My hourly rate playing poker online sucks

It's not exactly a huge surprise that my hourly rate playing poker online sucks, but at least I can measure it and try and improve it as I work through my next two challenges, and that's a start I guess.

In this post I'll start delving into some of the statistics relating to my 1st Bankroll Boosting challenge on Party Poker, watch out for a few more postings on stats coming in the next few days too.

The eagle eyed among you may spot some slight discrepancies in my stats, this is due to a difference of 5 games between my two information sources, poker tracker and my Excel bankroll spreadsheet. This has been caused by playing the odd game on my laptop and not capturing the hand historys results for poker traker. The difference equates to 5 games and a profit variation of just $10, so the stats are close enough for me not to worry about trying to correct them.

I've been using an excel spreadsheet to track my results more or less since I started playing poker online and I continue to use it even though I now use Poker Tracker to record everything and am reasonably comfortable finding my way around it. I log every game in my spreadsheet and it gives me a really nice snapshot of where I am at. I start a new page in the spreadsheet each month, or with each new challenge and have a summary page at the front that errr... summarises everything. If you don't alreaqdy use a spreadsheet or Poker Tracker to track your game, you should. Feel free to download a copy of my poker spreadsheet and use it yourself. I'll post a video tutorial on Poker Tracker sometime soon as it is a bit daunting at first, but the data it can give you is just awesome.

The challenge took approximately 2.6 months, during which I played for 163 hours. That equates to approximately 1 month's work in a 9-5 job. After all that effort my hourly rate equates to $2.48. To put that in perspective the national minimum wage in the UK, expressed in dollars is $11.38. To feel comfortable enough to become a professional poker player I would want to be earning £75,000 a year which would equate to an hourly rate of approximately $75. For my next two challenges I need to be looking to increase my hourly rate rather dramatically, lets set a target of say $4.00 per hour on my Full Tilt Challenge and $7.50 on phase 2 of my Party challenge. In short I need to play more hours, with more simultaneous tables, at higher levels and achieve better results. Should be easy then!!!!!

That's it for this quick post but I'll post some more statistics on phase 1 of my challenge soon, so we can drill into the profitability of different game types and start looking at hand ranges, positional play etc..

Till next time..