I’m an analytical (nerdy) kind of guy so I do love making spreadsheets. When I started playing Live Tournament Poker I wanted to record all my results so that I could see how I was improving (or not). Having a look back over my results today it’s a good time for a bit of a review because it’s been almost 2 years. Having now played 243 Live Tournaments over that period I’ve got a good chunk of data to look at.
Today I put my Cumulative Live Poker Results into a chart because that helps me to visualize my performance and see things I might miss from raw data. The first couple of take-aways I have is that I am reminded that for the first year I was getting some wins but remained below the Break-Even Line. The Good News is that all my profit has come fairly consistently in the second year where I played more regularly. The Bad News is that over the course of the last year I haven’t really improved and I might even be tapering off a bit...
In asking myself why I dug a bit deeper. For the first year I played mostly just 2 venues. My small “Home Club Game” is usually just 1 or 2 tables each week and I got to know most of the players fairly well. I do well there and I struggled with the second, larger venue (typically 5-6 tables) where I didn’t know all the players well and I was often moved around different tables during each tournament. That larger competition was definitely tougher for me. I was only playing once or twice a week in that first year and in hindsight I was kind of treading water while experimenting and developing my game.
Around a year ago I had a bit of a breakthrough win at the larger venue and took on a third venue, which was another small pub game that still had decent prize money. I quickly became a strong competitor there and things started to kick off for me. I had a bit of a draw-down around November 2023 and a flat spot in February 2023 but its otherwise been a pretty consistent incline that I am fairly happy with.
A few months back I also tried to swap out some of my large venue appearances for a different large venue (4-5 tables) which has a fresh player base and a new structure that I think suits me better. However, I’ve needed to adjust and it’s still been a challenge. While my progress remains good, it’s been less steep and the chart has more of a saw-tooth look to it. This venue change has increased my Variance because the prize structure is a lot more “Top Heavy”. If you win, the payouts are much better but if you make final table and come 6th you get nothing.
Ideally I’d like to see this chart doing a bit of a hockey stick thing in year 3 and beyond. Maybe not exponential but having a bit of an upward parabolic shape to it would be nice. I’m looking over my game and strategy to try to identify what I need to do to get to that next level. I have some ideas that I might try to phase in, but I also don’t want to mess with a winning formula too much. Any suggestions?