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Here's the bankroll guidelines we recommend for professional online MTT players (with no other source of income):
Aggressive BR:
6 months of living expenses PLUS 500 ABI for the games you're playing
Baseline BR:
12 months of living expenses PLUS 1,000 ABI for the games you're playing
Conservative BR:
24 months of living expenses PLUS 2,000 ABI for the games you're playing
If you don't have at least 6 months living expenses AND 500 ABI you should consider having another source of income (like a part-time job) until such time as you do have that covered.
Otherwise your risk of ruin is pretty high.
9/x But the main problem with downswings isn't even the money you lose playing.
The real problem is that they set off a chain reaction.
Your bills don't stop coming because you're in a downswing and every month your life BR gets smaller.
And as much time as it takes to go on a downswing it can take even longer to get out it.
Meanwhile your life BR keeps shrinking and you're faced with a tough choice - deplete your poker BR and drop down stakes, or stick it out and hope it turns around before you go "broke"
Wholeheartedly agree that volume is important. It doesn't matter how good you are at poker if you don't play and APPLY your edge.
Having said that, we run across a subset of players who grind TOO much - to the exclusion of other very basic and important things - for example a life outside of poker, setting aside time to study and improve etc. etc.
One risk is burning out, but a more crippling risk we've seen is players who end up getting depressed during downswings because their identity is so wholly wrapped up in playing poker / winning.
Usually we advise players to play at most 5 days a week, setting aside 2-3 hours for study on 1 of the days off, and staying away completely from poker the last day.
1) Volume Is King
One of the biggest mistakes poker professionals and aspiring ones make is simply not playing enough. “Never miss a Sunday” is a fun mantra, but that doesn’t allow you to skip other days of the week. MTTs are a high-variance format. Even great players can go through prolonged stretches where their results don’t reflect their ability. The great equalizer? Volume.
Every hand is another opportunity to realize your edge. The more you play, the more opportunities you get to see that edge translate into actual profit.
During this challenge, I played 562 tournaments (Excluding rebuys) in 6 days. For some MTT players, that’s an entire month’s worth of volume.
You can’t control short-term variance. But you can control how many opportunities you give yourself to overcome it.
Wholeheartedly agree that volume is important. It doesn't matter how good you are at poker if you don't play and APPLY your edge.
Having said that, we run across a subset of players who grind TOO much - to the exclusion of other very basic and important things - for example a life outside of poker, setting aside time to study and improve etc. etc.
One risk is burning out, but a more crippling risk we've seen is players who end up getting depressed during downswings because their identity is so wholly wrapped up in playing poker / winning.
Usually we advise players to play at most 5 days a week, setting aside 2-3 hours for study on 1 of the days off, and staying away completely from poker the last day.
The Venetian is the first poker room on the Las Vegas Strip to switch to slide dealing.
Instead of throwing cards across the table, dealers now slide them across the felt. The goal is to stop cameras from catching a quick glimpse of a card during the deal.
South Point was already using this method, but now The Venetian is bringing it to all 50 tables.
The WPT Fall Festival starts there on October 28. It’ll be the first major poker series on the Strip using slide dealing.
Poker rooms are changing how they deal just to keep the cards hidden.
Results don’t lie. But you have to track them first. 📊
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Banning any specific software (or not banning it) won't have big impacts on the games.
Their users will adapt - most will learn to play without it, some will change where they play, a few will find ways around any ban.
The underlying justification here seems silly, given that less than 3 years ago GG had a bona fide super-user scandal.
On the other hand, as far as we know they haven't had one in 3 years and maybe that's because they've actually improved security (or maybe just done a good job hiding it).
The underlying reasoning from GG is more about making it harder to play on multiple sites, which hurts their competitors by decreasing liquidity and further strengthening their market-share.
The software ban will jostle the equilibrium a bit between regs and recs and make it a little bit harder for smaller sites to maintain liquidity. But long term won't change too much.
GGPoker Security Update
We’re introducing new measures to protect our community, including new client security features and a ban on all third-party poker software and automation tools.
Full details here 👇
https://t.co/F1CAu3p0zY
Wasn't implying that they're connected from an attack vector point of view. Just that GG's handling of the superuser case exploiting their own software was very poor and poorly explained afterwards. That superuser case effected thousands / 10s of thousands of their users.
It was mishandled to such an extent that it makes one strongly consider that this reaction to an exploit of a 3rd party tool that effected a handful of users maybe has very little to do with actual security.
Was paying off my mortgage with poker winnings awesome? Yes.
Was firing the FPC as a reward reckless with the state of my bankroll in a downswing and putting so much on my mortgage? Also yes.
Back to low stakes online to rebuild, hope to see you in the live streets by Jan.
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Study off the table. Execute on it. ♠️
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At the bottom of this article:
With that, I hope you have enjoyed hearing from her as you will get to do more of it. It is my plan that Raechel and I will co-write a monthly article in which we will review various poker videos (such as hand compilations) on Youtube!
The first of the articles co-written by Raechel and myself will be out in late-November or early-December. It turns out that Raechel and I started out on opposite sides of the Robbi Jade Lew and Garrett Adelstein hand (with Raechel thinking it most likely Robbi had cheated), so we will be watching that back and discussing our opinions relative to the investigation having not taken place yet.
Some of the comments on our warning post earlier this week boil down to "why are you posting this."
The answer comes down to a cultural difference between online and live poker.
In online poker it has been standard since the mid-2000's to post about people that steal or scam from others in the poker community. On 2+2 there was a thread with thousands of posts.
The reason it's standard practice online is that it's common for the community to work with people across borders and continents and you don't know who the person will target next. So you want the information to be widely available to protect the community as a whole.
Compare that to live poker - particularly in the US - where relationships tend to be very personal and built over years. Which leads to a reluctance by people to alert the public and instead alerting just those they think might get targeted.
In the US we've had a couple of cases where others came to us privately after we posted about a player and said "he stole from me too", and when we asked why they didn't alert others their answer was along the lines of they were concerned that it would tarnish their own reputation.
We want to bring the same model that exists in online MTT poker to live MTT poker. Namely that players can find funding based on their skills and track-record rather than based on who their friends are.
We think that there's many competent poker players without access to the funding they need to pursue their goals - and our goal is to fill this niche.
As we work with more and more players in the live MTT space we acknowledge that we will get stolen from - and we will let the community know so that others can avoid those individuals.
We'd appreciate it if the rest of the community did us the same service.