And in his final words...

This is more difficult than I would have guessed. I’ve got a whole bunch of things I want to address in this, the final post, but I lack a coherent thread with which to tie it all together. There’s just too much, and it’s too varied. Really, what I should do is separate the various ideas into separate posts, and I may end up doing that before this is all over.

(NOTE: I did break it up. This first part will be almost all analysis, so if you aren't particularly interested in the wherefores and whys of just the poker, wait for the next two installments.)

In order to gauge the success of my experiment of living in Las Vegas as a professional poker player, let’s first re-visit the goals, as stated in the very first post:

1. To experience what life is like for a professional poker player
2. Improve my skill as a player
3. Make money
4. Document the experience on a daily basis via the blog

Goals 1-3 above are general, so I also had two more specific goals that I felt, if achieved, would imply that I had been successful in the others:

5. Play for 200 hours (40 hours/week for 5 weeks)
6. Make $10,000 ($50/hour for 200 hours)

OK, so let’s look first at the cold, hard truth of the numbers. Actual results are:

Total time played: 155.5 hours
Net gain/(loss): (-$1851)
Net hourly rate: -$11.90

As I look at these results vs. the stated goals, it occurs to me that the results are a teensy bit off of the goals. I can see where some people would say, “You know, I’m not sure, but I don’t think you got there.” These same people might follow that up with “I’ve got a home game coming up this Friday – would you like to come?”

The one that’s easy to explain away is the total time played; 155.5 hours vs. the goal of 200 hours. I would have been able to play more hours (and would have wanted to play more hours) if I was being successful. However, the losses prevented this in two ways, not counting the psychological impact. First, my frequent bust-outs would force me to leave the casinos before I wanted on many nights; my allotted bankroll for the evening would be gone. Second, the losses eventually caused me to reduce my allotted daily bankrolls, leading to situations where after busting out with a single buy-in, I would leave. Therefore, I do not feel as if the 155.5 hours played is a “failure” to meet a goal, exactly. I would have considered it a failure if things had been going well financially, and I had not made the 200-hour goal. I feel that reducing my daily bankrolls due to my poor results, dwindling “main” bankroll, and horrible state of mind, was in keeping with the overall goal to live as a pro – I believe a disciplined pro would do the same thing. This is somewhat at odds with previous statements I have made about a disciplined pro being able to ignore bad beats and continue to play at a high level, but that was meant more in terms of a single session, not a protracted losing streak.

As for the loss of $1851 and hourly rate of -$11.90, that is much tougher to analyze. In a game as complex and demanding as poker, there rarely is a single reason that you can point to as the cause of failure (or success, for that matter). My belief is that the discrepancy between my goals and my results was caused by a combination of the following, which I’ve ordered in my opinion of their importance:

- A disproportionately large number of bad beats (a.k.a. “running bad”)
- Competition that was tougher than anticipated
- Attempting to evolve my playing style (i.e. more aggressive, acting on reads)
- Poor state of mind
- Missing the majority of my monster drawing hands
- Not finding that little old lady with the pension fund to bail me out
- Erroneous Rockie horoscopes emailed to me by Amy

It seems impossible for me to say, with any certainty, how much my results were affected by each of the above. I’m probably too close to the situation to objectively assess it. And I know that one of the hallmarks of losing players is to blame their results on bad beats (conveniently ignoring their poor play, and the bad beats that they put on other people). So even as I believe deep in my heart that bad beats are the single biggest reasons for my losses, I am aware of how it could be perceived by the public, and aware that I also might be fooling myself. You never know.

However, I point to two things that lend credence to my belief. The first is my history as a poker player. The year prior to my Vegas trip, I had played for over 300 hours and made over $15,000. So I feel like I have a pretty decent idea about how the cards should fall. Sometimes they bite you, but overall they don’t if you play a tight game. Of course, I have read and heard many times about running bad for weeks and months, so I knew it could happen, and more importantly, I knew it could happen to anyone, regardless of their play. Given all of that, it is important to realize that a person can play very good poker and still hit a stretch where they get destroyed, and this stretch can last for an extended time.

The other thing that supports (or at least, does not discredit) my position is the data I’ve logged. Every time I played, I recorded the day of week, and how I did hour by hour, among other things. My goal was to see if some days of the week were better than others to play, and likewise with the time of day. I expected a sinusoidal flow to both – peaks around Friday and Saturday with troughs around Tuesday and Wednesday, and peaks/troughs in the time of day as well (although I had no solid ideas about when those would be).

However, my data shows none of that, for either aspect. Now, I am not well-versed in statistical analysis, so I may be missing something. Still, it appears to me that my hourly rates have absolutely no correlation to either the day of week, or time of day. I invite anyone who cares to do so to analyze my results themselves and comment, after first promising not to laugh at my Excel spreadsheet. Here it is:

http://rapidshare.de/files/18535596/Track.xls.html

The rates based on day of week are as follows:
Saturday: -20.25
Sunday: -86.15
Monday: -6.15
Tuesday: -4.62
Wednesday: 43.91
Thursday: -44.10
Friday: 27.65

The hourly rates of the 7 hour-long periods during which I had the most accumulated time are as follows:
1800-1900 -60.69
1900-2000 37.29
2000-2100 -36.05
2100-2200 -6.71
2200-2300 23.65
2300-0000 -32.00
0000-0100 -11.35

To me, the random nature of both sets of data can mean one of two things:
1. There is no correlation between day-of-week/time-of-day and hourly rate
2. I don’t have enough data points, and/or an abnormal concentration of unusual results (read: bad beats) has skewed the results, and/or I played poorly and inconsistently.

Personally, I would not believe #1 without a lot more information. I strongly suspect that the hourly rate of any pro poker player in Las Vegas is going to correspond directly with the proportion of tourists in the games. I also believe that the concentration of tourists playing poker is going to change based on day of week and time of day. To be truly accurate about it, what you would really want to do is track hour-by-hour rates on each day; for instance, on Saturdays it is possible that the highest concentration of tourists occurs at 1400, while on Wednesdays it’s at 1900. However, I do not have enough data to even consider doing that.

Anyway, that leaves #2 as the most probable explanation. After Week 1, I posted a list of the major hands where I’d lost to inferior hands/suckouts, and it numbered 13. Anyone following along with the rest of the blog knows that there’s been a lot more since then. I haven’t counted, but I’d say it’s safe to assume that the number has at least doubled to 26. In contrast, the list of major hands where I was the beneficiary of the suckout is four entries long, if I remember correctly:

QT sucking out two pair on the river
76 suited vs KK (flopped two pair)
76 suited vs KK(flopped straight)
66 vs. JJ (board was K63 – don’t know why the guy called my all-in on the turn)

So there is a huge discrepancy there of 20 (or more) bad beats. At roughly $300 a pop, that’s $6000. You can throw in the 1 for 6 record of my drawing hands (where I am the favorite), and pretty soon things start to add up. I don’t know. Maybe I’m just searching for a reason here that doesn’t have anything to do with myself. I don’t think I am, but it’s possible.

Now about the competition. Without a doubt, the games were tougher than I expected. I expected a quality of play that I’ve experienced on previous trips to Vegas – universally poor. However, many nights I found myself at tables that were tough to beat. A frequent question posed to me was if I considered the games to be tougher than the ones in Los Angeles. I don’t believe they are, but I really can only compare to the $2-$5 no limit game at the Hustler, which is where I’ve spent 95% of my L.A. poker life. My opinion is that overall, the games are comparable. I know that when people compare my Vegas results with my L.A. results, many will conclude that the games are tougher in Vegas. In my mind, this would be a classic case of using results alone as the input for the decision-making. In analysis of poker, you must take into account how the results were achieved. For example, a player might play a J3 offsuit, flop JJ3, and make $1000 against someone playing AJ. They will then conclude that playing J3 off, and similar hands, is a wise choice because you might get paid huge. They will then proceed to slowly lose $2000 over the next month in playing similar hands and getting in trouble with them. The point is, just because I lost a lot of money in Vegas and made a lot of money in L.A. does not mean the games are tougher in Vegas. In fact, I have sat at several $2-$5 NL tables in Vegas that were populated by 3 or more abysmal players at the same time – and that is something you rarely see in L.A. However, the overall skill level in Vegas is without question higher than I expected.

In regards to my attempts to improve my game, I started out with good intentions, but could not follow through as I had hoped. I was well aware that playing looser, more aggressively, and actually making decisions based on reads would likely be detrimental to my bankroll. I anticipated making mistakes, because A) I have not played that way in the past, and B) It’s the most difficult aspect of poker, in my opinion. Two major hands come to mind, and I blogged both as HOTDs (I had ace-deuce in one, 77 in the other). I lost both. I am fairly certain, though, that the optimum way to play poker is to play fast, loose and aggressive, and making decisions based on your opponents’ behavior. The players that come to a table and miraculously triple their stack in about 45 minutes almost always do so by playing that style. At the very least, a good player should be able to play that way at times, in order to mix up their game. The thing is, it’s much easier said than done. It’s something I plan to work on more, in the future.

However, I feel I still made headway in my game. I did finally pick up on a few physical tells. I also feel like I made excellent, excellent progress in not letting tilt take me over, and in learning to call it quits when I am tired. I have had several sessions in L.A. where I have paid dearly for ignoring my physical and/or mental state, and before this trip I questioned whether I was even able to do so.

On to “State of Mind”. I don’t really have to talk about this much, as anyone reading the blog has been pretty well informed. I don’t think it was that big of a deal in the overall scheme of things, in terms of affecting my results. It sure did affect how I felt about poker, as the weeks wore on.

As for the little old lady and pension…when I moved into my apartment, my landlady did mention to me that there was an elderly lady living right next door to me! She also mentioned this lady had a tendency to start up conversations from which it was difficult to extricate yourself. She meant this as a warning of sorts, but I was like “Hey, she sounds lonely”. I don’t know what her name was, but I started thinking of her as “Plan B”. Well, in 5 weeks I never saw her once. My suspicion is that my landlady, after hearing about my results for the first week or so, warned her about me.

Finally, the Rockie horoscope as provided by Amy. I suggest you look up the Rockie archives for Capricorns, March 11 – April 15, 2006, and then compare the predictions with the day-after reports on my blog. Hoo boy! That would tell you everything you ever needed to know about astrology.

Bottom line: of my six goals, I succeeded in the top two, and came close in #4 (daily blogging...not quite, but close enough, for crying out loud!). The ones related to time and money were not met. We either call it a moral or immoral victory, depending on what you think about the institution of poker. More on that in the final-final post, which will come after the middle-final post. Ha! You can already see the effects of me working on a government contract, after just a few short days! A simple little final post turns into a three-part eruption of documentation and hypenated half-truths.

Until tomorrow, then. Play well, everyone.