♠ Sunday, July 03, 2005
Still Crazy after All These Years
While I'm broke, the blog is up at its old Blogspot URL. This breaks most of the art and a lot of the links, but hopefully it's temporary ... the next couple of months probably.
I'm still broke. But getting a job here still depresses me to the point that I'd rather hang myself than do that. (Actually, I'd take a job here dealing in a casino ... but the nearest casino is not only ninety minutes away, but they don't hire dealers from outside.)
My current plan is to scrape together enough that I can move west and get a dealing job there. I think that riding the rims for a while, I can do it with $1000 to $1200. None of that is bankroll; I essentially wouldn't be playing until I'd got a paycheck or two.
I've been stymied for how to get that $1000 to $1200, though. Even getting a job here for the two months or so it would take to amass that, is extremely distasteful to me, so I haven't done it. I'm upside-down on my car, the only asset I have (which means I guess it's not an asset). I don't think I have $1000 worth of stuff to Ebay. And without a stake, I can't poker my way up to $1000.
But DoylesRoom still gives these pennies away. Not as many as they did when they were a new site, but they do. I was able to run those pennies up to a few bucks, occasionally approaching $20, but never really a lot. Then last week I sat at a 5¢/10¢ Pot-Limit Omaha/8 table, on a lark, with $2. I lost most of it in a few hands so I put another $2 on the table. Then I hit a big hand, and never really looked back. When I stood up, I had put together $95 or so, which is pretty nice off of a $4 buyin. It's no 39¢-into-$250 day like I had last year, but it's pretty nice.
I sat just long enough the next day to get over $100 ... which took a while; I still don't really have a handle on Omaha. Then I popped that out and into PartyPoker (for a $20 bonus, whee!) mainly for increased game selection. It can be difficult to multitable at Doyle's because there is often only one game going at a specified game and limit. Also their interface's annoying pop-to-front all the time means mistyped bets and mistyped chat are common.
I was planning on running my stake up at PartyPoker, but that $20 bonus made me realize that I can make bonus whoring a significant part of my climb. Thus I shall do, working off bonuses and hopefully turning profits, so that assuming I'm above breakeven I should be able to take advantage of two 100% matches and be at my goal.
I'm not so sure I'm a +EV player at limit holdem, though. The first item of evidence is that when I've played live recently, my $3/$6 play has been mostly negative. I think I'm actually down in (limited) live play for 2005. Then, after blowing a buyin at Party's $25max PLO8, I sat two tables (or was it three?) of 50¢/$1 limit holdem. After twelve hundred hands of average (or a tick above) cards, I was down fifteen bets. That's the second item of evidence. I could discount my live-play results as small sample size, and playing each time with a stake that couldn't weather ordinary in-game variance (generally $100 into a $3/$6 game), both exacerbating simple variance. I can't ignore 1200 hands of breakeven play with average to above-average cards at a limit where I really should be very +EV. I have concluded that my limit game has gone to pot, and begun going back into Miller's Small-Stakes Holdem. (On the other hand, it's possible that the concepts therein is what drove my limit game into the crapper in the first place, that I'm imperfectly applying the concepts in the book.)
So, I've turned to the builder of my last stake, $25max No-Limit Holdem, and it's gone okay. Not brilliantly, but okay. I should hit the $200 I figured I'd take to a 100%-match site, sometime today. (Actually, it'll probably end up better than $200, since I'm probably not going to make a mid-day site switch—withdrawals to NeTeller aren't speedy enough for that.)
I made an obvious mistake with my last online stake—at least, it's obvious if I'm −EV at limit holdem. When I got enough for a live-play stake, generally $100, I took it up to Mt.Pleasant to play. This left my online stake in such an enervated state that one bad session would kill it, which of course happened. That left me where I am now, resolved to give up live play until I have the stake I need. (The only “local” casino regularly dealing $100max NLH is in Detroit, nearly three hours away, although two others, as far or farther, deal $200max.)
What all this says is that I expect within about two weeks to have the stake I need to head west. Still, that's riding the rims for a while, as I said; I'd pretty much need to get a job immediately. There are a number of things I need to find out about that, including whether extensive experience as a poker player is enough to get one a job as a poker dealer. I'll talk to somebody's HR office (or maybe their poker staff) before I head out there, because a detour through dealer school would be distressing ... not only would I need a way to pay for that, but I'd need to find a way to keep eating while I was at dealer school. On the plus side, the timing will be right for me in that the Las Vegas Hilton appears to be opening a poker room in August, so they'll be hiring a number of dealers.
Assuming I do in fact make it out there, this blog will become (I think) at least as interesting as when I first turned pro, because it'll be new, and because of the riding-the-rims aspect of the early going. When I go back and read old entries of the blog, the ones as I was turning pro are clearly the most interesting. And this (probably) future time only a couple of weeks away, could be as interesting.
