Bloggers / James Keys / 09 June 2008 / 1

In the last couple of days I've posted on my blog my profit/loss for 2008, clear for all to see, along with a detailed graph of my cash game winnings.

Frankly, for someone who in the GCBPT Nottingham write-up in many poker magazines was referred to as "a professional player from Bury St Edmunds", the results are embarrassing.

At the time of writing the piece, my cash game profit for 2008 stood at just over $3000, and the only reason I'm in profit for the year is a recent spree of wins at $2.50/$5 which could easily be down to pure luck. I imagine most people's response to seeing this will be "how can you call yourself a professional player?" with a sort of mild amusement at the statement. Aside from the meagre cash winnings, I've lost consistently at every festival I've attended since the WSOPE, with only a single cash to my name, which just happens to be for £22,000, fortunately covering my losses for the year and leaving a tidy profit for me to live off. I guess some people will say that I'm a lucky fish who will be broke soon enough. They might even be right.

What I would say is that freak tournament results are not necessarily anomalous and are as much a part of the results as smaller wins in STTs or cash. It's natural to think something like "take away that one big result and you're nothing", but the heavy skew of the distribution of tournament results (lots of small minuses and few large plusses) means that it would be incorrect to disregard 'outliers' (results a long way from the mean). I read somewhere that although the FTSE 100 has grown by over 200% in the last 10 years, take away the 5 best days of trading and you miss out on more than half of tha. 5 days in 10 years is not very much, those days might be considered "freak events", but their persistence means they are very much an important part of the results.

As usual, I don't really know where I'm going with this. There's not much I can say to people that don't believe I'll be able to make enough money playing poker long term. There's nobody who can point to their results and say "I'm a winning player. See, there's the proof" because in such a random environment, the results don't prove anything. People can go as far as to say "there's only a 1% chance that this profit is merely a random fluctuation from breakeven play", but with plenty more than 100 people embarking on the quest to earn a poker living every day, there are going to be plenty of breakeven players with such results. All I can do is know that I'm playing better than my opponents and that this will add up to profit in the long run. Without seeing my cards for every hand I play, people can't infer from my results that I'm a winning player, and it's natural to assume that I'm just lucky because there are many more players who've won as much or more than I have and then run out of luck than those who continued to make a living from the game.

Unfortunately there's no way for me to tell how things are going to go for me in the future, whether I've been lucky, whether I'll continue to be lucky. The only thing I can do about it is get my head down and play my best poker consistently. The longer I do that, the more likely I'll find out what my true skill level is in this game, I just hope it's good news.

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1. Rupert | 12 June 2008

   You are a fish, confirmed

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