This past weekend I spent some time with my good friend J who once expressed great surprise to learn that I was playing with Other People’s Money:

“From what I’ve read on your blog I thought you were losing tons of money!”

J has a habit of blowing things out of proportion, so now that he knows I’ve managed to grind out some wins here and there, he thinks I’m a great player. I asked him about a couple of his friends who also play poker at Party, and he said:

“Oh, so-and-so is pretty good, but nothing like you. They’re up and down in the red and black.”

I’ve been there. A few times. And while I take the game pretty seriously and think I know more than the average player, let me just say on the record that I am a very small-time beginning poker player who will never announce in this space that he is going pro.

Of course, what prompts this whole post is G-Rob’s musings at Up4Poker. I haven’t always shown a positive number (however small it may be) on the balance sheet, but until now I haven’t actually taken the time to line up all the rows and columns in my spreadsheet to figure out how low I sank, and when it all turned around.

Let’s do the numbers:

Months of playing online: 19

First online site: PokerStars

First online site where I made money: PartyPoker

Months it took to go from my first deposit into the black: 8

Number of $50 deposits before this occurred: 6

Months it took to go from the black into the red and into the black again: 3

Ditto that last one: 2

Months in the black since the last time I was stuck: 6

Lowest point: -$355

Highest point: $1078

Biggest 7 day gain: $410 to $1060 (early December)

Biggest 7 day loss: $1041 to $315 (late December)

Slope if you add a linear trendline to my ups and downs (total bullshit and uninterpretable, but fun!): 2.643

Current status: $809

Just a few additional notes on the bankroll numbers:

Weekly home game and similar situations are not counted in these numbers, since the stakes are usually super-low. Poker-related purchases such as poker chips and books are included, but lodging, food, and drink are not. I’m thinking of paying for the airfare this past weekend out of poker money, though the trip was not really a poker trip. I guess I just want to feel better about paying Southwest’s full price to and from by using OPM to cover it.

Why go back?

I think the answer to G-Rob’s question is pretty simple: I’m an obsessive compulsive with a gambling problem. But on top of that I also happened to figure that I could learn to become a better player if I kept playing, so that’s what I did. Will I ever become great? I doubt it. I think it’s a combination of lacking intuition and heart, which more or less makes me a bot. Beep!