At the start of 2008 I was coming off of a very succesful first year as a full time poker pro. Pokerstars had now added a new VIP program that gave me much better benefits, and there were much higher stakes 6 man SNGs available to me than at the beginning of the previous year. My goal was to close out the year as #1 in total profit on the sharkscope.com any game single table leaderboard & I believe I was shooting for about $400K in total profit. I also planned on getting supernova elite again & getting a lot of VPPs on the year. I believe I started the year 10-12 tabling playing exlusively on Pokerstars.
My routine throuhout most of 2007 & 2008 was that I would play late, go to bed around 4am, and set my alarm for 10pm. This definitely wasn't enough sleep but I was so obsessed with getting more volume in while still living a pretty good social life. I was playing pretty good hours in terms of profitability, but I never really played many weekends because that's when a lot more stuff is going on outside of poker. I wouldn't consider 6 hours of sleep a good idea for the HU games I play now, or overall health for that matter, but 6 mans can be so easy to play once you've played a lot that I don't think it effected me as much.
The year started out going very well. I started out doing well on Pokerstars. After talking to jalman69 a lot of AIM, I was convinced to try out this newer site called Cake Poker. Jalman kept telling me how ridiculously soft the games were. I figured I could still mix in another site and get supernova elite again on Pokerstars. Twelve days into the year I began playing on Cake. Jalman was absolutely correct. The games were soft as a pillow. The downfalls were that the software was awful & the highest stakes games were only $120. However, even $52s were still very profitable because I could sustain such a high ROI. I decided I wanted to keep this site soft and to myself as much as possible. Cake allowed you to change your name once a week so I did this every chance I could, using a lot of fishy sounding names like JerryYangFan & JohnsDad. Anytime one of my screen names was doing well enough to make it onto a leaderboard (yes this happened only playing a week on each name) I would block my stats on sharkscope.
In March (I think) I took my girlfriend (now wife) on a trip to Puerto Vallarta. We had a blast. It's always nice to get away from the grind with a vacation. We spent a of time participating in tours, going to shows, relaxing on the beach, and of course drinking every day. My only complaint was that the ocean was pretty cold there.
By the beginning of April I was #2 on the sharkscope 5-6 seated total profit leaderboard under my Pokerstars name, & would have been #1 under all of Cake screen names combined. Jalman ran into the VP of Cake in Ireland & they talked about me. He got the email of the VP & told him I was supposed to contact him. I decided this would be a good time to try to get some sort of special pro deal. I certainly didn't have the name to get a pro deal for Pokerstars yet. I wrote up a very long email promoting myself and explaining all of my profits on Cake. I told him that if I got a 100% rakeback deal, that I would come out with a blog explaining all of the profits I had made on Cake. I would also unblock all of my stats & converge them all into one username on sharkscope. I would play on Cake under the name jhub3000, which was the name I was best known by at the time, and I would not change it. I would plug Cake in any interview I did and wear Cake gear when I played live. The idea was that when people see somebody having a lot of success in one place, they want to go there and try it out for themselves. After all, if somebody was absolutely crushing some new site at the games you play with win rates higher than the norm, wouldn't you want to go try it out for yourself? Anyways, I sent the email & we exchanged several emails back and forth. The rest was just waiting for a decision on Cake's end.
About a week into April my wife and I headed to Monte Carlo for the EPT Monte Carlo Main Event. It was a free package I received for reaching supernova elite in 2007 on Pokerstars. The buy-in to the main event was around $16K USD, which was paid for by Pokerstars, along with the flight, hotel, and some food. I had high hopes for the trip but it was quite the disappointment. The prices were absolutely absurd. If you wanted a cheeseburger or a beer you literally had to pay $40. If you wanted water at a resteraunt you had to pay $15 for a bottle. I may have been making a lot of money, but there's a certain principle behind not paying outrageous prices for stuff. The normal cars in Monte Carlo were Bentley, Rolls Royce, Ferraris, & Larmborghinis. The taxis were BMWs and Mercedes Benz. The hotel was nice but everything was ridiculously overpriced. The free food buffets weren't really worth it either. We ended finding some somewhat reasonably priced places to eat, but didn't really drink much like we would on a normal vacation. The weather was also in the 50s, so we couldn't go and swim in the sea or anything. I did meet some other poker players and have some good times though. I made day 2 of the tournament but busted pretty early. During the trip I finalized a deal with Cake. At the time as an ignorant poker player I thought was getting an amazing deal, but knowing what I know about the affiliate business now, I probably would have made more money creating an affiliate account with Cake considering I had referred 523 players to the site before Black Friday.
When I made my deal with Cake I knew it would make the games tougher. However, the secret of Cake was already starting to get out on the poker forums and it was only a matter of time before a lot more regs starting flocking to the site for soft games. I was already starting to see more regs at the tables. My thought process behind the deal was that it would accelerate this process, losing me money in the short run, but making me more money in the long run because of all the rakeback I would be receiving and the fact that people were going to eventually flock to Cake anyway.
Once I got my deal with Cake I made a blog entry explaining everything, unblocked all of my sharkscope stats, & combined them into 1 username: jhub3000. I also started doing more interviews. I began working with the VP of Cake on getting some higher stakes 6 man SNGs added, & they ended up adding regular speed and turbo speed 6 man SNG buy-ins up to $1,800. The traffic increased a lot and so did my average stake. While the games were tougher, the higher average stake & more volume kind of made up for that.
Here are some of the interviews I did in 2008:
http://www.startribune.com/lifestyle/12986707.html
http://www.parttimepoker.com/ptp-qa-with-jared-hubbard
http://www.pokerplasm.com/2008/06/jared-hubbard/
http://roundersradio.libsyn.com/
http://pokerworks.com/poker-news/2008/05/06/the-round-table-meet-the-sit-n-go-master-jared-jhub3000-hubbard.html
http://www.pokerverdict.com/poker-players/usa/jhub3000-jared-hubbard/
http://www.pokerlizard.com/interviews/JaredHubbard.htm
Since most of my volume was now on the Cake network, I began to start accepting applicants for a coaching & staking combo deal. I started with 2 stakees on Pokerstars & then adding a stakee on FTP & some foreign sites until I had 7 stakees. I found SNGs to be pretty easy & I expected the coaching/staking process to be a lot easier than it was. I would coach them by making videos, mostly of me playing or reviewing their hand histories. I also shared all of the ICM push/fold charts I had made with them. I didn't hold anything back. I was always against making videos, but this teaching process would only teach 7 players instead of 1,000s, & should make me a lot more money than some of the joke training site offers that I had received. There were a few problems with how easy I thought this would be. First off, no matter how much you try to teach somebody, they have to have the work ethic to want to learn. Second off, no matter how much you teach somebody, they have to have the intelligence to be able to apply the concepts at the table themselves. 6 man SNGs can be a somewhat robotic game, but if you want to excel at higher stakes you still have to have the ability to adapt to different players & know when to adjust your strategy on your own. It doesn't matter how many videos you watch or charts you study. You still have to make the right decision in game by yourself. The third biggest issue was the mental game. Every player is different. While some can sit there and take beats all day & stay on their A game, others are just too mentally weak to do this. With work they can improve in this area, but we never really worked on any mental game coaching. In fact, I think I probably made it more difficult for each stakee to have a good mental game. Each stakee wanted to immediately start playing a lot higher stakes than they are used to. In order to maximize profit, I wanted this too. However, I think this was, and still is a big problem in the staking world. First off, if a player gradually moves up through each buy-in level, they get a lot better at playing against different player types and adjusting their game based on that. No matter what stakes you play you see just about every player type. It's just that certain player types are a lot more common at certain stakes. By skipping stakes the player doesn't get as much experience playing and adjusting to different player types. The second big problem about having a stakee make big stake jumps is that you are really setting them up for mental game failure. How is a player suppose to prepare mentally for an $80K downswing when they're used to having $5K downswings? I think it's pretty unreasonable to expect most people to be able to handle that big jump in downswings and continue to play their A game. Fixing this issue can be difficult considering the stakee wants to be staked so they can play higher stakes. However, I think you can still have them move up in stakes a lot quicker than they would normally be able to do with their own money, while moving up through each stake while improving more and preparing themselves better mentally. In the end I made some good money from staking, but just felt that it wasn't worth the headaches that came with it. I terminated most staking agreements the following year.
As more and more players started to see the success that 6 man players like Kenny05, sparta45, and myself were having, more and more regs started to come over to the 6 man SNGs on Pokerstars as well. However, this also increased the traffic of 6 man SNGs a lot, especially at the high stakes, so that kind of balanced it. Because of this, table selection became even more important. Most people didn't know too much about table selection in 2008, but the general rule between those who practiced is was that if there were 2 good players signed up in front of you, you would be better off finding a different game than registering behind. I practiced this on Pokerstars, but I didn't table select on Cake since I was getting so much rakeback that it kind of made up for it. I also sometimes arranged my scheduling around that of other regs. I think I was a little too "my way or the highway" on my views of table selection. It would piss me off so much when a top reg would signup behind 2 or 3 other good regs. I do still think most people would have made more money using some of the table selecting techniques I preached. I definitely think it worked best for me, and my results reflect that. However, I let my emotion blind me of some things. First off, not every reg, even the best regs, was playing simply to maximize profit. Some simply enjoyed the challenge of playing all of the other good regs. Even if somebody told me this I would sometimes just be a dick and tell them how stupid it was, just because it was different than my thoughts. Obviously, I shouldn't have done this. Secondly, some players could simply make more money not table selecting because they were allowed to focus on their games more. Let's be honest, everybody is different, and table selecting can take away a lot of focus from your games. For some, that lost focus probably outweighed the benefit of softer games. As my mental game has grown stronger and I've matured more I've realized how arrogrant some of the stuff I used to say sounded.
In June we went on a 1 week camping trip with Paula's family, which is a yearly thing. It was another nice vacation from poker. I love the summer weather in Minnesota too, and there's always a lot going on in the summer since the winters are so shitty. On Wednesdays, a bunch of us started going tubing down the river. We just tie the tubes together, put the cooler in the middle, drink and float. It's a great past time in Minnesota summers. Afterwards we would go to a really good pizza joint to eat and drink some more beer.
In July I headed to Vegas for the WSOP Main Event. It was part of my supernova elite package but I just took the cash so I didn't have to wear Pokerstars gear. I was staying in a house with Kenny05, Little Kraut (1 of my stakees), and chiefsfan17. However, by the time I got there Kenny went home sick. The house was really nice and it had a pool, which was nice for the Vegas summer heat. My only beef with the house was that it was in Henderson, so it was about a 20 minute drive/cab ride to the strip. The trip itself was a blast though. We did a lot of hanging out with clamface, DumpingKGM, Amak316, & Dcalzone as well. While we were there clamface & I each got deep in a Pokerstars MTT & decided to swap 50% of each other. Despite the fact that he played like a super nit and against what every other good poker mind around was telling him to do, clamface managed to luckbox himself into chopping the tourney for $30K. I think that's the only time I ever swapped with anyone in an event so I run good at chops. My girlfriend Paula came to visit for a weekend as well. We saw Blue Man Group and some other shows. I was pretty disappointed in the cirque du soleil shows though. I think you have to be on acid to enjoy the shows. I ended up at the feature table of the main event. I didn't know ahead of time and they didn't allow me to where a shirt that said cakepoker.com on it since it was being aired for TV. I called the VP of Cake so that I could get the proper TV gear. I ended up having to run all the way across the Rio to get the gear. I quickly just grabbed what they handed me and didn't try it on because the tournament had already started. As I ran back across the Rio I started to put my new gear on & it was pretty skin tight since it was in Euro sizes so I was excited to look like a douche on TV. I ended up being about 30 minutes late. I don't think I lasted more than 4 hours. I lost a good sized pot w/ a monster draw vs 2 pair and ended up getting it in vs Mike Matusow's TPTK with another big draw. Neither draw hit. They didn't show any of my hands on TV. I also got my Cake deal extended to a lifetime deal because I had done so well bringing in new players.
As the time went on my volume kept decreasing on Pokerstars. I had decided that it wasn't worth trying to maintain supernova elite anymore. I began to start playing some games on Absolute Poker. Despite the software being awful, I realized that the games were very soft and that they gave away bonuses like nothing and I could actually make just about as much rakeback there as I was on Cake. They also had a 6 man SNG structure called an ultra turbo, where players started with the usual 1500 chips but blinds went up every 2 minutes. Despite the lower edge, these games were great for overall profit. I suggested to the VP of Cake that we add this structure. Shortly after, Cake added the structure and called them super turbos. Players weren't completely sold at 1st, mainly because people are often afraid of change, but they became pretty popular in a short period of time, eventually becoming the most popular SNG structure on the site.
In the fall I also took a trip to Philly to visit Kenny05 with Little Kraut. Philly is kind of a dump but it was fun to hang out with Kenny and the cheese steaks were pretty amazing as well.
My girlfriend had graduated from college in he spring and landed a job in Burnsville at that time as a rad tech (taking X rays) at a hospital there. We started looking at houses together everywhere within 30 minutes of Burnsville and eventually purchased a house in Farmington. We actually were looking in a higher price range but a co employee of Paula had told her of this amazing house in farmington that was a foreclosure. We didn't have high hopes but were immediately sold after seeing the house. It was definitely a nicer house than some of the houses we looked at for $100K more and had everything we were looking for. If we had known more about the area at the time I might have strayed away from Farmington and more towards an area like Apple Valley, but you live you learn and I still love our house. On our closing date I proposed to Paula & somehow she said yes. We set a wedding date of August 8th, 2011.
Getting engaged and living with your fiancee may not be the best thing for your poker profits, but it was a +EV life move. We're very happy. I began to mostly work around Paula's schedule and play less profitable hours so that we could spend more time together. I think it's very important to not poker run your life, as a lot of pros seem to make the mistake of doing. Instead of making poker your life, you should be trying to make it part of your life.
Not only did I finish the year #1 in overall single table profit, but I finished #1 AND #2 on the sharkscope.com any game 5 to 6 players total profit leaderboard, on my Pokerstars and Cake accounts respectively. I felt great achievement in dominating a year in that fashion, and my confidence was at an all time high.
Please click on the images to enlarge.
I also think I did a much better job in 2008 of balancing poker with my life. While 1,510.88 hours may sound like a lot, it's really less than 38 40 hour weeks. Even if you factor in some studying, it's almost surely less hours than a normal job. I think spending the right amount of hours on poker is key to having a long and succesful career. I think most poker pros do a pretty poor job at this. You will see guys that are lazy and only play 20 hours a week and then you will see guys that play 60+ hours a week with no life balance. By playing 20 hours a week you aren't taking full advantage of the amazing opportunity you have as a poker pro, and almost surely aren't always doing something better with your time. It's pretty easy to cut out some meaningless activities during your day and be more productive with your time, thus being able to put in more hours at the tables. On the other hand, if you're playing 60 hours a week there's a couple problems. First off, you're setting yourself up to get burned out and probably not enjoying life all that much. Second off, if you're playing 60 hours a week you likely aren't spending enough time studying the game, so you fail to progress as a player. If you are playing 60 hours a week and studying enough, well then you're just setting yourself up for burnout even more. Personally, I think spending somewhere around 35-40 hours a week on poker and taking a lot of vacations is a good recipe for a long and succesful career as a professional poker player. Of course, there are exceptions to every rule. Guys like Phil Ivey and Tom Dwan have been known to play 60 hours a week and are certainly having long, succesful careers.
Please click the image to enlarge.
2008 5-10 Seated Total Sharkscope Profit combining multiple screen names:
1. Jared Hubbard: $272,491
Global Alias
2. DDbeast: $194,703
Global Alias
3. Kenny05: $172,464
Global Alias
4. Scoss: $137,915
Global Alias
5. azntracker: $108,912
Pokerstars
Year 2008 Online:
Hours: 1510.88
SNG Profit: $277,395.86
Rakeback/Bonuses: $178,589.61
Total SNG Profit: $455,985.47
Staking: $121,573.29
Total Yearly Profit: $577,558.76
