2015 Year in Review

Continuing my annual tradition in this space, I’m going over my 2015 year in poker today and next time I’ll take a look forward at 2016. Without giving you too deep of a look into the inner workings of Card Player, I must let you know that I’m writing this with a full three weeks left in 2015, but unless things change quite a bit in those three weeks, I should have a pretty good idea of how my year went.

Cash games were a terrible slog for much of the beginning of the year in 2015 and I stubbornly stuck to the $5-$5 game I have been playing for the last couple of years. About halfway through the year, I realized a few things. First, I hate playing no-limit hold‘em cash games. This was fine when the games were super profitable, but when I’m not doing well and I also hate the game I’m playing, I tend to play worse, which then leads to me disliking the game more, rinse, repeat. Secondly, I noticed that many of the bad players were no longer playing in that $5-$5 game. They had moved to $2-$3, a different game, or a different casino. I then realized why. In July of 2014, the casino where I play the vast majority of my action (almost 900 of the 1,000 cash game hours I’ve put in this year) raised the rake by $1. That doesn’t seem like that much, but it makes a difference. That’s an extra six big blinds per hour coming off the table if 30 hands per hour are played. Put into online terms, the rake went from slightly less than 100BB/100 to slightly less than 120BB/100 (that makes me want to puke, by the way). Some of that is jackpot money, which gets mostly funneled back to the players and the casino does offer free food in that game and roughly $2/hour in rakeback, but that’s a pretty huge rake and definitely made a difference in the bad players’ bottom line, as well as mine.

Once I realized those things, I started playing in some different games. There’s a good Omaha eight-or-better game and once or twice a week we get a very good H.O.R.S.E. game running. I definitely need to brush up on my stud variants, but I’m competent enough to be profitable in them. I’m looking forward to playing more of these games in the coming year.

Tournaments were profitable for me again this year. I had about $55,000 in buy-ins and cashed for around $80,000. Of course, that all went to my backer and I’m hoping to get out of makeup next year. This is a mentality I’m familiar with, since I sound like a Cubs fan. “There’s always next year.”

I set up three goals in this space for 2015. Let’s take a look at those.

Goal 1: Average 120 hours per month at the casino

So 120 hours per month equates to 1,440 hours total. I have played a total of 978 hours in cash games this year and roughly 100 hours in tournaments. I’ll add another 70 to 90 hours of cash games for the rest of the year to put my total at 1,050 or so. Because I’ve found some other games to play, I definitely haven’t spent 250 hours waiting at the casino. I expect I’ll end up at about 1,300 hours spent at the casino, though I haven’t done a good job of tracking this information. I’ll have to come up with a better way of doing so in the future.

Goal 2: Journal after each session

Yuck, this goal was a complete dud for me. I have been negligent in this area and I’m not sure if I’ll have a way to improve this for next year. It’s hard to do when most of my sessions end at 1 am or later and I have to get up to take care of my kids at 7 am. I should find 15 minutes at the end of each session to do this, but I just don’t. I plan on having some study time in one of my goals for next year, another thing I was terrible at this year, so perhaps this will be a good thing to incorporate into that study time.

Goal 3: Keep at least two students active throughout the year

I did an excellent job at this one. I had between two and four students at all times this year, minus the holiday season and I expect that to continue into next year. I need to find a way to develop some contacts for students in the future, and if anyone reading this is interested, please feel free to contact me through Twitter, where my handle is nhgg or email me at gavinfgriffingmail.com.

Overall, though it wasn’t a very big monetary success for me this year due to the first couple months of the year, it’s been a good year for learning and I’m excited about 2016. ♠

Gavin Griffin was the first poker player to capture a World Series of Poker, European Poker Tour and World Poker Tour title and has amassed nearly $5 million in lifetime tournament winnings. Griffin is sponsored by HeroPoker.com. You can follow him on Twitter @NHGG