Poker coaching

So at the beginning of September 2008 I asked a poker player who had never coached before to be my coach.  The rate we agreed upon is in line with what I've seen others coaching, in fact a little less.  Since he's never coached before, we sort of made it up as we went along.

Every week I do homework, usually based around my play from the previous week.  I've played about 7,400 hands online since we started, and 130 hours live.

Here's my graph of live results, BB/hr.  It's taken a while but my live losses have declined.  I've eked my way up to an average profit of 0.10 big blinds per hour.  The BB/hr is a measure that poker players use to try and compare games played at different stakes.  If you play $3/$6 limit texas hold'em and $6/$12 limit texas hold'em it's hard to compare, since you'll win at different rates because of the higher stakes.  But if you divide your winnings in every session by the size of the big blind (in this case $6 for $3/$6 or $12 for $6/$12) then you can compare win rates at different stakes for the same game.

Live I'm almost a break even player, but online the results are clearly positive.  This is my running average of BB/hour for $0.25/$0.50 Limit Texas Hold'em.

 
I have always been an unprofitable online player, and I have played about 5,000 hands of $0.25/$0.50 Limit Texas Hold'em since I started my coaching.  Over time I have become consistently though mildly profitable.  It only took about 3 months of work to get there.

I've sampled the $0.50/$1.00 and $1/$2 Limit Texas Hold'em games online and I've found they change intensely by the time you get to $1/$2.   At $0.25/$0.50 you see 6 or 7 people see the flop.  At $1/$2 online 2 or 3 players see the flop.  This is analogous to the range of play here in SF as you travel from $3/$6 to $6/$12 and up to $15/$30.

The progress continues.