3 Months $3,000 Summary

My 3 Months $3,000 experiment has reached its conclusion.  I was trying to win $3,000 over the course of 3 months playing live poker for the challenge.  Instead the challenge included my largest career downswing ever, although I did start mounting a comeback toward the end.  This blog is a summary of what I learned doing the challenge.

Over the course of the three months I played 167.5 hours of live poker spread across 58 sessions for a total loss if $2,749.  This compares to 4 hours of live poker played over the same time period in 2011.  Of course in 2011 I was still playing quite a bit of online poker.  And I've also increased my live play since becomming an Ambassador for Ante Up Magazine.  However I'd guess that the challenge caused me to at least double the amount of poker I would have otherwise played in that time frame.

I played 50.8 hours of live tournaments spread across 25 events.  I lost $2,306 without achieving any significant cashes.  I did make several deep runs and was within 4 or 5 places of cashing several times, but didn't quite make a big score.  Prior to becoming the Ambassador for Ante Up, most of my tournament play was done online.  Since most poker coverage involves tournaments, I thought I should increase my live tournament play.  I am still trying to become proficient at live tournaments, and hopefully that will be possible since I did have some success at online tournaments.  25 tournaments is small enough of a sample size to no be statistically significant, so it's unclear what conclusions can be drawn from the numbers.

I played  58.8 hours of cash games across 33 sessions.  At my low point I was down $4,023.  I ended up making a come back and was down only $433 in the end.  I probably had a couple of larger losses than I should have in the beginning, but I felt I was playing well toward the end.

Overall Impressions

I think I felt quite a bit of pressure from the challenge.  I am a little surprised by this.  After all no one forced me to do this challenge, and I could have stopped at any time.  Additionally my blog gets fairly low traffic, so not very many people are seeing it anyway.  Despite all that, the challenge added extra pressure to me and may have affected my play.  I must say I did have a harder time trying to actually blog about the challenge after a losing session.  And it isn't fun sharing your worst losing streak ever with the entire internet.  (Or at least the 7 people who actually read this blog.)

The losses playing tournaments aren't statistically significant so it's hard to draw conclusions, but I definitely think I need to improve my tournament game. Strictly speaking I shouldn't have played any tournaments for the challenge since the variance is too large for such a short challenge.  But I do want to improve my live tournament game so I kept playing.

I think there was a little bit of run bad too.  For example I had 70% equity in an $1800 pot with one card to come.  Had I won that pot, it would have cut my losses in half.  I think there were other examples of running below expectation in the beginning.  But it is also likely that I was running a little bit above expectation in the end, so maybe things evened out.

It does make me appreciate professional players who have to win day-in and day-out in order to make a living.  I, on the other hand, have a steady income and do not rely on poker winnings in order to pay my bills.  But just post the results to the internet was enough to throw me off my game.  I choked under the pressure I manufactured in my own mind.

Having said all this, I'm considering repeating this challenge next year.  I enjoyed the challenge, despite being demoralizing at times.  If I want to become a better player I need to handle pressure in all its forms.  I need to be able to win when it counts!