I had my best session at NL100 for ages yesterday in online poker and I think it may just be the best ever but I will have to go back through my records to check. I played for three hours and made just over seven buy-ins which ended up at $714! But my style feels powerful now and I think that I have pushed through this stagnating phase. This may just have a profound effect on my online poker challenge because I have gone from 35k to 36k in the blink of an eye.
This leads me to discuss the most important metrics in online poker. You can talk about VPIP/PFR/AF…3-bet percentage and all of the rest of them until the cows come home but they are nothing compared to hours played and dollars won. I see people discuss the merits of theoretically perfect tracker metrics in online poker all the time but you can have great VPIP/PFR/AF figures and if your game selection sucks then you simply are not going to make money in online poker unless you play NL50 and below.
Likewise if you don’t play online poker or you don’t play much poker, it is pretty hard to make money if you don’t play. So clearly then a vital metric is the number of hours that you play but another vital metric is the dollars won figure. I think far too much emphasis is placed on sample sizes. It is true that to have a high confidence level in any earn rate needs a big sample size. But online poker changes constantly and so let us say that you have a sample size of 1 million hands taken over 1 year with an earn rate of 4ptbb/100.
Now clearly over that sample size then 4ptbb/100 will be pretty close to the absolute figure in terms of EV. However this does not alter the fact that you have still only played for one year and the environment may change the following year which means that the 4ptbb/100 figure is no longer valid.
Get the latest news on online poker bonuses and rakeback at Carl’s new site at www.thedeanrakeback.com and why not join Carl at www.pokerloco.com quoting bonus code DEAN600. You can also reach Carl at Sharkpooldean@yahoo.co.uk to register interest in his new VIPER poker system.
Whenever you play online poker then you are in fact entering into a highly complex moving dynamic. You can find someone with a great earn rate over say 1 million hands but if those million hands have been compiled over the space of only one year in online poker then that doesn’t alter the fact that only one year has passed. All this means is that your earn rate has a very high confidence level for that particular year. But environments change and I started playing online poker seriously in 2001 and during that time have had to undergo numerous changes. The biggest one was totally switching poker codes in 2007 from limit to no limit.
The brief excursions into PLO have been nothing more than that but I am not a great PLO player and so my short stacking system has been my mainstay. But it is easy to take your finger off the pulse when you are making money and I have made around $35k so far this year from all sources which mainly means the challenge and PLO. But after taking some good advice lately then it has become painfully clear to me that my earn rate in NL100 is nowhere near what it could or should be.
I do not frequent forums anymore and so my contacts in regards to me playing poker have shrunk somewhat so I have been cocooned when it comes to talking to people. But I am going through a transitional period again and hopefully I can get my earn rate up to $100/hour by early next year. The advice that I have been given is top notch by a strong pro that is unknown in the industry. His earn rate at NL200 exceeds $120/hour and if I was making this sort of money rather than the puny c$35/hour that I am making at the moment then I would maybe have more incentive to play poker.
Go to www.thedeanrakeback.com and find all the latest and best news and reports on the best bonuses and rakeback in online poker along with all of the latest rake races.
Why not join Carl at www.pokerloco.com quoting bonus code DEAN600 for sign up bonuses up to 1000%.
For those of you that were following my posts on my $100-$10,000 challenge then you will be aware that I am taking this onto $100k. I passed $10k almost at the end of 2010 and the current bankroll has just passed $35k…….not bad from $100 but $25k this year is hardly pulling up any trees. But I have had a bit of advice lately in how I have been game selecting at NL100 and I think that this will pay dividends over the next few months. I intend to start playing NL200 by the year end but I have not been concentrating well enough.
Anyway, the regular readers will also be aware that I have been talking about my poker systems for ages now and mainly the Vulture, Jackal and Fox. However I have had problems articulating these systems into print as passing on what I want to say has not been easy. I have basically approached this from a system based aspect. At least 90% of online poker players lose money long term……period! In fact this figure could easily be as high as 95% for all I know lately.
If you are in the 5%-10% then well done or you are kidding yourself! However just like in financial day trading, system based methods of operation are a huge quantum leap forward for any players who either do not have the skill sets to become top poker players or they do not have the time or inclination to learn and master deep stacked play. Poker is complex enough when you play deep stacked that top players often fail to make money any longer. This doesn’t mean that making money is impossible; you just need to approach it from a different angle. The Viper does this and does this very well. If you are interested at all about coming on board and being coached in this system then contact me at Sharkpooldean@yahoo.co.uk
See you soon
Come and get some of the best bonuses and rake deals and other financial incentives anywhere on the internet through me at my new site at www.thedeanrakeback.com along with the latest news regarding online bonuses and rakeback.
You can also join me at www.pokerloco.com quoting bonus code DEAN600 for outstanding sign up bonuses.
You can also read my words and thoughts in Poker Pro Europe magazine, Online Poker Pro magazine and Player Ireland poker magazine.
I was thinking about kick starting my blog again after having a break for a few weeks. What actually happened was that I was leaving my blog until the evening and then didn’t feel like doing it and so it simply wasn’t getting done. But what prompted me to get going again was a message that I received yesterday from a player who clearly wasn’t making money online using any type of poker strategy. It just highlighted the ignorance of the person if you read it and I almost want to post it here for reference. It wasn’t an abusive message by any means but he did accuse me of being biased towards poker sites because I work with them…….in fact I will post it and it is from some guy called Ian
“poker sites are crooked and you know they are. they work like fruit machines and roulette machines. after a losing session i can play 5 sit n gos and walk all 5 getting good cards great flops etc. i then begin to lose again till i have no money in my account. i can then reload and go through the process again. i use tracking software and the odds dont add up kk is my biggest losing hand not 7 2 and i always make sure i get heads up pre flop and play aggresive. you shouldnt look at hand percentages anyway u should look at flops hitting 2 or 3 hands hard at once. ive been playing poker 15 years have won 100 plus live tournaments i play texas and dealers choice im not daft. its bent but obviously your site has advertising and its easy to twist your opinion for personal gain.
Apparently he had made money playing live (debatable as he had no idea about sample sizes or variance) and couldn’t do so playing online. Well if I had $1000 for every time I have heard that story then I guess that I would have more money than Phil Hellmuth. If people have absolutely no concept of how much tougher it is to make money online than playing live then how can they possibly succeed? People approach online poker as if it is nothing more than an electronic representation of live poker.
This guy’s sample size of SNG’s was laughable and he gave no data to back up why “KK wasn’t making money and losing more than 7-2”. If you are reading this my friend then rather than waste valuable time writing back to me, take that time and use it and get some good coaching from some of the reputable coaching sites out there by some very good players. All of which make money online in the environment that you claim is impossible. Then when you have educated yourself in poker and variance…..I then urge you to go back and re-read your post because you will be staggered at how naïve it is.
Carl “The Dean” Sampson plays at www.pokerstars.co.uk
In my mind then the best players in online poker games are the ones who make the most money. However the jury is out at the moment as to who that will be in twenty, thirty or forty years’ time and for one very important reason. This is because it is a mere 13 years since the inception of online poker. So when it comes to seeing your poker profits making you money by investing them then unless you have made phenomenal amounts of money then you are not going to see huge returns very quickly.
A half decent player with a bog standard 4bb/100 at say NL100 could be clearing a safe $500/week working twenty hours. This is $25k per year but if you have other sources of income that mean that you could reinvest 100% of this money then online poker could make you financially comfortable within ten years. That is at least $250,000 plus all accrued interest and if you put your winnings into safe bonds that pay around 5% then by year three or the end of year three then you would be making as much money in interest than you would make playing online for an entire month given this example earn rate.
$250k is often touted as a “life changing sum” of money but yet it can be amassed if you are careful enough and play solidly against players who you can beat. It is simply committing to a process and making sure that you play weak players. This is how I essentially make my money and it isn’t hard to see that after twenty years of doing this then making a million dollars from poker despite being quite a mediocre winning player is possible. When you start to feel the effects of compounded interest in the later years then and only then do you begin to see what poker can do for you.
Why not join “The Dean” on www.pokerstars.co.uk
For those of you who have wondered where the hell I have been for the past two months seeing as there haven’t been any blogs then I can assure you that I am not dead. I have been firmly engrossed in my poker again and I now have a new found love for playing the game. I have been active playing NL100 and NL200 full ring and really putting in the hours. The $100-$100k challenge is still going strong and has just reached the $25k mark and I have made $15k since January 1st.
But from here on in then I am looking to maybe make somewhere in the vicinity of at least $5k/month and possibly $10k if I can put the hours in. The earn rate dictates that I can do it which is now c$45/hour with rakeback. A 50 hour week (you must be having a laugh) would net me $2250/week but I have slowly been dropping some of my writing work and now the swing between poker and writing is about 50-50 unlike 80-20 and even the 90-10 that it has been.
I will try to post regular but shorter blogs from now on and keep things going.
See you soon
Carl
I had a few responses to my last post which I feel deserves a bit of explanation. Firstly I am not using PokerTracker for the first time in 2011 
Obviously these are new readers to the blog who have not been aware that I was originally using Poker Office in around 2008 and then switched to using both later that year and then exclusively PokerTracker in 2009. But regular followers of the challenge will be aware that one of the key criteria for this challenge of taking $100 to $10,000 was that I didn’t use any tracking software at all because the goal was to prove that anyone could make $10k playing online.
Another point that was raised was that $10,000 to $100k playing NL50 was too steep to reach it by 2012. I need to point out a few things here. Firstly I meant the back end of 2012 and certainly not Jan 2012 so this is two years and not one. Like I have said many times on this blog, it is going to be a critical part of how I play poker now to play as many tables as I can as low as I can. This means learning new skills and playing 20 tables is my goal by the year end.
At NL50 full-ring then playing 9-10 tables isn’t really difficult as you are 90% folding. With a great rake deal then you can make very good money at this level because there is nearly always value at NL50 full ring so table selecting isn’t as critical. So what we are looking at here is not ptbb/100 but $/hr as volume is going to be the key metric here. The ptbb/100 figure is going to shape up to look pretty poor but that should be offset by the volume.
I have been saying for years that coming in under the radar would soon be the future of online poker. Limit hold’em at certain levels is a solved game which basically drove me out of the game in 2007. There is still good money to be made at NL as long as your definition of “good” is $50 to $100/hour and that certainly is good to me. But the rakeback is going to be key and I have always had an angle on NL50.
The problem recently was that I was playing very poorly once I went beyond six tables at NL50. This should be so easy to do but yet I was multi-tasking and so I was getting into trouble in big pots when they were converging together three and four at a time. I recently took some advice from someone who crushes NL50 playing sixteen tables and that was to switch to small ball and simply milk the mistakes and the rakeback even if it means sacrificing EV in many individual situations.
I have always maintained that $100/hr is achievable at NL50 if you can play enough tables and I think that this number is 16-20 if you can avail yourself of a good rake deal. I already have an earn rate of around $35/hr over a very large sample size at NL50 FR and so I want to push the boat out this year…..watch this space.
The Dean plays poker at www.pokerloco.com where you can join Carl quoting bonus code DEAN600.
It has been ages since my last post but I need to make you aware that on the 29th December I passed the $10,000 mark with my $100-$10,000 challenge. I never ever want to do anything like this again as it was the toughest thing that I have ever done. I switched to playing single tables at NL100 and poker games and this rapidly escalated the bankroll. I even made $1000 in a single week in late November.
So all that is behind me now and I need another challenge. What my next challenge is will entail me taking the current bankroll of $10,017 up to $100,000. Before you think that I have taken leave of my senses then let me say that I will be doing this by playing the sort of poker that I believe is where my future is. This is playing as many tables at full-ring NLHE as possible at the NL50 level. I have a real angle on this level and so will try my utmost to play as much poker as I possibly can this year.
The next part of the challenge will see me using PokerTracker for the first time until I start to play so many tables that I struggle with LAG. My aim is to start off this month playing 8-10 tables and I have played four hours already this month and made around $550 after hitting every flop possible and getting aces versus kings three times in the space of thirty minutes. It would be amazing to turn $100 into $100,000 but this is what I aiming to do and my goal is to do it in 2012.
What I will be looking to do this year will be to replace quality with quantity and the major metric for me in 2011 will be as much volume as possible. I am hoping that my automatic almost “algorithmic” style coupled with PokerTracker will prove highly successful this year not in terms of better quality of play but in helping me to achieve a far greater level of volume. But of course there is one thing that any tracker program cannot give me and that is the desire to play a lot of hours in the mould of a Dusty Schmidt
Carl “The Dean” Sampson plays at www.pokerstars.co.uk
I think it is becoming pretty self evident that my blog will not be a daily one. I have been really trying to become more active on my blog but my workload is just seeing me slip time after time. It seems ages since my last post and I suppose it is so what has been happening. Well I have restarted my $100-$10k challenge and I am still struggling to keep my mind in gear even after a two week break. So I am moving up to $100 and $200 games and hitting and running which I have done in the past and been very successful.
The bankroll currently stands at $4441 but I need to do something to keep my head in gear. My problem was that I said at the outset that I would not be using a tracker and I suppose that I had better stick to that. It is pretty evident now how important the use of trackers really is and so I need to get a little cute with how I am working or am going to work. I simply cannot allow people to datamine me or get meaningful sample sizes in how I play.
So I will be changing sites frequently and site hopping and game hopping so that I am not playing the same line up or same players twice. It is very difficult for players to be able to get an edge on me and in 2009 I was making about $200/day doing this. I simply do not think that I can hack it any longer playing and multi-tabling NL50 and I need to get back to playing the sort of poker that I know that I can play and enjoy and that I can win at. This is hitting and running before players can get an angle on me. I would ideally like to use a tracker but I set out to show that really good money could be made without getting as serious as that.
Have also just started road testing “The Fox” six max low-stakes limit hold’em system as well and so playing the challenge may be something of a premium this month.
Why not join “The Dean” at Pokerloco by quoting bonus code DEAN600 and you can also contact Carl at Carl@Pokerquest.f9.co.uk for news on the latest and best non standard rake deals.
One of my former backers came looking me up this week and asked me if I were still interested in playing the $25-$50 levels and if I thought that there was any value in them. It is always nice to be thought of in this way but the NL5000 games are populated by the very best players in the world and I simply do not belong in that area anymore and in fact maybe I never did to be quite frank.
This was what annoyed me when I got attacked on the Hendon Mob forum last year by some short sighted people who said that I had claimed “big things”. When you consider that I write about what I do then it is silly to claim that I am claiming “big things” based on a tiny number of articles that I have written. I also write about bad sessions, bad times and bad everything else and there have been more of these than I can care to remember.
But anyway I gave a polite no thanks to being staked again and it is me who does the staking these days. So is there value at $25-$50? Well that kind of depends on how good you are but not just in how good you are but in how driven you are to make money at that level because believe you me, to stay at that level involves far more than just switching on your computer and logging on and playing poker.
The very best in the world play those levels and players who would like to play nosebleeds but simply don’t currently have the bankroll. Those days are gone for me and thankfully so. I am happy to let other people chase the rainbows and the glory and my own philosophy has changed and I have reached a sort of poker nirvana. Poker is my life and probably always will be but there is more to poker than playing serious levels. My poker challenge on 888 has shown how much interest can be derived from low stakes. My latest venture is to road test my new small-stakes limit six max system which is “The Fox” starting 1st October and I am really looking forward to that.
“The Dean” plays poker on PokerLoco where you can join him getting some great bonuses quoting bonus code DEAN600
