Wednesday, January 8, 2014

Boxes



Over 20 years ago, as we were getting used to the fact that we were somehow married to each other, myself and Mrs Doke were watching the BBC one night. It must have been a pretty slow night, because we ended up watching a guy wax lyrical about his line of work. Human passion takes many shapes and forms, none more incongruous than a 50 year old man with a strong Brummie accent talking at length about the box industry. He worked in a box factory somewhere in the English Midlands, something he had done for his entire adult life, something which not only made him inordinately proud but seemed to define him. On the subject of boxes, it is difficult to imagine a more definitive expert. He could talk at great length about industry trends and regulation. He was at once aware of the threats the industry had to face, and incredibly optimistic about its future. It wasn't clear if he had a wife or kids (if he had, it seemed they were not worthy of cutting into time he could spend talking about boxes), but if there were junior versions of him running around somewhere, he seemed confident they would grow up in a world as box friendly as the one he had enjoyed.

Now, I have friends who have jobs and careers that when I say to other friends I know them, they get excited. A couple of novelists, a few models, an actor or two, a few poker players, some journalists, a politician or two, a variety of musicians and producers, a few artists, a couple of inventors, and even a rock star. Yet none of these friends has ever given me the impression they get anything like the same amount of satisfaction from their careers as the Brummie boxmaker. Maybe it's just that the sort of people who feel the need to become models or rock stars are harder to please and therefore will never be fully satisfied, but I felt there was still something to admire about someone who was able to dedicate their lives to something as mundane as boxes and actually love it.

Mrs Doke had a more jaundiced attitude. With more than a soupcon of Gallic disdain, she offered the opinion that this guy pretty much re-enforced the stereotype French people have of the English as dull and uninspired.

I thought of this recently after a friend asked me how I was able to go back to grinding the small online games that are my staple after my Super Tuesday bink. He wondered how on Earth I was able to give games where the first prize was a fraction of the Super Tuesday buyin my full effort. By way of response, I tried to explain how the way I (and most but not all other mtt pros) look at these things. Recreational players look at first prizes and big scores, but we focus on long term edges and ROIs. My screens are like real estate that I try to fill with 12 boxes at all times. I don't think of them as tournaments: they are just boxes on the screen. I give each box the same amount of attention without being aware whether it's a Super Tuesday box or a 10 rebuy. Each box presents me with 100 or so decisions per hour, and when it beeps to demand my attention, I look at my cards, my position, the relevant stacks including my own, and the stats of the players still in the hand. Then I decide which button to click. Notice that I generally don't bother to look at the title bar to see what the tournament is. I sometimes do, when the decision is close, and depends on how tight or loose I think I should be playing at this point in this game, or whether I want to increase or lower variance. But generally not: 99% plus of my decisions are going to be the same no matter what the game is. 

Sometimes at live events, recreational players approach me to ask about a hand I played against them. It's generally one where I either sucked out on them (which I do a lot) or one they think I butchered (a lot of that going on too). When I hear the phrase "Do you remember this hand...." I have to bite my tongue not to say "Not a hope" and listen on the off chance that this is one of the rare hands I do remember. But most of the time, it's a hand where I made a standard (for me at least) decision, then looked away to the next box bleeping for my attention. If I shoved, I generally don't know if I got called unless that box just disappears from my screen (in which case I know I was called and lost, and it's time to click the lobby for a replacement box), or I happen to notice next time it bleeps that I have more chips. If you shove and I call, same thing, and I probably won't even know who you were and what cards you turned over, because I don't look at avatars or even screennames, I look at HUD stats. Yes folks, you are all just a bunch of HUD stats to me.

When I am deciding which boxes to fill my screen with, first prize money doesn't even come into it. What does is how soft I think the game will be, how long it will last (at the start of my session, I'm looking for games with good long structures. By the end, I just want a few hypers to fill my screen while I wait for my other boxes to disappear). It's a decision based primarily on perceived edge, believed ROI, and variance. If it's a tossup between a 1k game where I think I only have a 2% edge and a $10 game where my long term ROI is 200%, which means my expectation in both games is about 20 bucks, then I will play the $10 game every time. It doesn't matter if first prize in the 1k game is 100 grand and first in the $10 freezeout only pays $500. I know that in the long term I will average 20 bucks in profit every time I play either game, but my variance and risk of ruin is much lower if I stick to $10 games.

I won't deny that it does feel good when you realize 85k of equity in one fell swoop in a Super Tuesday chop. It feels good to win a Major. It feels good to win a 50 rebuy, or a 20 rebuy. In fact, it feels good to win any tournament, but it's much more important to focus on the long term. Assuming I play enough volume, in the long term I will make the amount I am supposed to make, based on how many boxes I play, and how much my expectation per box is. So I concentrate on trying to choose the best (most profitable) boxes, and making the best decisions I can make in each box.

Whenever I outline this outlook to people who play for fun (or the dream of the big score) I end up feeling like the kid telling the other kids there is no Santa Claus. There's no doubt that the perspective that looks at poker as the chance to play big games, get big scores, pull big bluffs and make audacious plays is much more exciting than the one I just described. But like most jobs that appear glamorous from the outside, professional poker is considerably less glamorous when you start doing it. The people who last are the people who can adjust to this, take on and embrace "the grind", and replace the Get Rich Quick mentality that draws so many to poker with a Get Rich Slow one (or a Make A Methodical Living one).

In a sense, I have gradually become the Brummie boxmaker. My boxes are on screens and they require me to click buttons, but still, they are just boxes. Boxes I am looking to make me $10 an hour in the long run, not 85 grand once in a blue moon. Sometimes when I get through explaining this, friends express sympathy that my life is so small and my career so mundane. But there's no need to feel sorry for me. Like the Brummie boxmaker, I love what I do, even if most people think we'd have to be mad to. No, if you must dole out sympathy, spare it for Mrs Doke. She thought she had married an exciting enigmatic Irishman who would travel the world with her, do mad things like run for 24 hours non stop, spawn wonderfully unique individuals, and introduce her to exciting artistic people. We did all those things together, but at the end of the day the poor woman finds herself married to a guy who works with boxes on a screen.

Wednesday, January 1, 2014

An interesting year and the Cliffs of More

In the early hours of 2013, I was scanning through my email inbox, trying to quickly decide which messages were worthy of my immediate attention. I was basing this not on the Subject (they were nearly all the same, "Happy New Year" or some cutesy version thereof). Rather I was scanning through the From email addresses until a few semi-retired neurons in my brain fired in recognition at an email address of a friend I used to talk to online almost every day (hey, who remembers MSN and Usenet?), but hadn't heard from in years. There hadn't been a big bust up or falling out: just a gradual drifting apart and divergence of interests. As an older gentleman, I thought maybe he just lost interest in the internet, or had passed on to a better place but with no wifi. Nevertheless, I was instantly happy to recognise his email address.

After opening it, I was rather disappointed to find that after several years of lying low, all my friend had to say to me was "This could be an interesting year". Disappointment turned to curiosity as I wondered whether this glib pronouncement was directed at me, at him, or at both of us. I suspected he meant him, as the bulk of our friendship was before that day in 2007 when my brother sat me down and taught me the basics of poker, and although our communications continued for a while into the period where poker gradually took over my life, he never showed much interest in my latest career. With the benefit of a year's hindsight, I'm now even more convinced he meant himself, as his year turned out very interesting indeed. But enough about him, this is my blog not his. At the end of every year since I started this blog, I have written a summary review looking back at my year in poker, and this year shall be no exception. So here it is, 2013, through the rear view mirror.

Live

I played less live poker this year than any other in my career. I focused more on quality than quantity, for the most part sticking to main events and eschewing side events (and for once I completely skipped several events on the domestic calendar). My WSOP campaign was shorter than in previous years, and I didn't play every day I was in Vegas. I guess another way of saying the above is that I abandoned my previous strategy of grinding everything and keeping my average buyins down to take a series of shots, but I think at this stage of my career that's not an unreasonable way for someone who is primarily an online player to approach live poker.

The Hendon mob records ten cashes for me in 2013, a reasonably consistent return given how little I played. Unfortunately there were no big results in there: my biggest cash was for €4395 (UKIPT Marbella) and my total cashes for the year amounted to $23571 (the lowest annual total to date I have recorded). I don't keep detailed records of these things like I used to, but I suspect that number is in or around my buyins for the year (or at least the portion of them I paid myself: I sold for all my bigger buyins like the WSOP and EPT London). So basically a breakeven year live. Maybe a bit better than that as I swapped pretty well (most notably 10% with Daragh Davey in UKIPT Galway).

The UKIPT was the only live tour I really committed to in 2014, mainly because I was cleaning up in the online satellites, and ended up as UKIPT Qualifier of the Year (I'm currently leading this season also). I cashed in 5 UKIPT main events in 2013 (which I think is a record), but the highlight of my year live was an event where there was no money at stake when I was part of the Irish team that won the IFP European Nations Cup in Cyprus.

Staking

I continued my involvement in staking with my Firm brethren David Lappin, Daragh Davey, and Jason Tompkins. Overall this has been profitable, but not to the degree I had hoped. This might be a result of me going into it with an overly optimistic view as at least one of my partners feel the returns to date to be more than acceptable, but the fact is that in terms of pure hourly rates I would be better off forgetting about staking and just playing more myself (or coaching). This makes me less keen about expanding my involvement any further.

Even though I have often resolved to stop buying one off percentages of so many people in one off live events in the past, I continued doing this in 2013. Again, I don't keep detailed records these days, but I'm pretty sure I lost a relatively modest amount doing this in 2013.

Other Activities

I did more coaching in 2013 than in any other year. Some of this was as part of the in house Firm coaching headed up by David Lappin provided to staked players, and admittedly my involvement mostly boiled down to offering the opinion that a spot was "HUD dependent" (that is, the optimal decision or line depends on interpretation of HUD statistics on the villain). The rest was done on an ad hoc basis when outside players came to me for sessions, offering amounts of money it didn't seem prudent to refuse. While I enjoyed these sessions a lot (and I certainly enjoyed the money), my plan going forward is to keep this to a relatively small sideline to the core business of my own online grind.

A couple of poker-related investments came a cropper this year. It must be said my track record on this front is very poor since I left the world of business just over 5 years ago and moved into poker, so it may be my instincts are no longer what they used to be in this area and I should just stick to clicking buttons.

As a group, it has been a very good year for the Firm. My continued association with such a great group of guys and players is something I am very pleased about. I appreciate we may come across as something of a clique to people on the outside, but I learnt the hard way that not everybody in poker can be trusted to act honourably. So having identified a group of guys I do trust, that makes for a stronger bond than any one based purely on convenience, proximity or nationality. However I like to think I go out of my way to help people who approach me for my thoughts on a hand or advice on any other aspect of the business, and while one or two may fall through the cracks, this year I answered literally thousands of questions and requests from people I barely know if at all via Facebook, Twitter, IPB, email, Viber, Skype, text, phone call or face to face. If some did fall through the cracks it is just the media is so diverse these days. I don't mean to imply my doing this is a burden on me or a tremendous act of charity as I get a lot of pleasure from interacting with people and have made some brilliant friends in the process, guys like Willie Eliot and Mark Smyth who can make me laugh out loud (as opposed to LOL) with a line on Twitter or a photoshopped image. Online poker is a lonely and solitary pursuit at the worst of times: at the best of times you get to chuckle at the breaks at some responses to your tweets, or from railers in the chatbox.

Blog

This year I wrote some of my best ever received (and most widely read) blog entries. Of course there were also quite a few ho hum ones lacking in inspiration. It gets harder and harder to think of new things to say, or new ways to say it, and as soon as I reach the point where I feel I am just repeating myself, I will stop. I have a strong feeling that could very well happen in the next year, and if it does, well, after six years and almost 400 entries, I think it will have been a decent run.

Although I complain every year that I am running out of material, I take some pride that so many still read the blog and seem to enjoy it. Five of my all time top ten most read blogs come from the past year. For the record, my five most read blogs this year were:
(1) "No I in team, and no Irish in biggest tourney in Ireland this year", my thoughts on the Norwegian poker championships. I strongly suspect this was the most read this year because I talked about Raheny Shamrock legend Dick Hooper so the readership extended beyond poker degens and into my old friends in the running world (this became my third most read blog ever)
(2) "Trying to make colour blindness work in Vegas", my first blog from Vegas this year (5th most read ever)
(3) "Living it little and large", my UKIPT Edinburgh trip report (7th most read ever)
(4) "Online, not orange", my thoughts on the parallel rise of online poker in Ireland and decline in live poker (8th most read ever)
(5) "A Super Tuesday in the life (how one man and his dog won Super Tuesday, almost)", my account of chopping Super Tuesday back in August (9th most read ever)

Online

OK, finally we get to the nuts and bolts. As much as I'd like to win a bracelet or an Irish Open or get a six figure live score, I am primarily (and pretty much have been from day one) an online player. That's where the vast majority of the money I've made has come from, this and every other year.

A picture paints a thousand words, or in this case a graph accurately summarizes 7000 mtts:

I guess most people looking at this graph will focus on the spike in the middle, and certainly my $85k score for chopping Super Tuesday was the singular highlight of the year. However, if anything I take more pride from the rest of the graph. Even if I hadn't satellited into Super Tuesday that night in August and proceeded to run well all night, it would still be a pretty good year. That score accounts for only about a third of my overall profit for the year (less when you include rakeback and bonuses), and even if you take it out my year would have been approximately as profitable as 2012.

It was very much a year of two halves. After a really good start to the year in January (one month and 500 mtts in, I was already up almost 30k), I then ground out only another 30k in profit over the course of the next 7 months and 2500 mtts. In the middle of this, I remember complaining to my poker bff David Lappin and saying it could be a sign of the poker apocalypse. I also remember coming back from Vegas pretty depressed not just with how Vegas had gone for me (although I bricked everything there, I genuinely felt I played really well while running really badly, and of course the sample size is far too small to be meaningful: nevertheless the brickage did nothing to lift my spirits) and as I reflected how the year was going for me, I couldn't help but wonder if I was one of those self deluding players who doesn't realise the game has essentially passed him by. I remarked to Lappin that even if I managed to clear 100k this year, it wouldn't be by much. He made the reasonable point that most people would be happy with making that much in any year, which is undoubtedly true, but most people don't have my expenses and family to support.

In any case, given where I was at the start of August, I'm really happy and pleasantly surprised to end up having not my worst year online but possibly my best (I say possibly because I know I made a similar amount in the first year I switched to mtts, 2010, but am not sure of which year pips the other), and to have reversed a two year decline. Since my Super Tuesday bink, I have made approximately the same amount again, without any massive single score, grinded out over the course of 4000 tournaments. For the first two thousand of those I was actually just breakeven. Sideswings (prolonged breakeven periods) are frustrating, but a lot easier to take when you have just had a big score. I would guess it was mainly down to variance, but it's also possible I was a little less than focussed after the win (so called winner's tilt, which I knew was a weakness going back to my running days. I never won the same race or broke the same record twice: it seemed once I'd won a race once a kind of been there won that mentality kicked in), and I certainly took more shots at bigger games that probably are not massively profitable long term. On the plus side, I did grind through it, and did more volume in the last 5 months than in the first 7. Part of this was a result of noticing back in August that if I kept up the same rate of vpps for the last 4 months as I had for that month, I would get Supernova status, something I achieved about 24 hours from the end of the year.

I also put in far more work away from the tables, watching videos and running the maths myself on certain spots (this was something I resolved to do after Vegas, to try to jump ahead of the curve again). That's something I want to keep doing this year, keep working, learning, improving. I don't want to be the best poker player in the world, it's not realistic to think I ever could be, but I do want to be the best that I can be. That's always been the approach I've taken with everything I do, be it chess, bridge, running or poker, and I'm pretty sure that when I do get as good as I can get at poker and plateau, then I will decide I'm done with it and move on to the next obsession.

As I was typing up this blog, Mrs Doke looked over my shoulder and commented that my graph looked like the Cliffs of More. I think she meant the cliffs of Moher, but you never know with her, she is French after all. So there you have it, 2013, from a prophetic email in the first few hours to the Cliffs of More.

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