{"id":1065,"date":"2005-02-14T02:45:11","date_gmt":"2005-02-14T09:45:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.studioglyphic.com\/blog\/?p=1065"},"modified":"2005-02-14T02:45:11","modified_gmt":"2005-02-14T09:45:11","slug":"im-not-a-professional-poker-player-either","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.studioglyphic.com\/blog\/2005\/02\/14\/im-not-a-professional-poker-player-either\/","title":{"rendered":"I&#8217;m not a professional poker player either"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>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&#8217;s Money:<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;From what I&#8217;ve read on your blog I thought you were losing tons of money!&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>J has a habit of blowing things out of proportion, so now that he knows I&#8217;ve managed to grind out some wins here and there, he thinks I&#8217;m a great player. I asked him about a couple of his friends who also play poker at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.partypoker.com\/\">Party<\/a>, and he said:<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Oh, so-and-so is pretty good, but nothing like <i>you<\/i>. They&#8217;re up and down in the red and black.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;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 <i>very<\/i> small-time beginning poker player who will never announce in this space that he is going pro.<\/p>\n<p>Of course, what prompts this whole post is <a href=\"http:\/\/www.upforanything.net\/poker\/archives\/000943.html\">G-Rob&#8217;s musings<\/a> at Up4Poker. I haven&#8217;t always shown a positive number (however small it may be) on the balance sheet, but until now I haven&#8217;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.<br \/>\n<!--more--><br \/>\n<i>Let&#8217;s do the numbers:<\/i><\/p>\n<p>Months of playing online: 19<\/p>\n<p>First online site: PokerStars<\/p>\n<p>First online site where I made money: PartyPoker<\/p>\n<p>Months it took to go from my first deposit into the black: 8<\/p>\n<p>Number of $50 deposits before this occurred: 6<\/p>\n<p>Months it took to go from the black into the red and into the black again: 3<\/p>\n<p>Ditto that last one: 2<\/p>\n<p>Months in the black since the last time I was stuck: 6<\/p>\n<p>Lowest point: -$355<\/p>\n<p>Highest point: $1078<\/p>\n<p>Biggest 7 day gain: $410 to $1060 (early December)<\/p>\n<p>Biggest 7 day loss: $1041 to $315 (late December)<\/p>\n<p>Slope if you add a linear trendline to my ups and downs (total bullshit and uninterpretable, but fun!): 2.643<\/p>\n<p>Current status: $809<\/p>\n<p>Just a few additional notes on the bankroll numbers: <\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;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&#8217;s full price to and from by using OPM to cover it.<\/p>\n<p><i>Why go back?<\/i><\/p>\n<p>I think the answer to G-Rob&#8217;s question is pretty simple: I&#8217;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&#8217;s what I did. Will I ever become great? I doubt it. I think it&#8217;s a combination of lacking intuition and heart, which more or less makes me a bot. Beep!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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&#8217;s Money: &#8220;From what I&#8217;ve read on your blog I thought you were losing tons of money!&#8221; J has a habit of blowing things out of proportion, so now that [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1065","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-poker"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/psIKy-hb","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.studioglyphic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1065","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.studioglyphic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.studioglyphic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.studioglyphic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.studioglyphic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1065"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.studioglyphic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1065\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.studioglyphic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1065"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.studioglyphic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1065"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.studioglyphic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1065"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}