Decision Time

I have made a decision. It wasn't an easy one to make, mostly because of that thing that drives many people, pride. I have decided to play exclusively Rush Poker.

I know many people who I associate with in the poker world will look at this and think this is a bad or weak decision. It took me a while to make this decision, because I had certain goals in poker I wanted to achieve, mainly being a solid MSNL regular. Doing the Rush Poker instead does feel a tiny bit like giving up and admitting defeat, which I despise more than anything. People who know me well know that I am an extremely competitive person, with as much desire to succeed as anyone else. I poured myself into poker, studying on my lunches at work and studying and playing while home. And tbh, I had the roll to play 400nl before I switched over to heads up, so maybe if I had just stayed on with 6max and never played HU I would be playing 400nl regularly right now. I don't regret the decision though, as it taught me a lot of things about poker and how to think differently about the game. But yeah, a part of me feels like I should not stop my quest for being a solid MSNL reg. But I also know that baby #2 is going to be here soon, which will essentially kill all chances at having the required time to be a MSNL reg, so ...

That being said, the numbers just cannot be denied. I do feel that playing 50nl 6max I can achieve a winrate of 5 ptbb/100. I did the timing on this and I can get in 60 hours of play in a month easily for the time being, maybe even in the future when baby #2 comes, who knows. This can be done easily with the bulk of the time being played on the weekend and would actually give me more available time per month to do things with my family and get in shape. 60 hours may seem like a lot, but I don't go out like I used to with friends anyways, and the wife and Jacob as is are usually asleep by 10 and 8:30 respectively. This gives me a fair amount of time in the evenings on the weekend to get hands in and I can do it some during the day as well. 4 hours a day Fri-Sun means getting just 3 hours in during the week, which seems very reasonable. It would also give me more days completely off of poker. The math works out to being about 1,000 hands per hour. That means 5 ptbb/100 plus rakeback calculated out to being approximately $3,600 per month. Even a modest 3 ptbb/100 with rakeback is about $2,400 per month of essentially variance free money. I do think 5 ptbb/100 is quite reasonable though.

Another benefit of doing this is that I have always struggled with my mental game. Hard as I try, I still sometimes in bad ruts see $ and not bbs. Does this qualify me as a poor player? Maybe so. But it is what it is and I still saw losing 3 flips as $600 and it sometimes was frustrating. It will never be that way with $150. Yet another good thing is the fact that I never have to table select, which takes time of course. So basically other than pride, I can't think of a single reason why I should not give this a try. The beautiful thing about poker is that if things change somehow, I can always go back to regular 6max games, nothing is blocking my options long term.