Year-End Review

24 December 2009 - So 2009 is officially in the books, poker-wise. It was a weird year for me and I feel like, despite what I perceived as tremendous growth, I left a lot of goals unrealized. And I didn't win anything meaningful. And that's what it's all about: winning. It's the only thing that matters. It's not about silver linings or moral victories or whatever. It's only about winning.

For the first time since I started playing poker in 2001, I played virtually no cash games. That's hard for me to believe--especially considering I was only a cash player until 2008--but when reviewing my records for the year, I did not have one cash session recorded. Which means, if I played cash at all, it was done so sparingly that I didn't even bother to record it. I guess I played a few sessions, but I don't really remember. As for MTTs, I finished on the +side but just barely. Is it "the black"? I always get that red/black accounting terminology confused (apparently so too does the gov't, wall street, hedge funds, the automobile industry, and our healthcare infrastructure. way to go america!). Anyway, I managed to win a little but a marginal winning/breakeven year certainly feels like a losing year to me.

In live tourneys, I finished down $465. My best stretch of the year was a one week stretch in March where I chopped the $15k gtd Beau; then won/chopped the first nightly at the Beau Spring Break Poker Classic; then disappointingly finished 13th in event #2 of the same series (I blogged about it here). My worst stretch was basically the rest of the year! Excellent.

This year, I made the transition to primarily focusing on online poker; it's a transition I'm still making and learning about in a number of ways. Regardless of the results--and they have been positive--I feel I've learned so much this year by playing online. I'm regretful it took me so long to make the move, but better late than never. In the end, I logged only about 1000 total hours and 56,000+ hands online. This translates to averages of 80+hrs/month and 4600+hands/month. I can obviously do much, much better than this in terms of volume; my main problem was enduring long stretches where I rarely played. I both started and finished strong, but there were too many gaps in between as this aggregate hand charts reflects:
















Some other noteworthy online stats:

• I finished in the money 19.75% of the time
• I played 552 total tournaments online
• I final-tabled 15 tourneys (almost 3%)
• The average field size I played was 2980 (hello low stakes!)
• My best field size:finish ratios were 2213:2, 5967:9, 2452:8.
• My ROI was in the 33% range (I compile the data myself so I'm not exactly sure I'm calculating the ROI correctly)
• My longest stretch without cashing was 24 tourneys
• My best consecutive streak of cashes was 5 tourneys
• And my favorite stat is that I deposited ONCE and grew my online bankroll by following simple bankroll management principles!

I also compiled some other stats from my final month of playing that spanned 60 tournaments to see what I might learn. This is obviously a small sample so it might not be completely relevant, but in reviewing the data/hand histories I learned that:

• 38% of the time, I got my money in good (gulp)
• my average equity when all-in was 39.8% (uh oh)
• three times I was all-in drawing stone dead (wtf)
• 27% of the time, I got all-in postflop (my equity was always significantly better in these 16 occurrences)
• needless to say, I had a losing month as those are some seriously ominous, donktastic stats!

Ok, that's it for now. I'm looking forward to eating/drinking for the next 10 days! I'm also eagerly anticipating the Saints postseason run to the Super Bowl. That's the only Christmas present I'll ever need for the rest of my life. Enjoy the holidays and thanks for reading.