{"id":3493,"date":"2019-12-31T21:30:41","date_gmt":"2020-01-01T05:30:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.mutantpoker.com\/?p=3493"},"modified":"2019-12-31T21:30:41","modified_gmt":"2020-01-01T05:30:41","slug":"look-back-in-poker","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mutantpoker.com\/?p=3493","title":{"rendered":"Look Back In Poker"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>Everybody\u2019s always asking<br \/>\nWhy do what I do<br \/>\nI don\u2019t gamble \u2019cuz I want to win, boys<br \/>\nI gamble \u2019cuz I need to lose<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><span class=\"embed-youtube\" style=\"text-align:center; display: block;\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" class=\"youtube-player\" width=\"584\" height=\"329\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/TbfWmJU35b8?version=3&#038;rel=1&#038;showsearch=0&#038;showinfo=1&#038;iv_load_policy=1&#038;fs=1&#038;hl=en-US&#038;autohide=2&#038;wmode=transparent\" allowfullscreen=\"true\" style=\"border:0;\" sandbox=\"allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-popups allow-presentation allow-popups-to-escape-sandbox\"><\/iframe><\/span><\/p>\n<p>This was the year I\u00a0<em>didn&#8217;t\u00a0<\/em>go to Vegas.<\/p>\n<p>I announced last fall that I was <strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.mutantpoker.com\/?p=2920\">retiring from poker at the end of 2018<\/a><\/strong>, then got a lot of funny looks from people when I started showing up at tournaments three weejs after I retired. It wasn&#8217;t ever supposed to be an\u00a0<strong>absolute<\/strong> thing, but I did\u00a0<strong>scale back<\/strong> my poker playing to\u00a0<strong>spend more time with the family<\/strong>, specifically, my <strong>wife<\/strong>, who retired on January 1st. And I did.<\/p>\n<p>I played 95 live tournaments in 2018, and <strong>only 53 in 2019<\/strong>. There was a starker comparison in the first half of each year, because in 2019 I played only <strong>14 live tournaments between January and June<\/strong>, where I&#8217;d played 37 in 2018. Online, I was still fairly active, with 388 tournaments in 2018 only going down to 306 in 2019, but half of the 2019 tournaments were\u00a0<strong>Jackpot Sit-and-Go<\/strong>s, hyper-turbo,\u00a03-player tournaments that tend to last less than 10 minutes, so they weren&#8217;t exactly eating up the time an MTT would. 3% ROI playing mostly $7 entries but also some $2, $15, and $20 games. Never saw a jackpot higher than 5x the buy-in.<\/p>\n<p>After playing 85 of the nightly\u00a0<strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.mutantpoker.com\/?p=2445\">Thousandaire Maker<\/a>\u00a0<\/strong>tournaments on\u00a0<strong>Ignition Poker<\/strong> last year, I <strong>entered 16 Thousandaire Makers<\/strong> in 2019 (cashed 2, for a -14% ROI).<\/p>\n<p>I had my <strong>second-largest career cash<\/strong> ($10K) in this first year of my retirement, which\u2014at the end of November\u2014had me as #28 on the\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.poker-media.com\/\"><strong>Poker Media Power Rankings<\/strong><\/a>, right between two of the actual poker journalists I worked with at the World Series two years ago.<\/p>\n<p>In 2018, I made two brief trips too Las Vegas\u2014in the summer and just before New Year&#8217;s, but I didn&#8217;t leave the Northwest at all (for poker) in 2019. My <a href=\"https:\/\/www.mutantpoker.com\/?p=568\">first experience as a player at the\u00a0<strong>World Series of Poker<\/strong> was in 2012<\/a>, I was down for short periods at least once during the summer each year until 2018 (and for a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.mutantpoker.com\/?p=1595\">pretty long period in 2016<\/a>) even when I wasn&#8217;t playing a WSOP event); now\u00a0<em>that\u2019s<\/em> retired.<\/p>\n<p>Just\u00a0<strong>one third<\/strong><strong> the number of tournaments at Final<\/strong>\u00a0<strong>Table<\/strong> this year (13 vs. 41 in 2018), even though it was the final year of my free door fees there (part of the payment for doing their web site a couple of years back, and a real steal in no-rake Portland). I\u00a0<strong>played a couple more tournaments this year at Portland Meadows<\/strong> (14 in 2019 vs. 11 in 2018) because of the Grand Finale series.<\/p>\n<p>You might think that the second-best career cash would be my <strong>best ROI in a tournament this year<\/strong>, but at 1800%, that was just over half the ROI from an\u00a0<strong>Ignition $4K GTD NLHE Turbo<\/strong> where I took 4th of 471, for\u00a0<strong>ROI of 3100%<\/strong>. I had five other tournaments where I cashed for more than a 1000% ROI.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Wins this year<\/strong> included a 66-player\u00a0<strong>Ignition $500 GTD PLO8 Turbo<\/strong>, first in a chop in a\u00a0<strong>Final Table $10K GTD NLHE<\/strong> (83 entries), the\u00a0<strong>Chinook Winds $50K GTD NLHE<\/strong> (technically second, but I got a skosh more money, 210 entries), and a bunch of Jackpot Sit-and-Gos.<\/p>\n<p>As usual, I didn&#8217;t play much in the way of cash games, but a couple of decent sessions at Portland Meadows were enough to make that part profitable.<\/p>\n<p>Goals in the new year:\u00a0<strong>satellite into a $5K or $10K buyin<\/strong>. I&#8217;ve got my eye on the\u00a0<strong>Bay 101 Shooting Star<\/strong> (which has satellites running this month and February) or the\u00a0<strong>LAPC\/WPT Main Event<\/strong> at the end of February, with two 50-Seat guaranteed mega satellites just before Day 1. Then, of course, there&#8217;s the <strong>WSOP Main Event<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p>Love to goto the\u00a0<strong>Irish Poker Open<\/strong> in March, but there are some obstacles in the way that make it easier to try for Bay 101 or LAPC instead. PokerStars hasn&#8217;t announced that there&#8217;ll even\u00a0<em>be<\/em> and\u00a0<strong>EPT Prague\u00a0<\/strong>next year, so that ship may have sailed.<\/p>\n<p>Hapy New Year!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Everybody\u2019s always asking Why do what I do I don\u2019t gamble \u2019cuz I want to win, boys I gamble \u2019cuz I need to lose This was the year I\u00a0didn&#8217;t\u00a0go to Vegas. I announced last fall that I was retiring from &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.mutantpoker.com\/?p=3493\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2958,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_eb_attr":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,49,110,111,76,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3493","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general-poker","category-live-games","category-no-limit-holdem","category-pot-limit-omaha","category-ring-games","category-tournaments"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.mutantpoker.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/12\/img_4896.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1t0pn-Ul","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mutantpoker.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3493","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mutantpoker.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mutantpoker.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mutantpoker.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mutantpoker.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3493"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.mutantpoker.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3493\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3499,"href":"https:\/\/www.mutantpoker.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3493\/revisions\/3499"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mutantpoker.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2958"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mutantpoker.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3493"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mutantpoker.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3493"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mutantpoker.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3493"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}