But since Black Friday Full Tilt has fallen behind PokerStars and now appears to be better lumped in with Cereus. Tilt has not refunded US players monies (possibly because they cannot do so, due to 1) apparently looseness in crediting players with funds before the payment processor actual has collected the money, and 2) less segregation of player’s funds from operating funds) and they have far less forthcoming with information and action to follow up on statements ever since April 15.

The Alderney Gambling Control Commission, who issued the license to Full Tilt, has now suspended their license. You can read about it on Forbes or with more information on the AGCC on WickedChopsPoker. PokerStars is licensed by another jurisdiction, and that licensing body is clear that they do not regard PokerStars in any danger of losing their license with them.

It looks like So long, Full Tilt. I never had too much bankroll there, but it’s a good thing I cashed all my bankrolls down to $200 in spite of being non-US. I’ll miss the games of Rush poker though.

I postulate that the key difference is discipline. Not knowledge, not understanding odds, not experience, not personality; discipline. Some knowledge and experience are mandatory to be sure but the one key difference between a winning player and a losing player is discipline.

I’m not talking about what turns a Tom Dwan into the poker player durrr. I’m talking about what makes a small percentage of winning players come out ahead in the long run over their opponents. I’m talking about how one player can play 30,000 hands of poker and be making money while most of his opponents have lost money and many of them have redeposited in order to continue playing.

Discipline manifests itself in many ways. Discipline means:

• Folding, when you know that your pocket cards are garbage
• Folding, when you are confident that your opponent has a better hand
• Checking, when you don’t think a bluff will work and your hand isn’t strong enough to call a raise
• Betting, when you think that you have the best hand

Those are just a few simple hand by hand versions of discipline. The list could go on and on, but essentially, always think to the best of your abilities, and then have the discipline to stick to your decision.

Over a longer term discipline also means:

• Proving your ability at the lowest levels before moving up
• Playing within your bankroll restrictions
• Reviewing your past play to look for weaknesses in your game, both old leaks as well as new ones that may be developing
• Maintaining your emotional balance and cognitive abilities while you play, and being able to stop when you feel that you’re not at your best
• Maintaining your hand by hand discipline as in the earlier list

Discipline reinforces patience. Without discipline our patience disintegrates. Without patience we degenerate into gamblers. It’s far too easy to call just because your opponent is an idiot, but do that too often and you’d better have a huge bankroll to cover you. It’s also easy to tell yourself that you’re better than the rest of your table, but if you can’t beat 0.01/0.02 you are simply going to lose money faster at 0.05/0.10 tables. We’ve all had AA all in preflop and lost to KK or 97, but that’s why we have a bankroll with at least 20 (cash game) or 30 (sit and go) buyins so that there is no risk of ruin when we get sucked out on once or twice or even ten times in a row. The element of chance in poker means that we are supposed to lose hands to weaker players and that we will continue to lose to hands that we have dominated 20 – 30% of the time. That’s what the odds tell us. And those odds are what keep the bad players coming back; that combined with selective memory. Discipline is necessary to stay the course until variance starts to swing back our way again.

You’ve got to have patience, bankroll, and skill, but most of all you have to have discipline to be one of those players who cash out more than they deposit.

The question that came to my mind was, what if I were Emmit Smith and wanted to play poker? What if I had his personal finances, combined with my current poker background, experience and bankroll? What would that do to my poker game?

The answer should be: Nothing.

I guess the question could have been, if I won a lottery but continued to play poker, what difference would that make? And the answer should be the same.

Two thoughts that come out of this. One, if I were well off, not necessarily Emmit Smith range, but enough to be comfortable spending $200 every week for an evening out, $500 a month on clothing, $10,000 a year in donations, and more interested in playing poker as a once a week hobby, then maybe I’d be happy depositing $250 every month, losing that during the month, and then redepositing. This is similar to my paramedic who was happy playing at Doyle’s Room and losing $10 a week.

The second thought is that I’m really not emotionally disconnected from my poker bankroll. I can imagine that if I spent $10,000 a year in donations and $200 a week on evenings out that my attitude to my poker bankroll, currently in the small thousands, would be different.

And you know, I think that it’s the spending that is the key difference. I’m a cheap bugger in real life. I could afford to spend maybe not $200 a week but $75 every week on entertainment, but I don’t. I could spend maybe not $500 a month on clothes but $100 every month, but I don’t. My annual cost for clothing (I don’t buy a new suit or winter jacket every year) is probably close to $150 on average. Partly that’s because my clothing inventory relies on gifts since people don’t know what else to buy for me, but also because most things I wear until they wear out before I replace them. I have some socks and underwear that are well over ten years old, but don’t have holes or dead elastic so I keep them in the rotation.

Maybe that’s too much information.

So I’m not a spender and it takes some convincing for me to part with dollars. On the other hand I willingly part with $150 every fall to join an NFL pool because I get enjoyment from it, plus I think I’m ahead lifetime because the pool has no juice. But even if it turns out that I’m not ahead I can’t be very far under and that’s a small cost for the years of enjoyment that I’ve had from participating. But to lose one $100 stack, be prepared to lose another, and possibly another after that is still tough for me to accept even if it is variance and I know that I’m still within my bankroll requirements.

I’m sure Emmit wouldn’t worry about it.

Now they’ve released statistical info on the cost of rake at various sites and at various levels. For them it’s a pretty easy thing to do since they have millions and millions of hand histories from all the biggest sites so it’s simply a matter of separating by buy in level, totaling the rake charged, and dividing by the number of hands to get an average.

PokerStars, Full Tilt, and Cake shake out as the best rake costs. And at PokerStars.fr for the French players it shows how awful the cost of the French tax on poker is. Rake at the French site is often twice the cost at PokerStars, though interestingly in spite of the French tax, it still is not always the worst site in terms of rake, being overtaken by Cereus (with it’s bad beat jackpot charge), Bodog and IPoker (the network that only allows non-winning cash game players) at certain game/level combinations.

Boku87 set himself the challenge of doing so, and according to his blog, he’s made it.

Chris Ferguson had the most famous version of this type of bankroll challenge, turning $0 into $10,000. So Boku87, a pro at PokerStars has taken it further at the top end, but at the same time he had it much easier at the bottom end. Starting with $5 is much easier than trying to play freerolls to get to $5, and I don’t think his bankroll restrictions were quite as tight as Ferguson’s, at least not for the early stages.

So take heart, you rags-to-riches dreamers.

But keep in mind, these are players who have already made millions playing poker so they’ve already know how to play high stakes.

3-1/2 years ago I deposited $50 on PokerStars. After a month of donking around the bankroll was down to $18, but then I decided I would be willing to redeposit in order to earn the $50 deposit bonus. I started grinding $10nl tables (buying in for 60 bbs at first). Two weeks before the end of the 6 month period I cleared the bonus, and had accumulated $200 of my own winnings to go with it. With that $50 bonus I decided to take stabs at $25nl, being willing to quit if I lost that $50 bonus. Instead I made another $100 or so before I ran into a problem trying to add more aggression to my game. That froze my bankroll at around $400 for about the next year.

It’s now 3-1/2 years since I decided to grind $10nl with an $18 bankroll, and 3 years since I took stabs at $25 with a $250 bankroll. Now my bankroll is nearing $2,500 and I’m still playing $25nl as my base game. I had a session with a coach (more on that when it’s complete) and he said that I’m ready for $50nl. It’s nice to have his confirmation, but you know, I think that I’ve known that for a long time.

In spite of the introspective, analytical nature of this blog I still haven’t been able to figure out why I play $25nl after 3-1/2 years and with a 100 buyin bankroll. I’ve got 50 buyins for $50nl, even 25 buyins for $100nl. I’ve taken some stabs, had little bits of success, but always ended up getting away from grinding and then starting back at $25nl, or even $10nl when I wanted to regain my full stack game after a period of experimentation with short stacking.

So after some discussion with the non-poker player she brought up the idea of playing $100nl. I thought, what’s the point of that? Well, if I like to do projects and try different things (my entire poker career seems to be a series of projects that last anywhere from a few days to a few months before I wander off to a new project), why not try $100nl as a project? I thought, geez, I’d better go see my doctor first to see if I’m able to survive the anxiety.

But, I’m going to give it a go. I’m allocating $200 to experiment with, but if I lose $100 the project may end; the second $100 is more as backup so that if I’m down $50 I can still play without having to only buy in with $50. It’s a very tight bankroll stab, meaning that it may very well be short lived. I’d better savor the moments while they last.

I realized that both when I started at $10nl and when I took a stab at $25nl I played with 60bb buyins for the first few sessions. I’ve avoided that short stack-ish approach lately when starting something new but I might as well apply it again in this project to simulate as much as possible.

So, starting today you’ll see me hanging about the $100 tables, looking to buy into a single table with $60. Should be interesting to see how it goes.

For one, I mentioned in Part I that if you’ve been at that level before, then playing underrolled or moving quickly through levels is not so bad. There are a number of reasons for this. One is that you have the experience, confidence and ability to play at a higher level. These things will help to mitigate tilt and scared money. Another is that it can be difficult to move down in levels, especially if it’s a large jump, because it will take some time to adjust back to the type of play that you will encounter at the lower level. Not as much adjustment time as moving up since you won’t be going into unexplored territory and you won’t have new things to learn, but you do have to re-learn what kinds of plays the players make at that level.

This is one of the difficulties having a coach. Sometimes the coach has not played at your level for a long time and doesn’t remember how the level plays, so if you opt for coaching, make sure he has a number of students at your level or is not too far removed from the level that you are trying to play at.

And if you start a bankroll at a new site, or if you cashed out quite a bit, you may opt to play underrolled on that site because you have enough experience with variance and enough knowledge about variance and about yourself so you’re better equipped to know how to deal with suck outs, bad beats, tilt, and management of your undersized bankroll.

An example from my personal history. I decided to make a $50 deposit on Party Poker because I wanted to start a roll on another site but Party would only give me a $50 first deposit bonus because I had opened the account years ago but never deposited. I tried to earn the deposit bonus by playing $1 Sit and Goes but it was painful. The play was so bad and my results so high variance that I switched to $3 Sit and Goes to get through it faster. By the time I had cleared my bonus I had lost half the money that I had deposited so I only had a bankroll of $75 after collecting the bonus. Since then it’s up a bit as I’ve decided to play 2 tables of $25nl when I do play there, meaning at first I was playing with more than half my bankroll on the tables at a time. I moved to a low-variance nittier style on 9 player tables, avoiding the 6 max tables, and I’m comfortable with that. Unfortunately I’ve found the tables generally full of short stackers who don’t offer me implied odds and low player volume for me because of my time zone so I’m not exactly tearing up the tables so far.

If you’re starting out, it can be good to have as much bankroll as you can afford. If you start out your first bankroll with just $50 like I did with my 3rd bankroll at Party you’re only rolled to play $50 divided by 20 = 0.01/0.02 cash tables or $50 divided by 30 = $1 Sit and Goes at best. $1 Sit and Goes on PokerStars or Full Tilt aren’t too bad, but the ones on Party are pretty awful, and the 0.01/0.02 cash tables at most sites that I’ve played on are pretty awful, so try to buy in with as much as you can afford so that you don’t have to play the bottom levels if you don’t have to. Or, consider an initial deposit of $50 with the belief that you will be ready to deposit more if need be. The advantage of doing this would be to create a smaller, more attainable first deposit bonus to work for.

But if $50 is all that you’re able to afford for a starting bankroll, then stick with the micro-micro stakes. You’ll gain experience playing the micro-micro levels, and sticking to proper bankroll management and playing the micro-micro stakes will take you a lot farther than playing a higher level and going broke in a month.