Thursday 31 July 2008

July results

So July has not treated me particularly well. I didn't get in the volume I hoped for and obviously if you don't play much a downswing is really going to hurt.



I played 185 10ers at 6.6%, which is some way below what I'd like to achieve. But over that few tourneys, variance is a killer. Taking the past two months together, it looks a lot better (21%, which is very decent, but still only a small sample size). I felt I played okay but it didn't really run for me.

In August, I plan to go back to turbos mostly. I plan to play on Stars and Tilt. On both I'll play 6.5s, and look to move up soonish. My knowledge of ICM is really not at the point where I feel I can take on the 16s on Stars, but when will it ever be if I don't study? On Tilt, I'm going to use a Kelly bankroll. That basically means I will avoid going bust rather than be a bankroll nit. I'll be moving up when I meet the Kelly criterion for each level, and moving down if I lose enough to drop down to the previous level's Kelly bankroll.

I won't go into how you figure out Kelly (you can google it if you GAF) but I currently have 300 bucks or so on Tilt, and will move up when I'm up to 390, which is what you need for Kelly at the 12s if your ROI is 5%. If my ROI isn't 5%, I need to give up STTs. That doesn't mean I will necessarily run at that next month. It means that that should be attainable in the long term.

Playing with this sort of bankroll management means you risk yoyoing between levels, but I don't mind that so much. I am giving myself a decent chance to play at higher levels by doing this, rather than inching up all the time.

2 comments:

AJ said...

Gawd. This is all only because you're doing this as a serious way of making money, right? Please tell me it's possible to have fun playing poker w/o needing to be such a math freak.

Dr Zen said...

I am as far from a maths freak as you could get.

The Kelly criterion is just a way of saying "have enough money that you can't go bust because of variance given how much you win". The maths isn't hard.

You can have fun playing poker without knowing any maths. You may internalise the ideas without knowing the figures. Some people do. You aren't likely to become any good though.