Anyone who takes their Poker seriously and/or aims to make a living from it, should treat Poker like a business and have a business plan in place
Although my aspirations for 2011 are not overly ambitious, I certainly want to build up my Poker to a point where it is a second income rather than a cheap hobby, so have set some clear targets for myself in 2011.
As any business, I need to make a plan, monitor results, reflect on my results and adjust where necessary.
Plan
I have refined my plan slightly so my monthly targets are:
- Play 1000 hands of cash on NLHE $0.50, 1000 cash hands on PLO $0.20 and 500 cash hands of PLO8 $0.20 (all 6-max) with profit target of 2 BB per hour. ($16.00 for NLHE, $6.40 for PLO, $3.20 for PLO8 = $25.60 per month)
- Play 20 STT hoping for 10% ROI (around $20 per month)
- I will be playing some MTT as well, but not setting specific targets as will be low volume/high variance
Monitor
So how was my January compared to my monthly target.... well, first the excuses :-) I missed the third week of Jan due to illness and struggled in the last week to get back to fitness, so didn't play as much as expected.
Overall for the month I was up $23 on PokerStars and hit my monetary target on BBP, being up $45 (£28) ! Comparing to my Jan 2010 performance, well there is no comparison as I'd lost $942 (£610) by this time last year !
Jan 2011 Cash results
NLHE 170 hands + £9.70 (+0.2 buy-in)
PLO 446 hands -£44.74 (-2.2 buy-ins)
PLO8 72 hands -£15.81 (-0.8 buy-in)
Tournaments
Played 18 STT +£105.84 (+75% ROI !)
Played 15 MTT -£ 26.85
Reflect
My STT results are great, so am well happy with them. MTT are always going to be big variance, but are actually skewed for January by my trying to satellite into London Live and some of the Winter sales events
The cash results are not really representative being so few hands, but clearly dropping three buy-ins in the Omaha games is not where I want to be.
Adjust
In February I want to try to get back towards my targets, but know I will be one week short due to a holiday. Obviously will be looking to hit 3/4 of my targets for Feb with this in mind. Omaha is my biggest leak but realise I am still learning this game, so will take some time to even get to break even. Provided my NLHE game is looking good, will continue with Omaha and hope to see my losses reduce over the next couple of months.
So from a business perspective, January 2011 was profitable, but have a lot of work to do in order to improve to my own expectations. Lets hope February see's the improvements I'm hoping for, otherwise I may need to revise my targets (at least I'm my own boss in this regard, so can do that without any issues :-) )