So I handed in my thesis in December. My work was well received and I feel happy to have completed a task that seemed so daunting to me at the time of initiation. It definetly was very consuming, not only time wise, but also mentally, which is why I took time away from poker to complete it, along with exams and courses. This was a difficult thing to do, because it involved cutting myself off from income and making sure to keep my lifestyle in check during the time period, but I'm glad I did it, as it gave me some time to gain perspective on how I feel about poker, my life and my studies.
Towards the first quarter of the year, I definetly wasn't the happiest I could have been. My poker results were bad, as were my uni results and I couldn't seem to find a way out of it. Reminding myself that I don't need to play poker and can concentrate on my studies was immensely liberating. For the first time in my life I felt like a real student and sort of envied others that did not have to deal with the stress that poker can cause all these years.
Now I have to take one more final exam in February and then I will have completed my bachelors degree in economics. However I don't plan on persuing a career as an economist, at least not in the traditional sense. I know myself and I know that if I really enjoy doing something, it is easy to put in the hours required to be good and/or succesful at it.
Do I like economics? Yes, but I'm not sure I feel passionate about it. I believe that to be happy and/or succesful at life, is about finding things your passionate about and pursuing them. It's about finding your intrinsic motivation.
So how does poker fit into this equation? This was a difficult question for me to answer. Why? Because I think I'm heavily biased when it comes to poker due to the success I've had in the past with it and the possibilites it has given me. I think making a significant amount of money at an early age has helped me realize that money doesn't bring me happiness. It's the experiences along the way that bring me happiness and also sharing those experiences with others.
When poker to me became just about making the next paycheck, was when I was the least happiest in my poker career. The process of learning about the game and playing the game didn't bring me joy. That is why I now make it about enjoying the process, rather than the outcome and letting the outcome deal with itself. I make it about being passionate about learning and playing and not about making money. Don't take me wrong, the money does matter, but I make sure it doesn't matter the most.
In today's games I believe a lot of people don't care about the game of poker itself and this saddens me. A lot of people don't care about the art of poker. Online sportsmanship seems to be at an all time low. Surely there will always be a certain kind of player that just treats poker as an ATM and is succesful at it, but I believe these players will be short-lived.
I care about good sportsmanship, good poker culture, the person who is sitting across me from the table and I hope that others start caring more too.
In 2012 I hope to become a little bit more open in my blogs and share my thoughts on poker and life with you guys. I've become a lot more active on Twitter. And you can follow me on @uptodan. I'll be leaving Austria in about one month and am still contemplating my options. I'll post more on that in my next blog post.
I know I haven't been very rigorous with my travel updates, but I haven't completely abondoned my old ways, I just toned them down a bit for the duration of me working on my thesis.
So I'm currently on the Channel Islands visiting my Mother. To be more precise I'm on Guernsey. For those who don't know the Channel Islands, they are famous for being a tax haven. I've been contemplating what it would be like to live on a tax haven (Malta, Gibraltar and the Cayman Islands for example) some over the course of the last year and it's nice to get a taste of it.
So far my opinion is that on the one hand it's nice to live by the sea, the air is really good and you can go swimming (though it's pretty cold here in the Atlantic), but on the other hand there's also not a whole lot to do and you aren't really where all the action is happening. It seems really good for internet business though as the taxes are super good.
I'd have to check out some more warmer tax havens I guess, because maybe the nice weather will outway the feeling of being far away from things.
Been getting in some more poker hands and I've been having fun playing too. If I felt I wasn't having fun I'd just quit, but poker is pretty fresh to me right now and I've had a lot of time to reflect on my game and what my plans are for the next couple of years so I'm in a pretty good mindset. I hope to continue this trend and work on my game so I get better and better.
That's all for now, just wanted to post a small update. Here are some pics of where I'm staying and I'll make sure to post any updates as they arise:
Mhhhh fat.. err fish and chips
Tha beeaaaachhh
More of the beach
Nice little tea room by the sea side where I plan to go for lunch tomorrow
The last couple of months I've been concentrating on my bachelor thesis as I mentioned in my former blog post. Since then I've also taken a lot of exams and I'm getting closer and closer to finishing. Originally I was aiming to be finished by the end of July, but now it looks like it will have to be the end of September as I pushed an exam back to give myself some more breathing space.
It wasn't an easy decision for me to make, but I esentially removed myself from the games for some time to fully focus on my studies. I was stuck in a rut and I had to make a decision. I had to take a break from poker. It was a very liberating experience for me, because I had never really taken a prolonged break from the games since I started playing in around 2006. The feeling of allways worrying about how much it is costing me in opportunity costs to walk over to a supermarket to do some food shopping or study for some exam wasn't there anymore.
Don't take me wrong, I think as long as there is no reason to take a break, your motivated and running well you should push that as much as you can. It is a common fallacy in trading to sell winners too early and hold on to losers for two long and I think a similar concept applies to poker when it comes to managing yourself. It is however still nice to just be able to relax and be a normal university kid. It helped me put things in perspective and I feel like I've begun to develop a new joy for life and reflect on what I've been doing so far and what I want to do in the future.
This semester I took two game theory classes. One class was on decision theory with a very reputable professor named Pablo Blavatsky and the other one was a mixture of classical game theory and decision theory. What I like about decision theory is that it incorporates things like group psychology and personal preferences into it's models which leads to some interesting insights on how people tend to behave in poker aswell. I'm sure a lot of concepts will be known to poker players, but seeing them in concrete models was very interesting to me.
An example I could mention is that some players tend to become more aggressive when they are losing. This can lead to situations where people become risk seeking when they are losing as opposed to risk averse or risk neutral when they are winning. In prospect theory (a subdivision of decision theory) this is referred to as the reflection effect.
So I'm currently finishing up on my bachelor thesis in econometrics (for those who have not heard this term before, econometrics can roughly be described as a combination of statistics and mathematics applied to all sorts of data). Tomorrow I hope to get back to the books and get some work done. I'll also be getting back into some poker. I've been reading blogs again and watching some videos and I'm starting to get motivated for the game again. I probably will not be able to go on full blast for now though as I'd like to get done with my degree asap.
Finally here is a pic of (from left to right) me, my friend Alex and Steve and in the middle Sami Khedira from Real Madrid.
Uploaded with ImageShack.us
I was in Madrid in April to meet up with my friends who were studying in Spain at the time and we decided to go to Mecardo de San Miguel to drink some wine and eat some of their tapas. We were standing right behind him when my friend goes hey, isn't that Sami Khedira and I was like it could be. In an instant he had asked him to take a picture with us and he was down with it so that was cool.
Thought I might write a brief update on my progress with my degree. This semestre I'm currently enrolled in Decision Theory, Empirical Economic Research and Managerial Decision Making. I wanted to do Risk Management instead of Managerial, but it was not possible due to my time schedule. It's a shame, because it would have been interesting, on the other hand it would have been a lot of work for me aswell.
I've decided what I'm gonna write about for my bachelor thesis. I originally wanted to write about Rogue Traders in either Risk Management or Decision Theory, but that didn't work out. Now I'm writing about the effects of natural catastrophes on macroeconomic indicators in Empirical Research. I haven't really done much for it yet, just figured out the topic a few days ago and looked for some basic data. I should start to do some more serious work come tomorrow.
Poker has been more fun lately. After a very frustrating February I took it easy in March, just playing when I felt like I wanted to play. I've dropped my HUD stats for now and am just playing with the active players window so I can check on unknowns preflop tendencies in certain spots or stats from other players as I feel necessary. I can do this quite comfortably as I am only six tabling. I know common consensus says one should be using a HUD. In fact Jungleman says not using a HUD is a leak and he doesn't think he can be beaten without one. I really feel very comfortable without one though. I know I used to be a little paranoid that I would go on a massive downswing the first time I turned it off, but that didn't happen and I did pretty well without one. On the other extreme there are players like Samo and Benefield that don't use HUDs (Benefield might be using a HUD now it's just what I remember him saying back when he was a more active player) and also don't think it's good to use one. I guess everyone needs to figure out what works best for themselves. I like to mix things up.
I'm currently on the fifth season of The Wire, so things are coming to an end slowly. It has been an interesting watch so far and there is a lot of character diversity. This never seems to get old:
So after my big downswing last month I took a break and decided to play 200NL so I could remember what it felt like to win again. I really learnt a lot about myself and my game in that period and I don't regret the experience though obviously I would have preferred not to lose.
I've cut down a lot on tables (from 10 initally) and to me personally poker is a lot more fun playing fewer tables. Right now I'm playing anything from 1-6 tables and just trying to play as well as I can and as high intensity as I can at all times. I'm also not playing on a schedule, I just try to stay in good games as long as I can and quit as soon as possible if I feel I might be off my game or am not confident about my play. I will take frequent breaks in tougher lineups. I also try to play with more conviction when I play. By this I mean making sure there is a reason behind everything I do.
Uni starts back last week. This will be my last semester for my Bachelor of Economics. I have pretty cool courses this semester:
Risk Management
Decision Theory
Emprical Economic Research
I think I'll write my thesis in decision theory. Emperical Economic Research is esentially econometrics, which is kinda cool too. Will have to see what I end up doing.
Got my copy of The Wire today. I'm looking forward to watching it as I've only heard good things and the ratings are through the roof.
Looks like Dre will be bringing out a new album soon. He's already released two songs I believe. This one is pretty sick and reminds me of "back in the day" ^^:
This is something I usually don't do, but it is weighing down on me some so I'm opening myself up here a little bit to my readers. My 10 tabling hasn't been going so well and after being almost even on the month I had my worst losing session ever yesterday. I lost in the region of 15 buy-ins playing in fairly soft 2/4 and 3/6 games over 5000 hands. This is a lot playing ring games that I would not consider to be tough, ie obvious soft spots at the tables. I've been messing around with ev++'s variance simulator and assuming they haven't botched the programming I get very surprising results. Assuming over that 5k hand session that I were a -4bb/100 loser with a standard deviation of 100 the liklehood of a 15 buy-in downswing is in the region of 5-7%:
Here is the same graph for a break even player:
And for a 4bb winner:
The liklehood of this downswing occuring is slightly lower for the break even player, but what is interesting is that for a 4bb winner with the same standard deviation the liklehood is still around 2%.
First I would like to add that it is extremely unlikely that I was a 4bb loser during my session yesterday. I am not a heavy tilter. Sure I was frustrated by losing that much, but wasn't that aware of it at the time as I don't check my results whilst I play unless I'm taking a shot at something. I've been going over the big pots I played and I can't see spew anywhere. Just the obvious setups and one or two plays I made where I had a read and was wrong/ran into the top of villains range, but we're talking about 200bbs in said spots. What I'm trying to play at is that even given extremely bad play (-4bb/100) based on the variance simulator it is still pretty unlikely to even lose that much.
In contrast to this my empirical winrate at 2/4, 3/6 and 5/10 prior to my downswing was 5bb/100 with a standard deviation of 75bb/100 over 250k hands. Inputting that into the variance simulator makes it almost impossible to lose that much over 5k hands.
Interestingly enough Nassim Taleb (Author of the Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness) actually briefly spoke about NLHE having similar extreme variances as financial markets which makes one wonder if the tools we use to analyze variance underestimates extreme occurences.
So what now? Well my results for this month are very bad by my standards and I am willing to accept that my play may well have been subpar.
I'm not giving up on my hand goal for this month and I'll continue to put in volume. However to ensure higher quality of play I am capping the amount of tables I play to 8 and will make sure I take frequent breaks. I will also stop playing hu when multitabling as this has been source of my losses now and prior to my downswing. I don't mind playing anybody hu, but I think for it to be a worthwile experience I should be able to concentrate on my opponent better.
The title is the number of hands I played today. Yesterdays session was pretty bad. Played around 4k hands and lost in the region of 1000bb. Today I managed to win a little, but nothing in comparison really. Still I'm glad to have won and not lost again. I have had the most brutal swings of my career over the past couple of months and I think it could be correlated with me having to split my focus between uni and poker and the usual downwards spiral of losing and playing bad. I think I deal fairly well with losses, but I'm sure I'm not playing at my best when losing. I think once I get into a rhythm again my winrate will increase and I'll get unstuck quicker. Still a bunch of hands to come and I'm looking forward to putting in the hours at the tables .
I'm also currently rereading Mathematics of Poker, it's a lot easier to read going over it for the second time plus now that I've had to deal with a lot of math at uni I can understand their calculations more easily. I really enjoy reading MOP, I guess I find it intriguing what you can do with numbers.
Almost done with Battlestar Galactica. It's quite an original series and if you're in to sci-fi definetly check it out. There is this film called limitless that I'm looking forward to see when it comes out in the cinemas. Check out the trailer:
Took my econometrics exam today. I think it went fairly well. Might have a shot at an A, but we will see. Feels like on average I should atleast get a B. Would be sick if I got an A, because it's considered a tough subject and I don't really have many A's to show for plus it would make me feel better about not playing as much poker as I would like ^^.
After my exam I headed out to some lunch with a friend and then we went for coffee afterwards. Got back around 4pm and decided to log some hands. I actually got 10 tables going at one point and I feel like I'm handling it really well. I've got them all on my 27" so all tables are in my field of vision at the same time. I think this really makes it a lot easier to play 10-12 tables. I find myself looking left and right frantically, worried about timing out when I have more than 8 tables open on multiple monitors.
I made sure to take enough breaks, because I was kinda drained from all the studying and not optimal sleep due to being anxious about finally having my exam over and done with. I played around 2500 hands in total today. Hope to log around 4000 tomorrow. I think if I reach my target of 75000 before the end of the month, I'll probably just take the rest of the month off, but let's see how it goes. If I'm doing well in the games and don't feel burnt out I might just keep on going.
Right now I'm really digging this tune from Justice:
Been very busy with uni lately. I'm currently studying for an econometrics exam that I have on Friday. I'm finding this subject has taken up quite a lot of my time this semester, it's not rocket science, but probably the most math heavy subject I have had up to date. Even though they tell you it's not really math, which I kinda agree with. They just make you do a lot of the calculations by hand that you would usually have a computer do for you and that's tedious, especially when it comes to matrix calculations which we skipped in school due to time constraints.
I've set my time schedule so that after the 4th of Feb I can play for the entire rest of Feb. My goal is to play 75000 hands in 24 days. There are some very lucrative promotions that I can partake in and that keeps me motivated to put in a lot of volume regularly. I'm gonna aim for 4-5000 hands per day starting Friday. It's gonna be quite intense, but the potential pay off wll be quite large.
I've also been thinking of ways to increase my volume from a hardware stand point without giving up too much of my winrate per table. I actually considered buying new monitors just for Feb to play a 3*20" or 2*30"setup, but that's kinda crazy seeing as I already have a 27" and a 20" monitor. From my experience the best setup is one that gives you the most vision on the least space. This should increase focus and also make multitabling easier. Basically this means high resolutions and little to no overlap. The maximum amount of tables I can play are 10 (software restricted). My comfort zone multitabling currently is probably 6-8 tables (at 2/4-5/10, I'd probably try 10 at 1/2 and 4-6 at 10/20). If I can get that up to 10 then playing 75k hands becomes a breeze I'd say, but we'll have to see how that goes. I won't push myself too much if I feel I can't handle it.
Some friends of mine introduced me to Battlestar Galactica, so I've been watching that a lot lately. I like it so far (almost finished the series lol). As my friend remarked yesterday I tend to only notice the "flaws" in the series, but despite certain things that are not so credible (like the pilots space suits having know sun protection...) the general idea is pretty good and the action is gripping for sure.
Gotta get back to my studies now. Talk to ya later.
