I'm stopping.

I'm actually not down too much more. It's not the losing streak that decided it.

On Saturday afternoon, I downloaded a ROI simulator and toyed with it a bit. Considering my normal distribution of place finishes at all limits, it's very likely that if I'm a winning player, I'm about 4% at the $13 limit experiencing some bad luck (and consequently, a 3% winner at $25s). The best I could hope to be is probably a 6% at $13s and a 4% at 25s.

Some quick math, as an aside. 11,000 SNGs at $13 would yield me $9,000 in profit at 6%. A 50/50 mix of $13s and $25s would yield me $10,500 in profit at 6%/4%. The points and total rewards I would earn would be between $3,600 and $4,800.

Therefore, the BEST I could hope to do, this year, given ALL of my poker history and the nature of the game that I'm playing, is make between $12,600 and $16,300 playing poker. That's the very best I could do grinding SNGs. Sure, I could hit a windfall playing the Goldstar. Sure, I could hit a windfall playing the $215s. It's not very likely. I'd give it about a 3% chance, if even that.

In order to play 11,000 SNGs at the level I'm playing them at, at the speed I'm playing them at, it would require me to play poker 4 hours a day every day of the year. 4 hours * 365 days = 1460 hours.

Therefore, the best I could hope to do is make between $8.60 and $11.16 an hour for 1500 hours of work this year.

The worst I could do is worsen the tendinitis in my wrist, lose my bankroll, go on massive emotional tilt, and get obsessive compulsive about a game that doesn't matter.

The most likely scenario, and the one that I'm focusing on, is that I would play 1500 hours of poker this year to make about $5-$8 an hour.

What sealed it for me was toying with the ROI simulator. The tool allows you to enter any number of SNGs and any number of simulations, given the distribution of your place finishes. I kept entering 1 simulation of 1000 games, and hitting the button to watch how the simulated ROI varied from the actual ROI, over and over and over again. The actual ROI was 4%. The simulated ROI jumped from 15% to -8% to 4% to 1% to -2% to 9% to 6% to -5% to....well you get the idea.

I entered 5,000 games, and I could not get the simulated ROI to reliably be within 5% of the actual more than 70% of the time.

I entered in 100,000 games, and occasionally the simulated ROI was still 1-2% away from the actual.

I entered in ONE MILLION GAMES, and occasionally, probably 30% of the time, the simulated ROI was still up to half a percent off of the actual ROI.

To play ONE MILLION games, I would need to play 36 games a day for 90 years.

So, playing 11,000 games this year....who the fuck knows what would actually happen. It could be anything....literally anything between -3% and +8% (in my opinion)

Given that I have a fairly good job making enough money already, and given that my girlfriend just graduated college and is in a position to double our household income, if a hit a very unlikely positive outlier and maybe even make 15 bucks an hour, what in the fucking hell would I be knocking myself out for? I already make roughly $30 an hour at my day job and could take any number of side jobs making $10-$15 an hour easily.

I want to thank all those who followed the blog and gave me encouragement. I will probably play the points I have accumulated, just for fun. All said, I lost about $950 in online poker over this experiment. Given that I won about $700 in live poker in 2010, the whole thing is a relative wash.

I will say that online poker is significantly harder than it was a few years ago.

Like most things I have tried, I wasn't able to make it happen in the way that I wanted to. C'est la vie. Hopefully, I will try something else and have greater success with it.

Now down about $500 for the year over my first 200ish games. Fun stuff.

Emotionally, this is becoming exhausting. I have not had a significant upswing since November 12th. I've had a few glimpses, and one steady positive streak that was incremental, but nothing off the charts like a lot of regs have.

2200 games in, I'm starting to once again question whether or not I'm a winning player overall. I'm down 26 BI at $13s and 15 BI at $25s. I'm about -$400 overall over the entire span.

I think if I hit something like -$700 I'm probably going to stop, in the short term.

In the long term, if I reach 5000 games as a losing player I'm definitely stopping.

It's interesting to consider that poker could very well be the same for me as Roulette or Blackjack - I might very well just have a losing expectation from the moment I walk into the casino.

* January has been a total rollercoaster thus far. I started playing a bit more $25s than I initially wanted to, just to see what would happen. I experienced a nice 15 BI downswing almost immediately! Yay for -$357 through 60 games there!

* On the $13 front, I'm about breakeven thus far in the year, still down 20 BI overall. The bankroll is intact, but limping a bit. More on numbers later, once I decide on a format.

* I did take last year's FPP and took a shot at the Sunday $215. I promptly got colddecked for 90 minutes, got KK, raised, got min-reraised, sighed at the obvious AA-QQ, and pushed into an insta-call. Villain flips up AA, I flip off the screen, and resume building the points back up after obviously getting no help.

* Depositing has also been an issue - Pstars got a new depositer and they are only letting me deposit incrementally. Thus, things are fucked up in terms of calcs thus far. When I straighten them out (hopefully tomorrow) I will start posting numbers. Now that I'm down almost $400 on the year, I can't really mess around too much until I have my full bankroll compliment, so I'm off the $25s til I can get that sorted.

Variance ho! I now have two red walls to contend with...