I can’t add the All-in EV line to the total graph, because for a large section at the start the hand-histories did not contain hole-cards for opponents’ hands if they were allowed to muck without showing, meaning it was biased towards including hands that the hero had lost. Anyone determined to estimate it could look through the individual months. Broadly, I think I was roughly even at the end of ’09, ran 5-figures below EV in no time at all, and then ran above EV during the rest of the year to finish well ahead. That means that the results from the latter third of months are worse than they appear.

The chart shows an indication of bankroll management at work. Variance clearly drops at about 580,000 hands and again at about 730,000 hands, limiting the downside of the bad run to an amount that looks fairly negligible overall.

I had practically stopped playing by the beginning of October, when I started considering getting a qualification in case I needed a real job soon. I bought the materials for the Professional Risk Manager qualification, and the small bets I made that I could pass it in 5 weeks are probably my only gambling income since then. I thought it was quite a fitting designation for a professional gambler (or ironic, depending on your philosophy towards gambling).

I started work on the 7th December, so that’s the end of the professional poker player blog. At the moment I can’t imagine wanting to play online poker again, but I’ll still play live occasionally and may write about the odd tournament. If I get around to it and think that anybody would be interested I might upload some of my GTO-modelling spreadsheets, as I’d be interesting to see if other poker experts thing they are useful, and if they could be adapted to some different applications.

But its not. I’m cashing out because every short session ends with the tables greying out and ‘not responding’. Its obviously impossible to play effectively with that happening, but even more so because getting on (or back on to…)tables is harder than average due to no wait list function.

They somehow forgot to make the software beep when its your turn, and with no time-bank the fact that the 2nd-warning does beep isn’t too much consolation. I have always been baffled by the lengths that poker software developers seem to go to in preventing things working well and its the usual story here.

At least I ran well – spun my $700 deposit up to $2700, but couldn’t play enough to even activate the 1st $300 stage of deposit bonus.

So now I guess I’m deciding between Ipoker, giving Microgaming’s anonymous tables a shot, or trying PLO again anywhere.

I think I’m now about £8k down (excluding rake back and promos) since I posted that I was even for the year back in June.

I’m going to accept the suggestion that I should try a different site. I hadn’t wanted to do that because; playing at Ladbrokes had seemed soft and profitable in the past; it seemed a bit like giving up defeated; it seems a bit like a concession to superstition.

But it could be that the Microgaming network has become tougher than average and so it is sensible to check out the games elsewhere. (probably something I should have been doing continuously, to be honest.)

Its not all bad though, I won about £400 in live £1/2 and £450 at the opening Fox tournament. Interestingly, I’m pretty sure I’m correct if I say that I have won the last 3 tournaments I bought in to; the Laddies 100k, DTD £300, Fox £20. (I also entered a VIP freeroll and placed for a £100 shop voucher!). Based on that it seems like I should become a live tournament-circuit donkey; I’ve started correctly by being a loser in online cash this Autumn!

64 runners, I think it was £420 for 1st and £60 in £5 bounty chips.

And I got a toy bus with the fox logo and date on the side.

There is one sense in which it is not entirely as horrifying as it looks: After the summer’s poor hold’em results I decided to take a dedicated shot at learning PLO. It started promisingly but then over 20k hands or so turned out not to be going well at all. But, that was only when adjusted for all-in EV. I had actually ran really good and broke even over that ‘training period.

So that explains a lot of the drop in EV adjusted profit during the month, and that it wasn’t too bad at the time because I was learning a new game and, in real money, breaking even.

The opposite happened in hold’em though, and while the adjusted results weren’t necessarily good, the real results were awful, and running badly there almost closed up the gap that the PLO had created.

I will be playing €1/2 until I remember how to win again…

I am starting to suspect that there aren’t as many fish in the games this summer as there have been in the past. Certainly the regulars have been tougher and more numerous since Ladbrokes began sharing the Microgaming network tables last year.

I also suspect that I haven’t been playing as well as usual. Partly from playing more tables, partly from the psychology accompanying weaker results, and partly because regulars, and even fish, are taking some more creative and better-balanced lines, and I need to re-calibrate some default assumptions.

I think the games have probably been a little worse recently, so I’m going to try improving table selection. I also think I may have been playing some hands that were profitable last year, but aren’t profitable with a couple of aggressive regulars behind me and only one fish at the table. I’m going to try adjusting some of my opening %s to get in fewer tricky positions, and I have a few other ideas that I shouldn’t mention in case any opponents are reading this.

A decent proportion of these hands were PLO, which I started learning again as a back up in case good NLHE tables become too hard to find. That probably also helps explain the worse than usual results for the month, because PLO doesn’t seem to be working for me yet. I have a few books to read and videos to watch. At the moment I’m playing super-tight, never hit a flop, and rarely manage to bluff successfully, which isn’t a combination that usually makes any sense. I’d like to think its possible that I’ve been running badly for flop hand values making the whole thing much harder to learn, but I don’t know what the chances are that that’s true.

July is off to a better start AND I’m still running above expectation,so hopefully both earnings and fortune continue I guess.

Up €83 for the year, having finally wiped out the disastrous run at 10/20 in the first two weeks. Obviously a very pleasing moment!

Since the start of the chart was at 10/20 and 5/10, and the rest is 1/2 to 3/6, its interesting to note that if each buy-in was at the same stake I’d be up 36 stacks now.

Admittedly, most of this comeback has been facilitated by running disgustingly above EV in all-in pots for the last 100k hands, so much so that it was too embarrassing to add the EV line to the graph. It will be apparent on the month-end graph anyway.

Back to work after the long holiday. I withdrew all my online balances while I was away, and I don’t like using the deposit button. That combined with the fact I felt I was playing badly at the start of the year and needed to remember how to bank slow steady wins again meant that I decided not to deposit very much and to start at 1/2 and work my way up. So its like a £3k  spin up for the next two months.

Its not a managing a whole ‘bankroll’, because the old bankroll is still in reserve, meaning I don’t have to ensure a reasonable risk-of-ruin. So no problem starting with only 15 stacks, and its OK to play 2/4 and 3/6 if the line-ups make it a necessity.

It has gone well so far and I’ve run well above expectation finishing the month on about £8k (proper 2/4 roll, hurray!). I have been experimenting with playing up to 10 tables, so a lower win rate is expected and I’ll be keeping an eye on whether the hourly makes up for it.

I only ‘earned’ 12 stacks in 50k hands, which is just 2.4bb/100, which I suppose is fine if I am doing it on twice as many tables as usual. Playing twice as many hands in the month

I had to take a week off in the middle of this month for Jury duty, although I was never selected to sit on a trial. I was in the selection group of about 30 from which 12 were chosen for a long trial. They gave us a form to fill in asking if we knew anyone from HMRC, so presumably it was tax/fraud, the form also asked if we had any holidays booked or any surgery scheduled. One lady, who was selected for that jury, was baffled by those three questions and asked the judge if she could change her ‘incorrect’ answer at the last minute, then gave the form back unchanged after staring at it for a minute. This is someone you couldn’t trust with a shopping list and she is now in the process of starting to decipher 2 month’s worth of complex information in order to make a decision about somebody’s freedom. And that is why its not true that trial by jury should be something we are proud of and fight to keep in use as often as possible.

Furthermore, on getting sworn in each juror has to decide which oath or affirmation to read out. Only 4 of 12 picked the non-religious affirmation. The other 8 said this;

“I swear by almighty God that I will faithfully try the defendant and give a true verdict according to the evidence.”

A true verdict ‘according to the evidence’ sworn on their FAITH in ‘almighty God’. That’s such a gross evidence-evaluation failure right there that they should all be struck off immediately, and yet they are in a majority on that jury. These are people that think that the characters of millennia-old tales from goat-herders probably really do exist, and they are going to be left to decide whether someone is guilty of a crime for which the evidence takes 2 months to present.