clarkatroid is not folding

When you start off playing cash you have to run well. You need to be running +EV. You have to get lucky and you need to avoid a routine downswing, and you need this break right at the beginning of your career.

Otherwise theres a huge possibility you'll drop out never to be seen again. In all likelyhood, if your a newbie and bit scared of playing cash poker like i was, you'll deposit once, all excited, give it a bash, and if you hit a 30 buy in downswing off the bat, which means getting your roll wiped out if you deposit $1500 bucks@
.25/.50. And that will be that. You will probably never make such a significant investment again. Ok you might deposit 50 bucks here and there and play a little at weekends, but the chances are you will be a recreational player for the rest of  your life.  The problem is, your not a good player as a cash newbie, no one is, and the chances of a bankroll inducing wipout are massively increased because of this. So when you combine the variance and lack of skill factor together, this is potent negative concoction and why the odds are stacked against anyone launching a succesfull career in cash poker.

Ive played over 2 million hands of cash poker in the last 36 months, and many more in other forms of poker previous to that and the one thing i have learned, but never totally embraced ,and that is.....Never understimate the power and ruthlessness of variance . At some point you will run worse than you ever dreamed was possible. Its mathematically unavoidable if you play enough hands.

No, you need to be one of the lucky ones at the start, either that or have the trust in what your reading here to give it another 1500 bucks, and another try. Which you probably dont, and i wouldnt blame you

What im trying to say is that there are potentially, almost definately, really really good players out there that never had the breaks in the infancy of their career that are needed to develop their talent. On the flip side, their are poor players who ran like usane bolt on acid at the start of their career and built up enough of a roll, and very importantly saved this roll, and are now part of an established online cash players infrastructure.

These less talented players are the rakeback grinders of the day, of 2009. They are players that make loads of errors, they have huge and obvious leaks, probably poor emotional control and tilt a lot, whatever,  but they play a shit ton of hands and break even/make a small profit/or loss. But when you add in the rakeback and they make a decent living. And this is the thing. Your average mid stakes less talented grinder makes a better living than the the average uk wage.

For example, if you play mid stakes and 50k hands a month, which is around abouts a 35-40 hour week if your 6 tabling, your rake will be circa 8k a month, and at these levels you should be able to achive 50% rakeback, which is 4k, circa £2400 pounds. Thats roughly the equivalent of a £50k a year salary. 50k a year for playing break even poker. Not too shabby, If it was lying in the street, youd bend down and pick it up! On top of that, most full time players do eek out at least a small profit

Same when i started, if lost my 20k, theres no way i would be repeating the exercise. Im too much of a bankroll nit to risk losing that amount again.  In retrospect, i realise i was very lucky to hit the ground running, with the negative spells of luck occurring later on, at a time when ive won plenty and im mentally, emotionally and financially ready to tackle a downswing

The first thing i did was join the 2p2 forum, which has been an invaluable source of learning. Thats where the true poker heavyweights are at, so its a bit of an e-dick waving forum at times, well mostly, but its not an understatement to say it was the most critical part of my progress. Its where you can post a hand and people better than you get to call you an idiot for playing like a retard, and then they tell you how to play it in the most plus EV way. And its free. great.

This particular thread is the most visited webpage on my PC for over the last 2/3 years-

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/56/medium-stakes-pl-nl/

And these are the significant threads of my time on 2p2 -
This thread is when i took a shot at 10/20 and posted the hand, and got put in my place by the high stakes boys - I can still remember the hand and where i played it incorrectly. Each post i made in the strat sections brought me on a little bit more as a player
http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/19/high-stakes-pl-nl/msnl-player-taking-another-shot-308240/

This was when i was worried about that game, and my most popular thread, it obviously triggered a nerve with my peers
http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/56/medium-stakes-pl-nl/msnl-doomswitch-18-months-counting-285694/

this was how i ran in year 1
http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/54/poker-beats-brags-variance/6-max-msnl-ok-so-im-bad-reg-but-still-nailing-209146/

this is how much regs earn -
http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/56/medium-stakes-pl-nl/mid-stakes-living-431696/

this was my lesson in not playing drunk
http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/54/poker-beats-brags-variance/beat-7-pints-stella-later-287736/

this got shit tons of replys
http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/29/news-views-gossip/there-any-uk-cash-players-out-there-185880/

this was earlier this year when i collected 1 million databased hands
http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/54/poker-beats-brags-variance/1-year-1-million-hands-519211/

a good stats thread that helped me immensely
http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/56/medium-stakes-pl-nl/6-max-winrate-lossrate-position-467019/

after i won a few quid in a live game -
http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/54/poker-beats-brags-variance/how-i-roll-bitchez-337495/

 my take on the top grinder
http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/56/medium-stakes-pl-nl/most-successful-msnl-player-322986/

on how lazy grinders are
http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/56/medium-stakes-pl-nl/grinding-your-little-bollocks-off-310917/

A hand
http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/56/medium-stakes-pl-nl/do-you-think-im-sexy-320617/

on different playing styles
http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/56/medium-stakes-pl-nl/can-you-winning-player-playing-25-8-a-320353/

on variance
http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/56/medium-stakes-pl-nl/your-biggest-downswing-msnl-453130/

So i put in some time and effort in the strategy sections on forums, i watched some videos and i grinded 3 or tables on my laptop. I ended up 6 tabling quite soon and started to make some serious candy. |At the beginning of this year i invested £3500 in a proper set up, and converted the spare bedroom into my office ,complete with 2x30 inch monitors, nice desk and chair. All of a sudden i had the technical gear to play 24 tables with no overlap, and i pushed myself to play as many as i could, which was a mistake in hindsight and this has hit my winrate earlier this year. The decisions were coming too fast, i was timing out with premium hands etc. Now i play 10 or 11 as a maximum

I gradually lost interest in mtts and sngs

I started off playing taggy at around 19/15 and these days i play a bit looser, circa 24/19 ish. And thats about it, i dont know anything strategy wise that hasnt already been said. I never sit down working out complicated math, dont discuss hands with anyone, i just play off instincts. But i would say that bankroll mgt and emotional control are the 2 most underated skills, and i still havent got to grips with the latter

My winrate is slowing down, this year ive had 3 break even months where as 08 i had only had 1 losing month. How long will it last? who knows, i do feel like im a better player this year but i still have some balancing and tilt issues that i need to work on.

I now have 290k strewn across 8 different sites, but i dont really play higher than 5/10, so i feel like im established now, and not going anywhere soon. But i do need to improve and step up my game next year as its getting harder and harder to make a living.

This is my life graph. It only dates back from june 08 though as i lost my database prior to that



In 5 years time, in an ideal world, i hope to have made enough money to quit playing but this is a fast changing industry and who knows what the future holds.

happy new year all

In the "normal" world, and i use the term normal because the poker world is crazy as toast, my profession was as a licencee, which i did for 15 years before buying my own gaff,  a local nightclub in March 2004.

But it turned out to be a huge mistake in retrospect. In 2005 the introduction of late licencing crippled my business, then a year later the nationwide smoking ban was a final sledge hammer to my nuts. My livelyhood was unavoidably collapsing after i had pumped my life savings into it.  Im not going lay total blame on these legal changes though as thats a cop out, and the reality was i probably wasnt up to the job. I thought i could make it successful and i didnt. And i still dont know why. And the failure still rankles me

Debts started to spiral out of control, and i was at the point where i was frightened to answer my phone or open mail. And im not exaggerating. There was mail piling up at the door, and unopened answerphone messages dating back 3 or 4 weeks. It was all bad news, there was no way out, and i couldnt face it. Folk ringing up demanding money, or red letters and court dates piling up  at the door. I was depressed, it wasnt supposed to happen this way.

This was the club...... with about as many people in it!

Id served my time for years learning my profession, worked under the best in the business (thats you Jackie "Mad Dog" ) , won company awards n' stuff, and now i was phoning bankruptcy agencies to see if i could save my house from the creditors. I was going into work and drinking too much as it was so damn depressing being in the building to start with. I hated being there.

Anyway, i digress. The point of mentioning all this of this misery is that i got out just in the nick of time, just as everything was coming to a head, just as my finances where going tits up out of control, i somehow managed to sell the business and the weight of the world was lifted off my shoulders over night. The sale went through at around the same time as my huge 144k poker scores.

I realise im drifting around a bit here with the story, but i dont think i can mention winning 144k in 3 big fat chunks, within 5 days, without giving it a little more respect than one nonchalent, passing sentence.

So heres my take on tourneys. They are time consuming, all of your time if your not disciplined. They can take over your life. At one point i was playing 14 hours a day starting with the pokerstars 10 buck donkashoot rebuy at 1pm, and finishing at 4 am if i ran deep in the 9pm rebuy. You are shallow stacked which means the skill edge is reduced as most the action is pre flop compared to cash poker, and you get soul crushing outdraws. Over and over.

But..........Theres no better feeling for a poker player, in any poker game, in any format, than running deep in a big money tourney. To most of us it happens so so so infrequently, this only highlights the tension and drama. It feels fantastic. The ride is amazing, breathtaking, you spend moments at the edge of your seat screaming, doing X factor style air grabs when your all in and hit an unexpected but helpful card. The buzz is incredible .You get your missus out of bed at 4am and shes doesnt mind! Its a special moment, youve won a shit ton of money, and theres a shit ton more money up for grabs in the next 60 minutes. And she knows it. Your poker bankroll, that youve been trying for years to build,  is imminently about to multiply by 10x 20x 100x!!!! Nothing in poker compares to having 2 million chips infront and playing heads up for the title. Nothing.

And lthough ive only played 1 mtt in 8 months, i would never say id given them up totally as my fond memories of those special moments are just too powerful to say never

Ok, now i got that out of my system, back in reality, its january 2007, i have a whopping $175k poker roll,  but im unemployed.

I worked out that i could grind like a bastard, 4 tabling 100 dollar sng 8 hours a day for 10 pounds an hour and pull £400 for a weeks work. A real shitty, shortsighted job, no prospects, and very unappealing, but i thought that would keep money coming in while looking for a proper career. Problem was, i was pig sick of the licenced trade and i never wanted to pull another pint every again either.

And I didnt want to play tourneys for a living as despite the excitement which only happens once in a blue moon, its a terrible, time consuming lifestyle where your annual income depends on winning a couple of coin flips deep in a big tourney. Plus i felt like id used up my luck in those games. No stability, and working the nightshift. No thanks. Not for me. Time to take the money and run as far as mtts where concerned

So i was at a crossroads in both real life and poker, my past efforts and experiences in both fields had no place in my future.

And all of the above waffle takes means the story hasnt progressed any since the end of my last post. Apologies for that

I decided to take 20k out of my roll and give cash poker a bash. I my bankroll was cash rich, and now was the time to do it.  I decided if i was going to do this properly, and 20k is a proper commitment, i had to immerse myself in it. So i banned myself from playing any sngs or tourneys for 3 months or until the 20k was busted

I played my first cash hand in summer of 2007, and jumped straight in "mass tabling" one 6 max table at 2/4 on pokerstars. No preparation, no poker tracker, no strategy, a proper virgin.............. and i loved it from day 1. 

The decision to divert from sng/tourney poker to cash is easily the most important poker decision ive ever made, but its also been the best career decision.

So its winter 2001 and im on a dialup PC.

The tower was soo big it wouldnt fit under my desk, the monitor was about 60 inches deep, and there was about 600 cables meshed up and running everywhere. Im on pokerstars and looking for stud games as im excited about applying doyles strategies. Unfortunately it was hard to find any stud games going, which it still is, so like most folk i found my route into online poker through sngs and tourneys.

I can remember being amazed at how many people where playing, circa 1500 in low time and up to 3500 in peak hours, paultry compared to todays mighty figures. There is 250 000 playing on stars as i type this, only 8 years later. I think the incredible difference between those 2 statistics best quantifies the magnitude of the boom of poker.

Some observers attribute said boom to Chris Moneymaker and his victory in wsop, but for me, it was the first series of channel 4s late night poker that really helped catapult the industry in the uk. I was in awe of the devilfish, the boatmans' and so on. The media hyped them up to be superstar soul readers that could name name actual holding by simply staring at you." I dont need the cards , i just play the person". What did these guys know that the rest of us didnt? The answer, which only came to light a few years later, was nothing. Jack shit. It was all TV bluster. Smoke, mirrors and ego. But no one knew this at the time, and it made for pioneering and riveting television that propelled poker to the masses.

The Devilfish's of this world turned out to be TV personalities, not really poker players, good back in their day, a day when no one had a bloody clue,  but unable to move with the times, and the internet exposed them as mainly a bunch of donks, via forums and tracking software that accurately detailed winning and losing players. Literally no place for the proganda machine to hide. This information is privy only to industry insiders though, and in the eyes of the general public these guys are still the bomb

Back in the real/cyber world i started out with a 50 bucks deposit and was grinding 1 dollar sngs on stars. I decided it was best to pretend to be a girl, and i wanted to start my new poker journey with a deceptive move right off the bat. No one gave women credit on late night poker.  I chose the screen name of ladyluck22 and picked an avatar of a 22 year old brunette who was attractive but not amazing to the point where people didnt believe.

It seemed like a good idea at the time, but pretty pointless looking back and if i had my time again i think an avatar of my dog and the name "norma" would have served the donkish image i was trying to create much better. I spent the next 3 years pointlessly flirting with other online regs and was constantly constantly getting chatted up

The games where soft back then, there where no training sites, little literature, so everyone was winging it basically and making it up as they went along. I dont want this to turn into a brag post, but for whatever reason i had some success from day 1, and to be honest i have no idea why. I painstakingly moved up stakes over the course of 2 years or so, and settled at $100x9 man non turbo sngs, which i played in my spare time for another couple of years. i didnt like turbo sngs as they forced me to push/fold too soon as i felt my edge was greater the longer the game went on. I really enjoyed playing them, and used the winnings to build my online roll and play micro tourneys.

I never really cashed out, and this is how i built up my online roll, but i also never deposited ever again, which is something im really proud of.  By 2005 i had 30k in my pokerstars roll from mainly sngs




So i used this dosh to fund shots at tourneys.  I was never a top tier player, a bit of a spewtard crotch monkey, but a profitable player nonetheless. The online mtt stars of the day included purr of aces, hamman, thebeat, lord hutty, and teecoy. All revered players back in the day. I was a grinder back then and nothing much has changed. My main strength has always been bankroll mgt, and thats whats kept me in the game while other, probably more talented players have not. I resisted the urge to cashout knowing that variance would catch up with me at some point, as is the nature of the beast, and i needed to be ready for that black day. Being overolled gave me the confidence to play without any fear of going busto, and i believe that enables you to play better.

Playing poker overolled has been one of the most important poker strategy decisions ive ever made. It supplies me with a tilt evading inner calm that only having 300 buyins behind you can achieve

i joined johnny baxs' poker xfactor training site in 2005 and learnt how to play tourneys better, got fed up of my transexual poker identity, so changed my stars screen name to clarkatroid and gradually increased stakes in both mtts and sngs. I had evolved my sng game and and bankroll to the point where i could now buy in to the sunday million every week without having to satellite in every week, which was a big break through. However i only bought into the comp if my bankroll went up $200 on the previous week. My only poker aim at the time was to mince around in sngs midweek,win my entry money to the sunday big one, and freeroll it . I nevered managed to win it but  hit 5th once for a tidy 32k



So, basically its all very dull, boring and steady eddie, and to summize, i didnt learn much prior to 07, i got by by just playing off my instincts. I grinded away for a few years building up an online roll in my spare with no real game plan or idea of what i was going to do with it.

But the defining moment in my poker career came when the luckbox donkament gods handed out what turned out to be a career changing sum of 144k in sept 2006 . (66k in sunday warm up, 50k in ipoker 200k guaranteed and 28k in 100 rebuy, all within 3 days of each other)

This was the moment that everything changed everything for me, it was the beginning of the end for playing sngs and mtts, and the start of a new learning curve.

With hindsight, prior to sept 2006 you could have written what i knew about the game on the back of a stamp. I had spent years monkeying around autopiloting. Playing shove/fold poker whilst always having one eye on the telly

I made a decision to trial 20k of my winnings in an experiment playing cash poker, something that had previously frightened the life out of me. I had to do it now, fresh from my massive wins and if i lost the 20k i could handle it.

The main reasoning at the time was to develop my post flop game, which was very poor. I basically had never really played any flops, turns or rivers with any thought, such is the push/fold animal that is sngs/mtts.

The plan was to quit mtts sngs totally for 3 months, play exclusively cash, then re-enter my old world a master of post flop play and a better all round player.

But that never happened and i never came back at all....................

This is the story of my journey from playing 50 cent stud in a las vegas casino to my current $300k online bankroll., But firstly id like to preface story this by restating my place in the poker hierarchy.

Im not a top tier player, ill never play nosebleed stakes, i doubt very much ill ever be a famous player, but i think im a reasonably well known face on the uk circuit. Im pretty sure ive plateaud' and reached my level as a player at midstakes cash,  i dont think ill ever be good enough to play higher than i do now as the games are getting tougher and my learning curve is slowing down. Ive effectively been promoted to my own incompetance, which i think happens to a lot of people at some point in their career. ie if your keep getting promoted, at some point you will end up in a job thats just too tough for you to execute competantly. George W Bush being a good example imo. That said, playing poker is very well renumerated career if you reach a reasonable standard and ive earnt over 250k a year for the last 2 years since going full time. So I consider myself a decent but not exceptional player that plays 90k hands a month. What i lack in skill i make up for by volume. So this is the story of an average (but hard working) professional poker player. A true grinders tale.

I suppose my motivation for writing this is to strip down the nuts and bolts of my journey, to lay it out so that anyone reading this can see that it isnt that hard to emulate what ive done. Im no mathematical genius, i dont have any poker secrets, im an average bloke with average intelligence that got into online poker at its infancy and hung around long enough to find ways to beat it.

I played my very first game of poker in 1999 at the age of 29, as a direct result of being sacked from my job, which i had held for 10 years since leaving school. I was totally fed up and disillusioned, had 30k in the bank, no girlfriend and no ties.

It was time to travel and see the world.

So i bought a 40k miles open ended air ticket, convinced my mate Eddie to tag along and off we went on an adventure. The plan was to have no plan, simply pick a new destination everytime we stood in the airport terminal. We had no agenda, no time constraints. When the money ran out we would come home. Id like to say we experienced the diversity of different cultures as we travelled through many different countries, but you dont end up being a poker player unless you have at least a little degenerate hard wired, and the reality was we just drank in bars, messed about with as many girls as we could, and gambled in casinos from New zealand to Nevada for 6 months solid. We had a great time

So theres no surprises that i played my first hand of poker in Las Vegas. Me and ed were staying in a 5 buck hostel at the top end of the strip,opposite the Elvis chapel. We were sharing a dorm with a couple of illegal immigrants and a 19 year old fella who had had come to vegas for the summer to fleece the casinos and make his fortune, armed with a book " how to beat the casinos at blackjack" and a raft of fake ID cards. If it  went well, he was moving permanently to Las Vegas. But vegas can chew you up and spit you out if you aint got your wits about you, and in the small hours of the next day as we straggled home, our new gambilng bum chum was slumped outside the hostel porch pissed out of his brains, brown bottle between his legs, living in a town called busto. He went home the next morning, dreams in tatters and nada in his pockets

Back to the first day, and within 2 hours of checking into the hostel, we were drinking kamikaze cocktails and playing 50 cent craps in the sahara. 6  hours after that we were 6 sheets to the wind, stood on the chairs in the sahara card room singing tom jones records. This is where i played my first ever game of poker, with the locals hustlers, playing 7 card stud with 1 dollar big blinds, in a learn while you lose type of format. The same faces turned up playing every day, waiting to bust the tourists, these same faces had been turning up daily for 25 years. These folk where the original old school grinders, practically living the sahara card room, completely unremarkable to look at, cowboys, old ladies, little old chinese men. But they were the card sharks of the day , eeking out 50 bucks here and there from the donks, and reading books inbetween. After spending a month playing and drinking with this motley crew all day, everyday, (and losing obviously), it was pretty obvious that this game had a lot of skill in it. They were amazed at our very british skill, which was being able to drink for 10 hours and still be relatively coherant and jovial. I would like to think they are still there, i cant imagine 1 dollar limit stud being much harder than it was ten years ago

And thats how it all started for me. I caught the bug

Most people go on their jollys with good novel, me, I paid $49.99 for doyles supersystem from the gamblers superstore on Las Vegas strip, and spent the rest of our vacation reading poker strategies. When i arrived back in blackpool i thought that was that as far as poker was concerned, with no viable outlet to play,so nothing happened for a year or so, but the dawn of internet poker changed all that and in december 2001 i was playing poker at the launch of a new website, pokerstars.....