Well, after seven long months, the Year-long Intense Poker Experimental Study, or YIPES for short, has come to a permanent close. The reason? I’m busted. Broke. Out of money. Down to the felt, as they say. My bankroll has evaporated in a cloud of crazy all-ins and bad beats. I have a pitiful $0.06 left in the ‘Stars bankroll. I’ve lost all my money, and it ain’t coming back.
And you know what? It feels great.
Okay, it also feels pretty lousy, too, with me essentially pissing away a high of $270 in a mad effort to keep building the bankroll at all costs. My emotions are all over the place at this moment, but mostly I feel relief. The new reality of my life is I can, well, return to my life. I can go back to playing the games I like on FTP, rather than the ones I have to play on ‘Stars. In fact, I can choose NOT to play if the mood strikes. The pressure of adding $X per day to the bankroll on Poker Stars no longer exists. YIPES is dead. Hooray!
The short version of the crash is this: In the end, I simply could not keep up with the ever-increasing target bankroll requirements. The exponential nature of the game ran smack dab into the realities of linear poker skills. As I fell further behind the curve, I had to play at higher and higher stakes, which of course meant the swings were bigger and bigger. In the end, all it took was one prolonged downswing to zero out the ‘roll.
Just look at the plot, above, to see the crazy roller coaster ride I subjected myself to. A move of $100 in three or four days became common. Up, up, up…and then down, down, down. And then up again. And then down. At first, the swings were hard to stomach, but in the end I became somewhat desensitized to the whole thing. Fifty dollars won? Okay. $75 lost? Okay, too. No biggie. Sure, I wanted to win, but what are you gonna do when the cards aren’t falling your way? I stayed true to the experiment, and in the end the experiment won.
But there is good news that came out of the crash. For starters, my self-confidence at the tables has increased dramatically. I know now that I can sit down at a $3/6 game and hold my own with the average player at those levels. I’m a solid mid-level poker player. I know pretty much where I’m at in most hands, I know when to keep the pressure on the opp, and I usually know when to give up or at least when to slow down. My belief in Position Poker has been reinforced, as has also been my belief in Aggression, Aggression, Aggression. Tight-Aggressive play absolutely wins in the long run. The swings are big, sure, but so are the net profits. Everyone who’s read a book on poker knows these things, but there’s a difference between knowing something and believing it. I now believe.
I also learned a lot of new lessons and tid-bits along the way. For instance, the play at the higher stakes was definitely better, but also somewhat more predictable than at the lower stakes. An under-the-gun raise at $0.05/.10 could mean just about anything, but in a $2/4 or $3/6 game, it usually meant a real hand. In a sense, it was easier to read players at the higher limits than at the lower stakes. During the past few weeks, I noticed that I was putting players on hands a lot more accurately than I did when I was at the lower stakes.
Table VPIPs were also noticeably reduced at the higher stakes. In the 2/4-cent games, it wasn’t unusual for 6 people to see a flop; in a $2/4 game, on the other hand, three people staying in for the flop was out of the norm. And calling down to the river? In the $3/6 games, you’re only going to fifth street if you’ve got the near nuts. In the 5/10-cent games, people would call you down with just Ace or King high on a coordinated board. Yes, sometimes they’d hit, but more often not. In the higher stakes games, you better be certain of your hand strength to see that fifth and final card.
Another big thing I noticed is that while the players are definitely better at the higher stakes, bad players exist up there, too. Yes, there are far fewer of them at the higher stakes, but I definitely grew significant chunks of my bankroll on the backs of $1/2 and $2/4 fish. The trick was to find them and exploit their marginal play. It was with less frequency, but I definitely saw all the same types of things at $3/6 that I did at 5/10-cent: people chasing gut-shots, donks ignoring four flushed boards with their two pair, and fish swimming against the current with bottom and middle wired pairs on boards that had Aces and Kings out in formation.
So, if the donks were jumping, why couldn’t I capitalize on them more than I did? The reason, ultimately, is that my bankroll simply couldn’t support the swings. Even the fools occasionally hit their gutter balls, and when your aces get cracked, you need a big enough pile of dough in the 'roll to ride it out. Or at least be able to rebuy when you're felted. Unfortunately, I often sat down with my entire bankroll at the table. There simply was no option of re-buying.
Conventional wisdom says one should have 200x the big bet in a ‘roll to play at any given limit in poker. Downswings hit everyone, and you have to have a significantly large enough amount of money to weather those dark times. Unfortunately, this means that in a $3/6 game, I needed 200 x $6 = $1200 in the bankroll to sit at those tables. So I shouldn’t have sat at those high stakes, then, right? Normally, no, but the experiment demanded it from me. A solid poker player will earn 1-2 BB per hour at any given limit that he’s skilled enough to play. The exponential nature of YIPES, combined with my somewhat limited ability to play more than ~1 hour of poker per day on average, means that I was forced to play at those ever-increasing stakes… but the bankroll wasn’t growing at the same proportional rate. Ergo, I ultimately went bust. About a month ago, I kind of figured the crash was coming, but I stuck it out anyway. Maybe in hindsight that was stupid (I was up to $270 at one point, after all, which I could have cashed out and quit with), but I ended up riding the roller coaster all the way to the end and right off the end of the tracks.
So what’s in my poker future? Dunno, really. As I write this, I’m pretty burnt out, but I’m also keenly aware and wondering when (not if) I’ll start jonesing to try another experiment. We'll see. One thing is for certain, whatever I do probably won’t be on Poker Stars. In case you weren’t paying attention, I’m now broke on their site. I won a star for playing as much as I did, but in the end I lost the nest egg. I’d trade that star back in a heart beat for my $270 bankroll….
All-in for now…
-Bug
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