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Hi Brad
Thank you so much for producing your vlogs, I throughly enjoy them and think your humor is spot on. As a semi professional poker player for 10 years I think most of us here aspire to get better and we all can learn from each other.
Could you expand on your time in Los Angeles? I live in Los Angeles and would like to know your thoughts on what exactly happened in LA and what you learned here.
What do you honestly think about the games here vs Vegas?
Aside from cost of living what didn’t work in LA?
How did you rebuild your bankroll when you moved to Vegas?
If cost of living wasn’t an issue would you move back to LA?
Any other things you learned in this experience?Thanks Brad, again I appreciate all your hard work
Leonard
Thanks Leonard. Good questions. I definitely learned a lot from my time in Los Angeles. The big thing is that it’s extremely important to have good bankroll management. A lot of people advocate having a bankroll of 50-100 buy ins plus 6 months living expenses. That certainly is ideal but most poker players aren’t really able to maintain that. When I was in LA I had about 20-25 buy ins for the 5/10 game out there without any money set aside for living expenses. It was dumb. I kept everything in one bankroll. I still do that. I don’t quite see how people have poker money and then life money. A lot of my friends say it’s extremely important but at the end of the day it’s just a psychological trick. All of my expenses still end up being paid by my poker income so I don’t fully understand the mental separation of it.
People play a different style of poker out there. I had to make adjustments. I didn’t realize how good I was running before I moved to LA. I’d never experienced a long downswing before. Since I was under-rolled it was impossible for me to play optimally and not stress out. When I started losing, I thought it would turn around soon. Then I got deeper and deeper in the hole. I didn’t like the structure of the 3/5 game at Commerce and didn’t like the idea of moving down because in my head I was stuck so much money. In reality I was experience normal variance of 5/10 and wasn’t down that much money. I felt the only way to get unstuck was to keep playing 5/10 so that’s what I did. I learned my lesson the hard way that playing above my means was a good way to go broke quickly.
When I first started playing in LA, before I moved there, I was doing great. My girlfriend lived in Newport Beach so I would drive in to visit her. I thought once I moved out there that I would continue to crush it but that’s not what happened at all. I ran bad, got stressed, started playing bad, and lost the majority of my money. Things weren’t going well with my girlfriend at the time because of poker and a few other things. I wasn’t enjoying life. I learned that when things outside of poker are going well, poker tends to go well too.
It’s difficult for me to compare the games in LA to the games in Vegas. I had such bad memories of playing out there that I avoided it until I played on LATB recently. I went 5 years without playing cards in the area. I’m a drastically different player than I was back then. I think I’ve gotten a lot better. I’m not sure how I would do there now. I think I’d be fine though.
I wouldn’t move back to LA at this point if cost of living weren’t an issue. I used to have a lot more friends there but they’ve all moved. Now I have a lot more friends in Vegas than anywhere else so I enjoy being here. I like certain things about LA but I’ve still got a lot of bad memories from living there that don’t really have to do with the city itself.
One last thing that I learned from the whole experience is how to deal with downswings better. Getting through something tough like that and eventually recuperating the losses makes me feel a lot more confident when I have downswings now. When I’m struggling in poker, I look back at when the graph has plummeted in the past, realize I’ve gotten out of holes before, and my head becomes much more clear.
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