Full Circle

When I moved to Vegas in 2005, my hope was to make a living playing live cash games. Online poker seemed more like a novelty than a way of making money, and all I knew about live tournaments came from ESPN broadcasts. Being a professional poker player seemed so simple back then - head to the casino, put in your hours at the tables, and go home. No decisions about what form of poker to focus on, no worries about outside forces telling me where I'm allowed to play, and nothing that could come close to the extreme highs and lows that I've experienced over the past six years. Live cash was a great way to ease myself into being a poker pro, but the ability to play online and dabble in big live tournaments has contributed majorly to the fact that I'm still playing poker today. Grinding live ring games was a way to pay the bills, but I never looked back after realizing that I had different and better options to play poker for a living. Following Black Friday, those options no longer exist for me, and the aftermath has been surprising.

The WSOP came and went with little to write about, and after a two week period to collect my thoughts and cope with the uncertainty of my future, I got myself together and began my new/old career as a live cash pro. With 35 good hours of 5/10 at the Bellagio under my belt from the week leading up to the WSOP, I figured I'd head back to those games and see what kind of results I could put up over a larger sample size. The limitations of live poker, specifically the whole 35-40 hands per hour thing lowered my expectations significantly, but I figured that something like $75/hour might be attainable for a good player. In August, I felt like I ran well and ended up with a $148 hourly rate. That number fell to $115 in September, but jumped all the way to $170 in October. This month has been more of the same. While four months of live poker is the equivalent of a few busy days of online cash, I'm feeling a renewed sense of optimism for my second go-around as a live cash pro.

Initially, I planned on bouncing around the handful of casinos that ran 5/10 games, but haven't played anywhere other than the Bellagio yet. I have a nice feeling of comfort in the games I play, and running good keeps me wanting to stay on the routine I'm in. Unlike back in '05, I'm making it a point to maximize my hours during the peak times when the games are juiciest. Typically, I'll play a few 4-5 hour sessions during the week, and then put in 8-12 hour sessions on Friday and Saturday. Sunday, of course, is reserved for football, and I can't say that I miss the online Sunday grind at all now that I'm free to lay on the couch all day and be disappointed by the Eagles. Somehow, my poker career has found a nice balance following what was a worst case scenario back in April, and things look to be stable and boring, which is actually kind of nice after all the uncertainty that surrounded the poker world this summer.

Unless online poker is brought back to the U.S., things look to be pretty uneventful for me going forward. For once, I'll actually have a reason to abandon this blog for months at a time, instead of just being grumpy about poker and not wanting to write about it. Everything from my grinding schedule to my knowledge of the Bellagio 5/10 regs feels comfortable and easy to manage, and that will probably keep me playing in the same games at the same times for the indefinite future. I don't even care how repetitive and uninteresting that seems, because monotony is far better than uncertainty, especially when that monotony involves making $143/hour. Granted, I'm 99% sure that I'm running well above expectation and can't maintain that winrate, but I don't think it's unrealistic to assume a $100 hourly is attainable in the long run by grinding hard on weekends and avoiding the common forms of live tilt (playing too many hands out of boredom especially).

Black Friday was a disaster, and there isn't a single part of my brain that looks back and sees it as a good thing. Hell, I still have $24k stuck on Full Tilt. However, I can't say that the forced changes to my career were all bad. The beginning of 2011 was going well, but that came on the heels of a two year breakeven stretch, which included a $200k downswing. Poker had become very stressful at times, and I had lost my passion for the game entirely. Playing cards went from being fun to feeling a job, and often times seeming like a mind-numbing grind. Live cash isn't exactly fun, but it comes without the stresses of big downswings and confidence issues. The games I play in are easy, and there's something to be said about making decent money without much stress. Poker is simple again, although that's only the case when I keep myself from thinking about what once was and what could be in the future. Playing tournaments and online poker don't quite seem like a thing of the past yet, but I can't say that I miss them either. I'm content right now, and after everything that transpired over the last three years, that's more than good enough.