I know it’s been a while since my last post but things have taken a rather dramatic step since my last post and in fact over the summer in general. Firstly I stopped playing the challenge (just got bored with it) and stopped it at $50,000. I could basically make it up and say that me playing PLO now is part of it but that simply wouldn’t be true. I got fed up of playing NLHE full ring and felt that the level was getting too tough at NL100 to play 10-12 tables on automatic pilot and I have felt this all year.
The action at sites like www.pokerstars.co.uk makes up for everything but I have played more PLO this year although at my preferred full ring then you are always struggling to find the same level of action that you are at six max. I have also stopped writing for poker magazines as well. So no more articles in Poker Pro Europe, Online Poker Pro and Player Ireland!
Drastic changes but things were getting somewhat stale but last week saw my first week in nearly two years without playing NLHE ring whilst trying to make money within a gambling environment. I have had breaks away from poker games before but always to have a break permanently. But last week saw me play around 15 hours at PLO and I spent another 30 hours trading which is taking over my life more and more in the same way that online poker did in 2001-2002 and writing did in 2005-2006.
The act of trading and the theory behind it fascinates me every bit as much as poker and despite going back on The Hendon Mob forum recently and writing for them again……I feel once again that I need a fresh boost. I like full ring PLO as I think there is more value at the same levels than a comparable game at NLHE but that will probably change and is changing.
One key factor with PLO is that although the average starting hands are pretty close in value, the way that the equity disperses post flop means that many players end up getting into some pretty poor spots in a way that they wouldn’t do in NLHE and that has meant that I have been recording some excellent bb/100 this year but I am not even sure that I will be playing poker at all in 2012 but seeing as I am supposed to be a poker player then I better find time to do some of it.
So no more poker magazines, no more challenge and also no more Viper and Vulture…….I tried to get these down into print but time restrictions have just blown me out of the water now and so don’t bother contacting me asking about it because it isn’t going to happen anytime soon.
I realise that I haven’t been posting much lately but I haven’t been playing much poker either. I really think that the days are gone when I play poker full time and I simply do not want to do that anymore. What I have noticed though is in how the NL100 level that I have been playing has become a lot tougher over the past year or so. I have been having numerous discussions with fellow pro’s who are all saying that their earn rates have fallen over the past year by around 2ptbb/100.
I really don’t think I want to be making around 5ptbb/100 to be quite frank as this isn’t enough to warrant me staring at a computer all day. But I am a poker player and so I need to be playing poker. However I do need to say that I have been trading more and this is why I haven’t been posting as often. Trading has become my new passion and there is simply far less variance than poker. Even so though I played some PLO this week and short stacked. You need to devise strategies these days because the minimum buy-in has risen on most sites. I have a good short stack strategy in place but the variance is significant……..I have always hated variance as you can tell.
But for me then the key is to be playing as close to free poker as you possibly can. This means getting rake deals that are non-standard, getting sponsored, stakes…..anything that reduces the cost of playing poker. This process has served me well for the past 3 years since my dodgy 2008 and for me then this is the best way to ensure long term longevity. I will be playing $2-$4 NLHE single tabling this week in an effort to play differently to what everyone else is doing….this is multi-tabling the same levels using PT…..there is no future for players doing the same as everyone else. So I am hoping that I can maybe find value playing against players higher up who are multi-tabling but NL400 will be more of an entertainment these days than anything serious. But 4-5 hours per day trading is taking up my time and and so a poker player/trader is now what I am……weird.
Carl “The Dean” Sampson plays poker at www.pokerstars.co.uk
How long can we keep this up for?
I was having an interesting discussion on the Hendon Mob forum the other day regarding the longevity of online poker players and it is indeed alarming for everyone connected with the game in a playing capacity just how much tougher the game is becoming. However I do feel that there are millions of people who are playing poker who are in fact very good poker players but who simply lack other types of vital gambling knowledge.
I often quote Charles Darwin when I talk about online poker because his famous quote applies perfectly to online poker games ……. “The species that survives will not be the strongest or the most intelligent but the most adaptive to change”. A massive concept that applies to poker and especially online poker perfectly. In my opinion then an online poker game is nothing more than a microcosm of the entire poker environment…….what do I mean by this?
Well from a game theoretical perspective then the optimal strategies to use in a poker game are dependent on how each individual actually plays. Clearly though when thinking about mass multi-tabling then less than optimal play can itself be optimal not in the quality of the decision making processes but in the ability to successfully manage a large amount of volume and this itself becomes the key skill……..volume management.
But what happens when everyone else starts doing the same thing……..by the same thing then I essentially mean multi-tabling and playing tight poker looking for rakeback and sign up bonuses. Suddenly everyone is falling into a pattern and playing like too many other people loses value irrespective of how solid your game is at a theoretical level. So to do something different is to at least give yourself a chance at long term survival as a profitable poker player.
So what could that be? Well if the regs are playing 6-12 tables and in a relatively uniform way then the best value could be in single tabling but at a higher level. I have been contemplating lately playing NL400 and NL600 but only one table. If I can handle the variance then it shouldn’t be a problem but there has to be meta game edges feeling players out when they are playing so many tables like this…….if after ten years in the game I cannot beat a player who is playing ten tables when I am single tabling then I may as well pack it in.
Carl “The Dean” Sampson plays poker at www.pokerstars.co.uk
Despite the fact that many online poker sites are/have increasing their buy-in levels from 20bb to 30-35bb then you may be forcing players to play more post flop poker but don’t think for one minute that you are deterring the good short stack players. Online poker games these days are tough to make money at and that is something that the modern player has to live with these days.
Anyone who is interested in getting the better of online card rooms by playing a short stack system can contact me through the website simply by leaving a message for me. Also don’t think for one minute that just because you are playing a short stack that you cannot match the big players. Let us say that you want to play NL200 but are afraid of risking $200.
Well join the club because many players do not want to risk $200 on one hand of poker and also they know that the players at these levels tend not to be mugs anyway. So why not buy in for 35bb and make it $70? With $1-$2 blinds then you really cannot make a huge mistake but the key to playing a 35bb stack is to simply look for spots more and to play like it isn’t a small stack. But also if you lose or drop say 15bb then do not top back up as you have a far more ideal stack of 20bb.
Poker sites want you to make them rake and there were far too many players operating a short stack who were getting all in pre-flop and the hand was being won without paying rake. So the big stack players were getting hot under the collar and demanding bigger minimum buy-ins and the site then followed suit. Still, this is good news for the Viper because other short stack players are going to be terrible at playing poker post flop or laying too much getting all in pre-flop with a deeper stack.
Carl “The Dean” Sampson plays poker at www.pokerstars.co.uk
I was asked something today by Richard at Top15Poker regarding the validity of earn rates. This is a fascinating topic because what exactly is an earn rate and how can we establish one in online poker games? Well let me put it this way, let us say that you made 10ptbb/100 at NL50 over 1 million hands……how conclusive is this? Well I have mentioned this before in a previous post but it is very instructive in one very key way. This is because the online landscape shifts constantly and so we need to be careful trying to ascertain what is likely to happen in the future to what has happened in the past.
All that earn rate establishes is that the earn rate has been pretty conclusive for that one million hands. However if that sample size was played out over a year then one year is not an awful lot of time. I have spent nine years in the online poker industry and have seen many changes in that time. What this means of course is that strategies that have proven to be successful previously have become stale and players who were making money are no longer making money.
I wished I had a thousand dollars in my pocket for every online player who I either knew or heard about between 2002-2005 who could no longer make the game pay! If the environment shifts then in many cases the player needs to shift with it. Remember it was Charles Darwin who said that the species that was most likely to survive wouldn’t be the most intelligent or the strongest but the most adaptive. I was having a discussion on a major forum a while back about the hand reading capabilities of players like Doyle Brunson and Phil Hellmuth.
I championed their case because when you skilfully mix playing poker with business then you no longer need to be a world class poker player in the modern sense. It is quite amusing really because some of the best live game players look at online players with disdain and the same happens in many cases the other way around……I wonder who is right?
Carl “The Dean” Sampson plays poker at www.pokerstars.co.uk
The November Nine will soon be upon us again and does it only seem a year since the last time? I was talking to someone down at my local pub the other night who asked my opinion on the best way to approach large MTT’s. Now I would never consider myself a skilled tournament player but I do feel that many of the field go in without a set strategy and try winging it. All poker games in my opinion need a plan otherwise you risk running around like some headless chicken.
Do you play tight during the early rounds like in a STT or do you chase the “dead money”? Well firstly when you talk about “dead money” then you had better be sure that it’s not you. If you are inexperienced in tournament poker then I advise the former strategy of playing tightly during the early levels. At least this will or should get you to the middle stages and beyond much of the early wild play.
But there is no doubt in my mind that the serious pro’s milk this sort of thing and I have never been a fan of the “tight is right” philosophy but I guess that I like to be more aggressive in looking for chips. At the end of the day, whether you are playing in a WSOP event or the Sunday Million at www.pokerstars.co.uk then you are still looking to win the event……..or are you?
I know it sounds kind of weird but if you have reasons for increasing your chances of cashing then by doing so you could be drastically reducing the chances of a win. It is often the case that a player who has shorter odds to win the event may have longer odds to cash. This is a strange anomaly but not once you understand it. Some players have a far higher strike rate when it comes to cashing than others even though some players my win more events.
Much comes down to how you want to play and if you are happy cashing. If you have won your way into a $200 event for $1 then a minimum cash represents a massive return on investment. But a pro who may have bought in directly for $200 is certainly not going to be happy only getting back their buy in……not long term anyway.
You can contact Carl to discuss his new VIPER poker system……simply leave him a message.
Regular readers of the blog or at least readers who have been following me for quite some time will know that I started a challenge on the 1st April 2010 to try and turn $100 into $10,000. The first levels that I played were $2 NL Texas Hold Em games because I wanted to get a feel for very low stakes poker and also if I could maintain discipline. I moved up to $4 games after about a week or so but it took me about a month to make $100 and double my bankroll. As soon as I hit $10 games then the whole process started to move quite rapidly and I eventually made the $10k mark on the 30th December last year.
I like to give myself challenges and have done so periodically in all areas of Texas Hold Em down the years. So I decided to take the challenge onto $100,000 but I don’t really think that this is challenge at all because I know that I can beat NL50 and NL100 full ring. Also this is where I am going to stay as well as NL200 is a tougher level and while I know I could beat that level with good game selection……I prefer the easier levels because you can beat them with less work.
I don’t think that this is a challenge anymore because I am merely playing for wages now. Let’s face it, if you made $50 per hour and played 40 hours per week then you are going to make $1 million in ten years. So you could have a $1000-$1 million challenge but how much of a challenge is that when all you have to do to make $1 million dollars is to play long enough? I had another idea though and making money no longer motivates me in poker and I think the main reason for that is because I have found my optimal level at cash games.
I go through phases where I play a lot and then suddenly I stop again. The challenge has just gone through the $40k mark and so I have made $30k this year at NL100 playing 6-8 tables. I don’t use tracking software as I have a very good game selection process and I have different game strategies for fish and regs that work quite well in a sort of algorithmic way. I was looking on www.pokerstars.co.uk the other night and the traffic on that site is staggering.
I don’t know if I will reach $100k this year and time is/has run out for that. But the other day I started messing around trying to spin up $1 and got it up to $31 before I got all in with A-Ks and flopped top two pair against pocket nines. I got hit on the river with a nine for a $60+ pot but the idea to spin up $1 into $10,000 suddenly zoomed into view. I could have used bankroll control after I hit $60 and if I can make $10k from $100 then I can make it from $60. I have always been interested in spinning up (don’t know why).
You can contact Carl at Sharkpooldean@yahoo.co.uk for his new V.I.P.E.R poker system and to get the first lesson FREE.
Let’s face it, most players do not have a clue regarding how to make money playing poker……most are just happy as Larry spinning their respective wheels. But I am interested in making money and to me that means making it as effectively as possible. I had an e-mail the other day from someone who didn’t like the tone of how I write……I say it as it is. There is no glitz…..fancy videos or anything like that as I don’t believe in it. But the vast majority of people who come to me regarding trying to make money from online poker are simply not far enough along the poker evolutionary ladder.
This is why they get seduced into playing in the way that somebody else wants them to. Just because a strong player multi-tables six max doesn’t mean that you should. Six max no limit Texas Hold’em games are all the rage now but they are also far steeper in variance as well. You only have to look at some of the supposed top online players to see that many don’t have a plan. By “top” then I am referring to some high stakes players.
One minute they are up a million then they are down a million and with no backup plan in place or at least that is how it seems to me. But a plan in poker can take you an awful long way. In fact if you commit to a process for long enough then you can amass very significant wealth from something that is very mediocre in terms of earn rate. Let us look at a solid if unspectacular winning reg who wins at a rate of $50/hour.
If they play for say twenty hours per week on a site like www.pokerstars.co.uk then they will amass on average $1000 per week. This makes $50,000 per year but the real kicker behind this is in what you do with that money. If you save that money and invest it and it then makes you a safe 5% per annum then by the end of year two you have $100,000 in the bank and a 5% yield on the first $50k which is a further $2500. That is a full two and a half weeks wages for doing nothing. Add another year to that and you have $150,000 saved after year three and 5% on $102,500 which is $5125 in interest.
Actually these figures would be slightly higher as you clearly wouldn’t wait until the year end to invest the entire year’s earnings. Also if you were prepared to speculate on equity backed investments then you could return 10% or more on some good years with a percentage of your portfolio. You can only imagine just how this can compound over time and imagine keeping to this process for 20-30 years?
Contact Carl for access to his Viper poker system and get Lesson 1 FREE
This question isn’t always answered easily but there are ways to do this above and beyond the conventional coaching methods that are currently in existence. As a sports bettor and ex-blackjack player then I obviously have a keen interest in many subjects to do with gambling and risk. This is why I have a keen interest in financial day trading as regular readers of my blog will know as I quote numerous analogies with poker and trading.
Some years ago I read a fascinating book on betting in the field of Horse Racing and that book was called Against the Crowd by professional punter Alan Potts. Back in 1997 then Potts made £50,000 in one year from betting (a pretty sum 14 years ago). That book is educational even if you have no intention of betting on horses. It highlighted the dedication and philosophy to succeed in ANY field. But the underlying philosophy of it all was that you simply couldn’t make money or it was very difficult to make money doing the same as everyone else.
You were simply trying to swim upstream and while that is possible, you have to be a bigger fish to swim upstream because of the current. But yet smaller fishes can travel at a far faster speed going downstream just by riding the current. That book highlighted that being successful in gambling means doing things that the majority of people are not. So to make money in poker and to do that relatively easily means two things……follow a process that is theoretically sound and make sure that it is different to what the masses are doing.
There……that’s it…..hardly rocket science is it? I know that I have been advocating deep stack play with my $100-$10,000 challenge but I am very skilled and experienced at deep stacked play. It is also difficult to pass that on in any reasonable time frame. These days I can be seen on PokerStars (www.pokerstars.co.uk) as that site represents the best avenue to get the most multi-tabling action.
However it also gives me the best choice of games as well as game selection is becoming ever more crucial now. It is important to go onto a site if you play six tables for example and be able to pick the best six out of twelve or fifteen available. I can usually spot the regs quickly because I know them……if they are not known to me or they have shorter stacks than usual or they are only playing one or two tables then I pencil them in as value until I get further data. The Viper though comes at poker in a completely different way. It will not turn you into an automated Texas Hold’em clone but it will show you how to think on your feet and in ways that are not common in the world of poker.
Carl “The Dean” Sampson can be contacted at Sharkpooldean@yahoo.co.uk for anyone interested in his VIPER poker system.
I decided a few days ago to start being active on poker forums again or should I say poker forum. For me there is only one and that is The Hendon Mob site which I was active on for about 2.5 years. Felt really good to be talking to old friends again but anyway enough of that. Recently I have been reading Big Deal by Tony Holden, it is an old classic but I have been reading this book for a reason and that is to do with the fact that it was very motivational if I remember correctly.
Over the past few months I have been multi-tabling Texas Hold’em NL100 ring and doing really well. I have found a niche at this level in full ring but it is really boring me. Pre-2006 UIGEA then the smart players were making hay in six max NLHE and this is where the fish were. The combination of playing more hands per hour vs fish and being able to isolate them with position far better because of shorter player numbers made this game perfect for good NLHE players.
Did I see the good days…..don’t be silly….things never go that easy for me and I was still busting a gut banging my head against a brick wall in limit when the smart players were moving to NLHE. By the time limit became dead and the game was mathematically solved and I was seriously playing NLHE then it was 2008 and the 2006 UIGEA had already taken effect. When you look at how world class cash game players analyse the game and the quality of the analysis and how they assess your ranges then playing six max NL400+ wasn’t a viable option. Full ring regs are weaker in my opinion than six max regs on a level by level basis because weak-tight can be profitable in the right circumstances unlike in full ring. This is why I now focus on multi-tabling NL100 ring on sites like www.pokerstars.co.uk ……..does that answer your question Dan?
I think that over time then you need various back up plans in place as a pro and this is something that I think I have done wrong in the past. In all professional fields then safety margins are written into business plans and models. So if you want to play poker for a living then you need to be good at more than one game in my opinion. I used to think years ago that mastering one game is the way to go.
This is true in terms of making money as quickly as possible but in terms of longevity playing the game over the long term then you absolutely need to have back up plans in place and this means being able to play more than one form of poker for profit. Hopefully The Viper will just be what you are looking for and anyone who is interested can get the first lesson from me completely FREE of charge just by contacting me through the site comments section.
