My Results

I didn't get in half as many hands this month on iPoker, mostly because I spent most of my online poker time playing turbo sit-and-gos on Poker Stars in order to clear a bonus that was about to expire.

I had less than stellar results at both sites, but I guess I can't complain that despite losses at the tables, they both gave me net wins on the month:

Stars: Lost $189 to release $240 bonus and redeemed 10,000 FPPs for $160.  I was about half way towards both the bonus and the redemption award at the start of the month so I'll count this as earning $200 of bonus and cashback.  Net: +$11.

iPoker: Lost $102, released $90 bonus, received $68 rakeback.  Net: +$56

I have to say, though, it certainly doesn't feel like a winning month.

It wouldn't be the same without a graph, would it?

A quick summary of my poker results for May, if you'll allow me to indulge.  Shall we let the graph speak?

What on earth is that meant to tell me?  I started off poorly, then had an awesome recovery followed by a massive tilt-off, then ran hotter then fire and gradually dribbled money away for the second half of the month.

In case you didn't bother to count it, there's a swing of $700 in less than 2,000 hands.  Variance is a bitch.

One thing I do know is that I had better luck at $3/$6 than I did at $2/4, which has to be a significant part of the reason for the net win.

I hardly even touched no limit this month.  The loss was mostly down to one big hand where I flopped a nut flush draw with an inside straight draw and there were three all-ins in front of me.  I'd quite like to have run that one twice like on TV but what can you do?

Are these numbers good?  Who knows... but it's better than a breakeven month, which is all I need to make money.

In addition to the $304 win, I cleared $250 of bonus and received $169 of straight rakeback.  The 25,000 points I earned are worth roughly another $50 when you spend them on stuff and sell that stuff straight away on ebay.  I also won $50 in the VIP freeroll.  So overall, $519 back from the $670.80 I paid in rake, which is equivalent to 76% rackback.  I still love this deal!

So not a bad month at all really I guess

Gala's weekly casino bonuses are still going strong.  I've now played their free £10 on roulette three times, and £10 for blackjack the same.

I also checked out their Three Card Poker game when I received an email alerting me to a £10 bonus for £100 in action.  That's half as much as you need to play on Blackjack or Roulette, and while you'd except the house edge to be higher on that kind of carnival game it would have to be higher than 10% to make this bonus a dud.

There are other weekly bonuses I've not participated in for slots and a scratchcard game, because there's a very good chance that these do pay back less than 90%, and there's just no way of knowing for sure.

However The Wizard of Odds clocks Gala's Three Card Poker paytable at a very playable 3.7% for the main bet (the perfect strategy is ridiculously easy: bet if you have Q64 or better, otherwise fold) and 2.32% on the "Pair Plus" prop bet.  I played them both, and I'm glad I took the side bet because I hit a super hot streak of straights (each paying 6-1) to give me a total profit of £36, plus the £10 donation from Gala for showing up.

I must have been owed something good though after a brutal blackjack session earlier in the week which cost me £30.  That's after offsetting the free £10, so it was a pretty severe £40 loss from 200 hands, playing £1 per hand.  The effect of the bonus money makes it twice as easy to win £30 (as I did the first time I played) than to lose £30.

While the expectation of these quickie bonuses is good, the swings can be wild.  Fortunately, with so many of them to play (now at least 3 per week that I know are profitable), things should start to even out fairly quickly.

Here's the story so far.  I am working on a house edge of 1% for blackjack, 1.35% for European roulette on even money bets only (but 2.7% the first week, when I didn't know about this rule) and 3.7% for Three Card Poker.

Not too far off then.  Keep 'em coming!

I've never played casino roulette before to release a bonus.  There was a juicy risk-free play on Sporting Index's roulette spread game for a while, but for down-and-dirty bonus whoring the house edge on roulette is usually too high to make it worthwhile.

However, I just found a weekly promotion from Gala Casinos that turns roulette into a theoretical winner.  It's only a £10 bonus, and with a £200 play requirement you should expect to lose just over half of that (figuring a single-zero wheel with 2.7% house edge; forget about it with double-zero) but you can play it every Saturday, and you don't need to keep depositing and withdrawing.  You can just transfer funds between casino and sports to activate the bonus code.

There's also a blackjack bonus every Friday (£10 free for £200 in action, worth at least £8 per week) and a bunch of other random bonuses which may or may not be worth taking advantage of.

Look after those small edges and the bankroll will look after itself.

I did activate another bonus for blackjack last week.  However it could only be played at their live dealer casino and once I saw what was involved I gave up pretty quickly.

Don't get me wrong., if you want to chill out and play some cards online it's probably great.  The concept actually works really well.  The video and sound quality is fine, and the cards have jumbo numbers on so you can see exactly what has been dealt for yourself.  Plus, because you can see a human shuffling and dealing the cards, you can be confident that the game is fair.

Furthermore, if you were so inclined, you could count cards extremely easily.  Use a pen and paper if you want - nobody is watching.  You could even play the spotter and call in a friend as the big player to avoid detection (see the movie "21" or any of dozens of documentaries about the MIT teams for how this works).

However, if you just need to grind through 125 hands at the table minimum to clear a £25 bonus (which, relative to the amounts at stake, is much more profitable than card-counting) it's going to take hours.

Clearly computerised gambling is going to be quicker than anything that is run by a human, but live over-the-internet gambling is much slower still.  A dealer in a casino usually doesn't ask if you want to stand on 20, give a long speech and wait 30 seconds when offering insurance against an exposed ace, or announce the name of each winner after every hand.  I found these delays pretty painful.

Back to the roulette.  It really wasn't much effort to play through £200 for my few quid of expected value while I was cranking up a few poker tables.  It took about ten minutes.

The quickest and lowest-variance way, I figured, would be to bet £99 on red, £99 on black and £5.50 on zero.  It works out very nicely with 50p chips in play: for a £203.50 total stake (instantly releasing the £10 bonus) you'd always get back £198 for a guaranteed loss of £5.50, netting you £4.50 profit.

I actually went for a slightly different approach, hoping to avoid instant detection as a bonus abuser.  My deception wouldn't stand up to any kind of scrutiny if a real person examined my play, but at least I wasn't betting on the both sides of the same coin flip, which would surely raise a red flag.

I placed seven £1 outside bets: red, even, 1-18, 1st dozen (1-12), 2nd dozen (13-24), 1st column (1, 4, 7, ..) and 2nd column (2, 5, 8, ...).

This combination meant that although I covered almost every number on the layout - and most of them at least once - it was still gambling.  I'd lose everything on a zero or black 33.

Or so I thought.  To meet the £200 play requirement, I had to spin the wheel with this £7 bet 28 times (plus a slightly smaller bet to make up the difference) so the odds of hitting a wipeout number were high.  Eventually a zero came - and with it an unexpected lesson in European roulette rules.

I was amazed to see £1.50 returned to me from what I thought was a completely losing bet.  Turns out that you actualy get half back on the even money bets when a zero is spun.

Shows how much I know about roulette, I've never heard of that before.  I don't know how widespread this in in European casinos (Wizard of Odds has some information about this, and some variations) but I know Ashley Revell wasn't going to get half his life savings back if a zero came.

This is fantastic news.  The rule reduces the house edge on even money bets from 2.7% to 1.35% and increases the value of this bonus from £4.60 to £7.30 - assuming that you only make even money bets.  Which, of course, I did from that point on.

It's also opened my eyes to the possibility of exploiting roulette bonuses at other online casinos that offer the same rules.  It's still going to be tough to find a beatable game with a 1.35% house edge, but it's twice as feasible as I thought it was.

For what it's worth, I made £8 today.  It's not really worth getting excited about, but with several small bonuses available at the moment, my money is working harder for me in the Bank of Gala than any bank I can think of.

It's awesome to break even.

I'm serious.  I mentioned this before - if I can hold my own and not lose any money at the table on the iPoker network, I can make money over the course of the month from bonus awards and rakeback.

I could only be happier with how my bumpy ride through April ended if I thought I was good enough to actually win money in these games.

Never mind the variance (it's a $400 swing from the lowest to highest point) - I lost 93 cents.  How much closer to breaking even could I possibly get?

When you add everything up, this puts me up over $400 on the month; $170 in bonus already released, $115 in rakeback to come, a $100 win from a VIP freeroll in the bank and enough player points earned to put me a quarter of the way to redeeming for another iPod nano (figure it's worth about $30; I got £90 for the last one on eBay).

The freeroll is a $2,000 prize pool, usually with about 100 runners making it worth about $20 per week.  It's the first time I've made the money, and I wasn't sure whether to count it in my monthly haul but as the amount I won is about the same as the EV of playing in it every week I figured I probably should.

I was an overall loser on fixed-limit games but an overall winner on no-limit - but somehow the two numbers cancelled each other out almost exactly.

That 6.76% of hands won figure on $2/$4 is a bit worrying.  Yes, I play tight.  No, I wouldn't expect to win 10% of hands in a full-ring game (I'd hope to win larger than average pots to offset this).  But I need to work out whether I've just had some bad luck, or if I've been giving up pots too easily.

A bit more analysis on Poker Tracker also shows that when you total up all the hands that I called a raise on the big blind, I lost more money than I would have done if I'd simply folded every one of them.  I'm profitable when I re-raise (thankfully - it's almost always with premium cards!) but I need to take more care when it costs an extra small bet to play mediocre cards out-of-position.  I'm happy to have found the leak so that I can try to do something about it.

However it's a reassuring start to the first month that I've played no-limit on iPoker for anything more than a few short sessions.  The sample size is still pretty insignificant, but the row is green and that's about as much as I could ask for.

Let's see if I can't win a few cents this month.

Here's an impressive looking graph from my limit hold'em play last month.

Sadly, it only tells half the story.  I really needed that big upswing to get back even.

The yellow lines on this graph show the end of each month that I've been playing $2/$4 and $3/$6 on the iPoker network. 

Things did not start well, so "about even" is not only a good result relative to how I'd begun, but it also seems to be a very good result in this game.  The tables are overrun by rock-tight bonus-grinders, many of whom play little more than 10% of the hands they're dealt.

As that's exactly what I've been trying to do, it would be hypocritical to call them nits.  Hyponitical, perhaps.

I have to assume that the regulars I see all the time and assume to be professionals are all well-compensated for their efforts because among the familiar names - all of whom are all logging tens of thousands of hands every month - almost nobody is actually making money at the tables.

For me, the extra money I get is 25% rakeback and a $10 bonus for every 1,000 player points.  So while Poker Tracker says that I'm about even, my balance says that I'm actually $766 up from where I started.

I'm also getting close to being able to cash in my player points for an ipod nano.  I don't want it, but their store has a fairly limited selection and it'll sell on ebay.  Call it another $100 in added value, because I should get there in a week or so.

So in total that's $866, and Poker Tracker tells me that I've paid $1460 in rake over nearly 16,000 hands.  Overall, that's equivalent to nearly 60% rakeback, which ain't bad at all.  I'd get a slightly better deal if I played more, too.

With this level of payback, you could sustain a loss rate of 1 big bet per 100 hands and still break even (the actual figure is -$5.41 per hundred, based on my data at $2/$4 and $3/$6).  So if you are able to lose money no quicker than that, there's a clear profit potential from playing poker under these conditions.

Until recently, I was losing a little faster than that: 1.25BB/100.

So, given my sudden change in fortune this month, is is possible that I suddenly started doing something right?

I really can't say for sure, it's much too early to know whether I'm simply on a nice long hot streak.  I'm still finding it hard to believe that I have actually won it all back, and given that I can't recall seeing more than two long-term winning players in this game the whole time I've played it, I'm a long way away from even thinking that I could be the third.

But I did make one change to the way I played this game, which was to adhere to strict criteria about not only which tables I played at, but also the seat I sat in.

In fact my rule is pretty crude: A player makes my buddy list by playing more than 30% of hands, and if I can't sit within two seats to the left of a buddy, I don't sit down.

30% of hands might not sound excessively loose, but the typical range for strong players in this game is more like 15% so looking for anyone playing at twice as many hands as this, and then making sure I had position on them for the majority of the hands I would play, seemed like a good place to start.

That's it.  I hoped that improving my game selection would help me lose less quickly so that I could grind out a little profit from bonuses and rakeback.  If it can actually turn me into a winning player, that would be simply stunning.

It could all turn around again this month though.  Watch this space, graph fans...

I've given up at the $27s, at least for a while.

I'm on an absolutely horrible downswing, and for as much as I genuinely think I'm running abnormally poorly I'm just not confident enough that it's the only reason I'm leaking money at hyperspeed.  So, I'm going to drop back down for a while and try to win enough to take another shot.

It's pretty difficult to draw any conclusions from what's happened this month because I really didn't get to play enough tournaments to find any reliable trends, even though (sadly) the recent downward trend in my bankroll is pretty clear.

I can believe that I might not have enough of an edge to beat the rake at this level - or even any edge at all over the field - but I simply can't believe the later stages of this trainwreck graph could be representative of my long-term loss rate.

I still thought it would be worth trying to correlate my luck against my results, using a refined version of the technique I developed earlier in the week.  The graph below runs from the start of October until last night.

The green line shows profit over time and was generated by PokerTracker as normal.  Then I used a pretty crude copy and paste to superimpose the blue line for my homebrewed luck factor, which I had further mangled to only generate a point on the graph on the very last hand I played in each tournament.

There's no particular scale for the blue line on the y-axis, and it's not a perfect match but it lines up fairly well.

Most of the sharp ups and downs are visible on both lines and overall I'd say that about half the time the movement of the two lines seems to be in harmony, but of course this isn't always the case.  However, while I rarely had losing streaks during spells of good luck I did have some winning streaks during spells of bad luck.

If I had to suggest a hypothesis based on these graphs, I'd say that when playing the $16s luck did affect my results but at times I was able to overcome bad luck and still win anyway.  On the other hand, once I moved up to the $27s (just before the sharp upswing on both lines) my good and bad luck has been the predominant influence on my actual results.  In other words, my ability played a more significant role at the lower levels.

In other words, there's definitely a chance that I'm getting pwned at the $27s.

However it is only a very small sample and, unfortunately, gathering more data could be pretty expensive.

What type of graph is this?  I have no idea.

I asked Excel for a line graph, but it looks like it doesn't want to play ball, even though the x-axis data definitely is taken from continuous dates and times, with values to the nearest second.

I guess it'll do.  It's not like I'm going to ask the bloody paperclip what went wrong.

This is the output from my messing about with my PokerTracker database in order to try to quantify how lucky or unlucky I've been lately.

Since moving up a limit in the turbo sit-and-gos my results have streaked all over the place.  I started off with a $500 upswing which came from results that were almost good enough to put me on the Battle of the Planets leaderboard - but not quite.

This excellent run was immediately followed by a $1000 downswing.  It all happened very quickly, without me (knowingly) changing the way I played or the way I picked games.

There's actually very little game selection you can do when a sit-and-go fills up in less than a minute and seating is randomised, but as a rule of thumb if I see a dozen tables in the lobby all with the same 4 or 5 players sitting at them the chances are those players all know what they're doing so I'll hang back a few minutes and wait for their games to start before I try some new tables.

I thought I was used to the ups and downs of playing turbo tournaments, but these swings seemed unusually big - and not just because of the higher stakes involved.  That $1000 loss on the $27s is equivalent to about $600 on the $16s, and the worst spell I've ever had has been a $400 loss before starting to claw it back.

In fact, it's only because the results were so drastic that I suspected I'd been unusually unfortunate and wasn't just getting crushed by other players in this game.

I'm not going to get complacent.  When you seem to be constantly finishing just outside the money, or only make 3rd place the times you do get there, or clock up more last place results than you've had in a long time there's a good chance there's some other reason for the bad results than just luck.

However 14 straight sit-and-gos without finishing in the money is a clear personal worst.  An actual monkey should get better results than that, as long as he thumps on the mouse often enough not to get timed out.

My dilemma was that I wanted to stick with it and ride out the bad streak but unless I could somehow show myself that I was statistically running bad (and therefore stood a chance of holding my own with "average luck") I was going to have to move back down.

I generated the graph above by pulling out of PokerTracker all the hands where I was all-in pre-flop, either raising first and getting called or calling someone else's push.  In turbo tournaments the blinds get big quickly, so you have to take flips like this a lot.

The query I wrote only looked at hands with two players at showdown (about 6% of my all-ins were 3-way or worse) and ignored split pots.  There seems to be a quirk in the PokerTracker database when one player is forced all in on a blind so that it doesn't know whether he "won" or not (it treats the small stack surviving and the big stack losing less than a big blind as a split pot) so I excluded those hands too (another 5% of my hands).

From this I plugged each hand in turn into poker-eval, grabbed my equity value and used this to plot a cumulative graph of my performance ahead of or behind expectation.

This is a similar concept to Sklansky bucks, but I treated every all-in situation as having the same unit value rather than counting how much money was at stake each time.  Converting the amount of tournament chips won or lost on each hand to an amount of real money would just be way too complex - all I cared about was whether I was actually having a bad run of luck, or spewing off my chips to superior players.

The massive slump at the end of the graph is somewhat reassuring, although to be honest I'd rather have my grand back.

The ups and downs in November certainly correspond to my leaderboard-challenging run followed by the doomswitch-fuelled plunge.  I moved up on November 5th, which is the 6th vertical line from the right - the one that reaches the highest point on the graph.  The values on the y-axis aren't much use, but the distance of the points from zero and from the previous highs and lows gives you some idea of the extent of each hot and cold streak.

In fact, I would theorise that if you wanted to assess your "luck factor" at any given point in time, it is the gradient of the line on the graph at that point which matters, not the value at that point.  If you're running good, the line is going upwards - regardless of where it started.

So, calculus fans, we need to find d luck by d time.

But I asked Claire how to differentiate my graph and she just laughed at me.  Apparently I'd need a formula to do that.

I'm not actually sure whether attempting to capture an abstract concept like luck on a two-dimensional chart is something I should be focusing my efforts on, or just a brief mad scientist moment.  Surely if I could find a formula for luck, it would cease to be luck by definition and the world would implode.  Muahahaha?

Nevertheless, I did manage to tidy the graph up a bit by removing the date values from the x-axis and plotting results hand by hand instead.

It still looks like it was drawn on blotting paper, but at least it shows what I needed to see in order for me to carry on possibly throwing money away playing poker at this level.

Good luck me?

I'm such a sucker for a tiered loyalty program.

The number of turbo sit-and-gos I play on Poker Stars each month tends to mean that I can just about retain SilverStar, and if I'm running a little short of points as the end of the month approaches I'll make an effort to play a bit more in order to keep that precious status.

I don't know why I bother really.   I worked out the actual value of doing this is about $12 per month.

<show working>

The benefit of SilverStar (1500 base points per month) over BronzeStar (no qualification required) is that your FPPs (the points you can spend, not the VIP points that determine your status) accumulate 50% faster at the higher level.  Once you have that level you keep it right through to the end of the following month.

So the difference between earning your first 1500 points in month as a BronzeStar player vs SilverStar is 750 FPPs.  One FPP is worth about 1.6 cents, so those extra points are worth about $12.

</show working>

Like I said, I'm a sucker for it.  But you know that without people like me these schemes just wouldn't exist.

I do wish I hadn't bothered going out of my way to keep my status at the end of last month though.

PokerStars are currently running an promotion where you get a bonus if you increase your VIP level this month.

If you upgrade from bronze to silver, you get $50, so if I'd actually dropped back to BronzeStar last month this would be an easy $50 for not really any more play than I'd usually put in.  Much better than the $12 worth of player points from maintaining that level.

But now I need to bypass silver (1,500 points) and get to gold (4,000 points) for a $100 bonus.

It's not even real money, it's a bonus in your poker account that you then have to earn 7x the dollar amount in points to unlock.  But the thing is, I just can't say no.

$100 for free, and all I have to do is play about two and a half times as much as normal, and then make sure I play again next month too?  Sure, sign me up.

Well, I started off thinking that's how it was going to be, probably looking at 3-4 hours a day to stay on top of it, but Claire convinced me I should take the opportunity to move up levels (which will earn points twice as fast, so I don't have to play for as long).

I was some way off the latest win goals I'd set myself before taking another shot at the next level, but in the absense of having the stats to back up a decision it does help to have someone to blame if it all goes wrong. So I'm going to go for it.

I never wrote about what happened last time I tried this though.

Everyone loves a graph, and this one has even been annotated to add trend lines as I saw fit.  You can even click on it for a high def version.  You lucky, lucky people.

This is my entire PokerStars single-table SNG history for 2008 so far (apart from steps, which can't be measured the same way).

I've marked four zones on the graph.  Starting from the left, the first section is all $16 tournaments, and I was winning.  Then I moved up to the $27s and crashed and burned.  Next, I dropped back down to the $16s but played 6 at a time instead of the 4 I was used to, where I carried on losing - albeit slightly slower.  Finally I dropped back down to 4-tabling and things seem to have settled back down to how they used to be.

I'd only given myself $500 to play with at the higher level, which lasted just over 200 tournaments.  That isn't really enough to know for sure whether I was getting killed by the game or I was just running bad.  I'm still optimistic that it was the latter, but the downward trend seems pretty consistent after the initial spike.

The thing that really stands out when I look at those results is the number of times I cashed for the least possible money.

Overall I finished in the money almost as often as I did with the $16s (38% vs 40%) but on the $27s I had more 3rd place finishes than the total of my 1sts and 2nds put together!  With 1st paying two and a half times as much as 3rd, that's going to make quite a difference to my overall return, and I'll need to watch closely this time around to try to see if there's a reason I'm a habitual bronze medalist.

What surprised me most though was the difference between my results on the $16s when 6-tabling versus 4-tabling.

I really didn't think I'd be giving up too much by playing two more tables - hoping, eventually, to be able to move up to 8 or more tables at a time and increase my volume before increasing my stake.  I accepted I might not win as quickly if my concentration was being spread thinner, but I certainly didn't expect to suddenly be losing money at the same rate I used to be winning it.

The reason I dropped right back to four $16s at a time was to see if I'd still got what it takes to beat that game.  It's not a huge sample size (which is why I was hesitant to move up just yet) but things seemed to change almost instantly.  The graph appears to be going in the right direction and the last magenta line is virtually the same gradient as the first one.

So I don't think I'm broken, but apparently four tables is as many as I can handle.

Anyway, the heat is on and the time is right for me to play my game.  Going for gold, four-tabling the $27s.  Watch this space.

I'd played dozens of step tournaments to get this far and this was my first shot at getting something out of the system: I'd made it to Step 4 of a Poker Stars WCOOP Satellite.

With steps, you're never done until you either win a top prize or lose.  However unlike most of the live event satellites, the WCOOP Steps offers a choice of routes, some of which are much more achievable.

Instead of being stuck on a path that takes 6 steps to win your way into a $5,200 package ($7.50, $27, $82, $215, $700 and $2100) you can branch out at Step 3 or 4 to play directly for a $330 or $530 tournament seat.

I'd decided to go for the $530 route, with the intention of unregistering and keeping the W$ value for future speculation - or possibly towards buying into smaller WSOP or EPT events - should I get there.

In a 9 handed Step 4 sit-and-go worth $215 to enter, 3 players win a $530 seat and 1 gets $210 cash.  Everyone else leaves with nothing.

In fact, from WCOOP Step 3 onwards there's no backtracking.  You can't fall back to Step 2, only repeat the same level, move forward or lose completely.  This structure is designed to attract higher stakes players to buy in directly at the $82 and $215 levels.  It seems to work, and it can make these games pretty tough.

Anyway enough suspense.  My first crack at Step 4 was a terrific victory and will surely be an inspriation for other weak-tighties playing way out of their comfort zone.

I played like a rock, as did just about everyone else.  For example, how often do you see AJ check behind on the river with a board of TT7AA and a flush possible?  You really think the only hand that calls a bet there is pocket tens?

Then with just T1460 left in chips and facing a T300 big blind next hand, something beautiful happened.  Two monster hands and a big stack who felt like taking a crack.

The double bust out threw me into the top 3 and a seat to Sunday's $3m guaranteed event, apparently.  The first time I've ever made it out of a Step series alive!

It took about 1.5 seconds before I'd unregistered and was counting my W$.

You need wait no longer.  The long-anticipated results graph is here.  This is how my live poker experience in Las Vegas went.

As you can see, I was some way off my target of 100 hours played. In fact, I logged 64.5 hours, in 32 sessions at 14 different poker rooms.

Almost all games were $1/$2 no-limit Hold'em (only Caesars Palace and Palms were $1/$3, for a total of 2.5 hours).

Each point on the graph marks the end of a session - I only ever recorded wins and losses when I cashed out of a game.

However, because of the way I approached game selection and bankroll management, there won't be many big swings within a session that aren't shown here.

I always bought in for $200 and topped up whenever I dropped below $150.  Usually I'd just pull out another $100 bill if the table allowed it (some games have a $200 cap, some are $300) so I'd be playing anywhere between $150 and $250, except when I was winning.

If the game looked particularly soft and other players were already sitting deep, I'd bring another $100 into play as soon as I'd spotted where a big payoff might come from.

Usually, I'd hit and run after a win of $100 or more.  Spit all you like, but I needed a reason to stick around after taking down a big pot.  I especially didn't like to be sitting with $400 when other players still covered me, and particularly if I thought those players knew what they were doing.

If a player was very drunk, or steaming after a big loss, or just plain awful I'd stick around.  Contrary to popular belief, this isn't always the case and when it wasn't I was off to another game.

If I thought the table sucked, I'd always try to hang around for an hour for the experience, and to make sure I'd got it right before moving on.  But if I wasn't getting action from a table of rocks - or just because I hadn't seen a hand for an hour and the whole table went "oooooh" the first time I raised - I'd get the hell out at the first opportunity.

This "cardroom crawl" approach is pretty inefficient in terms of hands per hour, but that was my plan and I stuck to it.  In fact, until the last weekend, I hardly had to wait on a list at all.

At about 30hrs, I did indeed win over $400 in under an hour.  Pocket deuces, baby, and after hours of pain it was finally my turn to be on the right end of top two pair against a small set.

The graph does not include the $200 lucky seat jackpot I won at Palms.  I really didn't know whether to put this in but decided against it.  I still have no idea what happened, but I'm sure it had nothing to do with my cards.  I may as well have won it in a swipe-and-win.

If I'd hit a high hand bonus, I would probably have counted those on the graph - especially if it was paid with chips that ended up in play.  After all, the $1 jackpot drop taken out of of every pot is included in those numbers above (as well as dealer tips and cocktails) so when it pays off I guess I should count it too.

However, apart from a quite exciting flopped open-ended straight flush draw at Luxor (the highest hand each hour wins $100) I didn't get anywhere close.  I really wanted to spin the wheel at Excalibur one last time before the room closed, but it wasn't to be.

So, the overall profit of $635 puts my win rate for the trip just ever so slightly under $10/hr.  My "career" win rate over 160 hours is a little higher.

Make of all this whatever you like.  It's really not much of a sample size still.  All these numbers tell me is that I spent half the trip losing and then went on a heater.  Not as useful as I'd hoped it would be.

Since Poker Tracker 3 was finally released a couple of weeks ago I've been dying to try out it's graphing features, hoping that it would mean I'd be able to stop using my clunky Excel spreadsheet to keep track of tournament results and let it do all the hard work for me instead.

Indeed it does look very promising, converting my old effort (which I used in this post) into this piece of exquisite chart art (click for full size):

However, getting to this stage wasn't particularly easy.  The database conversion tool would not run (reporting a lost database connection after about ten minutes every time I tried) and even though I'd tried to keep all my hand histories and tournament summaries in anticipation of PT3, it turns out I didn't have a complete set.

I had still been loading my results into PT2 as well as keeping them in the spreadsheet.  It's not that I don't trust the older Poker Tracker, it's just that it could only tell me how great I've been playing with numbers.  For as much as I love the raw stats, if you can't show it on a graph, it didn't happen.

The data had tallied exactly for months, so nothing less than a perfect database migration would be good enough.

To get there I ended up exporting my hand histories from PT2 into text files and loading them into a fresh database on PT3.  This actually isn't such a bad way to do it if you want some control over the data you bring into the new version.  You can put a filter on the hands that are exported, so for now I selected only Poker Stars and only the turbo SNGs I cared about.  I left out the couple of hundred EPT Steps that I'd played earlier in the year that had been stinking up my results as well as about 200,000 datamined hand histories on iPoker that I didn't need any more.

About 20 minutes later, it had almost worked.

1,029 tournaments is the magic number, and this added up, but why on earth did it think 11 of them were different?  They should all be no limit!

I wasn't going to put up with that, but not to worry.  I put on my robe and database wizard hat and got down to business, uttering the secret magic words:

UPDATE tourney_holdem_summary
SET id_tourney_type = 200
WHERE id_tourney_type = 0

After that, all was right in the world.

So, what better time than now for a bit of results-oriented analysis.  A thousand hands is getting into the realms of a significant sample size and the signs are still fairly good.  A 13.3% ROI from turbo SNGs is fairly satisfying as far as I'm concerned.  $2193 profit is also something I can take to the bank, even if it is a bit depressing when the graph reminds me that I've been going mad at these sit-and-gos for what equates to an actual a win rate of about $2 per tournament.

I play four at a time and each set usually takes about 45 minutes to complete.  I could try playing more, but I already struggle a bit the times that I get short handed on all four tables, so giving myself more things to think about at a critical time is probably a bad idea.  There's a little extra value to be gained from player points, deposit bonuses and buying tournament dollars but even so (assuming this is sustainable) I won't be giving up the day job for what would be - at best - about $12 per hour.

This is going to be a disruptive month with my trip to Las Vegas and Laughlin around the corner, but if I get chance for a few serious sessions I think it's about time I took a shot at the next level up ($25+$2) and see how I get on.  Good luck to me.

I thought it would be virtually impossible to reach a prize-worthy position in any of the new PokerStars Battle of the Planets sit-and-go leaderboards playing only single table tournaments, but obviously I just forgot how great I am.

Seriously though, look at this unbelievable run of results I needed to even get up to 8th place: 7 x 1st, 5 x 2nd and 3 x 3rd.

That's 15 in-the-money finishes out of 20 tournaments.  Call it a game of skill if you like, but that kind of form takes more than a little luck.

You can see from my profit graph that I've never had a streak quite like it before.  Isn't it pretty?

I know there's bound to be an almighty downswing waiting around the corner, but I can brag while it's going well can't I?

Each Battle of the Planets league ends on Saturday night and resets on Sunday morning so there's still two full days of play left and my position certainly isn't safe.  504 points was enough for both 7th and 8th place last week, but right now 8th place is the best I can possibly get with that score.

If I manage to stay in to the top ten, I'll win some cash (it's $80 for 8th) and a ticket to the monthly $50,000 freeroll.  It's a triple shootout format (729 players max) but with eight different leagues, two "orbits" in each and ten players winning a ticket each week, in a four-week month that's 640 tickets given away for the tournament.  Some players will win two tickets and some winners won't turn up so the value of the freeroll ticket must be at least $100.

If I don't hang on to the giddy heights of top ten stardom, there's still some prize money for finishing in the top 30.  I should have a pretty good shot at that at least.

I realised - completely by accident when I happened to load the right number of tournament summaries into Poker Tracker at the right time - that I'd recently reached $10,000 spent on these turbo SNG entries.  I only mention it because that same money (if I actually had it all in the same place at the same time) would get me one World Series of Poker Main Event entry.

Doing things this way involves a little less variance, though.  Sure, I'm not going to win ten million but I'm also not going to lose ten grand all to one suckout.  It'd take 625 different suckouts.

Here's the magic stats:

I still can't believe that this is close to being a reliable sample size.  My last eight results alone (1st, 1st, 2nd, 4th, 3rd, 3rd, 3rd, 1st) pushed the overall ROI up from the 16.6% shown here to 18.4%.  Maybe when I've played a few thousand I'll have a little more confidence in the numbers.

EDIT: 5 hours to go and I'm 10th.  Gonna be close.

EDIT: Sodding eleventh.  A big fuck you to "$tr8t Hu$tla" who not only has a shit screen name, he also waited until the very last minute to score 521 points.  I hope I get the chance to bust you soon!

A week ago, Poker Stars launched their "Battle of the Planets" leaderboard week for sit-and-go tournaments. You get points whenever you finish in the money, then your best blocks of 20 results (the "low orbit") or 100 results (the "high orbit") determine your league position.

As I happened to be playing quite a few SNGs at the moment anyway, it's looked to be a nice free shot at some extra money.

My first set of results is now in: not even close.

The likely difficulty for single table sit-and-go players like myself is that although the leagues are divided by entry fee you also have to compete against players in the 18-man and 27-man tournaments, and they receive nearly twice as many points for a first place finish as you do for winning a 9-man SNG.

Of course, whatever you play it would take a pretty insane run of luck to win one of these things, but five or six first places in 3-table tournaments from a block of 20 seems much more achievable than ten or eleven single table victories in the same period - that would be first place at least every other game - to get the same number of points.

ryan422323, this week's winner in the "Earth - low orbit" (blocks of 20 for $10-$19 tournaments - the level I'm playing at), looks like a losing player who suddenly got lucky at the right time. It happens.

As expected, Sharkscope reveals his most recent results are from a mixture of 18-, 27- and 45-man sit and go tournaments (although the 45-man results don't count for this leaderboard - that's apparently enough players to be considered a real tournament).

Second place finisher jellycz has had a rather better tournament career, with Sharkscope showing a long term return on investment of 19% across his PokerStars tournaments.

Still, he would have had to do much better than that over the block of 20 that counted towards his leaderboard position.

In fact we can work out just what kind of return is needed to win the Battle of the Planets from the final points totals.

Regardless of the buy-in, the points you receive are based on the prize distribution rather than the actual dollar amounts won. The number of points is the same as the prize money would be for a $10 buy-in. For example, first place in a 9-man SNG gets 45 points - although you actually win $67.50 for a $15+1 stake or $112.50 for a $25+2, the prize is always 4.5x your stake. First place in a 27-man SNG wins 8x the stake, so you receive 80 points.

So, with 637 points the winner would have received $637 in real money if he had played 20 sit-and-go tournaments that cost $10 each. That's an amazing 219% ROI! Second place with 552 points is still-insane 176% ROI.

My hottest block landed me 369 points, with 11 in-the-money finishes out of 20 (5 x 1st, 4 x 2nd, 2 x 3rd). That's a fiendishly good 85% ROI, and I finished 256th.