How to not go broke playing on-line poker

You consider yourself a good poker player, better than most. But, it seems like you relentlessly go broke. Bad beats seem to consume you. You can't overcome the inevitable sucks-outs that eventually deplete your bankroll. How do you survive?

Typically the problem is bankroll management, and this is coupled with self discipline. Even if you are the best player, you will get bad beats, and gambling too much of your bankroll is a big mistake. What is even worse, many players will gamble an even bigger chunk of their bankroll to recover, play on tilt, and lose the whole thing. That is self discipline that needs corrected. So instead of just preaching about it, I'm going to give you three discreet rules to follow.

Rule 1. Never gamble more than 5% of your entire bankroll. Don't sit down at any table, any game for more than 5%. One exception is if you only have $10 or less. You could stick to penny poker, or just gamble a bit more (10%) until you are lucky enough to reach at least $50. Once you hit $50, lock in this rule.

Rule 2. If you decide to play a no-limit or pot-limit cash game for 5%, leave as soon as you double up your stake. Why is that you say? If you are gambling 5% and you double that to 10% or more, you don't want to open yourself to the opportunity of getting busted for 10% of your bankroll. Leave and start over. If you like playing a monster stack, just play lower limits so that stack is 5% or less of your entire bankroll.

Rule 3. If you enter a large tournament, don't gamble more than 3% of your bankroll. Large tournaments are going to be more difficult to cash, and the payback may not be so much unless you get really deep. If you are entering a rebuy tournament, estimate your rebuy/add-on total into that 3%.

Now, about self discipline. If you end up on a losing streak (and you WILL), you must drop down to lower stakes until you recover. Sometimes that means dropping down two, or even three levels of stakes if the going gets tough. What you have to overcome is the frustration of moving down, and this is just a part of playing poker. You will get bad runs, and temporarily moving down to lower limits is just part of the journey. It is also possible that you are playing limits that you are not yet profitable at. Even so, moving down, then back up when you regain your bankroll is going to keep you alive while you learn those higher limits.

That's it. If you try these three rules, let me know how it goes!

Oh and by the way, these rules apply to live poker too. Keep yourself a bankroll set aside just for poker. The vast majority of poker players just take whatever money they have. Sometimes they win, sometimes they lose. They really have no concept of how much they win or lose overall. But with a bankroll set aside, all of a sudden you are faced with the realization of whether or not you actually win or lose playing poker. Good for you! If you can't keep that bankroll alive without a constant feed from the paycheck, you might want to try these rules :)

first iPhone app

I wrote my first web-based iPhone app. It's ridiculously simple yet useful, a car lease calculator. Now when you're haggling for that payment price, you can look it up yourself :) It works in normal browsers too, have a look.

[edit: moved to motortopia.com]

http://www.motortopia.com/mobile/lease

The iphone drama

Yes, the iphone. It has been the talk of the town since June. Although I had not seen one in person, I wanted one. I never bought a PDA. I wanted to wait until the day I could easily do everything on one device, most notably:

* talk on the phone
* surf the web
* read email
* listen to music

I stress the word easily. The iphone is the first thing I've seen that lives up to this dream. I tried a few of the Smart phones such as the 8525 and 3125 from Cingular. They were, to say the least, difficult to work with. The 8525 sucked as a phone, and pretty bulky. The 3125 just wasn't too usable except as a phone, and it was sluggish.

Now that the price came down considerably, I ordered my iphone. It will be arriving next week. Also, I got a hold of a friend's iphone a few days ago and played with it. Although you could nitpick about a few things (3G, GPS, replaceable battery), even as a version 1.0 product it is MILES ahead of the pack. This has to be, by far, the most profound gadget in history.

I gave it the girlfriend test. She uses a Mac for Safari, Mail, and Microsoft Word. By no means is she a gadget user. I handed her the iphone and said, "Go to catster, look up your cat." She did it on her own, and quite easily. No coaching, no prior use or guidance of the iphone. Then I gave her my 3125 and said do the same thing. It took her at least a couple minutes to figure out how to use the soft-keys. Then she found the web browser, I had to help her a bit to get the URL prompt up. She did know how to punch in letters, she must have SMS'd before. But she couldn't figure out how to type a period "." without some help. Now as far as viewing the page in mobile IE, well let's just stop there.

No, I'm not a mac geek. I've used Macs, and I like them. I have a Mac at home. But I still use Ubuntu and Windows primarily. Why? A few reasons, but mostly because the poker clients I use are not available on a Mac. Poker Stars, are you listening?

Getting weather in PHP

Just a quick tip how to get weather from weather.gov using their SOAP WSDL weather service. You will need to know the latitude and longitude of the place you are getting weather for.

First, make sure you have the --enable-soap extension installed.

Then it is just two lines of code:

$client = new SoapClient('http://www.weather.gov/forecasts/xml/DWMLgen/wsdl/ndfdXML.wsdl#NDFDgen');

$result = $client->NDFDgen(40.7893,-96.6938,'glance','2007-04-20T00:00','2007-04-21T00:00',NULL);

More information here:

http://www.nws.noaa.gov/forecasts/xml/

controlling tilt

I went up to the Horseshoe casino Saturday evening and played some 2-5 No Limit. I bought in for $300 and walked out with $800 about six hours later. It was a pretty successful night of poker. I thought I'd mention one interesting hand regarding tilt.

There was a guy at the table talking a lot most of the night. It seemed he wanted everyone to know he's quite the seasoned player. Good for him. At one point during the night he decided he was buying the blinds from the small blind, and raised a pot-size raise with four limpers. One caller from the button, the flop came 89J, rainbow. The small blind makes a comment "Well, if you out-flopped me, you got me." (weakness?), and moved all in for about the size of the pot. The button called and turned up TJs. The small-blind scoffed and turned up K9o. He didn't catch up, and started ridiculing the button's play. "Interesting play. You'll go broke playing like that. Just keep it up." Then someone at the table shook their head, and then he decided to get in their face about it.

The guy is shaking his head because Mr. brilliant raised out of position with K9 and lost his bankroll. Obviously he picked the wrong hand and the wrong time, and it was unsuccessful. But my question, why ridicule the winner?

To be honest, I can't think of a good reason to ridicule another player. If he outplayed you, you make yourself look even worse. If the other guy make a horrible play and got lucky, so what? You want those players at the table! A nice hand sir! is in order! Make him feel good about his chase, he'll give up his money sooner or later. Are you trying to teach something? What for?

OK, we know the most probable reason: tilt. You have to learn to control your emotions. Getting a bad beat can be a tough thing to deal with. The other players know what happened, you don't need to explain anything to them. But the better they see you control yourself, the more respect you'll gain from them. And, it makes you feel better about yourself, and thats a little something that goes a long way to making you a stronger player.

The hottest hot sauces

You like hot sauce? This is a comprehensive list of hot sauces and their "scoville" ratings. I personally own a Dave's ultimate insanity (90,000 scoville) and Mad Dog 357 special edition (600,000 scoville), both too hot to take straight on. I couldn't imagine 16 million scoville. Use at your own risk.

Sauces and their scoville ratings

Poker Odds Calculator

This is a project I worked on last year. It is pretty useful for a lot of odds calculations such as poker, keno, etc. It has a very raw interface, but at the same time very flexible. You can also do simple Binomial Coefficient calculations, which is what the poker calculator is based on.

Monte's Poker Odds Calculator