Playing multis and the Abandonment of SNGs

"If you're too careful, your whole life can become a fuckin' grind."

On December 12, I played a $109 SNG on AP, and finished last. That was basically the last SNG I played. It feels a little strange to have abandoned them entirely, since they were the primary way I played poker for a lot of the previous 3 years. I started out online with 30 bucks and playing $11 SNGs on AP. Not surprisingly I made money, because the other players were terrible. And somehow that escalated to the point where I thought I'd try to play poker for a living, despite some very nice pieces of paper that say I can practice law if I want to.

The only SNG I've played since then was a $44 on AP that I played late one night because I didn't feel like going to bed and didn't feel like concentrating. So ship $180 obv lol. And let me say that the play in the $44s has not improved.

At some point, I just came to hate how SNGs are played. I hate caring about the bubble. Hate it. I hate making the money being the first goal, and intentionally folding the best hand. I finished 154th in the 50-50 on FT yesterday, exactly on the bubble (153 paid lol), and I couldn't have given a fuck less. I was making a play to try to win the tournament. I like winning, not trying to finish third.

I also don't think I'm a particularly good SNG player to be honest, $44 donkathons aside. If I was going to continue to play SNGs, I was going to have to work to improve at them in a way that I haven't done to this point. And I didn't really want to do that. So I'm done with them.

So that's left me with multis and cash games. Multis are my primary means of making a living at this point. And that's definitely preferable to me. I like playing to win. I like the variety of play that multis allow, the creativity. Much preferable to sitting there like a nit until 50/100. It feels like I'm actually playing poker.

But the variance, oh the variance. Things were looking kind of glum in February there for awhile. I was getting low on many of my accounts at the same time. Playing multis definitely requires a bankroll to sustain yourself when not running well, which is a lot of the time when you're only really making money off big cashes. Also have to put in enough volume, which I'm actually doing poorly at, but that's the subject of another entry. I have played some cash games in order to curb the variance a little bit. So that helps. That's really another full entry too.

If poker is a hard way to make an easy living, I'm not sure if multis almost exclusively as a way to make a living is a relatively harder or easier living. With the variance, sometimes I think it's an even harder living, because my salary is so erratic. But it feels like a lot less of a fuckin' grind.