Tracking My Progress

I finally decided to stop being a lazy ass, and start tracking how I play. Hopefully I can better figure out what I'm good at, and what I'm bad at, and either fix what I'm bad at, or stop doing it. I'm sure most serious poker players already do this, but like I said before, I'm pretty lazy, and I have just been using the size of my bankrole to determine how well I was doing. Probably not best tracking method around.

I think there are programs out there that will track your play on Party Poker, which is probably another reason I should play there. Next deposit I make will go there I promise. As far as I know, there isn't anything that interfaces with The Poker Room, so good ol' Microsoft Excel will have to do. I thought about writing some application for my website but then I figured that there are probably a bunch of better apps out there, so why bother. There's that laziness again. Maybe if I get bored I'll work on it.


So where do I stand now? I made an initial deposit of $115, and got a bonus of $23, Which brings me to $138 in poker funds (Anyone who wants to donate to the "Mike needs more poker funds" fund let me know). My bankrole is currently at $134.45 Not so great, but it could be worse. When I first started playing I didn't realize that they had single table sit and goes around the clock (sometimes I'm not so bright), and I didn't have the time for the huge multi-table tournaments, so I played real low limit ring games, which admittedly is not my specialty. Poker Room does keep some stats for ring games, and I can tell you that I'm down $45.55. I have only played a NL ring game once, and finished up about $5, so that's about a loss of $50 in low limit ring games. I don't plan on going back to those for a while.

I've also lost $22 playing in multi table tournaments. I've done three. Two 5+1s where I finished 100 something and 11th out of 250ish both times. The 11th place finish earned me $12 so those two were a wash. The $22 was from one of their guaranteed $15000 tournaments. I finished about twenty or thirty spots out of the money. Overall I'm reasonably satisfied with my large tournament play. Not a big sample size though. I generally don't prefer to play in them for a few reasons. First, I don't have the time. I usually don't have the hour that it takes for a single table tournament, finding the hours needed for a mutli-table tournament is almost impossible. Secondly, I'm not convinced that they are worth it. Winning one of those takes a lot of skill, but it also takes a lot of luck. All it takes is one bad move, or a bad read, or someone sucking out on you and you've spent three hours playing for nothing. I've over simplified that a bit, but I like my chances a lot better in the SNGs. Sure the ceiling isn't so high at 5x your entrance fee, but the likelihood of coming out ahead seems a lot greater.

So that brings me to my SNG tournament play. Since I started with $138, and currently have $134ish, and can account for $65 in losses, I must be up $61 overall in my SNGs. Of coarse since I haven't been tracking how many I've played, I have no idea if that's good or not. I do know that in the four games I recorded this weekend, all $10+1s, I netted $26, finishing 3rd, 1st, 7th and 5th. There wasn't anything particularly memorable in those games, so I won't bore you with details.

Ok I lied, I'll bore you with some details. In the final game there were four people that jumped in that all obviously knew each other, and talked throughout the whole game. I know people always say to be aware of collusion online, but I didn't notice anything peculiar in their play. Two of them went out before me, losing to a guy who was not part of their group, and I think I could have won, but I got had some bad luck, and called an all in with A2s in the BB and got beat when the guy paired a six on the turn. I was then short stacked and eliminated the next time I was in the BB. Calling an all in with only A2s may not have been the best play, but at least I correctly guessed that he was bluffing. It was a moral victory or something like that.

Anyway, for those who are interested, maybe I'll provide you with some periodic updates on the status of my bankrole. Also if anyone knows of some good tracking software let me know. Even better if its free, works with Poker Room automagically, and doesn't require a lot of effort to set up/maintain.


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Thanks to Iggy for pimping my site. I feel bad about not having anything particularly interesting to write about lately. I don't know how he has time to read all those blogs. I barely have the time to read the short list you see on right hand column. I'd get a lot more done if my fellow bloggers would stop posting so frequently.

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Football note... Don't look now, but the Bears offense actually scored more than their defense this week. Its amazing what you can do when you actually complete a pass or two. They even looked better than the local high school team. Of coarse this marks the part of the season when the Bears traditionally start winning a few games in an effort to trick you into thinking they might be good next year while at the same time blowing their chances at a good draft pick.