Notes from the Hill

February 24, 2009

One Day at a Time

I count myself lucky because I’ve worked pretty steadily since I first started writing for a living in 2005. All that time I’ve been able to avoid Cubicle Hell, where I worked before and aim to never see from the inside again. The last year was my best year yet, as I earned enough for Rachel and I to erase all our debt (aside from student loans). The extra income also helped to finance her applications for art shows around the country, which can be pretty costly if you cast a wide net. Most importantly, I got to spend more time with her in 2008 than any other year since we got married.

This year hasn’t been nearly as good so far. My main client slashed my workload by about two thirds at the beginning of this month, which looked pretty scary until more work (from a highly unexpected source, no less) came knocking on the door two days later. The new gig won’t completely make up for the loss of revenue from the old one, since it pays less, but having it does mean that I get to continue working from home for the foreseeable future. I’m also unsure that I’ll be working the WSOP this year, since it appears that the poker media industry is imploding faster than an ancient casino in a prime location. Staying home in ‘09 would mark the first time since 2003 that I haven’t spent at least part of my summer in Las Vegas.

All isn’t doom and gloom on the work front, though; sparkling potential is on the horizon. Rachel is applying for teaching jobs all over the country and has a few interviews lined up this week. Her application materials are stronger than they’ve ever been, including a beefed-up show record over the last year, and as she continues to gain experience she just gets better at what she does. We’ve got our fingers crossed that she’ll land a job and give us a little bit of security. In the meantime we’re taking it one day at a time – because really, is there any other way to go?

Learning to Love, Loving to Learn

I really enjoyed poker when I started playing in 2004. That hasn’t been the case the last few years, though. While thinking about this little conundrum at the beginning of the year I figured out what my problem was: somewhere along the way I stopped playing cash games and sit-and-go tournaments, which had always been my main moneymakers, and started focusing on multi-table tournaments. A return to the cash tables was in order, but my limited experience in the last year or two has been that the players are much better than they used to be at even relatively low-stakes hold’em cash tables. If I wanted to enjoy the game again, I was going to need to start playing another game that people don’t know quite so well.

Late last month I started playing small-stakes Pot Limit Omaha cash games on Full Tilt Poker. I know that fewer players have a good idea of how to play the game well compared to the hold’em, and after reading through Jeff Hwang’s book Pot Limit Omaha Poker I felt like I had a fairly good grasp on the changes I needed to make coming from a hold’em background. With rakeback factored in, I figured I could at least break even for a while by playing tight while I gained experience. So far I’ve logged about 7,000 hands at stakes between $.01-.02 and $.05-.10, mostly in sessions of a few hours at a time, a few times every week. Even before taking rakeback into account I’m showing a small overall profit, so I’m doing better than I had hoped.

It didn’t take very long to get comfortable playing up to four tables at a time. I’ve played equal amounts of full ring and six-handed, with my results at full ring generally being stronger. In the beginning I made some pretty big mistakes, with the biggest being a start to my experiment at the so-called “cap tables” on Full Tilt where you can only lose a designated amount on each hand; once I got my bearings in the game I switched to the no-cap tables and I’ve seen much better results since then. I also learned to focus on PLO and stay away from its Hi/Lo cousin, as I seem to be worse at reading players there than at the high-only tables.

I’ve gotten my money in really, really bad four or five times and gotten lucky enough to drag a big pot, though the frequency with which I find myself in such spots has dropped drastically over the last few weeks of playing. I’ve also been on the receiving end of that sort of situation many more times, and what I’ve found is that my determination to keep playing only grows every time someone hits an improbable card. Even though the preflop edges between hands are smaller, the average bad player in PLO seems to be at a much bigger disadvantage against a moderately skilled player than in a similar game of hold’em. I chalk that up to the fact that all the action in PLO comes after the flop, when people are much more likely to become married to their sucker draws. (If you don’t believe me, just ask the guy who paid off my royal flush with his nine-high flush.)

The enjoyment I’m getting from playing isn’t from winning a lot of money, because I’m certainly not doing that at this point. What keeps me coming back is the feeling that I’m actually making progress at something where I started from zero. I feel like I learn a lot with every session, regardless of the end result. I’m going back over hand histories on a regular basis before I play to refresh myself on the best and worst aspects of my game, I continue to go back over Hwang’s book here and there, and I’m doing my best to make decisions based more on information than fear. That last point is really the most important one of all, especially if you take the view that poker is just a microcosm of life.

Let’s Be Still

Other than work and my little poker experiment, I’ve mostly been tuning the rest of the world out as much as possible. Our little house on the hill has become an oasis of reason since we got rid of our television service late last year. No more screaming heads arguing over which puppet is the best. No more news tickers that don’t give you news. No more advertisements with louder volume than the program you’ve been watching. No more promos for the same show fives times every half-hour. Living without television has been a very pleasant experience.

I also stopped paying attention to the daily news in November. I can trace that back to a day not long after Obama’s election when I had CNN Headline News on in the background all day while I worked. Unlike a lot of people, I know I’ve never been the sort to keep cable news on in the background. When I was stressed and agitated and a little depressed at the end of the day I had to point the finger at the so-called news. I also had to wonder if people like feeling the way I did at the end of the day, since so many of them are apparently addicted to freaking out over things they can’t control. I realized in the days afterward that reading daily news had the same affect on me, so that habit hit the trash pile, too.

Thanks to these changes I’ve had more time on my hands than in the past. I’ve managed to use some of that time to start doing a little bit of writing for myself again. More often than not I would rather think about writing than actually write, so it’s been a slow journey so far. But part of that journey was returning here to document what’s been going on in my life since January, something I’ve avoided for quite a while. I figured it was time to just sit down and do it, so here it is.

The post Notes from the Hill by Jason Kirk, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Posted in Not Poker, Poker