Being Realistic

A good idea when setting goals for yourself is to always be realistic. Set goals that are difficult to attain, but possible. For instance, I set a goal of self-propelling 1,000 miles. This includes riding my bike, walking, running, kayaking, swimming, or whatever else you can think of, but mainly riding my bike and using my feet. It’s going to be a difficult goal. Because I only ride a mountain bike, my rides aren’t 50 miles, more like 6-10 miles. I basically need to go on three bike rides per week or two bike rides and two hour-long walks. This is a pretty big time commitment for someone who has a 3 year old and an 18 month old. I purchased a bike trailer to tow my kids, so that definitely makes it easier, but finding that time when we have so much other stuff going on and there is less daylight in the winter adds some challenges. That’s good.

Challenging is good. I fully expect to be able to make my 1,000 miles even if I’m off pace early on. I’ll have more daylight and better weather in the spring and summer to knock out the miles.

I feel like my poker goals are realistic as well. I’ve estimated what I think my hourly rate should be in all of the various games I play and if I can play my A-game 75 percent of the time and my B-game the other 25 percent instead of lapsing to C and D, I should be able to reach that hourly rate. Therefore, I don’t have an hourly rate goal. Instead I have a volume goal. That way, my focus isn’t on how well the results are tallying and instead it’s on how well the hours are tallying. Where I’ve run into problems in the past is in expecting that hourly to come to fruition easily or even in letting short-term results have a big impact on what I think my hourly rate should be.

So, in order to be realistic with myself, I ran some simulations on the www.pokerdope.com variance calculator. Because my goal is to play 1,200 hours this year of live cash games, I set the trial to run 36,000 hands with the presumption that we’ll get in 30 hands per hour. That might be a little bit off, I’d probably expect to get in closer to 40 when playing limit games, but it’s a good number. I set the standard deviation to 50 big bets (bb)/100 and win rate to 12bb/100 for my first simulation. This runs 36,000 hands 20 times. With these values, I should expect to win 4,320 big blinds or 2,160 big bets for the year with a 0.0003 percent chance of having a losing year. I will have a 150 big bet downswing 6.48 percent of the time and a 1,000 big bet downswing 0.01 percent of the time. Finally, I’ll have a 5,000 hand downswing 7.77 percent of the time and a 10,000 hand downswing 1.52 percent of the time.

So, fairly often, I’ll have a decent size downswing and it might last for over a month. That’s something to keep in mind, especially when you’re in the middle of said downswing or at the top of a wonderful upswing. You’re never too far away from a tough run.

If the variance doubles to 100bb/100, the chance of that 150 bet downswing goes up to a whopping 45.73 percent! Two times the variance = eight times the chance of a big swing like that. The chance of having a 5,000 hand downswing also increases to 37.12 percent of the time. At this variance level, I still expect to win 4,320 big blinds (2,160 bets) but of the 20 trials run, the best result was about 10,000 big blind winner and the worst was almost 2,500 big blind loser.

Finally, leaving me out of this, let’s profile a player who is attempting to beat the game, but hasn’t quite clicked. They are always working to improve but haven’t crested the hump that would make them able to play poker professionally if that’s what they wanted. So, they’re a 3bb/100 winner at no limit with a variance of 100bb/100. This player plays about the same amount of hours as me, so 36,000 hands for the year. Their expected win for the year is 1,080 big blinds with a 28 percent chance of having a losing year. 83 percent of their years will include a 300bb downswing and 80 percent of their years will include a 5,000 hand downswing. They are more likely than not (55 percent) to have a 2,000 bb downswing during the year.

The life of a cash game grinder can be pretty tough, though better than a tournament grinder overall (If you’re a multi-table tournament player and have a strong stomach, take a look at NoahSD’s blog posts on the subject titled “Life as an Online MTT Pro by the Numbers (It’s Hard)”). It’s best to go into each year having a good idea of what to expect. Hopefully, after reading this article you have a better idea of what a year as a poker pro could look like, but do yourself a favor and play around with those numbers on the pokerdope calculator yourself and hopefully you can take a realistic view of your results. ♠

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