Inspired by Puggy, below are two views of my own bankroll graph. The first is “undoctored,” plotting my balance after each transaction, against what my bankroll would have been if I’d collected my daily bonus each day since I started.
This next one is a bit more insightful. Although I created an account in January 2016, aside from a very small handful of ring games and low-stakes tournaments (with no wins), I didn’t really start playing on RP in earnest until November of that year. I didn’t even log in between Feb 1, 2016 and Nov 17, 2016. No sense in giving me “credit” for almost 750K chips when I didn’t do anything on the site during that period.
Up until about mid-July 2017, I was basically breaking even. No significant wins, no significant losses. In the April/May timeframe, I decided to focus more on heads-up, and played a bunch of HUSNGs. After I noticed my winrate begin to pop, I decided to shift more to tournaments, using what I’d learned at the heads-up tables to turn my deep runs into wins. The big discontinuities from October 2017 through February 2018 are from major MTT wins that brought big pops to my bankroll.
In 2018, due to some personal issues, I took an extended break. Even when I was playing, my head wasn’t fully on straight, and from February 2018 through November 2018 my bankroll was pretty constant, hovering between 5M and 6M.
Since then, I’ve retooled my game. A couple of solid MTT wins in late 2018 boosted my to just under 9M by the end of the year. I then decided to switch to ring games, which don’t require waiting for an appropriately-sized tournament to start. Getting laid off in mid-April gave me the chance to play a lot more (still only about 5-10 hours a week in between interviews), and you can see the results showing up as a much more rapid growth in my bankroll.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like I’ll be able to attain my goal of getting into the top 1000 before heading back to work. My first day at a new company is tomorrow, and I’m currently sitting at rank 1263. That’s much better than the ~1700 rank I had two months ago, with a bankroll roughly 50% healthier, so I’m not complaining too much.
Long story short, it took a while for me to figure out how to crush it here, though being free of the curse of the drinking classes has proven marvelously beneficial. If you’re having trouble growing your bankroll, read the forums, talk with other players, figure out what you’re doing wrong (and they’re doing right!), and be open to criticism so that you can improve. Almost as important - try to avoid sitting at the same table as me. 