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04-23-2007, 01:26 AM
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Pooh-Bah Post! 2/3 Irrelevant, 1/3 Poker-related
Hey, I just realized I've hit the Pooh-Bah post count recently. A little background before I give some advice from my SNG experience... I'm Derek and 23 years old. From Summer of '05 to Winter of '06 my only major source of income was online poker. I started off playing a mix of Limit Hold'Em and NL SNGs. Like many others, I tired of Limit after a couple months and I've never looked back. I didn't really study SNGs until Spring of '06, and my studying started from reading this STT forum regularly and purchasing SNG-PT.
Fast-forward to my last months with online poker as my only major source of income... a LOT of personal depressing crap. If you only want to read my SNG advice, skip like a billion paragraphs Last Fall I was still in college and it was supposed to be my final year there (I already finished my senior year but needed another 15 credits to graduate). I was having a lot of personal issues and was mentally unstable at the time. Mostly, I was very anxious and depressed. I was smoking pot pretty much every day and I was enjoying it less and less while it took its toll on me. It definitely made me more anxious and paranoid overall. I was seeing psychiatrists and they weren't doing me much good either. There were somedays where I would lie in my bed all day and do nothing but think about ways to end my life. I even considered calling my dealer who I knew also had guns and ending my life that way. Thankfully I didn't do anything that drastic. I told my parents how miserable I was and I couldn't get anything together, and my dad told me, "It's okay if you don't finish this semester". He drove over, helped me pack my stuff, and we drove back home. A week later I drove back to the college to finish my last errands - had to fill out some forms for dropping out, return my keys to the landlord, etc etc. I was living in Rochester NY at home. I've hated living in that area for the past few years (it's a really miserable area in every respect) and always wanted to move somewhere like Oregon or California. My best friend in college (who already graduated), Jon, asked me to move in with him in California. At the time he was living with his parents. But before I could move to California, I had to take better care of myself while at home. My dad helped me get setup with an outpatient program to deal with my issues. I felt like nothing would ever help me, and this was no different. I dropped out of the program after the first day. I then setup an appointment with a psychiatrist I used to see a few years ago in Rochester. He prescribed me more meds and they had a really frustrating side-effect: no more erections. I tapered myself off it and never wanted to go back on meds again. I've been on dozens and I either get really [censored] side-effects, it numbs me out (no more hardcore depression, but no more excitement or happiness), or it frankly does nothing for me. While I was still waiting for plans to finalize in California, I spent the majority of my time video-gaming. SNES, NES, N64, Starcraft, and UT2K4 every day for the majority of the day. Video games were all I felt like I could enjoy anymore. So I totally obsessed over them. It wasn't necessarily a bad obsession - I stopped feeling depressed and very rarely had depressing thoughts anymore. So yeah, video games saved my life and all that. A few weeks before moving out, Jon was telling me he doesn't think he can afford living on his own yet anymore because of some recent family issues, so it would be another few months before he could afford it. I originally was going to wait until Spring-ish and then move to California, but I hated just waiting at home in Rochester for that long. (I also had another friend in California who I was excited to meet up with again). So I dropped out of School in November of '06 and moved to California in mid-January of this year. One of my first goals after moving here in LA, CA was to find stable income. I couldn't take the instability of online poker anymore. My other California friend, Rana, recommended me some staffing agencies. I was great with computers and a very quick learner, so I got excellent results on their typing tests and general knowledge tests. But since I didn't have much formal experience in the workplace (thanks to online poker) and I just recently moved from NY it was tough to land a solid job. I had a few temporary jobs that lasted until the company finished whatever promotion they were doing or whatever. I quickly got myself into debt trying to pay for everything without a stable job. I ended up trying out multiple staffing agencies to see what they could find for me. I kept telling them I really need a long-term job, but I'll take anything they could find for me. About a month ago I demonstrated my awesome computer skills (XP, Word, Excel, and generic typing tests) in another staffing agency, told them my frustrations with the past one, and they assured me this would be different. Thankfully it was. The next day they had me working in an office setting to make spreadsheets for a company. I've been working there M-F 8 hours a day for the past month and it really is the best thing that's happened to me in a long time. There were many things I didn't like about my online poker job: 1) No stable income. If rent was due soon and I was having a bad streak, too bad. 2) I was already having mental instability and gambling was the last thing I needed in my life at the time. 3) I never meet or see anyone I play with. It's just me clicking a bunch of times, making thousands of decisions an hour, and making a little money. 4) NetTeller froze a lot of my monies. I'm still waiting on that one, like all of us. At my office job, I'm now a "productivity analyst", like the Bobs of Office Space. I collect information from other workers on how each department is producing and blahblahblah, and organize the information into spreadsheets to discuss with my bosses. My work isn't terribly interesting, but I'm happy having a stable job working with computers, and I love the people I work with. If it weren't for my fellow co-workers, I wouldn't like my job as much. It's always been the case for me that my favorite jobs were the ones where I like who I worked with. AND FINALLY ONTO POKER STUFF I still play poker occasionally, I just no longer need to rely on it for income. My advice on those struggling with SNGs... 1) Remember the times when you've given beats, not just when you take them. This should help remind you to just keep making the +EV plays and in the long-run everything will work out. 2) Stop checking your stats (ITM, ROI, etc) after every session. The long-run is not 25, 50 or 100 SNGs and this constant checking can alter your playing mindset (i.e. when you're running bad). So when to check? Depends on how regularly you play. I'm not to great on this one honestly, I end up checking like every three sessions even though I know the stats won't tell me much and I don't play that often. 3) At passiver tables with less pre-flop raising and more limping, also limp more hands early on. Your implied odds are HUGE at these tables! I assume everyone here knows how to play the pockets early on, pretty basic: limping and calling raises with the smaller ones, raising with the bigger ones. I also limp various suited connectors in middle-late position on these tables. You are NOT looking to hit one-pair on these flops and play a big pot. If you cannot get away from marginal hands, just fold pre-flop. If you cannot stop yourself from chasing a flush or OESD to decent sized bets, just fold pre-flop. Basically, if you're not confident with your post-flop play, just fold the marginal hands pre-flop and don't take this advice. When you hit two-pair or better with your hand, some donkey will follow you all-in to the river in many cases with whatever trash. 4) When you hit big, think about how to maximize your hand's value for a second. Depending on the players, stacks, ranges of their hands, and texture of the flop, you should play differently. It would take me forever to go over all the details here. In some cases it's better to lead-bet and 3-bet all-in. In some cases it's better to check-raise all-in. In some cases it's better to check-call to river. 5) When you have 8-10x BB you are NOT necessarily that desperate. To make it to ITM you're usually not going to make it there from a few blind steals. You're probably going to have to get all-in a couple times and win. Basically, although SNG-PT will tell you many hands are +EV pushes, it is not the end-all-be-all of the game. It cannot factor in future plays, for instance, such as picking up a better hand, or the donks knocking each other out. There are still many situations where you should follow SNG-PT advice and easily shove a very wide range, and I don't feel like detailing them all now. Just be aware you do not need to always follow SNG-PT just because it's a +EV push. I've been a fairly quiet member in this community. I mostly just post responses to hands here and then do whatever else to spend my free time. If anyone wants to discuss whatever, hit me up on AIM: EscapePlan9. Also IM me if you want to play me online in any SNES games. 
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