Kamrann's Poker Experiment:
Blame The Accountant - (Nov 14th – Dec 17th)

Cash games: 11 hours, +$492 , $43/hr
Online: NLHE $0.10/0.25 - $0.50/1; PLO $0.10/0.25; PLO8 $0.10/0.25

SNGs: 55 hours, 553 played, +$2047, $37/hr
$20+2 - $50+5 (Avg. $27)

MTTs: 24 hours, 29 played, -$68, -$3/hr
$3 - $150

Total: 90 hours, +$2471, + $27/hr

Expenses: $2978

A bit of a setback on the accountancy front this month unfortunately - a cock up on my part regarding keeping track of what was part of my bankroll and what wasn't led to me overlooking the fact that expenses have been eating away at it for the last 8 weeks. Basically, for some bizarre reason I had got it into my head that the large wad of cash I'd been carrying around since my big cash game win reported in the first update, was money that could be used for expenses without affecting my bankroll, because 'it was profit'. Of course, this was in fact a large part of my newly increased bankroll, and I really don't understand how I failed to realize this. Anyway, a couple of weeks back when daily living expenses finally finished it off, it became apparent to me that my bank balance was still where it had been for ages - zero - and the sum of my online money was far from equaling the amount that my recorded results said my bankroll should be. It was around about then that I realized I was an idiot.

Oh well, lesson learned. Maybe. Obviously the ideal situation would be to have all funds clearly divided into online bankroll, live bankroll, and money for living expenses for the next few months. Unfortunately in my current situation this is kind of impractical and pointless - if I were to put aside money for upcoming expenses, I would have literally no bankroll left with which to play. The circumstances in which I began dictated that it would be this way to begin with, hopefully sometime soon I will be in the position to be able to manage my funds more effectively.

Unfortunately, as became obvious after this recent error, growing the bankroll to a sufficient size is proving harder than I had imagined. The poker over the last few weeks has been going fine with a steady profit coming in from SNGs, the problem is the extent of the expenses. I had figured that by living more cheaply than I had been previously I'd be able to increase the bankroll fairly quickly, however as it turns out, in London even sitting in front of a computer most of the day and not doing all that much else can be pretty expensive. Add to that the fact I'm earning in US$ and the current state of the exchange rate, and it's not so easy after all.

Anyway, back to my current bankroll/expenses situation and how to resolve it. In order to steady the boat, I've decided to declare all the money I currently have online as my total bankroll. In other words, all the money I have spent that was actually part of my bankroll, plus a total of $1100 recently withdrawn from a poker account (not yet spent), goes down as expenses up to this point. The $1100 should cover costs over the Christmas period so can be thought of an advance withdrawal. So this amounts to a total of $2978 of expenses to date, and leaves me with around $4450 of working bankroll online. To avoid similar confusions occurring again, every so often any profit or loss from live play will be synchronized with the online bankroll, so for example if I book a loss of $300 in a live game, I will physically withdraw that $300 from my online accounts so the bankroll is reduced accordingly. However I do not intend to play much live poker over the next month so hopefully things should stay simple.

With all that out of the way, there's one other thing that has come up since I began playing for a living that is worth discussing, which is the idea of sponsorship or backing. Fairly early on I received an offer of sponsorship from an online card room. It was a small scale thing, involving a monthly bankroll supplement in return for some writing/reporting for their website. After some thought I decided it was not worth taking up, primarily due to playing restrictions it would impose. More recently another possibility has arisen, this time in the form of backing for online play. This would involve the backer putting up all or some of the bankroll, and taking some percentage of all profits. The obvious advantage to this is that I could move up to bigger games with a higher win rate potential, however this would of course be offset by my no longer playing for 100% of my profits. Whether this would benefit me overall is something I'll need to look into in more detail, but as yet there is no concrete offer anyway. Having said all of this, one of the reasons I turned down the earlier offer and may do the same again, is that part of the motivation for this whole experiment comes from the challenge. I've no doubt I would take more satisfaction from building a bankroll back up and being successful at higher and higher levels, if I had done so without getting a leg up from someone else. On the other hand, grinding at the low limits for a long time is not especially enjoyable, so if an offer comes along that I feel will really help in achieving my long term aims, no doubt I will take it.

Finally, a brief update on the actual poker I've played in the last month. Live MTT play was pretty uneventful, a bunch of tournaments ranging from $10 rebuys to a one-off $150 freezeout. My main problem was a complete inability to win a single coin flip, a run which stretched over about 10 tournaments until it finally came to an end in the $150 buyin, unfortunately not enough to make up for a complete lack of hands on that occasion. I did however play a WSOP satellite, and win a seat in... another satellite. That's a ~$350 event which will provide one or two main event seats, and I'll playing sometime in the next month. Online play was predominantly 8-tabling SNGs as planned, again mostly $22 buyins, though recently I played some $33's and $55's too, with decent results. Something that became very apparent in this period was how the opposition at the $33 and $55 levels varies so much with the time and day of the week. Living in the UK, obviously if I start playing in the early afternoon my opponents are made up of Europeans playing at the same time of day as me, and Americans playing in the morning. At these times you don't get such a large number of casual players, and indeed it seems to be the case that there are many serious players playing multiple tables, resulting in tougher competition. In contrast the standard of play in the $55's on Friday and Saturday nights has stunned me recently, so I have tended to play the $22's early on, and move up levels when the maniacs descend en masse. I had success in cash games this month also, though I didn't play many hours. The highlight - if it can be called that, my eyes were in bad shape by the end - was an 11 hour session of 8-tabling $25NL, which I finished up with an average of about 4x the initial buyin across the 8 games. I don't think I'll be doing it again any time soon though!

The plan for the upcoming few weeks is to stop wasting time in small buyin MTTs, play more $33 and $55 SNGs, and not spend so much money doing nothing. I wish you all many aces in the new year.

Results to date: Oct 12th - Dec 17th

Cash games: 88 hours, +$2202, $25/hr
SNGs: 104 hours, 1009 played, +$3137, $30/hr
MTTs: 106 hours, 102 played, +$93, $1/hr

Total: 298 hours, +$5432, $18/hr

Bankroll: $4,454

© The Poker Forum.com, all rights reserved