Eric Rizen Lynch

Another Saturday Update (w/o Ask Rizen)

I haven't really gotten any new questions this week. I still have a bit of a back log but I'm going to skip Ask Rizen this week and get back to it next week. For now I just want to make an update. This month I'm actually making a pretty big transition in the way I approach poker and the time I spend at the tables.

For those of you that don't know, I'm going to give a Cliff's Notes version of my online poker history. When I first started out it was in 2003 after the Chris Moneymaker thing and right around the time the first WPT episodes were airing. Poker was getting a lot more popular and I started going to home games with my friends for like $20 every week or so. I had a lot of fun, found out about Party Poker, ran my $50 deposit up to $200 real quick on a hot streak playing limit hold em (extremely poorly I might add). I got lucky to run good at first then had a friend that knew way more about the game than I did that pointed me to a few poker books and sat at tables with me online and coached me a little bit until I was actually good enough I was beating the games. I ran that $200 up and starting playing bigger games, all the way up to 15/30 limit eventually. I never made a ton of money, but enough that I withdrew 400-500 a month playing a few hours a night and it made good supplemental income and paid a few bills.

At the time, limit hold em was what everyone played, but it was no limit that everyone was watching on TV, and tournaments in particular. Obviously that appealed to me, and I found some of the sit n gos on Party. Those fit into my schedule okay. I had no clue how to bet in no limit hold em though. So I mostly just played 1-2 sit n gos a night and spent the rest of my time grinding the limit cash games. Party was really bad about not running any MTTs for less than $10 and at the time spending $10 on a MTT with a few hundred people in it tops and playing for 2-3 hrs often with no return seemed like a waste when I was making consistent money in the limit cash games. Then I found Poker Stars. They offered lots of $1-$5 tournaments and some freerolls at all times of the day (Party's schedule at first was very limited). So I put $50 on there and played their $5 sit n gos and $1-$5 MTTs. I never made much money, but I never lost my $50 there either. It was fun, I was learning no limit and still playing the limit on Party to supplement my income.

After 3-4 months of playing MTTs on stars I somehow final tabled a $3 tournament and won $700. I really still didn't have much of a clue about MTTs (fortunately neither did anyone else i played with) and decided to forget any decent rule of bankroll management and used the $700 to enter a $100 tournament. I ran really well and finished 6th in it for $1400. I was smart enough to realize it was a one time thing for me and I couldn't keep playing $100 tournament. Eventually I found the $10 rebuy on Stars (now the $55k guaranteed, then the $25k I believe) and the $20 freezeout on Party that guaranteed $20k at the time and eventually $40k. I set up a schedule where I played those two tournaments every night and spent the rest of the night grinding limit cash games.

Eventually I started playing some no limit cash too, but just the $100 NL and the $50 NL, with mixed results. After doing all this for a while and having some family issue cause me to have to withdraw a large portion of the winnings that I had ground out over time, I won the $10 rebuy for almost $13k. At that point I used those winnings to start entering all the major nightly tournaments (at the time, the Party $150, Paradise $30 rebuy, and all the big Sunday tournaments). Less than a month later I won the Friday Special on Party for $45k and at that point decided to focus on MTTs close to full time. I had worked up to 15/30 limit and $200 no limit by then and were beating both games, but I was just crushing MTTs at the time.

I probably went on the sickest MTT heater ever from basically the point I won the Friday Special until the WSOP main event in 2006. I played very well during that time, but also ran extremely well. After the WSOP in 2006 I was kind of burnt out on tournament poker, and with my wife being pregnant with child #2 things were tougher around the house and staying up til 3-4am playing tournaments was making it really difficult to get up the next morning and do what I needed to do for the family (yeah, somewhere in that big gap I quit my job and 'went pro' but like I said, this is the Cliff's Notes version). At that point I decided to focus on learning how to play no limit cash games better. I had dabbled in them pretty much the entire time and had success when I played, but never really spent a whole lot of time on them. I had just kind of filled the gaps with them. I had played off and on on Party and the games there were soft, I even occasionally played the NL $5000 game there and was a winner when I played, but the sample sizes were small and I just didn't play all that much at the time since MTTs were just such easy money.

Fast forward to today. With the UIGEA and Party and Paradise going away, the tournament selection today doesn't fit in with my schedule as well as it used to (too many good tournaments start between 8pm and 9pm ET and not enough start between 9pm and 11pm meaning I've got to stay up super late for the good ones that start later). Also, with the speed information travels on the internet there were maybe 50 really good players online a year or so ago. There were others that were capable and decent, but only 50 players that really understood the finer points of tournament play. Now there are probably 150 or so players who really understand how to play the game. With smaller fields now (the $100 freezeouts used to regularly get 500-600 people and now get 300-400) that consist of less dead money, my ROI has gone down a fair amount in a lot of tournaments. Don't get me wrong, it's still very profitable, but i used to consistently put up an ROI in the 150% range in all the $50+ non satellite freezeouts. Now it's closer to 75%. Maybe my game has fallen off a little bit, but I think it's more a product of a lot of other players catching up.

Long story short, I did some research last month on what my hourly rate was in a lot of the tournaments I play versus the cash games I was playing a lot more regularly now. The end result was that it was close, but I was making more playing cash than I was a lot of the miscellaneous MTTs.

With that in mind, I'm trying something new this month to see how it goes. Basically I've cut my MTTs back to only 'major' tournaments. On a typical weeknight that means the $100 rebuy, the Stars $150, the FTP $150, the UB $120, and on Mon/Tues the FTP/Stars $1k. The 150s (and 120) are bigger fields with lots of satellite players. Those are still very worth my while to play and my ROI is very large in those. The $100r and $1000 are obviously very tough fields, but since the buy ins are much larger I don't need a huge ROI for them to be very profitable. A 50-75% ROI at $1000 is a good return, same with the $100r. I'm obviously still playing all the major Sunday tournaments as well. They're high buy in with lots of satellites.

Aside from that, I'm playing exclusively cash now. I've decided what I'm going to do starting Oct is baseline everything in Poker Tracker and really pay attention to my results and trying to polish/improve my game. What I mean by baseline is I start at a certain limit that I'm very confident I'm a winner at, and play 10k hands at that level and do a review. If my bankroll allows it, my results show it, and I feel comfortable with it I'll move up. If not, I'll do another 10k hands and re-evaluate. Basically I want to make sure I have at least 25 buy ins for whatever level I'm playing online, I want to be beating my current level for at least 5 BB/100, and I want to not feel like I'm getting outplayed or struggling just to get that return. I'm going to start with 3/6 NL on Stars, 5/10 NL on FTP, and 2/4 PLO on both sites. I'm going to play 10k hands of each and post some reviews on the blog of my play and if/when I'm ready to move up. I picked these limits because I've played them a fair amount in my dabbling and I'm 100% confident that I'm a winner at all these levels. The Stars 6 max games get pretty tough at 5/10, and while I've won money there in the past I feel much less confident there than at 3/6, same with FTP 5/10 versus 10/20. I'm just now really moving up the ladder in PLO, and have honestly never tried anything higher than 2/4, so i don't know if those games get a lot tougher or not.

Right now the results are very good. I'm not at 10k hands of anything yet, but I'm absolutely destroying the Stars 3/6 and both sites 2/4 PLO. I'm winning at the 5/10 game on FTP too, but to a much lesser extent. I feel I've run pretty poorly there for the most part and it will clear itself up over time, because those games seem pretty beatable. I'm still over 2 BB/100 in Poker Tracker right now, but not where I'd like to be. We'll see where I'm at after 10k hands and go from there. Also, just a quick note. 10k hands is not really significant enough to draw lots of definitive conclusions from, but I find it's a good milestone to do regular checkups and get some idea of how things are going.

I'm going to try this out for October and see how it goes. I think I'm going to like it a lot better. It will allow me to still play MTTs, which I still love. But it will also prevent me from grinding out the $30 rebuys and the $100 freezeouts against the same 300-400 players, most of whom are at least decent, and give me a chance to play more cash games where I feel like I have an edge I can exploit for a better hourly rate. I already feel like I'm a lot 'fresher' when I play MTTs playing much fewer of them, and I'm really enjoying a lot of the different situations playing bot PLO and NL cash presents me. You're not 100+ big blinds deep in MTTs very often, and PLO is a really fun game with lots of unique situations. I really feel like my PLO game is starting to get really polished too and have a feeling I'll be moving up the ranks in that pretty quickly. It's a swingy game, so maybe I'm just on the good side of variance right now, but in the limited time I've played the 2/4 game I've already had several instances where when I quit I had 5+ buy ins on the table.

At any rate, I'm having more fun playing online poker than I have in a while. Don't get me wrong, it's always been fun, but I really enjoy the challenge of different situations and pushing myself to get better, and I've felt like I've been in a bit of a rut in online MTTs lately as far as really challenging myself and improving. That's not to say I can't improve, but playing 10-12 MTTs a night can get to feel like a grind when 99% of the situations are ones I've seen thousands of times before. Hopefully this will keep my game fresh and really challenge me to be a better player. I really feel like I'm a player (and person in general) who rises to the occasion and if I put a challenge in front of myself to become as good a cash game player as I am MTT player I will do it. It'll be hard work, and I'm going to have to study and dedicate time to improving myself, but when I put my mind to something it's usually best not to bet against me.

-Rizen