Adam Winter

Vegas went fairly well. I played somewhat poorly at times, but did well in cash games and tournaments. I finished 2nd in the $350 PLO tournament for $3319 after we chopped it 4 ways.. basically 2nd place money. 1st would have been 5k but we were all at 30bbs so it was becoming a crapshoot.

Tomorrow I fly to England to play in the UKIPT Nottingham event. This is a £500 event, roughly $800 so it will be the largest tournament I have ever played. I’m expecting to do fairly well since the tournament format allows for me to play very nitty, which is generally my style. I should be able to play relatively few hands and make it fairly deep before resorting to any kind of push/fold strategy. Hopefully I can run good because without luck, it’s tough to win.

Online I have been breakeven for the last few hundred games. Today I got 4th in a $27 KO turbo for $600. I ran ok in the tournament but lost a big “race” if you will with A6o vs A5o when a good player spiked the 5 on me. If I win that, I knock him out and become the chipleader 3 handed. Right decision, wrong result, oh well.

Business is fairly steady. I should do well this year profit wise. I plan on shutting down my training site because I don’t think it’s worth the effort, and just maintaining the trade sites I have.

Taxes suck for the self-employed. I’m going to end up paying about 25% of my gross income for taxes… which really sucks. I’m working on finding every possible deduction I can to reduce my tax burden. I opened a SEP IRA and plan to contribute a ton to that in order to lower my taxes. Not much else I can do. I think I’ll owe about another 4k when all is said and done (and I’ve paid 8k estimated so far).

Monday I won (chopped) the $1 rebuy turbo on pokerstars for $2434. Earlier in the day I won a $12/180 for $594. With some other minor cashes it was a great day. I felt I played really well in both tournaments, and even though I got super lucky in 2 hands in the $1r (99 > JJ and KJ > KQ), I think my mtt game is improving. I did win a ton of coinflips, which is pretty much how you have to win these turbo mtts. Also I stole pots when I could and made 1 3bet steal which worked out (A7o).

I’m up ~6k for the last month which I’m really happy about. I just need to keep grinding to build my roll up more. Lately I’ve had a lot of expenses and life/business stuff to deal with which has restricted me from playing much.

Saturday I did a 1 hour coaching session which went really well. Hopefully I can do more sessions in the future and possibly move into staking as well.

I have successfully moved SPT to new, lower cost servers. Video prices will increase soon, and there will be a new way to sell videos on the website: video bundles. Basically, I will be selling access to all videos for one price. Most likely it will be ~$500 for all my videos. Since I have about 80 videos, I feel this is a great deal for someone who wants to grind 180mans and turbo mtts. Just one victory in a 180man tournament pays for 100 hours of training material. Additionally, I might offer 1 free hour of coaching / hand history review to be included for anyone who purchases the full package.

Sorry about the lack of updates if anyone actually reads this… My girlfriend Dana and I moved to Tempe, AZ. We rented a budget truck which had some problems along the way. The whole ordeal caused us a ton of stress, but we ended up getting a $600 partial refund because of all the issues. We were actually lucky we didn’t blow out a tire and die according to the nice people at J & D Auto, where we were held up for 26 hours.

We are really liking Arizona so far. It’s been super hot, but still very nice weather. Once it cools down later this year we are really going to enjoy the outdoors. Our condo is really nice and our landlords are super nice people and we really like them. I think we got really lucky.

Poker has been going fine. I’ve only played 7 days this month and I’m up ~$1500. I have finished a lot of 2nds and 3rds in tournaments which is nice, but 1st is always much better. Usually 2nd is ~$300 in the games I play, and 1st is ~$500. So the difference adds up. Nonetheless, I’m still really happy with my play lately and I know I’m going to hit a big score again soon. After analyzing my play through half the year, I have played about 5000 games and won a bit over $32,000. If I grind really hard for the rest of the year and get up to 10,000 games on the year, I should easily be at +60k for the year.

Business is up and down. It seems like when one of my websites is doing well, the others not so well. Poker related sites are very hard to make any money from. The reason is because the margins are very small. Most sites make their money by “skimming” as I call it. This is making a very small % from users. This can be done in many ways – offering a service such as intersite-trades and taking a 5% cut, offering rakeback, selling training videos, direct referrals to new poker sites, staking, and other misc. services. I have yet to see a way to make huge money from poker sites. Small money is easy, but big money remains elusive.

April is going well, although I haven’t played much. I’m up about $2800 at this point. Yesterday I won $1k. I have probably only played 14 days this month, and not for very long. I took a lot of days off to work on my rakeback site. I’m almost done with modifications on that, and I’ll just be adding articles and promoting it to get some referrals.

My poker training site has been somewhat dormant for a while because I had to ditch my payment processor, firstdata. They are scam artists and scammed me into signing a 3 year contract while implying that it was a month to month contract and I could quit anytime. There is a $500 fee for canceling. I have called to complain many times, and tomorrow I will find out if I can get some kind of break without paying the fee. I told them to get the recorded phone calls from when I spoke to their representative about signing up because I know I was not told it was a 3 year contract. It would be totally ludicrous for me to sign any kind of long term contract, and I never would have even considered using their services for 1 second if I had know it was a 3 year contract. First Data is deceptive and charges a ton of fees. Avoid them at all costs.

Well november sucked pokerwise… just tons and tons of beats. December is off to a decent start… I’m up about 500 now on stars after winning a 180man and a $3 rebuy 180man. Unfortunately I ran bad in the casino tourneys and also cash games in general.

I unblocked my sharkscope and I’m up 19k on stars. But my high point was ~25k so obviously a 6k downswing blows.

I’ve decided to rebuild my roll playing 180mans in the morning when there are fewer grinders and more eurofish. So far the games have been excellent. Then in the afternoon/evenings I will work on my websites.

My sites didn’t make as much as I had hoped in November… I think that people aren’t playing quite as much with the holidays here. Once the new year rolls around I have a feeling things will pick up.

Yesterday, I decided to voluntarily resign from my nightshift supervisor position. I had many reasons for quitting this job besides the pay being sub-par. The main one is so that I can focus and devote more time to my business and playing online poker. Some other very important reason are that I want to go through life doing what I want, instead of reacting to life’s challenges all the time. Now I feel that I am the master of my own destiny. No longer will I feel trapped inside a cubicle working hours I don’t want to work, and doing unchallenging and mundane tasks all night.

The pay at the job I’m quitting is approximately $20/hr, which by most standards is a “good” job. The benefits are decent and comparable to most IT jobs, with very few side perks besides a generous holiday schedule. So I could continue to work this job, making about 42k per year, working lousy hours, and feeling unchallenged. But everyday for the past year I have gone into work knowing I want to do something else. I know in my heart that there are so many things in life I want to accomplish, and I just can’t do those things if I’m stuck working for someone else.

My last day is October 29th, which will give me two full months this year to really focus on my new business, and online poker. I will also be able to spend more time with my girlfriend, visit my parents and brother more, get on a better workout schedule, and get more things done that have been on my to-do list for years.

I want to go through life doing what I want, and be happy doing it. I realized after nearly 4 years of working for an IT company that I would never be fully happy working this kind of job. People always say find a job that you love doing, and I know this is it for me. I have over 10 years of online web development skills and about 8 years of profitable online poker to back that up. I know I can do this, and it will be fun, and challenging at times, but also easy at times.

My goals for the rest of the year are to increase profits on Smart Rakeback and add a ton more functionality to the website. For Smart Poker Training I want to have 100 videos by the end of the year, as well as phase 2 of the project completed. Profitability isn’t important for SPT yet, since it is not well known enough, but I think 2010 will be a great year for SPT once I get over a few hundred videos. For online poker, this year I am going to try and achieve supernova status on pokerstars. This may be difficult since I still need 55,000 vpps. I plan to play mostly $12 180man and $12 45man tournaments for November. At 5 vpp per game, I will need to grind up a nice roll before playing hyper turbos again to complete this goal. I do not think I could grind even close to 10k of these games in 2 months – I have too many other things to do. Although… my roi is quite good and 10k of these might net me about $25k. Hmm….

Well that’s enough of an update for now. I will post more after this weekend. Badger hockey game on Saturday, and plenty of time to get things done.

So I’ve been super busy lately like always and barely had time to play poker. It’s probably a good thing because I went on quite the downswing, dropping my roll about 4k from it’s peak. That’s ok though I think I just needed a break from it all and I wasn’t playing well or getting other things done. So I cashed out most of my roll from pokerstars. This year I’ve cashed out 11k, which will suck to pay taxes on but oh well.

The main thing that has kept me busy the past 2 weeks is a new business I purchased. The website is Smart Rakeback. This is an established poker rakeback website that is well ranked for search terms such as Aced Rakeback and some other rakeback terms. I’m really excited to update this website and make it a huge success. Obviously, I feel very lucky to acquire this site since I was able to get it for a fair price which included some affiliate accounts. Also, there are a ton of useful articles already written which bring in some quality traffic.

I plan to integrate both Smart Rakeback and Smart Poker Training together so that rakeback members will receive “Smart Dollars” at SPT, which can be used to buy poker training videos, poker books, poker software, basically anything poker related for players I want to offer. I really hope that I can make this is a huge success with players so when they want to get rewarded for playing, they earn both rakeback and rewards.

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.

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.

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.