I am officially jobless, 21, and consistently winning poker tournaments. It is what I have been waiting for since I was 16 years old. But now that I am here, I am only wondering how to get even better. As far as I have researched, and read from interviews of the pros, the best way to get better at poker is for collaboration with fellow poker players and to get other viewpoints of how to play. For example, asking another player how he or she would have played this certain hand from this position. It is from there that I study and question the plays that I have made. I know that twoplustwo.com is a good start for posting hand questions, however, those players seem to be either trolls or internet players that only want to analyze very stimulating, complicated, in depth hands. I really do not wish to discuss deep strategy, because in tournaments, there really aren't very many difficult decisions to make. Tournaments seem to play themselves, as most of the play is very mechanical and mathematical. It really depends on getting the right hands in the right spots.
I think what I want to do now is just to find a partner, or a group of players who all share the same passion for the game as I do, and want to develop further as professional poker players. A pro poker player is my dream, but I still don't know the extent of that being possible for me. Some support would be ideal. Anything is possible if I set my mind to it, and I am very consistent in my tournaments, but I have only been 21 two weeks now, and made a few thousand bucks. It could just very well be a hot streak of cards, although it certainly didn't feel like that tonight. Early on I made a few moves to try and get some momentum going, and was outflopped every hand I played. I ended up getting it all in early with 7s vs KQs and they held up to keep me in the tournament. The last hand before the break I managed to bring my stack back to its starting point when I rivered an ace with AJs vs TT. The best hands I saw after that were pocket 5s I received twice, both times in which I folded due to action before me, and AKs, which I raised preflop and took down the blinds and antes. And yet, I almost made the final table with these terrible cards. I stayed very patient and played calm and collected. I have been able to maintain my patient, calm demeanor and attitude toward the game, and it has benefited me greatly. I know now that if I stick to that mentality, these multi table tournaments at the live casinos should be easy enough for me to consistently make a living from.
But where do I go from here? I am left on my own to wonder these things, and this is why I have started blogging. I will probably update my blog from time to time on my poker progress, the friends I make, where I play, and how I do. Many of these blogs may include a lot of poker terms and strategy analysis that many of you may not fully understand. My hoep is that some day, when I am successful, I can look back on these first posts and see my progress documented from day one.
Right now I will call my poker home The Orleans Hotel and Casino. It is a fairly large casino, close to the strip, off of Tropicana and the I15. It is connected to the Arena, where graduations, speeches, and events take place, as well as it hosting the Las Vegas hockey team. The casino is mostly table games and slot machines, and attracts a lot of nightlife on the weekends. Most of the visitors are locals who all know each other, and it has a great mix of good players and recreational players. The tournament structures are the best that I have seen in Las Vegas. Tournaments generally do not generate a lot of profit for casinos, so it is hard for the smaller ones to be able to offer well structured, bang-for-your-buck type of tournaments. They usually have fast structures that force players to move all in against their will for the lack of time and funds to keep dealers on the floor. These type of tournaments much variance involved, and aren't good for serious players like myself. However the Orleans offers structures that allow patient players to prevail, with 30 minute blind levels and decent beginning stack sizes. The antes also offer incentive to steal more often, and this also benefits me as the weak passive players in these tournaments consistently check fold all hands if they dont hit top pair or a flush draw. On Friday nights they have a $125 buy in tournament that last time I was there drew 281 players for 30 places paid and a grand first prize of $6,750. Saturdays and Sunday nights also draw a nice pool of players. I wager that if I do well even one of those weekend tournaments, I have made my goal for the month. By the way, my goal for live tournament poker is to make over $2,000 a month average, after all buyins subtracted and cashes added up. I am using a new tool called "poker income" which is an app I have on my iphone. It is kind of like a budgeting app for poker. :)
Next month The Orleans is doing a "Tournament Player of the Month" Promotion. I am not exactly sure where the funds come from to pay out this promotion, whether it comes from tournament fees or rake from cash games, but they offer a prize pool to pay out to the tournament players who fair the best that month. For each tournament that you place in the money, you earn points. The more points you get, the higher on the leaderboard you are. From what i have seen this month, the prize pool paying out is around 7 grand, 1st place receiving 50% of that. I figure even if I can get top 5, I should still be able to rake in a nice little sum of money each month from this promotion alone. And, of course if I am fortunate enough to make this top spot, I probably made a decent amount of money playing the tournaments to begin with. That is how I plan to keep paying off the student loans, the storage, and the apartment fees I owe for breaking my lease, thanks to a few awesome roommates (*smirk*)
If this doesn't work out the way that I want it to, which I doubt that to happen, I will still be able to find a dealer job after I complete school in a couple of months. Right now Monday-Thursday I am studying craps and blackjack at PCI dealer school 10-4 (which I usually cant wake up for in time due to my late nights being successful in tournaments that dont end until 2am) so its usually about 4-5 hours a day, or 16-20 hours a week. Working a dealer job while trying to work my way up there as well as the other side of the table is my sole focus for the next few months of my life.
I am looking forward to seeing what I can do, but I also dread the fact that I will soon be feeling lonely, as I do not have much comradery out here in Vegas. My fellow poker friends I either have never met in person or they live back in my home state of Michigan. My non poker friends are busy being successful as interns or in prestigious unversities across the country. My family members have careers or are in school, and my lovely, beautiful girlfriend that I have grown very fond of has a life of her own trying to find her path in life in a neighboring state. I am truly alone out here in the sense that no one is really there to understand my life. I guess no one really ever has, but such is the life of a bipolar card player with a chip on his shoulder bigger than any dorito you can imagine.
This should be interesting.
-ATR
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