The weather has been quite dark down here in Sydney, I attended a suit fitting for my friend's up coming wedding and was fitted as expected with a classic black suit. I have been sick for most of the week and in bed over the weekend - but on the poker front the good news is that after this week's sessions I am finally back in the black three weeks into my bankroll challenge.
Despite having an absolutely horrible run in the first two weeks I managed to make back the 80 odd minus buy-ins and then some by finally having some cards holding up even though not everything went my way. I have always found my discipline to be my biggest asset - patience and just knowing that I have a good solid MTT strategy is worth its weight in gold at the lower buy-in levels where there are a myriad of casual and weak players.
Due to personal commitments and getting ill later during the week I managed to only get three sessions in this week and half my expected volume as follows:
Session 1: 12 played, Placed: 3 (3rd, 9th, 11th), Prizes: $61
Session 2: 11 played , Placed: 2 (1st, 4th), Prizes: $156
Session 3: 9 played , Placed: 3 (5th, 16th, 18th), Prizes: $37
I managed to finally break the duck and get a 1st place in a tournament under my belt. I also had five final table finishes that basically made for an excellent week of poker and giving me a lot of personal satisfaction in the knowledge that this week wasn't really a fluke.
Just to put the first three weeks into perspective here is a graph I put together of the trend of profit and loss:
This equated to having to withstand an initial 80+ buy-in loss (around $208 down) from the initial $534 bankroll and make it back to around a $10 profit overall. Let it never be said that I run like Super User or that I am a luckbox - its never going to happen that way for me unfortunately...but the good news is that this is the way I have been successful in the past and its all going to plan even if it doesn't look like it right now.
Staying away from cash games and the roulette tables when down buy-ins is a critical skill - its too tempting and easy to say "luck isn't going my way so let's put the last $300 on red or black and if it's meant to be I'll be back where I started and we'll play poker again next week". If you ever feel this way just disconnect your internet and go and spend time with your loved ones instead - you'll feel much better for it from every aspect.
So obviously I still have all my work cut out for me - It doesn't seem that I've proven to much so far apart from being able to be slightly ahead after 163 tournaments over the past three weeks. But on the contrary a lot has been proven here - the initial estimate of 200 buy-ins for MTTs seems about right to me now. If I had started with 100 buy-ins which is what alot of people recommend I would have been down to my last $40 in this case and tilt would have been more than a factor I would most likely have gone broke.
So where to from here? Looking at PokerStars they have 180-player turbos at the $1, $2.50, $8, $15 and $35 stakes.
So I have established a 200 buy-in level as adequate for the turbos but what's interesting is the that the structure of the $1 turbos is a hyper-turbo format with the blinds going up every 2 mins as opposed to every 5 mins in the turbos. The variance in these tournaments would increase - does this mean that a $200 bankroll for the $1 buy-ins may not be enough? Well the standard of the opposition hopefully being much weaker would be a balancing factor - in future I might try a different bankroll challenge on these $1 tournaments and see what happens - I am sure it will be stomach curling!
Assuming for a moment I won't do anything as insane as go down to the $1 level then there is a big jump from the $2.50 level to the $8 level which would require a bankroll of $1600 by my rules. Looking at my results in August I have an ROI of 102% - even if I were to maintain this excellent result from here at say 180 tournaments a month I would make 180 x (1.02 x $2.50) = $459/month. It would take me another 2-3 months to make an overall bankroll of $1800 to start playing the $8 buy-ins. There are a lot of ifs here as well - have I turned any of you off from grinding the $2.50 180-player SnGs yet? LOL
PokerStars have a $4.50 buy-in level that would seem to be the next port of call if I can grind up to $900, However! This $4.50 buy-in is at regular speed with the blinds going up every 15 mins - these can take 2-3 time as long as the turbos to finish! They also don't fill up as fast making it difficult for me to grind enough in a 3-4 hour session. It just doesn't make sense that PokerStars have this buy-in level at regular speed - it is the only 180-player SnG in this format at these low levels and doesn't make any sense - if anyone from PokerStars is reading this do me a favour and please make the $4.50 a turbo structure so that I can grind up to the $8 level much easier!
I will either need to prove my worth grinding all the way from a $500-$1600 via the $2.50 or look at playing the $3.50 45-player turbos but I have not worked out the details on strategy, bankroll requirements or likely ROI for the 45-player format. I may just start to do some research on this in the coming weeks.
Another option would be to try and fit in a longer playing session on the odd weekend in order to have more time to play some of the larger tournament fields in the hope of a relatively big score and quick boost to the bankroll - but as it stands time doesn't currently permit.
If nothing else - hopefully I can at least provide you all with some entertainment at the attention to detail (and confusion) that goes on in my head when planning my poker bankroll building expeditions. For some people who are starting out - there might even be a useful piece of advice or two.
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