Return on time invested (lowish content)

YULETIRED

What value do you place on your time? The below is a bit waffley but there is a valid question in there.

I was reveiwing my s/sheet from last year and realised I've made a fair few pounds and pence playing the ol poker. However I decided to calculate on average how much time it took out of my personal life. I know a lot of you will scoff at this as you probably do this in a day and a half., but on average I've put in 10 hours a week playing LIVE poker in 2007 (520) and I've made 12K+ profit . So I've been paid just about 24 Euro an hour to play poker in 2007 . However looking at these figures I would need to run well in 2008 to have a better year OR I will have to put in more hours. I do enjoy playing poker but my time is valuable to me....


I've decided for next year to log how long I play and calculate my earnings per hour to guage progress. For example if I earn 25K next year but play for twice as long, I would consider it a similar year to last year and not exactly progress.


So this leads me to my questions.

[SIZE=+0]Do you calculate a value for your time spent playing poker ? If so what return per hour would you consider to be -> Average / Good / Excellent.[/SIZE]

Th

hf4z6sqo7vjngi

Yes use Pokertracker to determine your hourly rate

Lafortezza

Playing poker online is for non-pros an alternative to watching TV or sitting in the pub, so essentially free money (if they win) for doing something a bit challenging.

Mellor

Kehlani Massive Weeknight wrote: »

Yes use Pokertracker to determine your hourly rate

Wouldn't it be compromised by multi-tabling?

5starpool

Tell me Willie, what else would you be doing in the time where you play poker that you could earn €24 p/h at?

Requiem4adream

I think it comes down to how you value your time willie.

I could play a $20 180 man sng for 3 hours and come 4th for $288 making $89~ per hour or i could go to see I Am Legend with the lads, get an Eddie Rockets, large nachos extra cheese, large popcorn + fanta, bag of sweets etc for -$20 per hour. I'd prefer the cinema. If i view cinema with the lads as >$89 per hour of my time then i'd never do anything in life (currently anyway) as very few careers offer this type of starting salary.

On the other hand, sitting at home watching Emmerdale or Corrie is a nightmare and i would provide an equal but opposite value to that of cinema in terms of how i spend my time. If i went about life thinking in these terms though my head would explode So.....


In terms of your progress for 2008, i think the best thing you can do is play as much or as little as you feel like playing, have fun, try turn a profit and not worry so much about outdoing a previous total or target. I'm not sure you can view progress in these absolute terms - more profit = playing better - improving. In poker, in particular, variance, luck etc plays a role in negating that. In sports, improved results don't necessarily come down to improved performances. Arsenal didnt play great over the Xmas and New Year period and picked up almost maximum points; whereas in other periods they've dropped more points playing so much better.

In the long run, both you and Arsenal will do fine if you keep playing good stuff. And a Happy New Year to ya

YULETIRED

5starpool wrote: »

Tell me Willie, what else would you be doing in the time where you play poker that you could earn €24 p/h at?

Well , I do enjoy the poker but it has sidetracked me somewhat from other things. I suppose placing a value of 24/hr was my way of asking myself does 24/h for 520 hours compensate for a year of missing out on somethings I have let slip... Everyone is different and have presonal projects etc. so my questions were really to see what value people (other than me) place on their time and what in terms of monetary value would something like Eur24/hr equate to in the scheme of things for them. (is it worth it?)

there is no right or wrong answer, just looking for other people personal viewpoint on the time invested in poker.

Part of my January musings...times flies by too quick...

YULETIRED

Requiem4adream wrote: »

In the long run, both you and Arsenal will do fine if you keep playing good stuff. And a Happy New Year to ya

I'm more like West Ham than Arsenal..-> .occasional shock victories....then back into the doldrums..

Ditto on the new year greetings.

PS
I AM A LEGEND.....great movie.....pay the extra go to the VIP (the MEzz) in Dundrum drink wine and enjoy......

Russh

It's a hobbie for me...I don't put a value on my time for Poker because 90% of it is done outside of my working day and as long as I can keep it to this I'll be happy lobbing along...(staying off forums during the day is a different problem altogether)...

I think if I started earning an unignorable amount of profit from poker and if it could potentially rival other earnings then I would have to re-assess things and start to put an hourly rate on my Poker hours...and compare the two....(paradise me thinks:))...

If I wasn't playing Poker I'd be doing something else....non work related and probably not expecting to get a return for my money....

This is just purely from a live tourney perspective....I don't play much online....Just my opinion on it......

(Played approx 50 live 150+ tourneys last year......is that not enough/average/or too much...?...for a hobbie:o)

ianmc38

Ive made about $100/hour over the last 9 months. Unfortunately I havnt played enough. I never swap poker with something I actually want to do, whether it be socialising, watching something on the tv or whatever. I only play poker when I feel like playing and when I have nothing else planned, so I dont really put a price on the time I spend playing.

TommyGunne

One thing you might be wary of is that 500 hours live isn't a very big sample, maybe circa 10k hands. It is possible for your winrate to vary considerably for a period this length, making estimating your true edge over the game almost impossible.

In other words, if you play the same amount of hours this year, playing with the same skill level, there could easily be differences of thousands of euro in actual profit.

DeVore

Work to live, don't live to work.

Poker is either a job and it takes up the 8-hour+ slot that most people spend in an office or its something you do for fun and you should enjoy it, if you make some money too... thats great.

I'm one of a few people who can actually kinda do both (though I've hardly picked up a hand in 6 weeks now). I play for a living when the feeling takes me, otherwise I do a bit of "regular work".

So the question is, are you doing it for a living, in which case you need to play more and treat it like a job; get your entertainment elsewhere with the lovely untaxed dollars you make. OR... is it a recreation, in which case... what are you moaning about? lol! You're hobby makes you 12k a year... sweeeet!

DeV.

YULETIRED

DeVore wrote: »

Work to live, don't live to work.

Poker is either a job and it takes up the 8-hour+ slot that most people spend in an office or its something you do for fun and you should enjoy it, if you make some money too... thats great.

I'm one of a few people who can actually kinda do both (though I've hardly picked up a hand in 6 weeks now). I play for a living when the feeling takes me, otherwise I do a bit of "regular work".

So the question is, are you doing it for a living, in which case you need to play more and treat it like a job; get your entertainment elsewhere with the lovely untaxed dollars you make. OR... is it a recreation, in which case... what are you moaning about? lol! You're hobby makes you 12k a year... sweeeet!

DeV.

Im not moaning at all (the other half might be) , its called musing...anyway, I was looking for other peoples view on their time playing ROI etc......Anyway, In Galway now feeding on the loooose cash games...probably the 1st time I've ignored the tournaments...I was going to play the 825 game but that money is worth more in the cash games...
madnesss.......

Iago

YULETIRED wrote: »

Im not moaning at all (the other half might be) , its called musing...anyway, I was looking for other peoples view on their time playing ROI etc...

Start Lifestory

I started playing around 4 years ago now, when I started playing I played because I enjoyed it and it was something social to do. I played in the Fitz freerolls & €20 rebuy Thursday games and in the inaugural Boards.ie Home Games. They were great craic and everyone turned up to each one, we'd have a few drinks and food and the nights would fly by. We all wanted to win, but the craic was the important part. Then it was about enjoyment, it was money spent doing that instead of going out drinking or to a club or whatever.

A few months later at one of these games, someone mentioned that they had started playing online, and that it seemed fairly easy to beat. There was also talk of free money for signing up to online casinos. So I logged onto some websites and found that they literally gave you free money to gamble at their site, all you had to do was meet a minimum wager requirement. I made about $7k from this free money playing online slots and blackjack over the next 6 months, $4K coming in just one night. Before going to bed I set up an auto game of online poker slots. 50 hands each time, 5c a hand. You can be dealt one hand and hold that for all 50 or be dealt 50 individual hands. I selected one hand and went to bed. When I got up the account had $5k in it after hitting a royal flush and a straight flush and paying out 50 times on each! As all this casino play was taking place when I was in bed or at work, it was effectively money for nothing.

I took part of that money and started playing online poker, the theory being to pay off some debts I had and see whether I could make money on an ongoing basis. I played online for the best part of the next two years, each of those years I made a reasonable 4-figure profit. It took up a huge amount of my time, but as I had nothing I deemed better to spend the time on it didn't matter, and as has been pointed out above I was getting money from a hobby which was funding other hobbies.

Over the last 18 months though I brought my play to a standstill, my life circumstances changed and I had better and worse things to do. True they weren't bringing in money, but they were giving me something far more important. I had cleared all my debts, had a couple of promotions and salary increases and the additional money while nice, no longer changed my lifestyle. That combined with a bad run of cards, and a loss of confidence in my game meant that for 2007 I played less than 20% of the amount of games/days for the previous couple of years. I made abt $27 per hour for the time I played last year. I make significantly more than that per hour in my day job, so I was asking myself what's the point?


This year I'm going back to playing with specific goals in mind, and with a set amount of games I want to play in a given month. I'm playing for the challenge and any money made will be a welcome sideline as opposed to a goal, so ROI is slighlt less relevant to me. I'll probably play more than last year but less than the years before in an attempt to strike a balance.

/Lifestory

for the tl;dr crowd
- Used to play for enjoyment
- Then played for ROI
- Got sick of playing for ROI / had better things to do
- Now playing for challenge and profit is a bonus

TripleAce

Anyone taking into account the money saved while playing poker? You could be spending that time drinking in a pub (cost about 10€/hour)...average evening 50€ .... so if you lose a 50€ buy in tourney, you actually break even ....plus it is not damaging for your health (at least not directly damaging).

jayhawk

Anyone taking into account the money saved while playing poker?

The Lord loves an optimist...