Lessons Learned from the Prop Bet

Posted by icemonkey9 on Feb 16, 2010 in poker | 3 comments

I'm not sure how interesting it was for the readers of my blog to follow my progress during last week's prop bet.  Judging by the dearth of comments, I'm guessing it wasn't of much interest to most of you.  That's fine.  But what I think might help is writing out some the lessons learned from participating in the prop bet, because I think I definitely benefited from putting myself through that torture.

For those of you that follow LOST I kind of feel like Sayid did after the episode where we see him learn to become a torturer.  He does what he has to do in order to save himself and his loved ones and basically tortures a bad guy commanding officer of his to get the information he needed.  At the end of it all, he's changed and gets taken to outside the city by the Americans.  They drop him off in the middle of the road with the American tell him, "Looks like you picked up a new skill set."  He handed him a wad of cash, then left him there and drove away.  I feel like that because I feel like I went through this very difficult process, gained a valuable skill (massively multi-tabling) but have been left out in the middle of nowhere (with some money) asking myself "well wth do I do now?!".

Anyways, enough of the random and vague metaphors.

The first thing I learned is that as soon as you start a prop bet, you will, without fail, go on a downswing.  It'll suck and be frustrating and irritate you and every end.  Life will seem dull, gray and horrible.  It happened to me, it happened to Zachvac and its happened to countless others.  I don't know why or how it happens, but I just know it does.  If you ever decide to put yourself through something like this, just be ready for the fall-out.

One surprising thing I learned was that if you do add more and more tables, it doesn't necessarily mean you just play ABC autopilot poker.  In fact, if you arm yourself with the right poker software you can definitely play a great thinking poker game.  Here's what you will need:

• Holdem Manager or PokerTracker 3, with a HUD chalk full of stats
• TableNinja (or its equivalent) for assistance and shortcuts
• A good playlist for iTunes (or no music at all!)
• A great ergonomic mouse that won't kill your wrist after long days of playing
• 2 monitors, with your main monitor at least being a 24" 1920x1200 resolution monitor.  Your second monitor should be the same but if its a 22" 1600x1200 that's fine too.
• Experiment while not playing with table layouts and try to get it so that you can always be able to click on a table.  If you can do this you can jump to tables during short breaks and hit the fold button if there's a hand that's an obvious fold.
• Eye drops. Lots of 'em.
• Comfortable chair with arm and back support

You have to create an environment where you can focus and you get a system down that works.  There's no way that I could play even 15 tables if I didn't have the dual monitor setup along with the shortcuts program.  We all operate differently and you need to experiment to see what works for you.  Make sure you save your table layout within the poker client so you don't have to redo it every time you start a new session.

Another important lesson is knowing when peak hours are for your time zone.  For me in the Pacific Time Zone, I found that the tables were "best" starting around 11am and were good until about 10pm during the week.  Thursday nights were exceptionally good, and starting from about 10am on Friday through about 8pm on Sunday games were fantastic.  I think if anyone ever went "pro" for online poker they would forced to adapt their playing schedule around peak times at the sites.  Clearly, you can't play 8 straight hours no matter who you are - you have to eat, you have to go to the bathroom and you need to simply close your eyes to rest.  Factoring in these breaks and creating the right schedule is really important.

One very underrated thing about playing "full time" or in my case undergoing a prop bet is pacing.  Setting the right pace every day and outlining your schedule a week in advance is very important.  For me, once I got through the first two days of the challenge, I realized I couldn't just wing it.  I set myself a daily hand requirement schedule and stuck to it.  In the morning each day I outlined my time schedule to estimate when I should play and get other activities accomplished.  That was one huge piece of the puzzle for me in my success.

Before this challenge, you have to realize that I was used to playing 4 or 5 tables of 6max games, which I had done for the better part of 3 months.  When I last played Full Ring regularly, I think I only played 9-10 tables at a time.  By the end of the challenge, I was playing 19 tables without any issues and no time outs on any table.  You just have to push yourself, experiment and not get freaked out when your computer starts beeping and flashing.  Stay calm, make the right decision and quickly move to the next decision to be made.  I kept telling myself I do have a timebank which is automatically clicked, which helped me remember that I have time to think through my decision making process in a hand.

I am not sure if I will remain 19 tabling (or more) Full Ring moving forward, but I know I can do it.  Most likely at 50nl FR I'll remain 19 tabling to keep myself in a groove.  My upswing out of the downswing didn't really take off until I started doing the 19-table sessions and that allowed me to get in a lot more hands per hour.  I played 30,000 hands in 30.5 hours which is just crazy.  Last year I think I played 180,000 hands total, so to get 1/6th of those hands in for a year within the timeframe of a week is quite an upgrade.

Sometimes you have to push yourself in order to make leaps in your game and often times it will be very frustrating and uncomfortable.  If I didn't have money on the line in my prop bet, there's no way I would have finished the challenge because I would have bitched and moaned about the break-even stretch that was just destroying my mindset.  That tilt would have forced me to "take a break" and come back later rather than fight through it, which I have so often struggled to do.

I'm not sure what else there is to say but I am hoping this long entry helps a few of you learn some of the lessons it taught me.