YIPES? Yikes.

So, month 1 of the Yearlong Intense Poker Experimental Study, or YIPES for short, has come to a close. Time to recap the highlights and results.

[To refresh the reader's memory, YIPES is an effort to turn $5 that Poker Stars gave me as seed money to play at their site into, well, a lot more money. Specifically, I'm trying to double up the dough every month for an entire year. For the mathematically challenged, doubling would result in $5 x 2^12 = $20,480 at the end of 12 months. This would, clearly, comfortably fund a trip to the main event at the WSOP. Sounds ambitious? Well, it is. Read on…]

YIPES got off to a bit of a rocky start during this first month of March, 2008. I started by playing at the 2/4-cent level (limit cash games) and built my bankroll up to $8 or so, but then proceeded to donk off about $6.50 of it in a few SnG tournaments, some Stud Hi/Lo and other ill-advised idiocies. So, I buckled back down and built the 'roll back up to $5 in the 2/4-cent games, but then had another donk-episode where I got "creative" with my game (experimenting with VPIPs, mostly) and lost all but $1.20 of the money by the 20th of the month.

That was the bad news. The good news is that, with a long, steady slog playing tight, semi-passive poker in the 2/4-cent world, I once again built the 'roll back to $5 within a few days, and then just kept right on going upward. The current count, as of this last formal day of the month, is a not-too-shabby bankroll stack of $14.17. Not bad, if I do say so myself.

But this brings up a couple of questions about the "rules" of YIPES that I should probably address now, rather than later. For instance, should I now use $14.17 as the figure I'm trying to double for the month of April? Or should I stick with the original plan of doubling the $5 every month. I think the answer is the latter; i.e., I'm going to stick to a preordained target series of $10, $20, $40, $80… for the end of every month. This means I'm starting April with a nice leg up on the $20 target.

Okay, that's the easy question. The next one isn't so straightforward. Specifically, I've been pondering whether I should stick to just cash games, or should I introduce SnGs and such into the equation as the bankroll grows. My buddy Bret, who is also attempting his own run at YIPES in parallel with me, has suggested that playing SnGs would be somehow cheating. After much deliberation, I think I disagree. I think the only real criteria is that I select games that are lucrative and will allow me to double up for the month. If that means sticking solely to cash games, then so be it. But if I feel I can make a better win rate in other games, I think I should be free try them out too. I certainly don't want to unnecessarily risk too large of a percentage of my bank roll whenever I sit down to play, so I will have to be judicious and a bit conservative, but I think I'm going to have to open my game selection criteria if I'm going to make an honest run at the big prize. Of course, I'm not going to run out now and plunk $11 of my hard-earned $14 into a single $10+1 SnG and hope for the best. No, instead I might wait until I'm up to $20 or so and then risk no more than 5% of the 'roll on a $1.+.2 SnG. We'll see. For now, I think I'm going to stick with the 2/4-cent games until I clear $20… or so I am currently thinking. The truth is that YIPES is an evolving beast, and I've been known to change my mind mid-stream before in these kinds of things, so don't be surprised if the rules get tweaked a bit in the coming weeks.

In any case, I've managed to double up this first month of March. I'm also doing pretty well on Full Tilt Poker. I tranferred nearly $100 of my bankroll on FTP to a couple of other players' accounts last week, but then managed to earn it all back in a few days playing some $5 SnGs and some $1/2 limit. Not too shabby for an amateur poker player. Or should I just say, "yipes?"

All-in for now…
-Bug