Resolutions - Part 2

You may recall that on Monday, we were looking at a list of New Year’s resolutions. We had gone through three of the top five most common and made them appropriate to a poker player. In today’s post, I will deal with the final two resolutions and also offer some general advice about how to stay focussed on your poker goals. I will also end the post with details about how, in the months to come, you can become involved in the blog.

The fourth item on the list of most popular resolution is – Save More Money.

In poker terms, this is quite similar to the third resolution – Cut Down on Spending. For that, we looked at how a tournament player might want to improve his or her ROI. For ‘Save More Money’, we will switch to no limit cash game players and how they could improve their profits by concentrating on BB/100 hands.

Rather confusingly, the standard way of measuring BB/100 is a PTBB, the acronym formed from Poker Tracker, one of many pieces of software that can analyse your play. (To have any chance of forming an accurate appraisal of your BB/100, you will probably have to invest in some tracking software. The biggest two are Poker Tracker and Poker Office.) A PTBB is double the big blind so, if you are playing .50-1NL and you are making €2 per 100 hands, your PTBB is 1.

Obviously, a PTBB greater than zero gives a winning rate; but if it is between 1-2, it is painfully slow and you must be wasting money. (In a particularly grim period for me, my PTBB slipped to 1.8, partly because I was playing scared and had become passive.) If you are consistently winning and it doesn’t feel like a grind, you are probably averaging 5 PTBBs. According to the forums, a PTBB of 7 is considered good and 10 is excellent. Higher PTBBs are possible but be aware that it becomes a lot harder to boost your number after you have surpassed 10.

However, let’s say you have a PTBB of 5 and you have assessed about 35,000 hands. I would say that a reasonable goal for the first quarter of ’09 is to reach a PTBB of 6. The software should enable you to do that. It will highlight leaks in your game (one of mine was playing the blinds – I was either folding too often or becoming far too aggressive) and, in the same way that focussing on ROI can help tournament players, it will help remove emotional assessments of your play.

Let’s clarify how much difference it can make: if you were playing .50-1 for 10 hours a week (at average of 300 hands per hour), a PTBB of 5 would yield €300 a week; a PTBB of 6 gives €360. That is a 20% increase and it can usually be achieved by plugging one or two leaks – or, if you prefer, ‘By Saving Money’.

Although, I am playing tournaments a lot more, I will endeavour to increase my PTBB from 7.4 to 8.0 by the end of Jan.

The final goal in our list is to ‘Learn a New Skill.’ This is one I fully support and I intend to play thirty hours of Pot Limit Omaha by the end of January. Hopefully, I may even turn a profit. However, I accept that, at this stage, the experience is more important because I suspect it will improve my Hold ‘em game. Playing one game can quickly become stale and I have often found that a spell at another discipline reinvigorates my love of Hold ‘em.

We should all try new poker variants, particularly as the level of knowledge about their strategies is so low. I have been told, by semi-reliable sources, that the number of players who know what they are doing at PLO is minimal and there can be easy pickings. If that is the case, I hope PLO can become a secondary source of minerals when the Hold ‘em tables are full of rocks.

So that is the list of New Year’s Resolutions creatively re-interpreted in a way to make it relevant to a poker player. I have outlined the ways in which I will try to improve my poker game in 09 and I hope you will do the same. However, goal formation is only the initial stage. We also need reviews and assessment. To make sure I keep on track, I will post a progress report on the first Monday of every month and I will want your thoughts.

Any players that are currently inspired to improve their game will be able to post examples of their progress on our ‘Resolutions Update’ page. Those who do not set goals are also welcome as they may able to learn from (and laugh at) my endeavours.

Happy New Year!