Soon I will give up online cash games altogether. It’s a result of not having enough time, really. So many players out there devote their entire working week to poker; playing, watching videos, posting on forums. I have writing, teaching, and other business interests to look out for as well as actually playing the game.

Improving my game is about sixth on my to do list. And the first five things on the list could all be full time jobs. Talk about spreading myself too thinly. As a result, my game stagnates through lack of time to learn and becomes rusty through lack of practice.

Even in the days where I played more, I would only put in about 500 hours of cash game poker a year, at about 200 hands an hour. I’m afraid the variance monster eats 100k hands for breakfast. The second of the two graphs on David Nicholson’s latest blog should demonstrate:

As you can see “lil Dave” is running at ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTY BUY INS BELOW EV over 167k hands. He’s still in profit, God bless ‘im, but with variance like that, who would be a cash game player?

As you can see, I’m at what’s known in dramaturgy as a crisis (i.e. decision) point in my life. I honestly believe that within a year, online cash games will be taxed in the UK, and with that, a lot of the profit will go out of these games. With all the bits and bobs I do, I haven’t got time to play enough to make a decently living out of online cash games, and on recent form I pretty much suck at it anyway. So what for the future?

When I started my career, I would play low stakes cash games for bankroll grinding, but my ambition was always to be in bigger and bigger tournaments. Writing I’d rather be lucky than good kind of took the sheen off tournament poker for me at the time – at least as a sensible way to make a living. So I settled for becoming a cash game grinder who played tournaments just for fun. My aim was to get sponsorship for the bigger tournaments because there was no way I could justify them on the bankroll I had.

Years later, with the online games getting as tough as they are, perhaps playing tournaments – albeit with a healthy appreciation of how much variance they entail – is the only way forward for me. I still have to grind my 10k in VIP points before the Unibet Open Riga because I’m currently third in the leaderboard. There’s no question that for rakeback purposes, cash games are better (unless you can 12-table tournaments, and I can’t!), but after I’ve binked my 10 bonus leaderboard points, you’ll find me in the tournament lobby trying to qualify for Riga, Cannes, and all the rest.

If I’m going to play poker more for enjoyment than as a daily grind, it makes sense to play the most fun version of poker, namely live tournaments. On the plus side, satellites to major events are where the most fishy online money is. On the minus side, I’ll need to adopt a new “for the hell of it” bankroll management system. This will basically involve shot-taking, because the variance essentially multiplies as you satellite up to the next and the next level. The principle then becomes to take shots with no more than you can afford to lose, and to consider tournaments as a hobby. The hope, of course, is that I get a big win (in my life-time). Given that it’s my middle of my poker life already, I may need a bit of fortune to get that. Wish me luck.