Making a living with STT SNGs

I have to correct myself. In my previous post I calculated "how much do you get back of your BI in scenario X if you exactly win 1/3 of the spins".
Meaning if the game had no rake, including the jackpot, you'd exactly get back 100% of your BI, down to 71% if you only hit the 2x.

However, this is not your ROI. Your ROI is what is left when you recover your BI, so the % need to be relative to your BI.
For the sake of this, obviously i need to assume a winrate, in this case 37% of all spins.

Recalculating, with 37% you get a ROI:
only 2x -26%
2+4x -9.2%
incl 6x 0.8%
incl 10x 2.2%
incl 25x 3%
incl 120x 3.4%
incl 240x 3.74%
with Jackpot obv 4.1%

This gives a different picture: Assuming your true hourly winrate is $35, if you only include 10x multiplier in your calculation, you'd end up with a winrate of only 18.8$ due to the decreased ROI. If you are super unlucky and only hit max a 6x, you'd end up with meager $6.8
Hope this calculation makes more sense. The effect obv increases drastically with a lower winrate, while for someone with 39% it does not matter too much (39% ITM with true hourly of 35$ would make still 22.7$ with only 6x)
Skype me if you want the xls

Let's do skype for sure as I am very interested in those xls.
In my hourly calculations when I mentioned between 25-32$, I was talking about post RB. Pre RB it is less then that obviously.

Obviously with RB you gonna lower the effect of variance as you practically get something in return every game. I calculated with 30%

Recalculating, with 37% you get a ROI:
only 2x -26% -24.2% with RB
2+4x -9.2% -7.3% with RB
incl 6x 0.8% 2.7% with RB
incl 10x 2.2% 4% with RB
incl 25x 3% 4.8% with RB
incl 120x 3.4% 5.2% with RB
incl 240x 3.74% 5.5% with RB
with Jackpot obv 4.1% 5.9% with RB

Makes a big difference, going from Jackpot to "only 10x" you loose without RB roughly half of your WR, with RB not even 1/3.

Great info. I am sure many readers and players interested to take on road for Spins will benefit a lot from it!

In this update I will mention some ongoing things and things that are in plan for August.

Health and fitness
Training sessions are going well even though I strained my ankle on Thursday and had huge pain because of it. Past 10 days or so (since my birthday), I have not followed my eating habits well. I drank a lot of beer during football matches and there were a lot of occasions where I went out and hooked up with girls where I also had a lot to drink. I am now still 5kgs lighter since 1st of June but I am 100% sure that I would have dropped minimum 2-3 more kgs if I didn't do what I did past 10 days.
On Wednesday I have scheduled 3 very cool things. Body fat measuring (both outside and inside the body); food testing (what kind of food I can eat a lot and not eat any etc); and appointment with specialist to analyze my results and tell me his/her advice. These tests cost less then 60 euro in my town and I am very much looking forward to finishing up with them. After I get body fat results, I will come back with them to my Sensei and we can talk about targeting work outs for very specific things.
I have watched a lot of videos and read blogs and articles on different eating and working out programs. My goal is to cut down my body fat to 10% regardless of where I am right now. I am assuming with all beer drinking, fast food, unhealthy eating that I am probably between 20-30% body fat now. Regardless of where I am, in order to cut down to 10% I will seriously need to push my training and more importantly follow through minimum with 80/20 rule with my eating habits. Intermittent fasting is awesome, I use it but for best effect of it I need to limit alcohol and bread (carbs) and need to create that 20-25% calorie deficit daily vs needed calories to function in order to get the results that I want. So cutting down to 10% body fat will be a long term process, one that I hope to achieve by the end of this year with proper training and nutrition after which my body will have very visible transformation from where I am now.

Dentist
I am very close to finishing my dentist visits. They did phenomenal work so far and now its for the main part. Today I will get 2-3 roots taken out from 2 teeth for which in 2 weeks from now they will take a stamp to create brand new teeth. After this is done I will have 0 teeth left to be fixed changed or anything like that which will allow me next year to travel to Thailand safely and not worry about my dental health.

Friends, Family, Girls, Poker
Lots of activities in July, very little to none Poker (22 hours or so only). I am in danger of loosing Platinum and dropping to Gold status!!! On the other hand, lots of activities with friends, girls and even had family visit for 2 days. By the end of July have a friend who will stay with my for 4-5 days. So very little poker, lots of money spent and instead of saving getting further from my challenge and goal.
When I look at the big picture I say this is expected as long as I pick up where I left off and push harder then ever before. If I do in August what I am doing in July, very likely I will miss my Thailand goal for end of January 2017. When I look back to whole July, I don't feel sorry or bad. I had awesome birthday, spent tons of quality time with friends and family, watched tons of football games, partied very hard, hooked up with several girls and had a vacation like feeling (still feel like that!). But, August will have to be different. I will set up a side challenge to grind 180 hours on 15s during whole August. Idea will be to make minimum 4k and try to save 3k in such month. Once I complete this, I can then push in September to save 2k and complete the challenge, leaving remaining of the year to save for BR and Thailand trip.

I hope your July was full of events that made you happy and alive just like mine was so far. Also, hope you enjoyed the update.
Expect the monthly break down on 1st of August or so where you will see shocking results since I spent more then I earned which is pretty hard thing to do in Serbia but I did it anyways ♦

See you in the monthly update!

wow, red much here, i am happy for you! I wish my brains could start working as yours.

Monthly update for July

Profit

Poker 255$
RB = 120$
Teaching 420$
Total 795$

Expenses

Total 2670.66$

Current BR for Challenge : 5281.56$

Poker graph:

Poker Tracker 4 box:

Quick review of July

Tons of activities with friends and family as well as hooking up with girls. What I am personally very proud off is with my training sessions with Sensei and how well that is going. Financially I pretty much did every single wrong thing I could do this month wrong. Very good investments however that I made were finishing 99% with dentist visits and going for food tolerance testing as well as body fat measuring. Thanks to these things in August I have very specific and clear targets set in training, nutrition and dentist.
Month like this could have been avoided but I decided to take a step back and after my birthday (7th of July) just relax and enjoy it 3 more weeks. I had family come into town also 2 days, my friend for 5 days, was there for 2 of my friends who were/are going through hard times, hooked up with some girls, got to like one girl after a very long time...
Poker wise, less then 30 hours of grinding is just not acceptable with goals that I set for this year so with that in mind, I will push August very hard to make up things in July.
Great news about 12k for mortgage is that I actually need 10.9k$ total to save. Talked to my dad and bank, they did some numbers and that is the number I need to come up with by 1st of January 2017. So I am right now half way through that number. I will definitely hit that target and it won't be any problem however for Thailand trip to be realized I need another 6k on top of that (3k for bankroll and 3k for the 2 month stay there). It is Asia goal that is pushing me and making me grind my ass off in August. I will keep that in my mind every day to keep pushing.

What to expect in August
Poker = 180 hours, 6 hours per day grinding. That should result in about 5.7k or close to 6k games for a month. With say 25$ hourly (assuming variance will be in the lower part again), that should make me 4.5k$ just from poker from which I plan to save 4k to enter September with 9k+ money on all accounts. It will be brutal and very hard to 4 table every day to fight with focus and different levels of game (A to D) and of course tilt (loosing continuously larger multipliers - just like what happened in July, won 2 out of 30 6x games that I remember!!!)
Training = 24 hours total. 12 hours training in the CrossFit temple, 12 hours lost in travel time. Finishing up in August with my 36 sessions with Sensei after which I will take another package for sure. Hope to hit my 10kg lost by the end of this month, now at 7kgs dropped, 3 more to go.
Teaching guitar and music = 30 hours total. This is very standard and something that I love to do and don't plan to stop. Should make 760$ in August from teaching alone minimum.
Total hours just for these things 180 + 24 + 30 = 234 or around 8 hours per day. Grinding without breaks in between is suicidal to say the least so for 6 hours grind I calculated additional 2.5 hours daily in resting periods. Basically whole August I will be home grinding from 6:30am until 8-9pm, and then occasionally I might go out meet friends for 1-2 hours before hitting bed at 12-1am and tomorrow again rinse and repeat!

Financially since I will be staying in, eating healthy, training, teaching and grinding, I should be able to save 4k - assuming that I get 25$ hourly and do those 180 hours of 4 tabling. If I save less then 4k then Asia trip for end of January will be in jeopardy and I will have to either: 1) postpone till I have enough money 2) bink some 100x or larger on 15s in the meanwhile before the end of the year 3) loan money from a friend that I am going with. From all the options, 1st sounds the best to me because I want to go to Asia and be in maximum control as relaxed as possible living my dream over there doing things that I love to do.

So here is for the very strong August and hopes that it will be one of those 5k+ months of profit with poker and music teaching combined and should bring me very close to 1st goal which is saving 10.9k$ for apartment mortgage before tackling additional 6k of saving.

Cool post, best of luck for a big August

Originally posted by Schrader69
Cool post, best of luck for a big August

Much appreciated support my friend. 1st session starts now, 2nd one will be completed by 9:30am. Curious to traffic and regs vs recreational players during those hours + focus and tilt this early (will grind with 1st coffee also).

Just finished 2 sessions for today. 1st one focus was great, 2nd it sucked hard with tons of bad post flop decisions. After 2 sessions down 10 buy ins but its interesting that after 1st session I was up 14 buy ins so 24 buy ins lost in 2nd session. There was variance in 2nd session also but I would rate my game 3/10 in that session. Will need a week likely to adjust to 6 sessions per day. Hopefully sessions like 2nd one today will be very minimal in comparison to big picture of 180 sessions this month.

Owned 3rd and 4th session and from 11 buy ins loss went to 21 buy ins profit. ITM is 35.95%, not high enough, but I finally binked some (3 or 4 today?) 6x games that I couldn't hit in July at all which is where the buy ins came from. Also before 4th session believe my ITM was super low like 26% or so. So like I mentioned before, 2nd session despite playing bad had variance spots. Overall 4.5 hours in and over 150 games in, tons of coolers pre flop and some post flop as well. Not worried, need to keep this level of play and $ will come.
Taking a break now, meeting a friend and then returning home to do 2 more sessions to complete the day.

Just in!!!

August 1st graph:

222 games, 6.08 hours

Celebrating obviously:f_love:. Everyone have some drinks on me!!!:f_drink:

Big congrats man, have been following your blog for a while. Have a goal to pursue a similar lifestyle!

Originally posted by TomClassy
Big congrats man, have been following your blog for a while. Have a goal to pursue a similar lifestyle!

Appreciate it Tom! I wish you all the best not only with that but with all your goals in life. Thank you for following

About 200x win and experience
I was 15 minutes close to finishing my 6th session for the idea when I saw 3600$. At that moment my heart started beating fast, I was super excited. I had 3 more tables besides it and by the time I reached HU I had 2 more besides it.
Actual game was very interesting. 3/3 I took some blinds pre flop and very soon I was playing unknown player in HU where he had 2:1 chip lead. He clashed pre flop with KK vs TT and won which left us in HU. Just before that I figured that I still get 300$ no matter what happens in HU and I said that to myself only once to take some pressure off and play my best.
HU was very interesting. Opponent had 3 bet of around 40% and was tricky to play post flop. Thanks to my focus and hand reading skills I manage to dominate him both pre and post flop. Most domination was post flop of course and I took and turned around 2:1 chip lead to my favor without any all ins. It was then all in spot for 10bb or less, I had Ax he showed JT, I called and he got there with T on the turn. At that moment I shouted in the room NO, one loud no. Looked at the chips, again he was 2:1 chip leader but the blinds were going up. I said to myself "You already took his stack post flop, you will do it again!". Patiently I was pounding post flop and finally got a hand which I was value betting heavy 3 streets where he gave me chip lead again (his bluff catch was very light!).
Finally he was a bit lower then 10bb and I shoved 54s (of spades) and he called with 22, I got there on flop and held.
I guess pair of deuces never losses is not really true

After running bellow EV for over 6k games, now I am running above EV from just 1 tournament. Don't you just love Spins?

What is the plan for August then?
Well now that I have close to 8.5k money and I need 10.9k for mortgage, I will push to save additional 2.5k this month besides 3.15k that I won yesterday. 1st step however is to enjoy today with friends in favorite restaurant, celebrate the way I celebrated my birthday. I will try not to drink too much since I am working hard on cutting down body fat and drop kgs and alcohol is the worst enemy with such goals.
Realistically with day off today I can still get to 180 hours of grind. It would kick ass to have 5k+ month on 15s so that is one of my motivations for the rest of the month while the 1st motivation is to finish saving money for the mortgage in this month and from next month move to save for bankroll and then for Thailand!

Later today at 8am I am going to give blood sample and get results for tests that doctor suggested. It has been ages since I did that, a bit worried that tests don't show something bad but doctor after looking at my fitness score and results said that I should not worry and that it looks like I have perfectly healthy body (balanced strength everywhere, all the levels are good etc).
I will need to schedule my favorite restaurant, get a special cake made with flare, Partizan Belgrade flag (because of IvicaIliev77 of course) and figure out a message for 200x ♦
Very much look forward to celebrating today with my friends!

Wish you all a happy and full filling day and week.

Originally posted by IvicaIliev77
Just in!!!

Congrats m8 well done :f_thumbsup::f_drink:

Congrats on getting your monthly 'salary' in one tourney!!!

Originally posted by IvicaIliev77
Most domination was post flop of course and I took and turned around 2:1 chip lead to my favor without any all ins.

If this were written by almost any other former STT reg, I'd be surprised but you're a fast and efficient learner and you were crushing the HU phase even in your STT days so I believe you!

Originally posted by IvicaIliev77
After running bellow EV for over 6k games, now I am running above EV from just 1 tournament. Don't you just love Spins? Heh, that's a tricky question. Playing for a big heap of money in a single game is a big stress no matter the result. I'd prefer to have a long and gradual heater. But then my success wouldn't hit the headlines like single-tourney binks do, that's how poker marketing works. And I can bear with large and rare jackpots because that's what attracts fish onto my dinner table.

What is the plan for August then?
Well now that I have close to 8.5k money and I need 10.9k for mortgage, I will push to save additional 2.5k this month besides 3.15k that I won yesterday. 1st step however is to enjoy today with friends in favorite restaurant, celebrate the way I celebrated my birthday. I will try not to drink too much since I am working hard on cutting down body fat and drop kgs and alcohol is the worst enemy with such goals.
Realistically with day off today I can still get to 180 hours of grind. It would kick ass to have 5k+ month on 15s so that is one of my motivations for the rest of the month while the 1st motivation is to finish saving money for the mortgage in this month and from next month move to save for bankroll and then for Thailand!

Later today at 8am I am going to give blood sample and get results for tests that doctor suggested. It has been ages since I did that, a bit worried that tests don't show something bad but doctor after looking at my fitness score and results said that I should not worry and that it looks like I have perfectly healthy body (balanced strength everywhere, all the levels are good etc).

My blood tests will surely be much worse, but they're very necessary, I should try to fix myself asap because I'm also saving up and need tons of extra bodily energy for the most intense grind of my life that has to start soon (I'm not going to document it anywhere as I'm very solitary nowadays).

Originally posted by rompas

Originally posted by IvicaIliev77
Just in!!!

Congrats m8 well done :f_thumbsup::f_drink:

Really appreciate the support!

Originally posted by tonypmm
Congrats on getting your monthly 'salary' in one tourney!!!

Appreciate it! I will push to make another such salary in August and complete the challenge for mortgage.

Originally posted by IvicaIliev77
Most domination was post flop of course and I took and turned around 2:1 chip lead to my favor without any all ins.

If this were written by almost any other former STT reg, I'd be surprised but you're a fast and efficient learner and you were crushing the HU phase even in your STT days so I believe you!

I know what you mean, I definitely after 2-3 hands post flop felt I had the edge. Prefer not to go into details how I saw and where I saw the edge but as we got to play more I exploited a lot of leaks that tons of players have in HU on 15s. Respect for the player, he did play well but I pushed a lot of edges that I worked out in my head in past 40-50 days and experimented in different sessions. At one point it felt like the only way I could loose is with pre flop all in setups, post flop felt that dominant really.

Originally posted by IvicaIliev77
After running bellow EV for over 6k games, now I am running above EV from just 1 tournament. Don't you just love Spins? Heh, that's a tricky question. Playing for a big heap of money in a single game is a big stress no matter the result. I'd prefer to have a long and gradual heater. But then my success wouldn't hit the headlines like single-tourney binks do, that's how poker marketing works. And I can bear with large and rare jackpots because that's what attracts fish onto my dinner table.

I agree with you Tony. I also prefer long term vs short term variance. In this instance it came very in handy for me because of several reasons. I spent in July tons of money and it put me away from my Asia goal - mortgage goal is already completed in my head 100% by the end of the year but for Asia I need 6k more. 2nd reason, I already made plans to go fanatic mode on in August with 180 hours grind, planing to save 4k from grind alone to get back on track for everything. And 3rd reason after running below EV for 6k+ games, I binked won and dominated despite loosing all in as favorite came back and won it again. So these things are great and I can now continue to push August and hope to save 6k instead of 4 initially planed.

What is the plan for August then?
Well now that I have close to 8.5k money and I need 10.9k for mortgage, I will push to save additional 2.5k this month besides 3.15k that I won yesterday. 1st step however is to enjoy today with friends in favorite restaurant, celebrate the way I celebrated my birthday. I will try not to drink too much since I am working hard on cutting down body fat and drop kgs and alcohol is the worst enemy with such goals.
Realistically with day off today I can still get to 180 hours of grind. It would kick ass to have 5k+ month on 15s so that is one of my motivations for the rest of the month while the 1st motivation is to finish saving money for the mortgage in this month and from next month move to save for bankroll and then for Thailand!

Later today at 8am I am going to give blood sample and get results for tests that doctor suggested. It has been ages since I did that, a bit worried that tests don't show something bad but doctor after looking at my fitness score and results said that I should not worry and that it looks like I have perfectly healthy body (balanced strength everywhere, all the levels are good etc).

My blood tests will surely be much worse, but they're very necessary, I should try to fix myself asap because I'm also saving up and need tons of extra bodily energy for the most intense grind of my life that has to start soon (I'm not going to document it anywhere as I'm very solitary nowadays).

I definitely advise you to take those tests. I took them today, tomorrow I will talk to doctor to analyze those results. Hope that everything will be OK.