5:23am: Poker can be an impulsive game at times, but if you truly treat poker as a business, you have to make the smartest business decisions possible in order to optimize your bottom line. Part of being a smart businessman in this case would include two steps (a) collecting data and (b) mining it effectively.

Collecting meaningful data could and should take a very long time. Statistics deviate from the norm more often than we’d like, and a lot of the time makes things that are irrelevant seem relevant, and vice versa. At what point does data become “valid”, you ask? If you have less than 1,000 heads up sit n gos under your belt, you have a long way to go. Just let the statistics fall into place and continue to put in more volume, and then see where you stand after 1,500 games. When you start to get around 2,000 games, that’s probably the point where you can start circling trends and label them meaningful.

Mining the data is easy. All you have to do is read it, interpret it, and pick out the statistically relevant information. Using this information effectively will, without a doubt, increase your hourly wage, roi, and win %. Paying attention to details such as these is what separates a person who wins 55% of their games from someone who wins 57% of their games. And you better believe it: two percentage points make all the difference in the world.

One example of this is how I made my heads up sng “work schedule” based on my most profitable days, and even during my most profitable hours. Take a look at my data below:

Looking at the days of the week chart, one thing sticks out like a sore thumb: Mondays are not profitable AT ALL for me. Therefore, right off the bat I know that if I’m working a five day week, this is the first day I need to stay away from. We now have my first day off. Choosing the second day off is slightly more complicated ONLY because of my living situation. Based on my graph, the next day that I should throw out the window is Saturday. However, my GF is off on Tuesdays, which is the next least-profitable day. All things considered, I decided that it’s better for me to choose Tuesday as an off day. Point being, I have chosen two of the three least profitable days as my days off, which in turn should optimize my winning percentage on the days that I have decided to work.

Whenever changes need to be made, always make the next best decision. For example, now that football season is here and I run a fantasy football league, I have no choice but to take off on Sunday rather than Tuesday (GFs schedule changes to off on Sundays as well during football season). Sunday is somewhere in the middle from a profit standpoint, so it’s not big deal that I’d be missing this day. Thankfully, I can still include Monday (and probably always will) in my days off.

Another profitable idea is to take a look at the most profitable hours of the day to play. Upon looking at my data, a few things stand out:

1. I should always be in front of a computer with games loaded from 1am-3am CST. 3am is my most profitable hour, and it’s not even really close. This is pretty much the irrefutable evidence I need to know that late night poker is +EV for me.

2. For whatever reason, 4am has given me some problems, however I don’t believe this to be anything more than a statistical deviation (it probably takes 10,000+ games for this particular data to be completely meaningful).

3. 9pm-12am are also pretty solid times to play, as I’ve shown a pretty consistent profit and ROI during those times.

4. The mid morning hours have abnormally large ROI’s, however the data is over a small sample size - and therefore I don’t have enough tangible evidence to suggest that I should alter my sleep schedule in such a drastic way. However, 3,000 games later if I have many more games registered at these times, I wouldn’t be adverse to putting some thought into it.

All things considered, whenever possible I try to put my best efforts into playing the most profitable hours. However, I value the “profit by day” data a little more, so if I deviate slightly from the most profitable hour chart, it’s perfectly fine as long as I’m playing within a profitable day itself.

So to all this, I say take an hour or two and evaluate your data. If your data is meaningful, choosing the optimal days/times to play will go a long way into making your business a thriving one. If your data isn’t meaningful yet, now’s the time to collect the data, and what better day to start than today?