It’s been a busy couple months here at Mutant Poker, even though my playing volume is still so much lower than it used to be and I don’t have any plans to go to Las Vegas this summer because of real-life stuff. Things to be happy about, though!
The Poker
First off, the past couple of months have been profitable, if not enormously so, which is always an accomplishment for someone who plays tournaments almost exclusively. I played just 25 tournaments (5 in April and 20 in May), with only two of those live (more on these types of numbers later).
No live poker at all in April, just a couple of small online home games and three in an online poker league. I bricked the first three (two Stud/8 tournaments and a NLHE Bounty), then won a single-table PLO tournament and a 21-entry 8-Game Mix that saved the month.
Just 6 of the 20 tournaments in May were NLHE (one live). I took first in two of the online home games. I was on a roll from the start in the live home game—nearly knocking out two players on the second hand—right up to the bubble when a player who’d clawed his way up from nothing at first lost a flip against me on the flop then hit a set on the turn and left me gasping for air and the booby-prize of less than half a buy-in.
The rest of the games were PLO/8 and PLO/8 Bounty (5), PLO (1), 8-Game Mix (3), HORSE (1), Stud/8 (3), and O/8 (1). I cashed in half of them and won the PLO, a PLO/8 Bounty, an 8-Game, and a Stud/8. The buy-in’s aren’t huge, the fields aren’t particularly big, but it’s great to be able to play something other than NLHE so regularly.
This would all theoretically hearken well for a WSOP trip, but no.
The Stats
May marks 14 years since I started keeping track of every real-money poker event (cash and tournaments). I built my own primitive online tracking tool just after Black Friday and a shift to live poker put a kibosh on automatically recording everything with Poker Tracker. At the time, I also had some ideas on how gauge the future profitability of tournament poker players who can be good even if they’re underwater financially.
Here are some stats on the local rooms I’ve played in in that time:
- 452 events at The Final Table Poker Club
- 448 events at Encore Club (that’s not going up any more)
- 431 events at Portland Players Club (same)
- 160 events at Aces Players Club / Aces Full Poker Club
- 99 events at Portland Meadows Poker (looking forward to that third digit)
- 21 events at The Game
- 17 events at Cowboy’s (briefly underneath Aces)
- 11 events at The Last Frontier
- 8 events at Claudia’s
- 8 events at Oak Tree Casino
- 4 events at Ace of Spades
- 4 events at Deuces Players Club
- 2 events at Rialto Poolroom
- 1 event at Big Stack Poker Club (does that put me at 100 with Brian Sarchi?)
- 1 event at Trio Poker Room
The bulk of that was in the years between 2011 and 2016, which is one of the reasons the Meadows number is so low, relatively. I went to work at the WSOP in the summer of 2016 after being mostly unemployed for years (hint: not the best time to pick up poker as a hobby unless you’re good at it) and came back to a job offer that took me off the streets during the weekdays when I had been frequenting Final Table, PPC, and Encore.
When I posted this in the NW Poker group on Facebook the other day, I got queries about some of the other fine rooms that have existed in the past 15 years. There are places I just didn’t get to. Sorry.
The Tracker
One of my projects the past month has been to update the software I use to track my poker playing. I wrote a crude system back in the spring of 2011 using mySQL (online database software) and PHP (a scripting language) but I’m a hack programmer. While I’ve been working with and programming computers since the days when we used paper tapes and punch cards, my formal programming training ended before any of the modern languages were even developed and more than a decade before the birth of the World Wide Web. Event the languages I did learn in depth (and wrote books and articles about) are long-dead. It’s been more than 20 years since I wrote my last book. So what I created was pretty unsophisticated but it did most of what I wanted it to do, which was to sort events by start and end dates, cash and/or tournaments, venues, minimum and maximum entrants for tournaments, and min/max buy-ins. Plus, it showed running totals for cost, payouts, and profits over the selected time period, median ROI for profitable tournaments, and the value of a metric I came up with called Tournament Performance Index, which is derived from a ratio of percentage of tournament cashed and the median ROI.
The “design” of the old tracker was pretty minimal, but it did use different backgrounds on tournaments and cash games, with varying shades for profitable events and unprofitable events. Despite the fact that part of my actual job is implementing the design for web sites, I didn’t put a whole lot of time into making it look nice, because I was the only person who was going to see it; I never had any intention to make it into a product—I’m not that kind of guy (i.e. a good businessman).
I’ve been wanting to do a revamp for a long time, and there were some features I wanted that were just too much of a hassle to add for just myself, but a recent evaluation of Codeium’s Windsurf Pro AI coding aid led me to do a complete rewrite of the PHP backend (API or Application Programming Interface that communicates to the database) and front-end. The front end was originally written in PHP, returning an HTML web page to the browser. My goal was to do something more modern, with a front end written in React, a JavaScript variant that does its work in the viewer’s browser. I’ve done a fair amount of work in React over the past five or six years, but most of it has been making data look pretty, not on actually fetching and slicing and dicing the data. If I was doing that for work, it’d be one thing, but any time I spend on tracker development is time I could be playing poker.
Windsurf certainly didn’t do the job instantly. Nor did it execute instructions with perfection. I found that with some tasks, once a component had been built, it was at times far more difficult to refine the component to get it to do what I wanted than it was to throw it all away and start over, knowing where I’d run into problems on the prior attempt. But with a couple of days of work, the basics of the tracker had been completely rebuilt. With a few more days poking at it, it was on a par with the pool I’d built up in dribs and drabs over 14 years, and even had a few new twists. Plus, it was going to be far easier to add new features.
At the heart is a simple form where all of the content should be obvious except for consortium which was a long-ago plan for a few of the guys in our home game to share a portion of our winnings, which—apart from me paying out $300 for the first $10K GTD I final tabled at Encore Club back in 2011—never saw any other money transacted. I could probably get rid of that column but it’s in the database.
I can filter events by date, name, buy-in,, and number of entries, and can show or hide by venue. I’ve been taking photos of tournament screen when I bust out for almost 15 years now, so it’s pretty easy to keep track of that info even if I don’t feel like entering it in right away. Believe it or not, I’m more likely to forget to take a photo when I’ve cashed than when I’ve busted short of the money.
Individual events have their own row with the date, event name venue, event type (T here for three tournaments). A number after a T indicates the number of tournaments in a row without a profit (thankfully just 1 here). An identifier for the venue. Basic financials, placement, cumulative financials, notes under the number on rebuys, addons, and payouts (if I take them). And a little graphic indicator to indicate the number of minutes played in the event (one full circle for each hour).
Yes, I only lasted 5 minutes in the game in the middle. It was a max late reg!
Up near the top are some tournament stats. As I said earlier, I’ve been running hot the past couple months, at least in my very minor-league circles.
Finally, some charts. As a big believer in data science and poker–let’s call it Moneychip–I’ve made a variety of charts over the years to try to figure out what, if anything,I was good at, and just how good “good” was. Aside from the standard cumulative cost, payout, and profit line chart at the top, the radar chart below it shows me where I’ve finished in tournament fields as a percentage of the field. As I mentioned, it’s been a good couple of months, with the upper-right quadrant of the Tournament Placement chart showing 1st-place finishes in more than a quarter of the events over April and May (I was first out in several events, as well). My version of the chart has grid lines at 90% (the old standard for payouts in larger fields) and 85% (the standard at the WSOP in most events). but smaller events often pay higher percentages, if barely.
So. That’s it for this edition. I’ve got more charts to make. Maybe some poker.
