A Look Back: Year In Review 2009

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Going into 2009 I was on cloud 9.  I was coming off an amazing year where I led the world in single table SNG profit, & had led the world in 6 man SNG profit in each of my 2 years as a pro, doubling the profit of the 2nd place guy the year before.  2009 was going to be such a great year!  I was going to lead the world in SNG profit again & make $600K+.  After all, I led SNG profit by so much in 2008, how hard could it be to repeat?  Man was I in for a rude awakening.

I started out the year where I left off in 2008 with a $23K upswing.  The good parts of my poker year stopped there.  From there, I went down, down, down, into a burning ring of fire.

I always considered my mental game to be pretty strong.  I never went on raging tilt.  I always heard stories of pros breaking multiple laptops.  To do this day I have never broken anything because of poker.  However, I didn't know nearly as much about the mental game in 2009 as I do now, and I think going from such a high point that 2008 brought, to a complete crash in 2009 would challenge anybody's mental game.  Needless to say, 2009 was quite challenging mentally.  While I knew a large part of my losses were due to running really bad at high stakes, we didn't have the adjusted EV luck calculators out there to confirm like there are now.  I started trying to fix things that weren't broken.  I basically tried way too hard to improve.  While I was still making really good money off of rakeback, it wasn't enough to satisfy the competitor in me.

The haters also really came out of the woodworks.  All I heard was that everybody had caught up to me and I was just a luckbox before.  In my frustrated and less experienced state I responded almost every time.  Today, I delete most of the hater comments on my blog.  However, I still sometimes respond when they post comments on other sites where I can't delete their comment, even though it's probably better to just not respond.  One good thing that came from the hater comments is that they fueled me to improve more and come back strong.  I've always been motivated to prove people wrong.

In 2009, table selection was getting more advanced, as people were doing more calculations & analysis on the topic.  I wrote this post on the topic, which is probably my most popular blog post of all time: http://jhub3000.livejournal.com/84368.html.  Later in the year I wrote a more advanced version: http://jhub3000.livejournal.com/87736.html.  However, I didn't really table select on Cake or Absolute, because my rakeback was so high.

During much of 2009 I played up to 16 tables to take full advantage of the ridiculous rakeback I was getting.  Considering the structures I was playing and the fact that I was usually managing 3 sites at once, I certainly don't think that playing this many tables was optimal.

As far as vacations we went on a week long camping trip with Paula's family and overall had a great summer, as usual in Minnesota.

I played my last game on Pokerstars in July. I felt that Pokerstars SNGs basically became a reg fest with a bunch of regulars obsessing over supernova elite.  I decided I'd rather table select between Cake & Absolute, where I was hardly paying any rake after rakeback.

In August Paula and I got married.  It was nice to have a bright spot in the year.  Our wedding went great.  We went to Aruba for our honeymoon.  We had a good mix of tours where we weren't sure if we'd make it out alive, going to shows, having drinks, and relaxing on the beech.  We also bought a time share that we haven't even used yet.  That was a good purchase.

Not too long after we got married we got a white lab and named him Gunnar:

In the fall a bunch of us flew to Ohio on a Friday night.  We partied Friday night, tailgated Saturday morning, went to the Minnesota vs Ohio State college football game, drove a rented child molestor looking van to Pittsburgh, partied again, & then tailgated, went to the Vikings vs Steelers game, partied again, and flew out the next morning.  Overall it was a great short trip and nice to get away.  We wanted to make this a yearly trip but it hasn't worked out since.

Toward the end of 2009 I started talking to the guy who ran the red pro program on Full Tilt.  While I didn't get a red pro deal, I finally got a form of rakeback on the site, in the terms of bonuses, which were actually worth more than the standard rakeback.  I previously didn't have rakeback on FTP because I signed up for the site when I was a major n00b and had never even heard of rakeback, and there was a strict policy on not adding rakeback to old accounts.  I started to mix FTP, AP, & Cake together, table selecting between the 3 sites.

Toward the end of the year I also started reducing the # of tables I was playing, even experimenting with playing as little as 8 tables at a time.

Overall, I think this year was a good experience for me.  I think going through a tough year like this makes you stronger in the end.  While that might sound silly considering I still made $233K+ after factoring in rakeback and staking, I think competitive poker players would understand, especially if you're coming off a huge year.  No matter how much money you make off of rakeback, losing money at the tables is not fun.  This year sure prepared me for handling downswings.

In later years I plugged some hand histories into HEM to calculate my adjusted EV, and it turns out I ran $60K+ below EV.  That means I would have made $40K+ pre rakeback if I was running at neutral EV.  While that confirms my assumption that I was running way below EV, $40K was also nowhere near the pre rakeback profit I made in my 1st 2 years.  This shows that I clearly wasn't playing my A game very often, and is probably evidence to the fact that I was trying to fix a lot of things that weren't broken.

Today almost all of the top all time single table total profit leaders have had a losing a losing year pre rakeback.  It sounds pretty crazy, but they're low edge games with a lot of variance.  Playing a lot of tables, as most of the top profit earners do, further decreases that edge per game, and playing a wide range of buy-ins further increases the variance.

In 2009 Pokerstars introduced hyper turbo SNGs where everyone started with 10BBs and a different payout structure.  Meanwhile, jorj95 studied his ass off (I'm assuming), blocked his stats, and laughed at the world:

Clearly these new hyper turbo SNGs would change the landscape of SNGs.  However, not everybody had realized this at the time.  Apparently jorj did.  When he unblocked his stats during the following year I was simply amazed.  To have a year like that playing single table SNGs is simply unbelievable.  Congrats again to jorj.  I'm impressed.

Please click image to enlarge.

2009 5-10 Seated Total Sharkcope Profit combining multiple screen names:

1. jorj95: $466,347

Pokerstars

2. chapmoney: $198,411

Global Alias

3. Gramps: $139,596

Global Alias

4. azntracker: $96,834

Pokerstars

5. Kenny05: $95,326

Global Alias

Year 2009:

Hours: 1,577.65 

SNG Profit: $(22,746.37)

Rakeback/Bonuses: $213,977.09 

Total SNG Profit: $191,230.72 

Staking: $42,219.80 

Total Yearly Profit: $233,450.52