2005 Year in Review

The year in review

OK. I’m not entirely sure where I’m going with this post. I’m going to start just summarizing my results and then hopefully look at some other interesting statistics/trends for my year. We’ll see how motivated I am.


SNGs

I started the year as a Sit-n-Go specialist. In April I switched over to mostly ring games and only played the occasional small tournament. In all, I played 132 SNG’s most of which had $10 +1 entry fees. There were a few $5s and $20s but the majority were $10. I’ve grown my bankroll quite a bit since the beginning of last year, so I anticipate the $20 to $30 level as my starting SNG size. We’ll see. I’m hoping to get back into them more as I’ve been getting frustrated with ring games lately.

After adding everything up I wound up down $80 in my SNG adventure. I think the bulk of that came in late March when on Party when I pretty much playing constantly on tilt because I felt like I should be ITM much more often than I was. As I result I played worse finished in the money less often, played worse, etc. until I switched to ring games.

Here are my place totals: I hope they add up. The 10th place is a bit skewed because I played a fair amount on PokerStars and FullTilt where there are only nine players.

Place	Finishes	Percent
1	11	8%
2	18	14%
3	17	13%
4	18	14%
5	11	8%
6	18	14%
7	18	14%
8	10	8%
9	6	5%
10	1	1%

Ring Games

I really started playing in ring games around April. I think bonus chasing started it, and then I grew to prefer ring games to tournaments. I played no limit and pot limit very rarely. In fact I think I only had 10 sessions all year at those levels. I finished down about $16. Whatever.

Limit ring games are where the most interesting things are going to come up. According to my PokerTracker stats I played 13,511 hands over 203 table hours. I’m not sure if that’s a lot or not. I guess if you are a hardcore player, four tabling three or four nights a week its not much, but if you are just starting, it probably seems like a lot. It seems like a lot to me anyway.

I started at $0.50/$1 and eventually moved up to $2/$4, although I think I’m going to move back down to $1/$2 as I didn’t play too well at $2/$. Overall I was up $549 for the year in ring games. Here are some other stats to go along with that:

Level	Total Hands	Total Won	BB/100
$2/$4	2,657	-147.3	-1.386
$1/$2	7,115	769.35	5.4065
$0.50/$1	3,739	-72.38	-1.9358

Multi Table Tournaments

I have a love/hate relationship with these. Sure they’re fun, and the thought of the huge payout is hard to resist, and they are what got me into poker in the first place, but on the other hand, more often than not you just end up frustrated after spending a decent chunk of your time and money with nothing to show for it. And often it wasn’t due to a particularly bad move on your part, its just bad luck/timing. I think I would play more of these but I don’t often have the 3+ hours of free time to spend on them. I did find time for 30 MTTs with buy-ins ranging from $6 to $30 and participants ranging from 64 to 666. Surprisingly, the best results that I achieved were in a couple of the blogger tournaments where I placed 5th out of 151 and 4th out 67. I think if I played often enough I could win one or two, but as I said I don’t usually have the time. I cashed in 7 of the 30 tournaments, and netted $37 overall. Not great, but its better than being down. Like I said before, if I play enough I’ll eventually win one, and if I can play better than break even until then, I’ll be way ahead in the end. I’d like to play more tournaments next year. We’ll see.

Bonuses

What good would all that bonus chasing be if I didn’t get anything out of it? I’m certainly not a great bonus whore, as I usually only have time to chase one or two site’s bonuses in a given month, but I did manage to claim $385 worth of bonuses for the year which is especially nice since I was ahead overall before taking the bonuses into account.

Totals

So here we go

SNG 80
MTT 37
NL/PL 16
Limit 549
Bonus 385
Total 875

Not too bad for a hobby huh? Especially considering the fact that I started the year with a bank roll of about $200. To be fair, I did earn a fair amount of affiliate commissions and some earn some advertising revenue that helped pad the bank roll and enable me to move up faster that I probably would have otherwise.

I had planned on doing another year in review type post where I do a summary of hand stats. Things like which hands are my most/least profitable, which hands I’m dealt most/least often, how I do in various starting positions. Stuff like that. I started it and to be honest it seems really boring. I can’t imagine anyone other than me caring enough to read it, so I decided not to finish it. If anyone really cares, let me know, and maybe I’ll put it up.

[***Edit. sorry for the way the tables are showing up. Either I'm a retard, or blogger sucks. I wouldn't rule out the first option but I'm leaning towards the latter. It doesn't seem to support tables very well, and I don't have the patience right now to mess with it, so sorry. It looked realy nice in Word before I uploaded it. Trust me. Oh, and since that post I was debating about putting up had like 90% tables and stuff. I don't think its going to happen.]