I thought it would take me a year, but it only took three months. I’m staring at my Cashier box on Full Tilt Poker and I can hardly believe that I turned $100 into $1000 (actually $1147) in just three months.
I’ve learned a lot over the past few months. In fact, I’d say I learned more in the past 3 months than I’ve learned in the past 7 years of playing poker recreationally. I’ve learned how to perform a deep analysis of my game to find and plug leaks and I’ve learned how to use combinatorial analysis in conjunction with betting patterns to read hands more accurately.
I’ve also learned that my bankroll management plan was pretty damn reckless.
After calculating my Risk of Ruin (the probability that I’d go broke), I came up with 16.7%. That’s a bit risky even for my crazy ass. In fact, a bad run took me just a couple of chips away from the felt. Fortunately I was able to pull out of the nosedive, but next time I might not be so lucky.
Moving forward, I plan on creating a more realistic bankroll system before moving from the $30 SNGs to the $50 SNGs. My current bankroll strategy would let me play at the $50 level now, but I know I’m not ready for it.
I still want to build my bankroll aggressively, but I want to reduce my Risk of Ruin to 5%. It’s going to be hard to set an exact number since I only put around 900 SNGs under my belt in the past few months so my ROI won’t be accurate for quite a while. Until then, I probably hang out at the $30 SNGs for a while and take an occasional shot at the $50s.
The second half of 2009 should be interesting for me.
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