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I just finished my last session of 2011. What a year it's been for me - I
won my first major live tournament, got my first six-figure score, won a
world championship title, got made a CardRunners coach and a blogger
for CardPlayer, won my first Sunday major online, made it number one of
my country at the P5s tournament rankings for the first time, managed to
keep my dreamy girlfriend for another year and met tons and tons of
awesome new people. It couldn't have been much better.
Here are my stats for the year for all of the 6117 tournaments I played online:
...and live:
According to my accounting I spent about $90k on live buy-ins this year,
so I ended up at approximately +$80k live and +$110k online for a total
of +$190k. That's just counting me as a player, excluding all
shares sold, swaps etc. And that brings us to the sad fact that I didn't
get particularly rich this year either. I had 50% or more sold for my
three biggest live scores and three biggest online scores this year. I
don't want to go into more detail since it isn't really anyone's
business, but the point is that despite making about $300k playing
tournament poker in two years I'm still not as wealthy as I'd like. I've
made serious money to some people but nicely managed to avoid pocketing
significant amounts myself. And then when I've tried to buy shares of
other people it's all gone to tits and after dropping $20k buying pieces
this summer I decided to quit it completely. Oh well, live and learn.
I'm quite a recognition whore and results have always meant much more to
me than money, and looking back at the year makes me immensely happy
and proud, but secretly I'm still a bit pissed about my finances. I'm
going to try to be smarter financially in 2012 and actually make myself
some money.
I wasn't that far away from potentially getting filthy rich. Had that QQ
held against JJ for over a final table average stack with 16 left at
the EPT Barcelona in a soft table, I could easily have gone all the way
to scoop the $1,2 million first price. That was a solid $200k beat
ICM-wise, and it took quite a while to recover from. It's sickening to
think how much your life can change from winning just one flip, in this
skill game we all play. I'm not complaining, after catching up with
variance in the last two months of the year I think I got quite close to
what I deserved results-wise in 2011. But still, it would've been nice
to win that one.
Regarding the PocketFives OPOY thing I've been going on about for some
time now, I came across a pretty big bad beat accidentally when I went
through the rankings. Their system is confusing as hell and it seems
they actually have two different rankings for each country. The first
one, and the one I've been counting on, is the sliding point ranking
which I definitely think is the one that *should* count. The way it
works is that it only counts each player's 100 (or was it 200?) best
scores within the year. So after you've got 100 scores tracked, the next
score isn't going to affect your ranking at all unless it's bigger than
the 100th, and when you get a new score the last one also gets reducted
than your points. This basically ensures that it only counts your best
performances and you can't just mincash every tournament to get heaps of
points and rape people who play lower volume. This is the ranking I
ended up winning for the year with quite a huge margin (of known players
Tomi "emeriaa" Brouk finished 2nd and Jami "ylad" Juutila 4th).
But then apparently there's also another ranking you can see at the
country rankings section, which simply counts every single score you
make and points wont get deducted. Because of the way the points are
being counted (no matter how huge you win you never get massive amounts
of points, and ten mincashes pay approximately the same amount of points
as one win in a 300 player field), pretty much the one who plays the
biggest volume is going to win that one, since you can just mincash
infinite times to win it. Unsurprisingly emeriaa has so many points in
this category that he probably beats my last two years combined.
It shows me as the #1 player for the year on front page and in the country rankings here: http://www.pocketfives.com/country-rankings/ so
that shall be good enough, but because of this extremely confusing
overall system I guess it doesn't count as an "official" accomplishment.
It's kind of stupid since that was pretty much the only reason why I
grinded like a madman for the last two months, but whatever, I'm pretty
happy with the money I made during that time anyway. Man, if there's
anything I'd like to change about myself as a poker player it'd be being
less interested in all kinds of glory-hunting and learning to love
money.
Anyway, enough about that ramble. As a player I definitely feel this was
another year of improvement. From one point of view this was a year of
massive spewing, since I wasted more tournament opportunities than I can
count with more or less spewy plays, including some pretty big live
tournaments. However, on the whole I think I made great progress as a
player specifically because of a slight style change. For most of 2010 I
still played relatively robotic most of the time. This year, and
especially after getting my self confidence back towards the end of it, I
changed my strategies quite a bit and started experiencing with new
tricks. I was never a nit, but I used to play too many tables for sure
and missed out on spots. Only until very recently I played close to 30
tables all the time, and usually decided to skip most of the
opportunities to do random weird but effective stuff, since I knew I
wouldn't have enough time to fully concentrate on later street decisions
because of the other 29 tables popping.
I still close to 30-table at peak hours, but I've learnt to schedule
better, and I've dropped most of the draining things that take a lot of
concentration like 6-max tournaments with a couple of expections. I've
also dropped almost all $22 freezeouts and $5 rebuys. Sure it adds
variance quite a bit as my average buy-in is now close to $100 when it
used to be $35 at the start of the year, but what the hell, I still
table select quite a bit (meaning choosing what tourneys to play) and
overall I feel I have a great enough edge in most of the stuff I play to
not worry too much.
This brings us to 2012. Setting goals has never worked for me very well,
as they always become a bit of a burden, so these are not that serious
this time. If I manage to reach these, great, but if I miss out on a
couple I'm not going to be crushed. But anyway, semi-serious 2012 goals:
-5k+ MTTs
-200k profits
-bink another sunday major
-100+ heavy exercise sessions of at least 30 minutes over the year (I'm going to start keeping an exercise diary)
-cut my alcohol usage in half from 2011
-8 hendon mob flags
-finally cash at the WSOP
-somehow manage to hold on to the girlfriend for another year
-make it to the top 100 of the worldwide PocketFives rankings and maintain that position throughout the year
-finally get some kind of success in the big online tournament serieses (wcoop/ecoop/scoop/ftops/gsop/whatever...)
2012 is going to start with a bang since all the big monthly tourneys
are on January 1st with half the field hungover. Can't wait (to possibly
drop $10k on the first day of the year)!
Best of luck in 2012 to all of my readers.
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