Is Breakeven Too Modest A Goal?

That's part of the appeal of the SNE idea, of course. If you break even in the games and make SNE you end up with a not bad annual income. The appeal extends beyond just imagining that result. On a day to day basis, I find it much easier to endure the ups and downs, knowing I don't have to post a big win rate to have a good year.

I have had some tough sessions over the last couple weeks and found my play much less affected than it has been in previous downswings. Not that I play my "A" game (such as it is) 24/7, but getting full-on tilted by variance is an increasingly are occurrence.

That has to be a positive. But I'm still left to wonder if it's a mistake to think of breakeven as the goal. Will lowered expectations lead to accordingly lowered results? Is it taking it too easy on myself?

First thing is that breakeven isn't actually breakeven of course. Breakeven means you are beating the games by the amount the house is raking. Read in someone's post on 2+2 that he did the math in his db and he is raked as follows:

At 200NL 5.4bb/100
At 100NL 7.4bb/100
At 50NL 9.4bb/100

It's not really anything I didn't already know, but somehow those numbers written down still seem staggeringly large. If someone had, say, a 3bb/100 long-term winrate while 20+ tabling 100NL I'd consider that pretty good. What the 3bb/100 winrate really represents is beating the other players in the game by 10.4b/100 (allowing for that rake figure). So when you breakeven, you are beating the players by 7.4bb/100, which means at breakeven your winrate before rake is over 70% of what your winrate is when you are post-rake beating the game by the aforementioned 3bb/100. My point is just that the difference between breakeven and a modest, but not insignificant, winrate is relatively small.

But while the above is important to remember, especially when it comes to self-esteem and whatnot, it's ultimately neither here nor there. What this blog is supposed to be addressing is the positive and negative effects of having breakeven results as the goal. The positives are mainly what I previously mentioned. Not being so stressed about bad days, or even neutral days. Which leads to less tilt, and also maybe less general life stress. Actually, not maybe on that less one. For sure, less general life stress.

The negatives? Well, I wonder if putting less pressure on myself to perform well will result in worse performance. I split this into two categories. Performance at the table, and work away from the table.

I am fairly confident I will not perform worse in the moment as a result of modest goals. Like most poker players, I'm fairly competitive about my results. In the moment I'm definitely not going to be sitting there hoping to chop a bunch of pots. Of course I wanna win. And as the reduced likelihood of tilting is hugely positive, I give the first category a no.

As for work away from the table, I have little doubt that feeling okay about breakeven results will make me a little less motivated to work on my game during off-times. There's nothing like a downswing to get you studying videos, posting hands on the forums, doing extra review of sessions in HEM, etc. Downswings are surely the most productive times for self-improvement. So this is the biggest drawback to the breakeven goal, imo. It's intensified by the fact that if am going for SNE I'm going to want to spend as much of my allocated poker time grinding as possible. It'll be more than easy to put study on the back burner.

Hopefully being aware this could be a problem will help me combat it. I need to figure out how to fit study into life downtime (most noticeably long band road trips, flights, etc), and giving up a little bit of my time on the tables when necessary.

Otherwise, I think the positives outweigh the negatives, so you heard it here first. My official goal for 2010 (and the rest of 2009) is to breakeven at the tables while amassing copious vpp's from the good people at Pokerstars.