Adam Winter

Well my hopes for a huge month were crushed the past week. I just couldn’t overcome all the bad beats and broke even the past week. I earned a ton of vpps and fpps, but wasn’t able to grow my bankroll.

Right now it is at $11,300. I got deep in several turbo tournaments such as the nightly $27.50 and the $77 6max turbo, one of my new favorites to play. I also loaded up a few $12 180 mans and remembered why I loved them so much: they are SOFT. So many poor players make it easy to go deep.

I also made a free poker training video for smart poker training, a $50 PLO video.

Below is my August graph, which doesn’t include about $150 in plo winnings.

I just signed up for linkedin, here is my profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/smartpokertraining

I heard about linkedin about a year ago and didn’t think it was anything special. After signing up and seeing all the features they have, I couldn’t have been more wrong. The site is simply amazing for networking, finding people who work in your industry, promoting yourself or your business, etc.

So far August has been great for me on pokerstars. Here is a sharkscope graph of every game I have played. I may have played a few short sessions of HU PLO and won ~$50 there.

My goal at this point is to get up to +10k for August. I would love to be able to consistently win $10,000 every month. Right now the games have been great and I haven’t really had too much trouble winning so hopefully the trend continues.

My new poker training project Smart Poker Training is off to a good start. I put some work in the past few days fixing some videos and uploading an intro video to explain how the website works.

I got my first two sales this month, which is nice. My next tasks are to enhance the coaching pages and try and recruit more coaches. I also need to get more links pointed to the site and try and increase traffic. The site is ranked well for search terms such as “poker training” on google and “free poker training videos” on yahoo. However, the traffic is fairly minimal so I will need to create some traffic via link trades and forum posts.

Lately I have been thinking a lot about trying to achieve supernova status on pokerstars and how much money I could earn throughout 2010. Ideally, I would like to get to supernova (100,000 VPPs) by the end of April at the latest. $1 in rake = 5 VPPs so 100,000 VPPs = $20,000 in rake fees.

There are 17 weeks through the end of April. Thus, I would need to pay an average of approximately $1176 in rake fees each week to get to supernova by April 30th. These calculations are based on SNG and tournament play. I will be playing the occasional cash game, most likely PLO, but that will be rare. 99% of my play will be SNGs and tourneys.

Obviously this seems like a ton and will require playing a lot of hyper turbo sng’s and large buy in tournaments.

500 $86+1.72 hyper turbos = $860 in rake
750 $86+1.72 hyper turbos = $1290 in rake

From my Hold ‘em manager stats, the hyper turbos take an average of 5 minutes per game. If I can play 150 games/day (~6 hours if I 2-table), then I can easily get to 750 games/week in just 5 days of play and 30 hours total 2-tabling. I feel like I could increase my tables to an average of 3 at all times since the games don’t fill that quickly. Which would mean only about 25 hours per week.

In the first week of August I was able to play 246 of the games in only 12.5 hours, or nearly 20 games per hour. A lot of this play was off peak hours, as well as me not actively trying to play a lot of games in a row. I was able to make $3000 profit from these games as well. So I know that I could easily put in more than 12.5 hours in a week and add in another table or two to increase my # of games per hour. There have been a few hours where I played 30+ games/hour.

Another thing I have been thinking about is if I do play 750 of these games per week, will my winrate suffer? If I decide to put in that much volume, I will have to play against other pros, grinders, and highly skilled players. I can still table select, but to put in the high volume I need, I will have to play some games vs. stronger competition. Therefore, I feel like a winrate of just +$2 per game might be more reasonable than my current expected winrate of +$5/game.

So if I assume that I can play 750 hyper turbos per week in 30 hours, that means I will rake $1290 per week. I am also assuming I will be able to maintain a winrate of +$2 per game, or +$1500 per week.

Using these rates I expect to get to supernova in 15.5 weeks, or by the end of April. If I continue playing through the rest of the year at the same rate of about 100,000 VPP per 16 weeks, then I can expect to earn approximately 300,000 VPP by the end of the year.

The first 100,000 VPPs will earn me 250,000 FPPs and the the next 200,000 VPPs will earn me 700,000 FPPs for a yearly total of 950,000 FPPs. I will be able to purchase milestone bonuses of $800, $2,000, and $3,000 when I reach 100k, 200k, and 300k VPPs. These bonuses cost 50,000 FPP each, which leaves me with 800,000 FPPs to spend. The best use of these FPPs is either concierge service, or a $4,000 bonus for 250,000 FPPs. Thus, I could buy 3 $4,000 bonuses for 750,000 FPP, and use another 150,000 for the milestone bonuses. In total for the year I would earn $17,800 from cash bonuses. This amounts to close to 30% rakeback.

If I am able to achieve my goal of +$1,500 per week, then over 50 weeks I will earn $75,000. With bonuses that equals $92,800 for the year. Assuming I win some small tournaments and do ok in live games, I should be able to make around $100,000 for the year.

For the past few weeks I have been talking to my girlfriend about quitting Gtech and playing poker full time. We have discussed the various pros and cons, health insurance, amount of money I would need to make, other income sources, poker legislation, risks, etc. We both agreed that starting next year, if I can get her health insurance, and the poker laws don’t kill online poker, that I should go for it.

I’m really excited about the idea since I’ve always loved playing poker. I have always been super disciplined, bankroll conservative, and savvy with my game selection. When I dedicate myself to the game, I know I can win. Being a tournament player moreso than a cash game player means that I might go one week without winning much, but the next have a huge week. Dana (my gf) and I decided that if I could not earn $18,000 over 6 months, or an average of $3,000 profit per month, I should quit. Honestly, I really think $18k will be incredibly easy.

Personally, I am fine with making less money in year than my fulltime job as long as I have the freedom to do what I want, when I want. I really can’t imagine only making $36,000 for the year as well. I think I would have to play very very badly, and very rarely to make so little. I have had 5k+ months playing in my spare time with a full time job! I just can’t see how playing full time and really dedicating myself to playing winning poker wouldn’t yield spectacular results.

If after a year I somehow hate playing full time, I can always find a new job or go back to school. My finances are very very sound right now. I have saved a ton since I started working at Gtech nearly 4 years ago. Thus, I have a healthy start on my retirement funds as well as a 24-month emergency fund. Additionally, I can always talk to my family if I ever need monetary support to get back on my feet if disaster struck.

Both Dana and I feel that starting in 2010 is a great time for me to try this out. She will be getting her graduate degree in the spring, and we plan to move out of the state during the summer. Most likely Phoenix.

Right now my online bankroll is $9350 and I plan to grind that up as high as possible by the end of the year. I have already withdrawn $5000 profit this year as well. Also, I did not play during January or February and played probably 10 hrs/wk March-June. So part time winnings of nearly $14k through 6 months in very encouraging. I feel like $50k/year is easily doable, and 100k from poker in 2010 is very achievable. My next post will analyze how I expect to make 100k in 2010 from online poker.

The other day I noticed that my blog was down due to a “failure to connect to database”. At first I assume dreamhost was down and didn’t really care because nobody reads this blog. I checked my site the next day and still the same error. After looking in to the issue, I realized that this blog was stored in a database linked to a different website, which I had deleted. Somehow I accidentally created the blog’s mysql database to point to mysql.randomdeletedsite.com instead of mysql.adamwinter.net. After the random site’s domain expired and I had no use for it, I deleted it from my dreamhost account and thus this blog was failing to load.

Now I probably could have figured out what to do with a few days of research and trial and error. Instead, I just opened up a support ticket with dreamhost and explained the situation. To my amazement, support had corrected the entire issue within 30 minutes and my blog was back up. Support said they had to modify a line in one of the wordpress files as well as create a new database mysql.adamwinter.net.

I must say I was very impressed. I’m only paying $10.95/mo to host this site and several others, which is well worth it. Kudos to Dreamhost.

The past month or so I have been absolutely crushing the games on pokerstars.  Mostly the $86+1.72 6max hyper turbo sunday million satellites.

Here’s my lifetime sharkscope for these games:

I started playing these games in late June/Early July. I feel like I have been a little bit luckier than average, although I did go through one or two really bad series of beats. In general, a lot of players play their hands wrong and treat these games are merely 100% luck. This couldn’t be further from the truth. These games require a ton of strategy and skill. There are many unique situations that occur late game in the hyper turbos, which causes many players to make critical mistakes. The trick late game is to force your opponents to make poor decisions while at the same time not risking a large part of your chip stack with a weak hand when calling an all-in.

I have been recording videos for Smart Poker Training which include my play on the hyper turbo games. I feel like they are great value for the price considering the information in them is probably worth more than the price tag.