Everyone else does it….
I guess you could say I had a good year playing poker. Interestingly, I played far, far more than I would have ever expected. I made my share of mistakes, but also had my share of good decisions.
I played in 84 cash games for a total of more than 405 hours. That would be nearly 17 24-hour days if I played non-stop. Thanks to a bit of a switch late in the year, I ended on a positive note, with a net profit of $833, which is a whipping $2.05 per hour.
On the tournament side of things, I played in 28 tournaments, mostly limit, and cashed in 8 of then, a better than 25 percent cash rate. Thanks to a first-place finish in July, my tournament net profit was more than $4000.
Thanks to the tournament performance, I’m up overall for 2005. My cash game chart, however, looks like a bit bell curve, starting slow early in the year, spiking high in the summer, before trending down the last half of the year. I was actually in negative territory in November, and I decided to switch things up, trying a new location, Artichoke Joe’s in San Bruno.
I found some nice $3/$6 games there. At the end of the year, I played there 6 times, and left with a net profit 5 of those times.
One of the mantras of the pros is to look for good games. The games at the Oaks were getting less good for me, and it took me too long to wake up–I just had a bit of inertia going there every Friday night–and seek alternatives.
As it turns out, Artichoke Joe’s is just slightly cheaper to play than the Oaks; they don’t require a new player to post to get their first hand. So you can potentially see several hands for free before the blinds get to you.
I went back east at the end of the year again and took a day to hit Foxwoods. I ended up at twice the limits I played at a year ago, $4/$8, and played a patient, careful game to leave much earlier than I had planned with a nearly $500 net profit. I felt lucky too in that I got to see and chat a bit with a very nice dealer originally from Southern China, way, way out in small-town New England.
I’m hoping for a good 2006 in poker. I’m under no illusion that I’ll every achieve lofty heights in the poker world. I just want to keep getting better, and hopefully just keep being successful overall.