willing to fire 3 barrels with when he’s certain I can’t have better than 1 pair very often. So that was the end of my first Main Event experience. Not a good one.

Alright, enough with the boring poker talk.

So one of my first nights in the city I decide to go to dinner and a club with some poker friends. Dinner at Nobu was fantastic as always, and a few brandys later I was ready to go to the bar. As we’re waiting in the VIP line at LAX, a hot Vegas club known for celebrity sightings, I take a time-out to enjoy the scenery and appreciate the surroundings. Then something catches my eye. A big, black, something. A big black something with tattoos, sleek aviator glasses, and an intimidating entourage. As the something brushes by my shoulder, I awaken from my stupor to realize that the something is in fact, LeBron James. Turns out, our VIP table was located just below (of course) the King’s fancy celeb table. So in our drunken state, we decide that it’s a mega +EV play to buy the King a couple bottles of champagne as he’ll certainly appreciate the gesture and most likely just return the favor by buying us at least 8 bottles back. I mean c’mon, it’s LeBron James. So with visions of clanking bottles with LeBron as we talk ball with him and exchange dance moves, we give the waitress our special order. After fifteen minutes pass by, the waitress returns to tell us the LeBron has let it be known that he enjoys a different type of champagne, a more expensive one. We give her the okay, and rejoice in knowing that LeBron has received our gesture. Another thirty minutes pass by. And then an hour. And then another hour. And then it’s the next morning and nobody really remembers anything except the fact that LeBron James owned us for a couple bottles of champagne and we never heard from him again. Two big bottles of failpagne.

The funny thing about champagne is that it causes severe drunkenness and hangovers when drank at an ill-advised pace. So the next morning I wake up at 7:30am in the blazing Vegas heat lying on a lawnchair in the backyard of the house I was staying at, with only boxers on. I crawl inside and pass out on a couch until I wake up around noon to voices of inquisition. I clamber out to the backyard where the investigation is taking place. The first thing I notice is that my feet are now wet. The second thing I notice is that water is spewing into the air from the water supply beside the house at an alarming rate. We all spend the next 15 minutes trying to figure out what the heck happened last night, but to no avail. So I go back to bed until the mid-afternoon when I start feeling well enough to resume daily activities. By this time, the water main had been fixed by the landlord and it was no longer a big deal. But its dumbfounding origins were still the hottest topic of conversation. Later that day, I walk around to the side of the house where I have trouble opening the gate, even though its completely unlocked. The procedure for opening the door just happens to be not-so-obvious. Then it occurs to me. I was the first one home last night, and I didn’t have a key to get into the house. That explains why I passed out in the backyard. But how did I get into the backyard if I can’t even open the gate when I’m sober? Well I must have climbed the wall beside the gate. The wall that’s located directly beside the broken water main, which would serve perfectly as leverage to help climb over the wall. Mystery solved. We all had a good laugh about that one.

The other notable partying experience during the first week of my Vegas trip was a party at Tom Dwan’s bachelor suite in Palm’s Place, the condominium resort concept. First of all, Tom’s place is pretty unreal. There’s a huge balcony that can support about 30+ people with a hot tub that features water pouring over the edge of the tub into the abyss of what is the best view of the strip in Las Vegas. The inside is incredibly spacious and furnished with lavish pieces that create an atmosphere of youthful success. The sound system is pretty sweet too. But the most amazing thing about this party was not the setting, but rather the company in attendance. Of the 40-50 people there, roughly ~30 people were young poker professionals. Of those 30 people, the average age was somewhere between 22-24 and the total net worth was somewhere between $50-$100 million. At least, that’s what a few of us put together as a guess. I won’t bother listing names, but it was pretty much a who’s who of online poker and it was a really fun experience for someone like myself that doesn’t spend a whole lot of time in Las Vegas or following the World and European Poker Tours.

Just like my prior WSOP experiences in Vegas, I had the best time when my friends from home were there to visit. This year, my girlfriend Lauren, along with four of my closest friends from home all came up to share in the fun that Vegas has to offer during the World Series.

There were plenty of great stories generated from our tomfoolery, but this blog entry is becoming exceedingly long and I’m simply tired of writing. So I’ll just limit the recap to the most eventful night, the PokerStars VIP party at the Palms providing entertainment by rapstar Nelly and highlighted by PokerStars pros being in attendance. Open bar was a pretty lucrative perk as well. It was really fun to experience a rap concert with a small audience and be able to get so close to the stage. I was never a huge Nelly fan, but it was really fun listening to him rap some of his old classics while we drank free triples from the bar. It didn’t take long before we spotted some PokerStars pros. The first being Marcel Luske. We did a shot of tequila with him before handing him off to my friend Jim who has a Dutch background in common with Mr. Luske. Apparently the conversation was boring because it didn’t take long before Marcel was back to talking to Lauren with hopes of taking her back to his place. So we moved on to the next pro, Daniel Negreanu. Lauren walked up to Daniel and started talking to him about Toronto and how they are both from the same area. It didn’t take long before I conjured up a plan to interrupt their conversation while pretending to be upset with Daniel for trying to pick up my girlfriend. At the time, I thought it was going to be hilarious. So I charged up to Daniel and grabbed him by the collar as I told him to get the hell away from my girlfriend, in not as many words. Apparently I was too drunkenly serious because he didn’t receive the joke well. He abruptly stated that he was just having a polite conversation, and immediately left the party. I’m fairly certain he was on his way out after his brief but mandatory shown face, but I like to think that I was the main culprit for his early exit. Just in case you didn’t believe me:

So that’s it for my 2009 WSOP Trip Report. I’ve got some other material to write about including a rant about Vegas and live poker, and analyzing live poker vs. online poker, but I’ll leave that for my next blurb. Until then, keep fit and have fun!

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Part One of my WSOP '09 Trip Report

Date: Fri, Jul 17, 2009 Professional Internet

So I arrive at Pearson Airport ready to head to Vegas for the 2009 World Series of Poker. I check my luggage… 43.5lbs. Maximum weight, 43lbs. $20 please. Ugghhh, bad start. Let’s hope that’s not a sign of things to come.

After a 6 hour journey including a layover in Chicago, I finally arrive at Mccarran Airport and take the motion sickness unfriendly shuttle to the Rio where all the magic takes place. As I walk towards the Amazon Room, I can feel the buzz of excitement in the air. Upon entering the WSOP area, I see thousands of bad poker players brimming with hope; some playing, some watching. I also see hundreds of good poker players brimming with legitimate confidence; some winning, some getting unlucky. That’s pretty much the essence of the World Series of Poker. It’s a fantastic short-term high risk investment. If we could string together 1000 years of the WSOP, we would see a relatively small group of people winning all of the money. Unfortunately, each year is only a sliver of time in the grand scheme of the live poker world. But enough with preaching variance and statistics, you want to hear stories!

Every time I arrive for the WSOP, I’m always curious as to which poker player will own the first face I recognize. This year, it happened to be two of my best poker friends as they were off to lunch as I waited in line for the cashier. Talk about coincidence. Of all the thousands of people at the Rio and hundreds that I know and/or recognize, the first two I see are the guys I’m staying with for my first few nights in Vegas.

I join my friend Todd to watch him play from the rail as he’s managed to go deep in today’s event. As they approach the money bubble and the tournament slows down to hand-for-hand play, a seat opens up beside Todd. Over strolls Antonio Esfandiari with his stack and he sits in the seat. As he sits down, I’m conversing with Todd about how I’m considering selling some of my action in the two events that I’m playing. Antonio overhears this and instantly says, “I’ll buy it!” I remind him that he doesn’t even know who I am. But he assures me that Todd looks like a smart young guy and if he’s interested in buying my action, it must be a good investment. So I give him 10% of my action and he proceeds to give me $1500 in chips while I write down my name and phone number on a scrap piece of paper for him. We chat a bit about Toronto and how we should party together next time he’s in the city.

So eventually I go home and rest up for the next day’s event, the $5000 6max No Limit Hold’em. This event is traditionally dominated by online kids as we’ve played millions of hands of 6max 100BB poker while even the best live poker pros have less than 1% of that experience at these tables.

I only really played 3 hands that were worth noting in the 6max event, as I didn’t last very long.

1) Blinds 50/100, ~T14,000 effective, (starting stacks were T15,000)
MP limps for the 2nd time in two hours. The table had generally been open-raising so limping was rare.

I raise to T425 with JJ from the button, MP calls.

Flop: 5c 5d 2s (pot=1000)
MP donks T700, I raise to T2100, MP calls.

Note that MP genuinely looked a bit dejected when he called. He simply wasn’t good nor smart enough to be doing it as a trick, he was legitimately concerned.

Turn: 4h (pot=5200)
MP checks, I bet T3000, MP calls.

River: Tc (pot=11200)

Up until this point in the hand, I really thought there was next to no chance I was beat unless he spiked a 4 on the turn. I felt like he had 33/66-88 here like 90% of the time along with maybe the odd AA/KK. Then it dawned on me. I’m playing live poker against bad players. He could conceivably have a 5 with a hand like 65s or 54s and thought that my raise on the flop meant I had a better kicker. Online or against a better player, I think this river is a pretty clear bet. Ultimately, I decided to check it back figuring that the value of the all-in bet wasn’t worth risking my tournament life. Sure enough, he tabled 65s and took the pot. Ugh.

2) Blinds 50/100, ~T8500 left

CO opens, who had been quite active up to this point. Folds to me in the BB with ATo. In retrospect, I like 3betting or folding better than calling, but in the moment I must have felt like it was a bad time for a 3bet yet also too strong to fold. The CO also played fairly telegraphically post-flop. Earlier, he had checked back AKo on a KJ3r board. I’d also seen him check back another top pair, yet continuation bet draws.

Flop: Td 8s 4d (pot=640)
I check, CO bets T500, I call.

Turn: Jd (pot=1640)
This is clearly a bad card for me as it completes the flush along with a straight draw as well as serving as an overcard. (I have no diamond).
I check, CO bets T1200, I call.

In retrospect, I should have just laid this down. My thought process at the time was that he virtually never has a pair or even a set and potentially never a straight. He’s completed his flush, or he’s barreling off on a scary turn card. I decided that of his flop betting range, only X% consisted of a flush draw while Y% was filled with pure bluffs, along with a small % of made hands that decide to check the turn. So I deduced that most of his Y% of hands fire the turn, and that this frequency was high enough in comparison to the X% of hands that made the flush and that I should call. In hindsight, I should have taken the careful route and left myself with in a much better position with ~T8000 left instead of risking getting really short. I also didn’t have enough reason to be sure that he would barrel off with all of his missed hands, which essentially I would need to happen for my call to be good.

River: 3s (pot=3040)
He bets T3000, and I make the stubborn call believing that the card doesn’t change anything and that his barreling frequency is high enough in comparison to the times he’s made a flush for me to make the call. [SARCASM]I mean c’mon, I know that I’m only losing to a flush, and what are the odds that he can have two diamonds!?!? [/SARCASM] Plus, hero calls are so much more fun during live poker.

He tables 75dd and I’m down to 20% of the starting stack.

3) I 3bet all-in to T3000 with AKo and get a tank/call from A6s. Flop is T64ss. GG ME. Not my day.

The good news: I busted at 5:40pm, enough time to make my way over to the Rio pool to “cool off” in the sun after being a bit steamed about busting from the tournament.

The bad news: The pool closes at 6pm.

Okay, so I’m getting rid of all my run bad before the Main Event, right?

To be continued…

[Teasers for Part 2: Some cash game hands, partying with LeBron James (kind of?) at LAX, a party at Durr’s Palace, my Main Event experience, a private PokerStars party with Nelly where two well-known poker pros try to pick-up my girlfriend (at least, I thought so..)]

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And I'm Vegas bound once again...

Date: Wed, Jun 17, 2009 Professional Internet

I didn't have any set plans for heading to Vegas this year for the World Series seeing how I was just getting back on my feet poker-wise and it was simply bad timing. But a couple Sundays ago I found myself entering a $650 1000+ person satellite on PokerStars giving away 51 $12,000 packages to the Main Event, and sure enough I managed to lock up a package. It was an interesting satellite tournament with (seemingly) difficult decisions for me near the end, but I'm not much of a satellite expert so I'm really not sure. With roughly 56 players left I found myself sitting in ~45th place with ~6BB. The 50-56th placed players were all roughly 4BB and less, 3 or 4 of them with 2BB or less. I'm dealt KK in MP at a table with a couple big stacks who are calling shoves often. I fold. Two hands later I'm dealt KK UTG+1. I fold. I managed to limp (but without any limping! ugh terrible poker humour..) across the finish line without playing another hand, so results-oriented thinking would peg me as a genius. But for all I know I could have fudged that up because I barely scraped my way in.

Nevertheless, I'm headed to Vegas for the Main Event. I also decided that I'm going to play the $5000 6-max event that starts on June 30th as its the last notable event leading up to the ME, and its a good one for me to play. So I'll be in Vegas from June 29th - July 10th, unless I manage to go super-deep in the big one. To pass the time I plan on playing some 5/10NL but I'm mostly looking at it as a freerolling vacation after a few months of working hard online.

I'll do my best to have some interesting WSOP hands to look at, as I know everyone seems to miss the days where I used to post strategy-based analysis from online sessions. Until then, wish me luck!

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Dealing With Variance

Date: Mon, May 25, 2009 Professional Internet

So apparently I'm a terrible blogger as I can't seem to find material worth writing about more than once a month. I'm not really interested in performing a running commentary of my day-to-day activities as found in more personal poker blogs. I tend to wait until I've found something worth writing about, or until I've realized that I haven't written anything for a month and that it's time for me to look for something worth writing about. Unfortunately, it's just simply not in my best interest to talk much poker strategy here as much as I know many readers have enjoyed it in the past. Especially now that I've taken to heads-up play, you won't see much playing-related material. However, I will make an effort to focus on other poker-related material that doesn't necessarily involve strategy and/or information I'm not willing to give for free.

This leads me to the theme of this entry: VARIANCE! Just the thought of such a term can cause chills down the spine of a poker player with a tingling sensation of wondering just which direction the next burst of "variance" shall choose to push them. As much as the term is grossly overused and often times disturbingly misunderstood within the poker world, it definitely deserves its share of attention and appreciation.

"VARIANCE (n) - A measure of the spread of a statistical distribution about its mean or center. With respect to poker, the distribution of your results over a a set of hands or sessions, or the swings in a positive or negative direction of cash flow. The greater the variance, the wilder the swings; the lower the variance, the more likely a given session results will be close to one's average result. As an example, suppose you average $20 an hour in winnings in a particular game. You calculated this over a long period of time, say 1000 hours, in which you made $20,000. You didn't make exactly $20 every hour you played, but a graph of your winnings was a generally upward-sloping line. Some hours, you might have lost $50; others you might have won $70 or $100. Some playing sessions you lost; others you won. The closer each hour to plus $20 were your results, the lower was your variance, and the farther from this number were your results, the higher was your variance." (Mike Caro, http://www.poker1.com/mcu/pokerdictionary/mculib_dictionary_v.asp)

Now that poker has become my sole focus and is no longer just a hobby while being a student, I feel a greater urgency to have positive daily results and feel as though every work day was worth my efforts. The thought of one leaving work with less money than one had upon starting the workday gives me an ill feeling of wasted time and energy. When playing as a student, I didn't feel this same urgency as I had less expectations seeing how I was a student and not necessarily expected to own or develop wealth at that point in my life. I was also playing in bigger games for larger sums of money and it all seemed so imaginary to begin with that I became fairly immune to any losing streaks I encountered. Now things are different, and losing days are tougher to swallow. The good news is that with all the work I've put into my game combined with the fact that I'm playing at a level where weak competition is freely accessible, I don't often have losing days. The even better news is that while reading "Fooled By Randomness" by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, I came across an excerpt that had resounding parallels to poker and inspired me to make a major adjustment that has completely changed how I view my results, both figuratively and literally. Here's the excerpt in the context of stock market investing:

"Let us manufacture a happily retired dentist, living in a pleasant, sunny town. We know a priori that he is an excellent investor, and that he will be expected to earn a return of 15% in excess of Treasury bills, with a 10% error rate per annum (what we call volatility).

Clearly, we are dealing with a very optimistic situation. The dentist builds for himself a nice trading desk in his attic, aiming to spend every business day there watching the market, while sipping decaffeinated cappuccino. He has an adventurous temperament, so he finds this activity more attractive than drilling the teeth of reluctant little old Park Avenue ladies.

He subscribes to a Web-based service that supplies him with continuous prices, now to be obtained for a fraction of what he pays for his coffee. He puts his inventory of securities in his spreadsheet and can thus instantaneously monitor the value of his speculative portfolio. We are living in the era of connectivity.

A 15% return with a 10% volatility per annum translates into a 93% probability of success in any given year. But seen at a narrow time scale, this translates into a mere 50.02% probability of success over any given second as shown in Table X:

Scale Probability
1 year ------ 93%
1 quarter --- 77%
1 month ----- 67%
1 day ------- 54%
1 hour ------ 51.3%
1 minute ---- 50.17%
1 second ---- 50.02%

Over the vary narrow time increment, the observation will reveal close to nothing. Yet the dentist's heart will not tell him that. Being emotional, he feels a pang with every loss, as it shows in red on his screen. He feels some pleasure when the performance is positive, but not in equivalent amount as the pain experienced when the performance is negative.

At the end of every day the dentist will be emotionally drained. A minute-by-minute examination of his performance means that each day (assuming 8 hours per day) he will have 241 pleasurable minutes against 239 unpleasurable ones. These amount to 60,688 and 60,271, respectively, per year. Now realize that if the unpleasurable minute is worse in reverse pleasure than the pleasurable minute is in pleasure terms, then the dentist incurs a large deficit when examining his performance at a high frequency.

Consider the situation where the dentist examines his portfolio only upon receiving the monthly account from the brokerage house. As 67% of his months will be positive, he incurs only four pangs of pain per annum and eight uplifting experiences. This is the same dentist following the same strategy. Now consider the dentist looking at his performance every year. Over the next 20 years, he will only experience 19 pleasant surprises for every unpleasant one! ...

A couple conclusions:

1. Over a short time increment, one observes the variability of the portfolio, not the returns. In other words, one sees the variance, little else. I always remind myself that what one observes is at best a combination of variance and returns, not just returns (but my emotions do not care about what I tell myself.)

2. Our emotions are not designed to understand the point. The dentist did better when he dealt with monthly statements rather than more frequent ones. Perhaps it would be even better for him if he limited himself to yearly statements. ...

Finally, this explains why people who look too closely at randomness burn out, their emotions drained by a series of pangs they experience. Regardless of what people claim, a negative pang is not offset by a positive one (some psychologists estimate the negative effect for an average loss to be up to 2.5 the magnitude of a positive one); it will lead to an emotional deficit. ...

[And last but not least, the most important point he makes:]

Note also that the implication that wealth does not count so much into one's well-being as the route one uses to get to it."

I found these few pages to be extremely enlightening as they so accurately display the effects of variance. The parallel to poker is quite strong. The successful poker player has a far better probability than 54% of succeeding in any given work-day, but the idea is just the same. The potential of having an unsuccessful day (albeit, much lower) is still apparent and just as emotionally draining. It's all fine and dandy to be a poker player and enjoy developing wealth with a flexible schedule free of bosses and deadlines, but if it means one must endure a day or two each week of emotionally draining activity, one must question whether it is a good life choice to be a poker player.

As I stated earlier, I've been enjoying very few losing days and great results overall in the 10 weeks I've been back to grinding and this really hasn't been that much of an issue. But Taleb still managed to grab my attention with this chapter and inspire me to try something new: NO MORE CHECKING RESULTS ON A DAILY/HOURLY/MINUTELY BASIS!! The plan is to only allow myself to check results for the past month on the 1st day of each following month. This is eons easier to say than to do. 99.9% of all online poker players developed a bad habit early in their playing careers to constantly check results in the form of account balances and poker management software both during and after each session. Because of this, I wasn't sure if I would be able to keep strong and resist the insatiable urges to see exactly just "how I'm doing".

It took some willpower at first, but I'm at the point now where I'm quite comfortable with the idea and am enjoying the feeling of never really winning or losing. I'm just working. I never have a "watermark" with which to compare each day. I no longer have a "losing day". I just have good days and bad. I no longer have a day where I lose $X, I just have the odd day where I "lost a bunch" or "might have lost a bit." It makes these tougher days far easier to swallow as my highly analytical mind has no numbers with which to analyze and the session tends to be forgotten quickly. I really do recommend trying this if you are playing poker online professionally and are comfortably rolled with no important reasons for which to check results.

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Some post-flop reflection..

Date: Mon, Apr 20, 2009 Professional Internet

Instead of writing forever about all of the things I learned from my nine month flipping excursion, I’m just going to briefly mention what I think are the most important and most pokerly applicable lessons I learned:

“Know your edge!”
This one came from a book I read this winter titled “Get Smarter” by Seymour Schulich. The book is mostly just a bunch of tips and stories from one of Canada’s most successful businessmen, written with a concise and to-the-point attitude. The one tip that really caught my attention given my situation at the time was to “know your edge”. Regardless of how intelligent and quick-learning a person may be, they will always have strengths and weaknesses. It’s often encouraged to work on weaknesses and turn them into strengths, and I completely agree with this sentiment. However, when it comes to developing wealth and/or creating an enjoyable career for oneself, it makes the most sense to stick to what you’re good at. Schulich talks about how he made most of his millions in mining-related deals which is where his career in business originally took flight. Most of his ventures into uncharted territory were failures and he was generally just not prepared for these other avenues. I found this chapter in the book to be of direct relation to my situation at the time, acting as a handyman to complete renovations on a house with intentions of flipping. As much as the experience was amazing and I can sympathize completely with my old self for choosing to dive into the project a little over a year ago, it was not something that catered towards my strengths and the areas where I know I have an edge. I’m a numbers guy, not a hammer’n’nails guy. I’m a math guy, not a drywall guy. I’m an academic, not a salesman.

Applied to poker – This is seemingly obvious, but not altogether respected. Many players, especially in the past, developed their intuitive strategies for beating specific games and tables of poker and were led to believe that their past successes were grounds for guaranteeing future success in all games against all opponents. Many of these players are now broke. It’s important as a poker player to maintain a slight “macrocosmic” view of the poker-world to understand exactly where one’s edge lies. Sometimes this means re-calibrating one’s “main game” whether it be playing for smaller stakes, or playing in different games.

“Time is of the essence!”
I could go on and on about this one for days if it weren’t such a terrible time management decision for me to do so. Time is without a doubt the most important recurring factor in one’s business and career-related decisions throughout one’s life. The fact that time should be one of the first considerations for any decision is fairly obvious, yet often overlooked. Having a four month project stretch into a nine month project really hammered home this point for me. Making $X in nine months is not quite as lucrative as making $X in four months, regardless of what $X may be. Not only is this more time spent making $X, it’s less time available towards making $Y or having Z amount of leisure.

Anybody I talked to that seemed to have any ounce of knowledge about flipping and/or real estate made it perfectly clear that I should keep track of exactly how many hours of work I put into the project. Of course, I didn’t. I could ballpark it, but I didn’t think it was necessary to get more detailed than that. Now I do. My time is money, and your time is money. That’s not just a cliché.

This point is only emphasized when tasks become multi-dimensional. As you increase the number of people’s time involved in the completion of tasks and achieving objectives, the time necessary to complete the overall project grows exponentially. Time X + Time Y /= Time X+Y when Time X relies on Time Y, and vice versa. It seems like a silly concept to use math in analyzing, but the point remains that developing a timeline is not as simple as just adding together smaller timelines and estimates.

Applied to poker – It’s important to consider all of the hours involved in being a poker player if you wish to take any sort of stab at depicting a reasonably accurate hourly/monthly/yearly income and/or deciding whether you are maximizing the profitability of your time spent. Most successful online poker players spend less than 20 hours a week at the tables, but more than 20 hours a week at other poker-related activities. Whether it be getting tables set up, waiting for games, analyzing results, reading forums, discussing poker with friends, writing in blogs, analyzing strategies, or just daydreaming poker-themed dreams while watching television, poker tends to consume an awful lot more time than one might be led to believe when shown hourly wages and financial results. A similar theme can be seen in many careers in the financial sector. Young investment bankers often do their best to let you know how much money they earn after salaries and bonuses. But they often fail to mention that they work 70 hours a week and have no time for anything else. This is obviously a generalization, but the point is that monetary values mean nothing if they are not accompanied with corresponding time periods.

“Poker –is-fun-for-ev-ery-one!”
The profitability of poker is just unfathomable in many ways. Since reaching the point some four or five years ago where I became a profitable poker player at significant stakes, I adopted the attitude that making money in all other arenas should be just as easy. It’s not. That’s not to say poker is easy, but for those of us who were blessed with minds analytical enough, spirits competitive enough, skin tough enough, and personalities obsessive enough to succeed at poker, we may never find a place where our edge is anything comparable. I don’t mean to put poker players on a pedestal with this idea at all. The point I’m trying to make is that if you’re lucky enough to have just the right blend of personal characteristics to let you succeed at poker, be thankful for that and take advantage of it. Many young poker players have yet to be exposed to careers outside of poker and because of that they may not realize just how amazingly lucky they are to not only have access to such a tool, but also be graced with the ability to use it.

That last point leads nicely into expressing my future plans for both poker and investing. Since completing the project a little over a month ago, I’ve been back to playing cards and having fun continuing my poker education. My short-term career plans are essentially to take advantage of the profitability that poker still provides in its given state while maintaining a keeping-my-eyes-open approach for my long-term career plans. There’s no telling just how long the game can remain profitable nor whether I’ll continue to enjoy being immersed in poker, so to consider making long-term pokerwise predictions at this point would be silly. But even more silly would be not taking advantage of what’s being offered to me at this point in time. As for real estate and investing, I have loose plans of continuing my education in these areas and am potentially considering property ownership as a vehicle for any future poker wealth. But for the time being, most of my energy is being directed towards poker and maximizing my edges wherever they can be applied most profitably.

I've recently been reading "Fooled By Randomness" by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a book about the important effects of randomness and statistics on all facets of life but most notably on the markets and financial results. It's been a fascinating read so far and I've discovered many important parallels with poker that I plan on discussing in my next entry.

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271 Days Later...

Date: Wed, Mar 25, 2009 Professional Internet

Has it really been that long since my last blog entry? It certainly doesn’t feel like it. When you phrase it as “38 weeks and 5 days” it seems more reasonable after experiencing how fast entire weeks fly by when you’ve got all sorts of tasks and responsibilities going on as manager of a massive life-engulfing project. Let’s see where we last left off...

“I've been home for a week and have spent the bulk of it tearing down the walls, ceilings, and floors of the old house I purchased in downtown Toronto. We plan on renovating and flipping the house, hopefully by the end of September. The project should take up the majority of my time but I still plan on dabbling at mid-stakes during slow times. It's nice to have potential non-poker income in my future and thus have zero pressure on poker results.”

Oh the naivety! Well I’ll start off by explaining how this flipping project came to be. I finished my mechanical engineering and economics degrees in the spring of ’08 and it was time to move on from academics into the less appealing real world. But my plans for post-graduation had come to fruition long before receiving my degrees in April. Throughout my years at Queen’s I spent a great deal of time playing and learning the game of poker and it yielded great results and granted me the freedom to pursue almost any profession I wanted, including poker. I’d known for some time that engineering was always going to be a “plan B” option as I just seemed to lack the passion for it as a long-term career solution. I’d also known for some time that the profitability of online poker was steadily decreasing and that its future was not certain so focusing entirely on poker was also not a valid option. Over the past few years I’d become increasingly intrigued by investing in all shapes and forms. So in fourth year I’d pretty much decided that upon graduation, I was going to find a way to get involved in either stock market investing or real estate investing. The only course available to me for my 5th year that was related to stock market investing was a 3rd year economics course called “Financial Markets and Risk Management”. The professor shared his extremely skeptical view on the markets and active investing as he consistently hammered away the theme of the course which was essentially: “Don’t get involved investing actively in the stock market as the markets are quite efficient and thus you are generally better off throwing your money into an Index Fund and avoiding the transaction fees.” Okay then, real estate it is. (I’ll get back to this course and how it unfairly skewed my young and easily influenced attitude towards equity investing in a later entry.)

My main concern upon entering the real estate world was that I would let my financial capabilities lead me beyond my learning curve. We’ve seen it a thousand times in poker where a player gets lucky and wins a tournament only to develop a false confidence that they are actually good at the game so they go ahead and blow the money playing tables where they are far out-classed. Basically, I wanted to focus on learning and gaining long-term knowledge instead of getting ahead of myself just because I had the financial means to do so. This fact, combined with all the fluffy entertaining American-based television shows about house-flipping, led me to believe that flipping a house in Toronto would be a good way to kick off my property investing career. I would learn a wealth of knowledge about houses while developing capital in a short period of time. Essentially, it would be a short-term high risk investment that I was willing to take on as a challenge. Upon completion, I would reflect on things and have a much better idea of what direction I wanted to head in. And after months of reading the books and watching the shows, I was ready to flip a house.

So after graduating but before leaving for the World Series of Poker in Vegas in May of 2008, I purchased an old 3 bedroom 2 bathroom house in Toronto in a transitioning neighborhood . Construction started when I got back from Vegas and it was soon discovered that the project was going to be much bigger than first forecasted with regards to both time and cost. Essentially, as we proceeded with demolishing the house we revealed that much more work was necessary than originally planned if we wanted to bring the house to the final product we had first envisioned. So the budget was stretched and the timeline was thrown out the window as we dove deep into this massive gutting and remodeling project. A contractor was hired but to save on money as well as to maximize what we could learn, it was decided that my partner and I would basically work “for free” on our own home as the contractor’s main laborers.

“Manual labor. Is this really what I’ve gotten myself into here? Weeks ago I was enjoying spa treatment and fine dining in Vegas, and now I’m removing 3 inch thick tile and concrete floors with a 30lb mallet in the middle of the hot summer heat. And I didn’t even lose any money or go broke. How does that work?” But my main objective for the project was to maximize potential profit while developing knowledge about houses and properties. So there really wasn’t any doubt in my mind that this is what I needed to be doing at this point in time. I managed to get through the long laborious days by telling myself that the hard work would surely pay off some time down the road.

I’d hoped to continue writing in my blog with updates on the project as well as updates on any poker I could find the time to play. But as the project plodded on it became exceedingly difficult to find time to do a lot of things including both playing poker and updating a blog.
So I decided that I would comprise a mammoth summary and reflection of the entire process once the house was complete. And that’s precisely what you are reading. I apologize for the lengthiness, but eight months is a long time!

I’ll try not to bore you with the details of what exactly we did to the house. Basically, we stripped it down to the bear framing before realizing that virtually the entire house was very unlevel. This fact alone added months of agonizing work that should have only lasted weeks had lines and edges been straight. It’s a daunting task to cut a piece of cardboard with four very different side lengths and corner angles at 8am before a shower or a good cup of coffee. But we battled through it while muttering to ourselves that we might as well have ripped the entire house down and started from the foundation. At the time it was mostly a joke, but in retrospect it could very well have been the best solution. But nonetheless, month after month we proceeded with the renovations while constantly revising our loosely followed timelines and pushing back the estimated completion date. In retrospect once again, it might have been in our best interest to bite the bullet and spend more on laborers to avoid the increased carrying costs incurred by dragging on the project. Hindsight is always 20/20.

Here’s a list of things that I did with my own two hands over the past eight months that I never imagined I would ever have to do if you’d asked me two years ago:
• Completely demolish a building. (Walls, floors, cabinetry, floorboards, etc…)
• All kinds of framing and woodwork.
• Dry-wall an entire home.
• Prime and paint an entire home.
• Lay grass and completely re-landscape a property.
• Use a drainsnake. (Oh God.. if you’re unsure what it is, google it…)
• Lay hardwood flooring piece by piece. (My knees still hurt.)
• Install an Ikea kitchen.
• Install a toilet.
• Completely refinish a staircase. (OMG it takes forever to strip off old varnish.)
• Install all sorts of hardware and light fixtures etc…
• Lay trim and do all the thousands of finishing touches.

The small list doesn’t really do the project justice. Each task involved running into dozens of problems and issues as the house was old and nothing could be taken for granted as a standard situation. Meanwhile, not only was the manual labor a huge task but overseeing the project from a managerial and financial standpoint was also just as time-consuming. It meant sacrificing some things such as playing poker and enjoying a social life, but I kept telling myself that it was all worth it and we were “getting close”. The most disappointing thing was constantly recognizing that the project was going to take longer than we thought at any given point in time. Not only was this disappointing for me, but it also created a feeling of disappointing others as I kept having to say, “no not yet, we’re getting there.”

That being said, I did enjoy some of the process as it was fun to constantly be confronted with new dynamic problems on a daily basis and be the one both making the decisions as well as feeling the consequences of said decisions. The one nice thing about the constant manual labor was that the type of labor often changed on a weekly basis as we went from one step to the next. And on the lighter side of things, our contractor was an interesting character who often provided unintentional entertainment through his thick Montreal-based French accent. Eventually we coined the term “Yanism” (his name was Yan) for every time he said words in a non-standard and often undecipherable fashion. The ones that come to mind are: “pizcat” (cat piss), “upstairs” (the object in question being located higher than surrounding objects), and “bubbabutt” (a woman possessing a large behind resembling that of a bubble).

So how’d we do, you ask? Well, we didn’t sell it. Unfortunately, the current real estate market conditions scream at the top of their lungs that it is not the best time to sell a flipped house right now. Instead, I’ve decided to hold onto it as my first investment property and assume landlordship. This was the direction I had wanted to go in with my original exposure to real estate and thus it only makes sense for my first house to be the one I slaved over fixing up. If we had managed to finish the renovations six months ago before the economic crisis caught up with the real estate markets, we would have been in decent shape to book a reasonable profit. Unfortunately the markets did not cooperate and consistent with the rest of the project, plans changed.

That being said, I feel in no way as though we failed to meet our objectives. We knew from the beginning that we were making a short-term high risk investment and thus we focused more on the product that we wanted to develop as our measurement for results as opposed to the numbers. That is not to say that we failed to perform the due diligence to ensure it was a good investment, as we most certainly did. But like other ventures in life that involve much volatility, *cough* poker *cough*, it is of the utmost importance to reflect on the achievement of non-numeric goals and focus on whether the right decisions were made with the given information. And I feel strongly that they were.

So without further adieu, here are the before and after flip pictures of 269 Delaware Ave, Toronto, Ontario:

(click on pictures to make them bigger)

BEFORE

DURING

COMPLETION

I had penciled in a reflection section here to write about all of the things I learned over the past 8 months both about myself and about the world. But this entry is already mega huge and I think this section deserves more than just a rushed mention so I will leave it for a later entry. For now, just know that I learned an almost overwhelming amount of knowledge, much of which I’m now learning can be applied to many facets of life, including poker.

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271 Days Later...

Date: Wed, Mar 25, 2009 Professional Internet

Has it really been that long since my last blog entry? It certainly doesn’t feel like it. When you phrase it as “38 weeks and 5 days” it seems more reasonable after experiencing how fast entire weeks fly by when you’ve got all sorts of tasks and responsibilities going on as manager of a massive life-engulfing project. Let’s see where we last left off...

“I've been home for a week and have spent the bulk of it tearing down the walls, ceilings, and floors of the old house I purchased in downtown Toronto. We plan on renovating and flipping the house, hopefully by the end of September. The project should take up the majority of my time but I still plan on dabbling at mid-stakes during slow times. It's nice to have potential non-poker income in my future and thus have zero pressure on poker results.”

Oh the naivety! Well I’ll start off by explaining how this flipping project came to be. I finished my mechanical engineering and economics degrees in the spring of ’08 and it was time to move on from academics into the less appealing real world. But my plans for post-graduation had come to fruition long before receiving my degrees in April. Throughout my years at Queen’s I spent a great deal of time playing and learning the game of poker and it yielded great results and granted me the freedom to pursue almost any profession I wanted, including poker. I’d known for some time that engineering was always going to be a “plan B” option as I just seemed to lack the passion for it as a long-term career solution. I’d also known for some time that the profitability of online poker was steadily decreasing and that its future was not certain so focusing entirely on poker was also not a valid option. Over the past few years I’d become increasingly intrigued by investing in all shapes and forms. So in fourth year I’d pretty much decided that upon graduation, I was going to find a way to get involved in either stock market investing or real estate investing. The only course available to me for my 5th year that was related to stock market investing was a 3rd year economics course called “Financial Markets and Risk Management”. The professor shared his extremely skeptical view on the markets and active investing as he consistently hammered away the theme of the course which was essentially: “Don’t get involved investing actively in the stock market as the markets are quite efficient and thus you are generally better off throwing your money into an Index Fund and avoiding the transaction fees.” Okay then, real estate it is. (I’ll get back to this course and how it unfairly skewed my young and easily influenced attitude towards equity investing in a later entry.)

My main concern upon entering the real estate world was that I would let my financial capabilities lead me beyond my learning curve. We’ve seen it a thousand times in poker where a player gets lucky and wins a tournament only to develop a false confidence that they are actually good at the game so they go ahead and blow the money playing tables where they are far out-classed. Basically, I wanted to focus on learning and gaining long-term knowledge instead of getting ahead of myself just because I had the financial means to do so. This fact, combined with all the fluffy entertaining American-based television shows about house-flipping, led me to believe that flipping a house in Toronto would be a good way to kick off my property investing career. I would learn a wealth of knowledge about houses while developing capital in a short period of time. Essentially, it would be a short-term high risk investment that I was willing to take on as a challenge. Upon completion, I would reflect on things and have a much better idea of what direction I wanted to head in. And after months of reading the books and watching the shows, I was ready to flip a house.

So after graduating but before leaving for the World Series of Poker in Vegas in May of 2008, I purchased an old 3 bedroom 2 bathroom house in Toronto in a transitioning neighborhood . Construction started when I got back from Vegas and it was soon discovered that the project was going to be much bigger than first forecasted with regards to both time and cost. Essentially, as we proceeded with demolishing the house we revealed that much more work was necessary than originally planned if we wanted to bring the house to the final product we had first envisioned. So the budget was stretched and the timeline was thrown out the window as we dove deep into this massive gutting and remodeling project. A contractor was hired but to save on money as well as to maximize what we could learn, it was decided that my partner and I would basically work “for free” on our own home as the contractor’s main laborers.

“Manual labor. Is this really what I’ve gotten myself into here? Weeks ago I was enjoying spa treatment and fine dining in Vegas, and now I’m removing 3 inch thick tile and concrete floors with a 30lb mallet in the middle of the hot summer heat. And I didn’t even lose any money or go broke. How does that work?” But my main objective for the project was to maximize potential profit while developing knowledge about houses and properties. So there really wasn’t any doubt in my mind that this is what I needed to be doing at this point in time. I managed to get through the long laborious days by telling myself that the hard work would surely pay off some time down the road.

I’d hoped to continue writing in my blog with updates on the project as well as updates on any poker I could find the time to play. But as the project plodded on it became exceedingly difficult to find time to do a lot of things including both playing poker and updating a blog.
So I decided that I would comprise a mammoth summary and reflection of the entire process once the house was complete. And that’s precisely what you are reading. I apologize for the lengthiness, but eight months is a long time!

I’ll try not to bore you with the details of what exactly we did to the house. Basically, we stripped it down to the bear framing before realizing that virtually the entire house was very unlevel. This fact alone added months of agonizing work that should have only lasted weeks had lines and edges been straight. It’s a daunting task to cut a piece of cardboard with four very different side lengths and corner angles at 8am before a shower or a good cup of coffee. But we battled through it while muttering to ourselves that we might as well have ripped the entire house down and started from the foundation. At the time it was mostly a joke, but in retrospect it could very well have been the best solution. But nonetheless, month after month we proceeded with the renovations while constantly revising our loosely followed timelines and pushing back the estimated completion date. In retrospect once again, it might have been in our best interest to bite the bullet and spend more on laborers to avoid the increased carrying costs incurred by dragging on the project. Hindsight is always 20/20.

Here’s a list of things that I did with my own two hands over the past eight months that I never imagined I would ever have to do if you’d asked me two years ago:
• Completely demolish a building. (Walls, floors, cabinetry, floorboards, etc…)
• All kinds of framing and woodwork.
• Dry-wall an entire home.
• Prime and paint an entire home.
• Lay grass and completely re-landscape a property.
• Use a drainsnake. (Oh God.. if you’re unsure what it is, google it…)
• Lay hardwood flooring piece by piece. (My knees still hurt.)
• Install an Ikea kitchen.
• Install a toilet.
• Completely refinish a staircase. (OMG it takes forever to strip off old varnish.)
• Install all sorts of hardware and light fixtures etc…
• Lay trim and do all the thousands of finishing touches.

The small list doesn’t really do the project justice. Each task involved running into dozens of problems and issues as the house was old and nothing could be taken for granted as a standard situation. Meanwhile, not only was the manual labor a huge task but overseeing the project from a managerial and financial standpoint was also just as time-consuming. It meant sacrificing some things such as playing poker and enjoying a social life, but I kept telling myself that it was all worth it and we were “getting close”. The most disappointing thing was constantly recognizing that the project was going to take longer than we thought at any given point in time. Not only was this disappointing for me, but it also created a feeling of disappointing others as I kept having to say, “no not yet, we’re getting there.”

That being said, I did enjoy some of the process as it was fun to constantly be confronted with new dynamic problems on a daily basis and be the one both making the decisions as well as feeling the consequences of said decisions. The one nice thing about the constant manual labor was that the type of labor often changed on a weekly basis as we went from one step to the next. And on the lighter side of things, our contractor was an interesting character who often provided unintentional entertainment through his thick Montreal-based French accent. Eventually we coined the term “Yanism” (his name was Yan) for every time he said words in a non-standard and often undecipherable fashion. The ones that come to mind are: “pizcat” (cat piss), “upstairs” (the object in question being located higher than surrounding objects), and “bubbabutt” (a woman possessing a large behind resembling that of a bubble).

So how’d we do, you ask? Well, we didn’t sell it. Unfortunately, the current real estate market conditions scream at the top of their lungs that it is not the best time to sell a flipped house right now. Instead, I’ve decided to hold onto it as my first investment property and assume landlordship. This was the direction I had wanted to go in with my original exposure to real estate and thus it only makes sense for my first house to be the one I slaved over fixing up. If we had managed to finish the renovations six months ago before the economic crisis caught up with the real estate markets, we would have been in decent shape to book a reasonable profit. Unfortunately the markets did not cooperate and consistent with the rest of the project, plans changed.

That being said, I feel in no way as though we failed to meet our objectives. We knew from the beginning that we were making a short-term high risk investment and thus we focused more on the product that we wanted to develop as our measurement for results as opposed to the numbers. That is not to say that we failed to perform the due diligence to ensure it was a good investment, as we most certainly did. But like other ventures in life that involve much volatility, *cough* poker *cough*, it is of the utmost importance to reflect on the achievement of non-numeric goals and focus on whether the right decisions were made with the given information. And I feel strongly that they were.

So without further adieu, here are the before and after flip pictures of 269 Delaware Ave, Toronto, Ontario:

(click on pictures to make them bigger)

BEFORE

DURING

COMPLETION

I had penciled in a reflection section here to write about all of the things I learned over the past 8 months both about myself and about the world. But this entry is already mega huge and I think this section deserves more than just a rushed mention so I will leave it for a later entry. For now, just know that I learned an almost overwhelming amount of knowledge, much of which I’m now learning can be applied to many facets of life, including poker.

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Back in Toronto and Braceletless..

Date: Fri, Jun 27, 2008 Professional Internet

Well my WSOP '08 came to a disappointing end by finishing 138th place in the $1500NL Event #36. I went into day 2 with T36,600, just slightly under average with sick-high blinds of 800/1600 and 100 antes. The very first hand I open KTss in EP for T4400 and an older European man calls behind me. I busted him in an earlier event and have a bit of a read that he likes to play pots and gamble so I know his range is probably fairly wide. The flop comes QJ5r and I ask him how deep he was to start the hand and he says "about 23k". I proceed to shove, and he tank/folds. Good start, up to T45,000. I steal the blinds once over the next 2 rotations and am down to about T43k when I open QQ from MP. A guy who's played a few pots and is about T32k deep quickly raises me to 13k from late position. I decide that I'm just never folding QQ for 20bbs on any poker table in any country in any world so I shove and he snaps with AA. His AA holds up and I'm down to 12k. I actually should have been down to 10k but the dealer made a mistake and I wasn't about to let the table know about it. Very next hand I pick up KJo UTG and shove, and get called and lose to AKo. Such is life. It's super deflating to go deep in a tournament like this and get cold-decked but that's the nature of the WSOP events. Once you get to the money, edges are far smaller as stacks get shallower and the game becomes a shovefest.

I've been home for a week and have spent the bulk of it tearing down the walls, ceilings, and floors of the old house I purchased in downtown Toronto. We plan on renovating and flipping the house, hopefully by the end of September. The project should take up the majority of my time but I still plan on dabbling at mid-stakes during slow times. It's nice to have potential non-poker income in my future and thus have zero pressure on poker results.

I'd like to congratulate both Vanessa Selbst and Phil Galfond for winning bracelets this year. Both are fantastic people and the bracelets are well-deserved. As I write this, my roommate-for-a-week Max Greenwood is in the lead of the $1k NL rebuy event with 3 players left. Go Max!

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In the money in Event #36...

Date: Fri, Jun 20, 2008 Professional Internet

Well after a long day of maneuvering through another huge yet ridiculously soft $1500 NL event field, I've had my first cash in the '08 WSOP. I'm heading into tomorrow with T36,600 in chips which should be just under the average stack with 187 players remaining. Blinds are high, so things will change extremely quickly. Progress should be reported here: http://www.worldseriesofpoker.com/tourney/tournament-chip-counts.asp?tid=4930&grid=411

Plenty of funny/interesting hands to talk about but I'll leave them for later and get some sleep.. bracelet one time!

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Vegas Update...

Date: Mon, Jun 16, 2008 Professional Internet

I've now been in Vegas for almost a week. I spent the first few days with my girlfriend Lauren doing completely non-poker activities. It was a fantastic few days and really enjoyable for me to finally spend some time in Vegas which wasn't totally poker-related and/or with poker friends. I saw three Cirque du Soleil shows this week and all of them were quite enjoyable. My favourite was definitely "Mystere", as some of the athletic feats were just mind-boggling and I was thoroughly entertained for the entire show. "KA" was also very good, with "Love" (the Beatles musical) being my 3rd choice. If you were to see only one, I would definitely recommend Mystere.

I've also managed to spend a lot of time in the World Series poker room this week. I've played in 4 events, with zero cashes. In fact, I haven't even made a dinner break yet. It's been fairly disappointing, however cash games have gone well so I've basically been freerolling the tournaments which is nice. To be honest, I didn't really have many interesting tournament hands. Although, my bust-out hand in today's $3000 NL Event was especially frustrating...

We started with T6000 chips and I've run it up to ~T11,000 fairly early. Amir Vahedi arrived late at our table and had since run his chips up to roughly T12,000. He opens from UTG to T300 (blinds 50/100), and I 3bet KK from MP to T825, he calls. Flop comes Q73hh. He check/calls a 2/3pot bet. Turn is an offsuit 2. He checks and then shoves all-in (effectively a pot-sized raise) over my turn bet. This is not a fist-pumping situation for me as he can definitely have a set of 7's or 3's here, but its still a pretty automatic call. I call, and he rolls over Q2cc for two pair. The river bricks and I'm left wondering how this amazingly terrible poker player has won a WSOP bracelet and is known as one of the "poker professionals" that 99% of America thinks is "world-class". He's terrible.

One semi-interesting tournament hand I played was my bustout hand in the 3rd event I played, the $1500 NL. This event sported 3000 of the worlds finest donkeys and fish. The field was amazingly soft, as to be expected in a weekend small buy-in event. Although, the disappointing part is that the structure is so poor that it's still fairly difficult to navigate through such a large field with very shallow stacks. Here's my bust-out hand with a bit of analysis:

I managed to run my T3000 up to roughly T6000, a little under average after the 2nd break. Folds around to a nice early-30's-ish whitewashed Asian guy I'd been talking to occasionally and he opens the button for T900 with T150/300 blinds and a T25 ante. I have A9hh in the SB and without much thought, I ship it all-in. My play here is pretty standard because he's definitely opening the button with a wide range and the pot is quite big with the raise/blinds/antes. Folding is just too tight and we're not deep enough to just call. He tanks (lol) and then finally calls with AKo and it holds. To validate my play, lets toss some numbers around:

After his raise, the pot is T1675. So I'm putting up roughly T6000 to win T1675. I'm fairly certain he opens the button with any pair, any ace, and any broadway. He also probably opens some other junk for a generously small total of about 27% of all hands. The fact that he TANKED with AKo leads me to believe that he's only calling my shove with AK/66+/AQs. This accounts for 5.6% of the time, or roughly 20% of his button-opening range. So 80% of the time, I will win T1675 without showdown. The other 20% of the time, I will be a 35% underdog against his calling range.

Summary:
80% of the time he folds and I win +T1675.
7% of the time, he calls and I win the showdown, +T6675.
13% of the time, he calls and I lose the showdown, -T6000.

So... Chip EV = .8*1675 + .07*6675 - .13*6000 = ~ +T1225

So in the long-run we increase our stack by roughly 20% every time we make this play, given the worst case scenario for his opening range.

As expected, the deepstacked cash games I've played have provided way more interesting hands than the straightforward tournament play. Here are a few that I can remember, all at NL10/25 no max buyin at the Rio:

Hand 1: Bit of history: AEJones is at the table, a very good online player. It's my first day living at a house full of online poker players including AEJ, and he doesn't know it yet as we haven't been introduced. However, I knew who he was as someone had pointed him out. He's playing/raising a ton of hands and as expected, both the old nits and loose-passive terrible players are all mumbling and muttering about how the "young kid" is "playing fast/speeding/wild/etc.." as he takes all their money.

AEJ opens from EP, something he's doing a ton. I call 77 from MP, all else fold. Flop is KJ7r. He bets, I call. Turn is a 7 bringing a flush draw. He hammers again, and I tank a bit. Finally I make a sloppy one-chip-at-a-time call. River is an off-suit 9 and he bets 2/3 pot, $850. I tank for a while before making it $2350. He thinks for a short while before shoving for my last ~$2000 and I insta-call with the nuts. He shows KJo for what at first seems like a mesmerizingly terrible play. But the more I thought about his play, the more I really liked it if I had been atleast $2000 deeper. And I'm willing to bet that being mostly an online player, he wasn't fully aware of how deep my stack was. His river shove is turning his hand into a bluff, as from his perspective I can never have a full house. I would re-raise KK/JJ preflop, not to mention that he has 2 of those blockers making it even more doubtful. K7s/J7s/99 are all not very reasonable. So from his perspective my most probable hands are trip 7's, QT for the straight, some sort of bluff, or quads. He should also be aware at this point that I'm most probably a thinking online player that is definitely capable of folding out everything but quads to his shove. His play at the time made me super-confused but in retrospect, I really like it if I'm deeper.

This next hand is fun. DJ Sensei is at the table, a really good online player who has significant live experience and can be tricky at live deepstacked tables. The button straddles to $50 and DJ calls from the blinds along with a few others, as I call Q9dd from the CO for a 6-way flop of KJThhh. DJ leads out for pot, an older nit who'd limped from EP calls after some hesitation, and I think/call with my straight. Turn is a brick, 5s. DJ and the nit both hesitate/check, and I bet 2/3 pot. DJ think/calls, nit think/calls. At this point I'm fairly confused because I'm almost 100% certain DJ leads the turn again with a flush. I'm also fairly confident (yet not as certain) that the nit would bet the turn with a flush after DJ checks. I'm decently confident that DJ never has AQ, and that the nit probably doesn't either. So I'm a bit confused to get 2 calls on the turn. The river is another brick, the 4c. Both players think/check, and I need to think about whether I should value bet. I decide that I just simply don't think either player has a flush very often and that I might get paid off by a weirdly played set or a stubborn two pair that thinks I just had the Ah for the nut flush draw. I bet half-pot, and DJ tanks with a hugely winceful look on his face. He painfully calls. The nit then begins tanking. It's at this point that I realize that my $1500 river bet effectively put him almost all-in. I also start to realize that its entirely possible that I might get DJ to call with a worse hand here, while the nit folds out a better one if he did manage to get to the river with a slightly oddly played flush or AQ. But the nit finally calls. First DJ rolls over KK for a slowplayed top set, as he expected the straddle to get re-popped preflop. I roll over my straight, and the nit then triumphantly rolls over AQ for the nut straight. It would have been so sick if he managed to lay it down and I effectively made a two-way river bet, one for value against DJ, and one to bluff out the nit. But nonetheless, it was an interesting pot. In retrospect, I should not have bet the river. Mostly just because in live poker, player's ranges are far less defined as they are in the typical online games that I'm used to playing. Players take more unorthodox fancy-pants plays in live games and thus you can never entirely discount hands from their ranges. After talking to Cole (cts), I should probably have just folded the flop with such terrible reverse implied odds. I agree, and the thought had definitely crossed my mind during the hand. The other option would have been to raise the flop and fold to a re-raise, or try to get to showdown cheaply if called.

The next hand isn't so much interesting as it is fun. Dude raises in MP, I call with Q9hh from LP, and an older "live poker professional" calls from the BB. He's clearly terrible but from his convorsations I gathered that he spends a lot of time playing in live games without much understanding of the fundamentals of poker. Flop comes A94hh. Check, check, I bet 2/3pot, and the BB quickly check-raises fairly big. MP folds, I think/call. Turn is the 4c. This is actually a good card for me as 44 is one of the hands I'm most scared of and now its much less likely. Especially when he insta-bets the turn with a big bet, as he would most certainly have Hollywooded a bit with quads or a full house, and he most probably would have needed some thought before betting again with an Ace if he happened to check-raise an ATs type hand on the flop. So at this point I'm almost certain he's on a draw of some sort, or even just a pure bluff as these people are incredibly bad. River is the Ac, and he thinks and checks. At this point I'm 99% sure I have the best hand with just my pair of 9's but its not really worth value-betting. In retrospect I should have bet something retardedly small like 1/12th pot to either humiliate him when he has to fold, or snap him off if he decides to bluff-raise. But instead, I opted to toss the dealer a $5 chip as tip before rolling over my cards. This is one of my favourite things to do in live games as it shows that you had a total grasp on the hand for you to be cocky enough to tip the dealer before showing down your hand when you don't have anywhere close to the nuts and your opponent showed only aggression up until the river. I'm pretty sure the hand tilted him a a bit as he mucked his cards and muttered a few things.

The last hand is fairly interesting, especially if the circumstances change a bit on the river. The same guy from the last hand opens from EP to $150. He has clearly been sizing his preflop raises according to the strength of his hands, so his range is definitely skewed towards the top of his range when he opens for such a big amount. One caller in MP and I call in the blinds with 99. I flop the world with J94hh. I check, EP bets, MP folds, and I raise large knowing that there's a good chance he has a big hand. He calls, and now I'm certain he's got a big one and I just pray for the board to brick out. The turn is the Qd and I hammer for pot. He calls. River is the Ah completing the flush draw. I'm forced to check as now I'm really only beating KK and a few other hands. Luckily for me, he checks behind his KK and I rake in the pot. It would have been a really really tough spot if he had of jammed the river. AA and a flush draw were both significant parts of his range, and I just don't think he's all that capable of turning KK into a bluff.

That's it for now. Tomorrow's event is the $2500 NL 6-max event, one that I should have a huge edge in along with all the other online 6-max cash players. Hopefully I can run up a stack and make my first dinner break!

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WSOP/Vegas, here I come...

Date: Sat, Jun 7, 2008 Professional Internet

So I'm leaving Monday for my 3rd trip to Las Vegas in the past 18 months. I plan on staying anywhere from 1-2 weeks depending on how well I run. The first event I plan on playing is the $5000 NLH Event #21 on Wednesday. I'll do my best to update the blog with interesting happenings and my results as days go by. Hopefully I can come back with a bracelet and/or all the Sklansky bucks that are owed to me.

In my last blurb I talked about "poker as a profession" and made a loose comparison to a civil engineer. I posted the blurb on 2+2, which was probably a mistake in retrospect. I was quite biased in my points in an effort to emphasize some of the issues that non-poker playing friends might not be aware of. The people reading 2+2 are mostly "poker professionals" and thus many of them did not take kindly to someone making points as to why such a career path may not be as lucrative as one might be led to believe. I fully expected to receive the occasional aggressive retort from some readers as they chose to defend their life choices aggressively. But the main goal of posting the article was to incite some constructive discussion, and I mostly succeeded. So here are some of the responses that I thought had some great points:

"Lefort,

I love what you have to say mostly, but your post I think suffers from that age old human flaw: your vision is limited to what you know. You are a poker player, and you suffer the problems of being a poker player. You see a civil engineer, building bridges, and you imagine him having a much simpler life because, hey, the grass is always greener.

But the civil engineer, when he goes to sleep at night, is worrying about whether his firm is going to get that next contract. He wonders if everything he did that day was done correctly, because if it wasn't a bridge somewhere will collapse one day. Tens of lives and millions of dollars could be lost. He's afraid that everyone these days has at least a masters, if not a PhD. Maybe he has to go back to school, to stay ahead of the field. And so on, and so forth.

The fact is that in any attempt at "great success" is going to involve problems of variance and staying on the cutting edge and so forth. We are not so special, we are merely fortunate. Enjoy the ride while it lasts, and prepare yourself for the day after."

----------------------------------------------

"Being able to transcend short-term variance and focus on the long-term picture is one of the most fundamental skills of a successful poker professional. It is difficult, but it is certainly not impossible. While bridge builders may not lose progress if they're doing it right, there are many problems which will arise if not prepared for in advance, and the difference between a good engineer and a great one is how well they prepare for these difficulties and how they deal with them when they arise.
...
Learning to adapt to changing game conditions is a crucial part of being a poker pro, but I don't see that as a negative thing. In fact, that ability will serve one very well in future life endeavors. The fundamentals of engineering will probably not change any time soon, but when the bridge-builder decides to quit building bridges (or is laid off because there are no more bridges to build) he may have a much more difficult time adapting to a new career than the poker professional. On the other hand, if the poker pro is accustomed to making much more money and sleeping until noon, it could be difficult for him to take on more traditional employment.
...
Professional poker players learn many useful skills that are applicable to other fields, such as financial/risk management (and tolerance), self-awareness, and many investing concepts. Just because the next job a poker player has doesn't involve cards and chips doesn't mean that he's a fish out of water.
...
For me, poker is not a long-term career. Its simply a springboard between college and the rest of my life which fortunately lets me bypass much of the nonsense that most people my age have to deal with, like low-paying entry-level jobs, tight budgets, and very little free time. When I stop playing poker for a living, I'll have plenty of savings from it, and probably will be ready to jump right into something new and exciting, most likely something that I've built up from the ground myself."

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Poker as a profession..

Date: Sat, May 24, 2008 Professional Internet

I mentioned in my last update that I was going to talk about poker as a profession and why I don’t plan on ever being considered a professional poker player. To give a better idea of why, here’s the life of a poker player in comparison to the life of a civil engineer. For the sake of simplicity, let’s say that the engineer is privy in bridge building and makes his living managing the construction of bridges. The poker player’s metaphorical bridge is essentially his bankroll. Now let’s look at some of the perks of being a civil engineer:

1. He never has to worry about having built less than nothing, or “negative bridge”. He always starts with two foundations with which to connect. If the poker player considers his current bankroll to be his foundation and experiences a losing day, he now has negative bridge. He goes to the job site the next day with less bridge completed than he had started with. Not only is the project further away from completion, but he’s also lost man-hours. Theoretically the poker player can avoid this by not considering each day to be new and thus not create a “watermark” at the end of each day for comparison. In a more realistic sense, this is very difficult to do.

2. Bridges are always bridges. The laws of physics do not change. The elements of the bridge might change but the fundamentals remain the same and the basic bridge-building skills will always be more than enough to complete the construction of a new bridge. Meanwhile, the poker world is quite dynamic. Strategies become dated and no longer useful for the development of the poker player’s bridge. In fact, not only do outdated strategies stint the building process, but they can also cause destruction.

3. As a result of (2), the civil engineer doesn’t have to worry about consistently scrutinizing and updating his bridge-building methods. He knows what procedures are being used for bridge-building in recent years, and any necessary adjustments will most certainly be brought to his attention by his superiors. Meanwhile, the poker player must be aware of whether his bridge-building capabilities are even adequate to build current bridges. Interestingly so, it becomes the player’s responsibility to use his own knowledge to reflect on the adequacy of the very knowledge he is using for reflection. If this is confusing for you, imagine how confusing it can be for the poker player. The point is that without foreign input, it is quite difficult for the poker player to know if he has the state-of-the-art bridge building techniques when the only pieces he has for comparison are that of his own.

4. The engineer does not have to experience the foggy distorting element that is statistical variance. If he puts in the time and effort to build a sound bridge, and his knowledge is sufficient, he will complete the task. The poker player does not have such assurance. Further complicating the issues put forth in points (1), (2), and (3), the poker player experiences a distorted viewpoint on how effective his bridge building skills may be. The element of luck involved in poker on a short-term basis presents difficulty in assessing the state of one’s skills and capability for building bridges. It is quite easy for a player without the tools necessary to fully complete a bridge to experience rapid bridge development in a short period of time, leading to conclusions that they must be fully capable of completing a full bridge if given the opportunity. Conversely, it is also quite possible for an adept poker player to experience the negative effects of variance and be forced to embrace a situation in which it appears as though they will never be able to build another bridge again. This only emphasizes the difficulties involved with point (2) and especially point (3).

5. The world will always need bridges. Well, maybe not. But it is a reasonable assumption that upon society losing the need for bridges, builders will still possess a skill-set that can be applied to other civil engineering needs of society. The poker player has no comparable future stability. The future of online poker from a legal standpoint is not clear. The poker player is not assured of the need for future bridges. Nor is he assured that future bridges will even be worth building. His bridge-building world is constantly becoming increasingly more difficult to survive in, and there is no way of knowing whether his current bridge-building skills will be enough to provide him with a career in the future.

6. Time spent building bridges is worth more than just income to the engineer. Society recognizes the sound work of an engineer and rewards him with a level of respect and gratitude. If for some reason the engineer decides to take a different career path, their resume is solid and they should not be in danger of remaining unemployed. The poker player, on the other hand, has a large void in his contribution to society. His resume is most probably lacking in areas and almost certainly littered with time gaps.

7. Everyone can profit in the bridge-building industry. Many builders can survive in the economy. This is not the case with poker. In fact, poker is an overall less than breakeven game for the player once factoring in the rake. You have to be significantly better than your peers to be assured of making money as a poker player. In the civil engineering world, this is often not the case.

8. From time to time, the civil engineer is blessed with a feeling of satisfaction as they complete another bridge. The engineer’s goals are concrete and achievable. The poker player’s bridge is never quite finished. This aspect of the game is often overlooked and rarely given much thought. It can become increasingly difficult for a poker player to find joy in his profession after his bridge has undergone much construction. The potential for a bigger bridge becomes less lucrative compared to the already existent bridge. Subsequently, there is no sign of the end of the bridge. It is very difficult to have concrete results-based goals as a poker player due to the effects of variance and the trouble determining long-term winrates. This can cause issues of never feeling satisfied in a game that never has an ending.

9. The engineer works with a team. They converse and strategize with their colleagues as they progress towards their mutual project goals. They have shared feelings invested towards the building of the bridge. Once the bridge is completed, they can rejoice together. The situation is quite different for a poker player. Poker is clearly not a team game. Yes, the poker player can make many friends within his profession, but they rarely find themselves in situations involving teamwork. Poker can be quite a lonely profession without putting forth the effort to develop friendships within the community.

10. Civil engineers provide bridges to aid society’s need for transportation. Poker players take money from people less intelligent than themselves. Quite simply, most poker players do not provide society any benefits with their work. It can be argued that they provide a source of entertainment, but such an argument does not hold much water when comparing poker with other forms of entertainment. I won’t bother getting deeper into this point, as it could potentially deserve a whole blurb itself.

There are clearly many perks involved in being a professional poker player and I have failed to mention them here. For some, these perks may be so lucrative that pursuing poker as a career may very well be the right path for them to take. For others, including myself, the reasons stated above dictate that they will always treat the game as a hobby, rather than making the full dedication towards becoming a professional poker player.

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I still play poker!

Date: Mon, Mar 17, 2008 Professional Internet

Apologizing for lack of updates is getting old so I won't bother. It's difficult to have material to write about when I've realized that it's in my best interests to both not post results, nor post any detailed hand analysis. In fact, I'd considered forgetting about posting at all until I'd come across some SSNLers on 2p2 who seemed to really appreciate and connect with the blurb I wrote on tilting. (http://lefort.livejournal.com/13827.html) I do enjoy writing about the non-strategy facets of the game and what I've learned about them, so I will continue with that. The topic I'll write about in my next blurb will be poker as a satisfying profession, why it will never be mine, and why I think a lot of players struggle with ever being "content" as a poker player.

As for the coaching sessions late last month and early this month, they were fantastic. This coach really opened up my eyes and re-structured my entire game. I now see faults in most players' games and feel like I've got edges on almost all of the regulars, instead of just sharing profits from the fish. As a result of feeling better about my game and enjoying it more, I set a lofty goal of playing 50,000 hands this month. I'm on pace for over 40,000, which I'd be ecstatic with when all said and done. As for results, they've been encouraging in that I've run really really really bad (broken record, huh?) but have still faired alright.

I won't divulge much into what I learned specifically in the sessions because its not fair to my coach, nor does it really benefit me a whole lot. But I will mention some of the broad conclusions I've come to after experiencing the game from a different angle. I've realized that the best players are the best not only because they are good at making the really tough decisions, but also (and possibly more importantly), they minimize the number of tough decisions they have to make. Their game is structured as a whole to be well balanced to the point where many of the tough decisions become easier decisions as they're filtered through the function that is your strategy. When you play thousands of hands a day, its not about what you or your opponents are holding at any given time. It's about what you or your opponents COULD be holding, and how to optimize your holdings while exploiting the imbalances in your opponent's holdings. Once you base your decisions on this concept, it becomes much easier to make the "right" decision on any street, as you no longer have XXxx, but instead of you have "a hand in this portion of my range".

These lessons have also reiterated the fact that who is "good" at poker is so inconceivably misconceived. It is not possible for someone unaware of what makes a player good to subjectively decide who is good. For MSNLers to gossip about who the best nosebleed players are is pure banter. They don't have the understanding of the game to be able to rate the understandings of players with much greater understandings. A player can combine a rather satisfactory understanding of poker with great table selection and game management to be a profitable player, even at high stakes. But to truly decide who the best poker players are is to go much deeper, not to look at database results.

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Breaking down a simple hand against a donkey...

Date: Tue, Sep 8, 2009 Professional Internet

Part Two of my WSOP '09 Trip Report

Date: Fri, Aug 7, 2009 Professional Internet

Part One of my WSOP '09 Trip Report

Date: Fri, Jul 17, 2009 Professional Internet

And I'm Vegas bound once again...

Date: Wed, Jun 17, 2009 Professional Internet

Dealing With Variance

Date: Mon, May 25, 2009 Professional Internet

Some post-flop reflection..

Date: Mon, Apr 20, 2009 Professional Internet

271 Days Later...

Date: Wed, Mar 25, 2009 Professional Internet

271 Days Later...

Date: Wed, Mar 25, 2009 Professional Internet

Back in Toronto and Braceletless..

Date: Fri, Jun 27, 2008 Professional Internet

In the money in Event #36...

Date: Fri, Jun 20, 2008 Professional Internet

Vegas Update...

Date: Mon, Jun 16, 2008 Professional Internet

WSOP/Vegas, here I come...

Date: Sat, Jun 7, 2008 Professional Internet

Poker as a profession..

Date: Sat, May 24, 2008 Professional Internet

I still play poker!

Date: Mon, Mar 17, 2008 Professional Internet