LATEsummer’s Night Dream (4 of 4): Mediocrity in the Online World.

So, how goes the Badger’s online game—you know, the $100 into $10,000 challenge; the real point of this whole thing?

Well,there are three ways to look at it:

1. I have squandered several hundred hours of my life, playing something like 800 Sit & Goes, with a measly $72 profit to show (to put it another way, I have made an average of less than 10 cents/game profit; PokerStars has made a profit of 40 cents—and that’s just off of me—not to mention the other 8 or 9 players in each SnG!)

2. I have received a vast amount of entertainment (if not, at times, supremely frustrating entertainment!) and have actually made a teeny tiny bit of a profit to boot.

3. I have logged hours and hours and hours in the online laboratory. That study has started to seriously pay off: knowledge of proper strategy relative to the stage of the tourney, coupled with a very marked improvement in “hand-reading” and bluffing skills have resulted in a highly profitable tear in bricks & motar play (in cash games to some degree; in tourneys to a great degree).

So, on balance, it is hard to quibble too much with my performance. I am a superior player to the one that set out on this journey in January. Yet, in the vast poker eco system, I have probably evolved from a single-celled amoeba into perhaps a newt. But there are plenty of T-Rexes and Great Whites in the poker world. I am just a newt (not even properly a badger yet)!

My father suggested that $100 into $10,000 was so unrealistic as to be insane. He was right—and that is precisely why I wanted to take a stab at it.

Sadly, I don’t think I will have an immense amount of time to play over the next couple months (at least not as much as I’ve had over the summer). And, truth be told, even if I had 10 hours/day to play, $172 (my current balance) into $10,000 in 3 ½ months would be a virtual impossibility. I just ain’t there skill-wise. At least not yet.

Also, there seems to be a gap between my online and offline results that I cannot quite get my arms around. I would like to say that it’s poor luck in the online world, but I know that’s not fair. I suspect it is rather two other factors: given their frequency of play, many online players—even at low buy-ins—are stonger than casual B&M players. Also, I think I am far better at focusing on strategy and reading my opponents in the “real” world. But these are just theories, not excuses. Bottom line: I need to be performing better online.

Perhaps as Autumn rusts into Winter, my blood will turn warm and I will grow some hair. Then maybe this newt will become a badger. And even a badger will probably never get to $10,000. But he will happily part with his meager $172 balance in an effort to get there!

I suspect that as the year closes, I will take a few stabs at higher buy-in MTTs in an attempt at significantly growing my balance. But I further suspect that I will end the year somewhere in the triple digits (unless I go on either a massive tilt or a massive rush).

If I am masochistic I will probably roll over that year-end balance into some form of 2010 challenge. If so, I should be starting 2010 with a much stronger skill set—and maybe, just maybe, a shot at that $10,000 number!

Evolve or die!