End of year report

January 1, 2010 by Nick Wealthall

End of term report

I thought for my benefit and maybe for your interest I should analyse my poker playing in 2009.

The exercise has actually been beneficial for my state of mind as it’s made me realise I’ve done a little better than I thought. Our perspectives often interfere with the truth and its important to see thing as they really are good and bad. At the end of October and the beginning of November I had a big downswing playing in games I know I can beat. Funnily enough this was the point at which the main tracking site started following Omaha so after 4 weeks of losing I was confronted by a big downward graph on this site and anyone who knew my screen name and looked me up would see me as a big loser in a game that’s relatively easy to beat. This was a low point in the year but I’m happy to say I took a week off refocused and won it all back by the end of December. The point is this downswing knocked my confidence and halted my moving up limits so I was feeling a little down about my year until I stepped back and remembered where I was.

At the start of the year I’d been playing Omaha seriously for 3 or 4 months and was just about breaking even at .5/1 – through luck rather than judgment. 12 months later I’m winning at 1/2 though I’ve yo-yoed between limits and endured some downswings I’m certain that when I play well and focussed I’m beating 1/ 2 and ready to seriously tackle higher.

In addition I’ve had an amazing year in PLO tournaments – running extremely hot in the few events I’ve played. I finished 10^th in an ftops, very deep in a wcoop, 13^th in one of only 2 live plo tourneys to date. Also – when playing for fun – I’ve final tabled 4 or 5 low stakes plo tourneys online and won one (the amount of dead money in these events is ludicrous).

In total this year I’ve won a little over $22k in cash and tournaments playing almost entirely PLO.

The truth is I have to be pleased with that result. Looking back I realise how little I understood the game at the beginning of the year and the exciting thing is there’s still a long way to go.

My frustration is that I thought I’d be playing 2 / 4 regularly by now but I have to recognise several things. First of all I simply don’t play enough. My other work and commitments mean I play on average 15k hands a month which is okay but nowhere near what a pro would play if he was trying to beat a new game.

The second thing is Omaha plays so much bigger than holdem. 1/2 or .5/1 with an ante are games where you can win or lose 2 or 3 thousand in a night on a lucky or unlucky day. It’s impossible to avoid big swings in your bankroll and it’s a mental and money management adjustment that takes a while to make. The biggest thing for me has been increasing my patience with the game and realising there are spells when you never make a hand or where you constantly run into the nuts and these are just a part of the game. Omaha is a much more enjoyable exciting game but it’s also a harder game because it’s a much bigger test of character. At times I’ve failed and losses have made me play worse and created big downswings – however I feel like I’m ending the year a much stronger player in terms of my self management and overall playing ability.

Out of interest you might like to know I now have a stop loss when I play a session of 5 buyins. I’ve never had one before believing the old mantra that if you have an edge in the games you should keep playing however you can lose so fast at Omaha and its so hard to play badly when you’re behind I think a stop loss limit for a session is essential.

I need to credit Brian for helping me so much this year. I know how lucky I am to have such a good player as a friend and someone I can talk to about the game and hands. If I took his advice and quit all my work and played plo with him as my coach I’m sure I’d be killing the 5/10 in no time. Sadly that’s not going to happen but I know I wouldn’t have made the money I made without his help so I am lucky. As a side note I should mention how awesome it’s been to watch him kill the big games this year – no one works harder at their game or deserves the success more.

I also played the main event this year. As I’m sure you know I had quite a dull event in terms of my play and the cards and result but the experience was great and I’m glad I won’t shuffle off this mortal chaffinch without having played it.

And so for this year I have a couple of clear goals.

Firstly I want to continue to improve my Omaha cash game. Its tough to set definitive targets as it’s dependent on how much time I have to play but by the end of the year I want to be a winning 2/4 player taking shots at higher. I think it will take most of the year to get my game to that point as I need to do the work – if I can do it faster I’ll be delighted. I hope to win more than this year but I’m not setting a target instead I’m going to set a target number of hands and hopefully the money will follow.

I’ll also be playing more live tournaments this year (which means more than the 3 I usually play each year). With the UKIPT job I’m playing some events Stars are kindly putting me into (which is super lucky for me) and I’ll also play a few more off my own back. Being sponsored for a few events is an opportunity for me to work on my tournament game and get the monkey off my back of not really having many live tourney results. It’ll be interesting to see how this goes and if I can keep my focus in the long live events!

Right longest blog ever so better end it.

Hope your poker was great in 2009 and 2010 is even better – if not I hope you run like the little baby Jesus.

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