Am I ready to go Pro??

My god, surely I'm not ready to turn Poker Pro yet, I've not even been playing for a year!!! but then again I have got a 50% ITM / 50% ROI in the $10 - 6 player turbo SNG's on iPoker network but the sample size is only 50 games!

So what makes me think I'm ready to go professional, well, I've just discovered a very interesting secret...

All the Pro's are rubbish, they are only paid huge sponsored deals, then featured in tourneys, magazines and TV shows to keep the whole poker gravy train rolling for the poker rooms and media companies. The Pros are in fact just ordinary people, and they are rubbish at poker.

Far fetched you might think, but whooaa, hold on there. I have proof. Infact more than proof, hard statistical evidence from a very credible source. Take a look at the image below, it's a readout from Sharkscope showing 10 players, nine of them are sponsored Pokerstars professionals and the other one is me!

OK so my ROI / Profit on stars isn't huge, but I am in profit, which is better than seven of the nine stars professionals listed.

It can only be a matter of time before Pokerstars realise the error in their ways and call to offer me a sponsorship deal.

Seriously though..... I was rather gobsmacked that some of the pros had negative ROI's. OK I understand that these are their public professional accounts and they are marked with a huge target when they play using them, so they probably have alternate private accounts that they use for making money, but none the less.... I was surprised.

What a Tosser!

That's what I shouted at myself a couple of times this weekend.

Occurrence 1: Whilst playing in the Titan Poker $3,000 Gtd Freezeout Multi Table Tournament. 215 players had started the game, 26 were left, I was in 2nd place. Two hands later I busted out... what a tosser!

Occurrence 2: After a great run on Friday and Saturday I decided it was time to try a $20 SNG. In the heat of the moment though I didn't notice that I'd registered for a $20 Olmaha H/L SNG. I have purposely never looked at Olmaha or any other of the poker variants as I want to make sure I've got NL Hold'em cracked before I confuse myself with other variants. Therefore when the cards were dealt and everybody started betting I was at a distinct disadvantage. I didn't know if my hand was good or bad never mind working out the appropriate bets, hell, I didn't even know the rules... what a tosser!

I shall be trying hard not to have any more "What a Tosser!" moments this month.

February Results

Another good month.

I managed to finish February in profit making it the fourth month in a row that I have been profitable and the fifth month in a row that I've been profitable in Sit & Gos.

My profit wasn't as high as I had been hoping, mainly I think because I played too many $3 & $5 SNGs and was only showing breakeven on them. However, on the 17th of the month I did some analysis of my results in Poker Tracker and it looked like I had been more profitable in $10 games. For the rest of the month I played in $10 games and my results suddenly improved.

February 2007
Profit for Month $121.80
116 Sit & Gos, ITM 36%, ROI 21%, Profit $140.50
8 MTTs, ITM 13%, ROI -54%, -$18.70

My profit was only $2 higher than January 2007 but I feel if I had played just $10 SNGs it would have been higher. The new bankroll management formula that I've discussed earlier seems to be working and I will be sticking to it for March but with my strarting level revised to $10.

As for my target last month...I didn't quite make it so that rolls over to this month.

March Target 150 x SNG's, $250 profit.