This is about 9 months out of date but I wrote this to help consider my results and then couldn't decide where to post it. Having recently got myself a Reddit account, this seems the place.
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A little history:
When I was 20 I considered dropping out of Uni and becoming a poker player. I had earned £18K profit across the previous year, and that is a lot of money for a student! Especially in the UK, where because poker is classed as a game of luck there is no tax on the winnings of gambling, it felt more like £25K. A significant “salary” for any 20 year old.
Then I started looking at the data behind that and realised that I was averaging almost 70 hours a week grinding 6 tables simultaneously at small stakes to make that profit. In fact my income per hour was just £5.37. Not awful, but hardly worth dropping out of Uni. Suddenly that profit didn’t feel so great anymore.
I tried moving up in stakes, from $20 buy-in’s to $50 buy-in’s, but in a month I lost £3K. The next level contained professionals, and the UK Government can pretend all it wants, but when you’re playing many thousands of hands, skill starts to overcome the short term coin-flips and variances. It was brutal. It was humbling. I wasn’t good enough, simply put, to do it full time and make decent money… so I decided to focus on graduating.
When I was 30 I decided I would try a bit more seriously again, but in casinos. I’d played in casinos sporadically over those 10 years (actually ended up in one with the woman who is now my wife, after I “accidently” missed my last train home when I saw her in a London pub), and although I felt I was a profitable and solid player, you need to be mindful not to kid yourself. So I approached things systematically, recording data for 12 months to see what stood out and lessons I could learn.
The results are in!
· I am indeed profitable. The data told me I had made a total of £8,279 in profit.
· I am fairly consistent, achieving a winning session 53 times from 77 visits, or 69%.
· I played 337.75 hours, meaning an hourly profit of £24.51, or annualised a take-home salary of £48K after tax, which is £68K before.
· I earned on average 14 “big blinds” an hour, a key metric for cash game players. At small stakes, anything over 5 is respectable, over 10 is great. I’ve heard it said 80% of small stake players are loss making, which seems a bit high to me, but I can easily imagine 60% are.
Better still, my graph has very few swings. Interestingly though, I only had 2 amazing nights where I won >£1500, which probably means I played slightly too safe. I confess I did seek to minimise variance where possible, feeling that I was better than 80% of the players I was against, so I didn’t need to take 50-55% marginally favourable coinflips.
Now because my sessions were of different lengths, it’s not immediately obvious if a £100 profit is good or bad. I mean if I’ve played 4 hours, it’s average, 2 hours, it’s fantastic, and 8 hours, pretty meh.
So I took another look and blended the sessions instead across number of hands played, producing the below graph, showing a level of consistency I am genuinely proud of. Roughly speaking, I make £1 per hand played.
OK Great, but what did I learn from this? Data is lovely and all (as is £8K!), but really you want insight from that data you can action to improve performance.
Wait, I did better at larger stakes?
Well firstly, there are a few things I found counter intuitive. Take the below, which shows the stakes I played at. In theory, you earn less the higher your stakes go as competition increases, but I didn’t see that at all.
Playing at stakes 50% higher (£3 an “orbit” versus £2 an orbit – more significant than it might sound), my hourly was a whopping 600% higher. Put another way, I played just over twice as much £1/£2 as I did £1/£1, but made 13x as much profit! Surprising indeed, and massively unexpected.
I am planning on playing some £1/£3 and £2/£5 once I grow my bankroll this year, it’ll be interesting to see if this trend continues, or if there’s something else going on not immediately obvious to me.
Day of the week – weekends are worse?!
Another unexpected development was found when looking at the days I was playing. I had expected that I’d be much better on Friday and Saturday when more amateurs would play and I’d be able to target them, but I found the opposite. Friday’s I made £2.47 an hour, Saturday’s £12.52, both way off my average, and across quite large sample sizes too (>55% of sessions between them).
Meanwhile Sunday, Tuesday and Wednesday all had ~10%+ of sessions, but saw hourly profit doubling my averages. My best hourly is Sunday, although I have never lost money on a Wednesday, so a close call as to which is my best.
https://preview.redd.it/v10rt8fkgod51.png?width=600&format=png&auto=webp&s=8f3b3c4e57acd27dd00a70c1bc6fe05276270c38
After reflecting on these trends I started to realise something. Poker is essentially a game of knowledge and imperfect information. A key part of that is “position” (where you sit in each hand), where being later to act means you have access to more information, and “ranges” (what hands your opponents are likely to have), where depending on the position somebody plays a hand in and how they play it, you can start putting them on a range of cards. Nobody sane would bet with 7 players to act behind them with 2 7 off-suit, literally the worse starting hand, for example.
More experienced players play more predictably, and I was much better at sparring with them because I have a good grasp of the fundamentals. I think my fairly conservative playing style is also more suited to regular players, as I tend to take fewer risks and so don’t punish mistakes as harshly.
Finally, my risk adverse approach also fooled regular players into thinking I had weaker hands than I did, so I was able to mess with their attempts to put me on a range. Likewise I tended to just call, and rarely raise, any hand I wanted to play pre-flop, so I could disguise my hand and out-play after the flop. Again this isn’t traditional at all, but many of my bigger pots came about this way.
Central casinos have easier competition
Less surprising was my split in where I made the most money. Tellingly, Empire and Hippodrome are based in central London and are tourist destinations. I find the competitors objectively worse than I am, as a whole. The Vic and Aspers are less central, with the consensus being that Aspers was the toughest £1/£2 in London, consisting almost entirely of regulars and semi-pro’s. I mean, who wants to go to East London as a tourist? There’s way more glitz and glamour in Leicester Square and so much more appealing. The Vic is West London so less extreme, but a similar situation, it’s pretty out the way compared to central two.
Length of session
Lastly, something that was unknown to me was that I would see such an obvious split in hourly profit based on the amount of hours I was playing in that session:
https://preview.redd.it/m9cs1n0xgod51.png?width=600&format=png&auto=webp&s=e23b60a18ef1f3cb6f77b32c92e12626f8450f3e
Here, we see a jump in profit after 4 hours, and really between 4-8 hours is my sweet spot, running at 50% more than my average. I think after I have played at the same table for 4+ hours, that I am observant enough to spot certain patterns. One of my favourite tricks is to identify regulars targeting tourists, and re raise them. You know their range will be wide to target the less good player, so you take advantage of them trying to take advantage. This is especially good if you have a good position (so act after them), so that if they do call you can play the hand with more information.
The drop-off at the end likely indicates that after 8 hours I start making bad decisions. Reviewing this, not only am I probably a bit tired, but I think those sessions I am on “winners tilt”, and I must be winning or else I wouldn’t be there after 8 hours. But when you’re up and doing well, you tend to play hands you shouldn’t and make bad decisions that cost you, it can feel like there’s less cost in getting it wrong because you’re still in profit, even though it can cost more in terms of £s. Once I became aware of this in myself, I started seeing it in others. There’s a regular at the Hippodrome who is a dangerous and good player, but becomes reckless and likes a gamble when they are up. If he has lots of chips, I always try and sit at his table, and look to get it in when I am a 60-80% favourite, and hope my luck holds.
What’s next?
I’ve taken 2 months away from the casino’s to make sure I don’t have a problem and focus on a work project, and I’m looking forward to starting this year on the 29th November. I suppose starting on a Friday isn’t ideal, but it aligns nicely with my wife’s office Xmas party, so oh well! That said, I will make sure I play the £1/£2 at the Hippodrome for 4-8 hours. As it will be a Friday I’ll look to punish mistakes more aggressively and make fewer assumptions about the other players and their cards if they seem less experienced.
Let’s see if I can take the lessons learned across this year, and drive further improvements to make more money, improving on my operational performance, the real purpose of data in my opinion.
submitted by Hubbyhog to poker [link] [comments] ----
A little history:
When I was 20 I considered dropping out of Uni and becoming a poker player. I had earned £18K profit across the previous year, and that is a lot of money for a student! Especially in the UK, where because poker is classed as a game of luck there is no tax on the winnings of gambling, it felt more like £25K. A significant “salary” for any 20 year old.
Then I started looking at the data behind that and realised that I was averaging almost 70 hours a week grinding 6 tables simultaneously at small stakes to make that profit. In fact my income per hour was just £5.37. Not awful, but hardly worth dropping out of Uni. Suddenly that profit didn’t feel so great anymore.
I tried moving up in stakes, from $20 buy-in’s to $50 buy-in’s, but in a month I lost £3K. The next level contained professionals, and the UK Government can pretend all it wants, but when you’re playing many thousands of hands, skill starts to overcome the short term coin-flips and variances. It was brutal. It was humbling. I wasn’t good enough, simply put, to do it full time and make decent money… so I decided to focus on graduating.
When I was 30 I decided I would try a bit more seriously again, but in casinos. I’d played in casinos sporadically over those 10 years (actually ended up in one with the woman who is now my wife, after I “accidently” missed my last train home when I saw her in a London pub), and although I felt I was a profitable and solid player, you need to be mindful not to kid yourself. So I approached things systematically, recording data for 12 months to see what stood out and lessons I could learn.
The results are in!
· I am indeed profitable. The data told me I had made a total of £8,279 in profit.
· I am fairly consistent, achieving a winning session 53 times from 77 visits, or 69%.
· I played 337.75 hours, meaning an hourly profit of £24.51, or annualised a take-home salary of £48K after tax, which is £68K before.
· I earned on average 14 “big blinds” an hour, a key metric for cash game players. At small stakes, anything over 5 is respectable, over 10 is great. I’ve heard it said 80% of small stake players are loss making, which seems a bit high to me, but I can easily imagine 60% are.
Better still, my graph has very few swings. Interestingly though, I only had 2 amazing nights where I won >£1500, which probably means I played slightly too safe. I confess I did seek to minimise variance where possible, feeling that I was better than 80% of the players I was against, so I didn’t need to take 50-55% marginally favourable coinflips.
Now because my sessions were of different lengths, it’s not immediately obvious if a £100 profit is good or bad. I mean if I’ve played 4 hours, it’s average, 2 hours, it’s fantastic, and 8 hours, pretty meh.
So I took another look and blended the sessions instead across number of hands played, producing the below graph, showing a level of consistency I am genuinely proud of. Roughly speaking, I make £1 per hand played.
OK Great, but what did I learn from this? Data is lovely and all (as is £8K!), but really you want insight from that data you can action to improve performance.
Wait, I did better at larger stakes?
Well firstly, there are a few things I found counter intuitive. Take the below, which shows the stakes I played at. In theory, you earn less the higher your stakes go as competition increases, but I didn’t see that at all.
Playing at stakes 50% higher (£3 an “orbit” versus £2 an orbit – more significant than it might sound), my hourly was a whopping 600% higher. Put another way, I played just over twice as much £1/£2 as I did £1/£1, but made 13x as much profit! Surprising indeed, and massively unexpected.
I am planning on playing some £1/£3 and £2/£5 once I grow my bankroll this year, it’ll be interesting to see if this trend continues, or if there’s something else going on not immediately obvious to me.
Day of the week – weekends are worse?!
Another unexpected development was found when looking at the days I was playing. I had expected that I’d be much better on Friday and Saturday when more amateurs would play and I’d be able to target them, but I found the opposite. Friday’s I made £2.47 an hour, Saturday’s £12.52, both way off my average, and across quite large sample sizes too (>55% of sessions between them).
Meanwhile Sunday, Tuesday and Wednesday all had ~10%+ of sessions, but saw hourly profit doubling my averages. My best hourly is Sunday, although I have never lost money on a Wednesday, so a close call as to which is my best.
https://preview.redd.it/v10rt8fkgod51.png?width=600&format=png&auto=webp&s=8f3b3c4e57acd27dd00a70c1bc6fe05276270c38
After reflecting on these trends I started to realise something. Poker is essentially a game of knowledge and imperfect information. A key part of that is “position” (where you sit in each hand), where being later to act means you have access to more information, and “ranges” (what hands your opponents are likely to have), where depending on the position somebody plays a hand in and how they play it, you can start putting them on a range of cards. Nobody sane would bet with 7 players to act behind them with 2 7 off-suit, literally the worse starting hand, for example.
More experienced players play more predictably, and I was much better at sparring with them because I have a good grasp of the fundamentals. I think my fairly conservative playing style is also more suited to regular players, as I tend to take fewer risks and so don’t punish mistakes as harshly.
Finally, my risk adverse approach also fooled regular players into thinking I had weaker hands than I did, so I was able to mess with their attempts to put me on a range. Likewise I tended to just call, and rarely raise, any hand I wanted to play pre-flop, so I could disguise my hand and out-play after the flop. Again this isn’t traditional at all, but many of my bigger pots came about this way.
Central casinos have easier competition
Less surprising was my split in where I made the most money. Tellingly, Empire and Hippodrome are based in central London and are tourist destinations. I find the competitors objectively worse than I am, as a whole. The Vic and Aspers are less central, with the consensus being that Aspers was the toughest £1/£2 in London, consisting almost entirely of regulars and semi-pro’s. I mean, who wants to go to East London as a tourist? There’s way more glitz and glamour in Leicester Square and so much more appealing. The Vic is West London so less extreme, but a similar situation, it’s pretty out the way compared to central two.
Length of session
Lastly, something that was unknown to me was that I would see such an obvious split in hourly profit based on the amount of hours I was playing in that session:
https://preview.redd.it/m9cs1n0xgod51.png?width=600&format=png&auto=webp&s=e23b60a18ef1f3cb6f77b32c92e12626f8450f3e
Here, we see a jump in profit after 4 hours, and really between 4-8 hours is my sweet spot, running at 50% more than my average. I think after I have played at the same table for 4+ hours, that I am observant enough to spot certain patterns. One of my favourite tricks is to identify regulars targeting tourists, and re raise them. You know their range will be wide to target the less good player, so you take advantage of them trying to take advantage. This is especially good if you have a good position (so act after them), so that if they do call you can play the hand with more information.
The drop-off at the end likely indicates that after 8 hours I start making bad decisions. Reviewing this, not only am I probably a bit tired, but I think those sessions I am on “winners tilt”, and I must be winning or else I wouldn’t be there after 8 hours. But when you’re up and doing well, you tend to play hands you shouldn’t and make bad decisions that cost you, it can feel like there’s less cost in getting it wrong because you’re still in profit, even though it can cost more in terms of £s. Once I became aware of this in myself, I started seeing it in others. There’s a regular at the Hippodrome who is a dangerous and good player, but becomes reckless and likes a gamble when they are up. If he has lots of chips, I always try and sit at his table, and look to get it in when I am a 60-80% favourite, and hope my luck holds.
What’s next?
I’ve taken 2 months away from the casino’s to make sure I don’t have a problem and focus on a work project, and I’m looking forward to starting this year on the 29th November. I suppose starting on a Friday isn’t ideal, but it aligns nicely with my wife’s office Xmas party, so oh well! That said, I will make sure I play the £1/£2 at the Hippodrome for 4-8 hours. As it will be a Friday I’ll look to punish mistakes more aggressively and make fewer assumptions about the other players and their cards if they seem less experienced.
Let’s see if I can take the lessons learned across this year, and drive further improvements to make more money, improving on my operational performance, the real purpose of data in my opinion.
