2006 - Year in Review

First of all, sorry to my small (but growing to at least 5!) list of readers if you subscribe to this blog via an RSS feed - I recently did a conversion of my blog to the "new" Blogger and it evidently mixed up the order of my articles in the RSS feed. Hopefully this is a one-time issue.

On to the real content - I've reached the end of my first calendar year playing Internet poker for real money. It has been quite a rush - over 46,000 hands , over 40 blog posts, and (as you can see by the bankroll update to the right) nearly $6,000. It'll be interesting (for me, anyways) to look back on how 2006 looked from a few categories. I'll start out with the category that makes me look Really Good then move down from there so if you get tired of reading by the end, you'll at least think I'm better than I actually am! Now on to a blog post chock-full of charts and graphs.....

Overall 2006 results

The title pretty much says it all - here is a graph that shows all the hands I've played in 2006 at all sites, all levels:

The winrate is a bit lower than I'd have liked (1.35 BB/100) , has a few 150-ish BB slides at the start, and has a stretch of about 10,000 hands (between 18K and 28K) where I just broke even. Even so, this seems to be a slow steady climb implying that I pretty much rock at poker, right? After all 620 BB can't be all bad. Well, let's look at the same graph, but measured in dollars instead of BB:


A bit more variance there at the end (including a few $200-ish drops) but it still doesn't look too outrageously bad. Maybe instead of "rocking" at poker, maybe I'm merely "good". But let's move on to see if that's true....

6 max

Below is a graph of all 6-max hands I played this year, in BB:

Now that's a much nicer rate: 2.61 BB/100 over nearly 13,000 hands. Again, there are a couple of 60-80 BB downswings in there but this seems to look pretty good. Somewhat troubling is the 6,000 hand breakeven stretch in the middle (almost half the hands I've played!) but in general, I can't complain about 330 BB earned at that rate. The story looks even nicer when expressed in dollars:


A nasty $200 slide in the middle, but not much to be worried about.

I find it really quite strange that I seem to have less swings at 6-max than at full ring, as conventional wisdom has it that 6-max is a much "swingier" game. Maybe I'm just lucky at it or (conversely) unlucky at full ring.

OK, now I'm back to thinking I rock at poker. What's next?

Full Ring

Well, simple math should tell you if I'm up 620 BB overall, and 330 BB at 6-max, then I should be up 290 BB at full ring. Ding-ding-ding! You win a prize:

This is where the trouble starts to manifest, perhaps. Three separate 130 BB downswings (including one right at the end of the year), and as of the end of the year I hadn't made any net BB since about my 17,000th hand, meaning for the last 17,000 hands (half my full ring hands played for the entire year!) I have been breakeven in terms of BB. Not good. But wait, it gets worse when expressed in dollars. Avert your eyes if you have a squeamish stomach:

OUCH! Yes, you read that graph correctly - I actually went from being up about $380 to down $50 (a $430 swing!) in about 4,000 hands. I am barely positive in dollar terms for full ring in all of 2006, and that is only due to that little uptick way at the end of the year. This is (primarily) due to the killing that I've been taking at $2/$4 that I've been complaining about in other recent blog posts. The amazing thing about it is that I (evidently) was running so good at $1/$2 6-max at the same time I was hemorrhaging this money at $2/$4 that the "overall" graphs in the first section don't look so bad!

Now, instead of thinking I rock at poker, I get to think I suck. And quite badly.

Monthly and Site-by-Site results

Here is the breakdown by level, by month:

I made money at every level except for $2/$4, and never really had a "bad" month, as most of the months where I was negative were "only" negative by less than 20 BB or so at the primary level I was playing at the time. You can clearly see, however, that my December was saved primarily due to my $1/$2 6-max results when netted against the $2/$4 carnage.

Here are my results when grouped by site, by month:

At least I am net positive on every site, although that was certainly not the case for Full Tilt for quite some time - I was actually down over $150 overall at Full Tilt at one point before going on a "late run" to pull positive for my whole time there. In fact, I went from highly positive there (+$220) to that -$150 in only a little over 2,000 hands. RIGGED! :-)

Live Play

No nifty graphs for this section - only the (depressing) statistic I can give is that I'm down $333 (Canadian) while playing live $3/$6 against competition that seems to be weaker than any I've ever encountered online. Admittedly this is "only" about 55 BB over an estimated 800 hands or so but still disappointing.

In terms of tournaments, I have entered three of the $50+$5 No Limit tournaments there and (although I've reached the final table in two of those three) have not cashed yet. So, another $165 CDN down the tubes.....

Final Thoughts

I was going to make a "2007 Goals" section but, frankly, I'm tired of typing. I'll likely leave that for another blog post soon.

When I started this online journey in February, I would never have imagined that I'd be where I am from a profit perspective. I have a lot of work to do on my game and finding good bonuses in 2007 will be significantly harder after the October legislation, but I'll have fun doing both.

Happy New Year!