Snow Blind

Friday was a special day for in poker. For the first time ever, I earned at least $1k in 1 day at the cash tables. Of course, this is the highest I’ve ever played regularly before. I had taken shots at $200nl before, but I have been able to stick it out in that game for the whole month. Both have been very good for my mentality when it comes to poker.

But this is intended on being a weekly poker update. I was attempting to play 10k hands this last week in hopes to catch up to my 30k monthly goal, but some family stuff ended up getting in the way. I needed to play 6k hand between Friday and Sunday to accomplish that, but only managed about 3300 hands falling short with only 7500 hands for the week. Despite missing my goal, I can’t be all that upset as my results for the week made up for any disappointment I felt.

Driven by my $1200 day on Friday, I ended the week $1900 on the positive side of things even with losing money 3 days this week. Alright, alright. They weren’t terrible days with the largest only being 1 buyin or around $200, but still, it took quite a few hands out where I wasn’t making money and had to make the ground back up.

My month is going well too as I’m up almost $3k so far and well on my way to destroying my previous best, so hopefully I didn’t just jinx myself there, but the games are good. As long as I keep playing well, I don’t see any reason I shouldn’t finish strong. Another month like this, and I’ll soon be posting about my exploits in the 2/4 games. My lofty goal for the year was to hit $400nl and with it being in reach, I feel really good about my game right now.

My graph of my month to date. Isn’t it pretty?

I was trying to look back and it seems I haven’t given a real poker update in a while. I think the last full one was back in January after my atrocious month. I lost nearly $700 that month which forced me to move down to the 25′s and 10′s. I also switched to the full ring games since the variance was killing me and I have friends who have been cleaning up on the full ring games.

I did pretty well at them but really wanted to get back to the stakes I had become accustomed. I was able to play at lower stakes, but was anxious to move up since I knew I could beat them. I was fortunate enough to find some one to stake me for the 100s back at the end of April. I had a bad run there and broke about even through May.

In June, I found some good games and made some adjustments that paid off well. All told, I did just over $3k in that month. My first $3k month ever so I was pretty stoked about that. With the stake, only half of that was my share, but it still was more than plenty to finally but me in the black for the year. Also a good feeling as I hadn’t ever had a loosing year in poker and certainly didn’t want to make this my first.

My good run also allowed me to move up to the 200s. I have played the 200s before but never other than taking shots or chasing bad players. Progress always feels good. Unfortunately, I had a bad run which is bad when trying to move up stakes. That was what killed me back in January forcing me to drop down stakes. While I still had enough to stay at the 200s, I dropped down early in the month until I built my confidence back up. I had a long break even stretch during which I thought I was playing well. It took me a couple of weeks that I was playing far to passive and it was costing me money. It was difficult to see the leak in my stats so it took me a while to come to that realization.

By the time I made the adjustments, I wasn’t able to overcome the slide I had taken at the 200s but fortunately, I had plenty of bonuses last month that eased the pain. I only suffered a $700 or so slide. Bad enough, but coulda been worse and still put me at a reasonable profit for the stake.

This month, I’m taking another stab at the 200′s as I believe I’ve fixed a lot of my issues. Last month I played about 26k hands and I would like to shoot for 30k this month. I’ll try and post weekly statuses to force me to evaluate my progress. If I can run like I did in June with a higher volume, I expect good things for the month.

But guess what, it’s already the 3rd and I only have 600 hands under my belt. Saturday I had intentions of putting in a few hands but got hit with the flu at my inlaws and really didn’t feel much like playing. Hopefully I can make up my ground. Good news is I am currently on a 5 day streak of winning sessions. In June I ended the month with 13 winning days. Seems like a good sign to me.

In late December, I had goals of hitting 20k hands for the month of January. I was playing 6 tables and had 4 days off from work to start out and was trying to clear a bonus.

20k or bust, and both nearly happened.

By the 4th of January, I had almost 8k hands played so I was well on my way. I did end up getting sick and missed 5 days shortly there after which put me a bit behind schedule. That, plus the fact that I had a working BR of around 2600 starting the month (600 of that was deposited for the bonus I was clearing), I decided to take shots back at 100nl. Unfortunately, I ran poorly and consequently tilted off a couple stacks due to frustration. By the time I cleared my bonus, I was down $1000 for the month. Running bad and playing bad are a disastrous combination for the BR.

I actually wasn’t running superbad until the last couple thousand hands. Check the chart out.

So once I cashed out the bonus deposit (plus a bit extra to make the wife happy), I ended up having a BR of just over a grand spread between 3 sites. I haven’t been that low since the first year I started out.

The biggest demotivator was that I was only bankrolled for the 25s and I really didn’t have the motivation to move down to those stakes. I ended up taking a couple of days off, but I have been working on changing the way I play so much lately, that I really wanted to play. I didn’t want to quit playing poker.

I had 3 options. Quitting, which due to my newly found motivation to play, didn’t really sit in my mind long. Moving down, which only really required swallowing some pride and ego an a worry that I could take the bets seriously. There were a lot of cases where I would say, “well, it’s only $5 to call on the river” without taking into consideration that it was actually a 20 big blind bet. The last option was to seek out a stake. While I think I could have found some one who would be willing to do this even if it was just some one doing me a favor. The bad part of this, is that I wouldn’t want to give up a significant amount of my profits to some one else (not that I need the money) and I wouldn’t want to think I was giving a friend a raw deal. The other reason I was thinking against this was that I wasn’t terribly confident in my play lately due to my poor results through most of January.

Ok, so that really just left sucking up my ego and, obviously, adjusting some of my play so that I didn’t keep leaking money even at the micro stakes. What I really needed was some coaching to pick up a lot of general play adjustments that I could use some help on. But I couldn’t really couldn’t afford that since my BR was now basically decimated. I decided to do the next best thing and started watching videos from players I could learn from. I started out watching some of the free videos at Leggo and continued watching the member videos they have there. I think it has helped a lot.

One of the goals I would like to have is turn my non-showdown hands (the red line in the chart above) into profitable hands at 100nl and lower. So I’ve been working on my aggression. I went from a 16/11 player to something more like a 25/21 player and the videos I’ve watched have done wonders in helping me make that adjustment. I don’t have any charts of my hands since I decided to move back to cake due to most of my BR being at cake at the moment, but I believe if I did, it would show that I am in fact profitable wiht my non-showdown hands.

I’m still making adjustments to my game and intent to keep watching videos when I’m not playing. I think what I’ve learned in the last 2 weeks has been more than I’ve learned at poker in the last 18 months though. Mostly a lot of misapplied concepts that I have a better understanding of now. Plus being more aggressive allows you to get more action. Sometimes that’s good, sometimes that’s bad. As long as I can run reasonably well, it will be good in the long run.

I cleared my bonus on the 16th which is what the chart above shows. After that point I moved down to the 25s (20s at cake since they don’t run a .25 big blind game) and have done well since. I played almost 6000 hands the last couple of weeks and made over $170 back. My month ended with 19570 and ended up only $680 in the red for the month counting bonuses.

19k hands is by far, the most hands I’ve ever played in a month and I don’t expect that to be a standard. My previous high for a month was around the 10k mark. I am, however, going to try and maintain around 15k hands a month and until I have a reason, will probably split my time between cake and full tilt so I can play some of the monthly freerolls they have for earning points. I don’t like playing freerolls, but when you are building a bankroll back, you have to do what you can to get money.

I’m going to try and play as many hands as I can reasonably work in as I hate playing this low. At cake, I’m probably $400 short of moving up right now, and full tilt, I might move up a bit quicker once I have the bankroll to play the 50s at cake. If you are playing that level at either of those sites, I’m sure I’ll be seeing you at the tables.

This is my june results (read as the latest results update since the last one which was who the fuck knows).

I’ve said in a previous post… somewhere that I’m much to lazy to look up at the moment, that I’m back playing at Cake poker. And OMG did I not realize how much I missed that place. For every little bit that the 100′s are better at stars than at full tilt, cake is that much times ten over stars.

But enough unquantifiable lies and to use some actual facts. Facts that resemble my profits for the month. I still didn’t play much, but I played enough to squeeze out a little more than $300 profit (not counting RB). Not all that amazing, but since I played fewer than 2000 hands this month and that total is also counting my $150 black hole that was my unlucky couple of sessions at PLO. If you just count nlhe and not the bonus I cleared, I made about $430 in about 1600 or so hands. Good results for as much as I played. Possibly I ran hot, but it certainly didn’t feel much like it. I had plenty of beats to go along that route.

So let’s talk about my PLO. PLO is currently like an itch I need to scratch lately. I have been away from it for a while but I don’t think I’m gonna give up on it. I do think the games I was playing in are beatable and I think my poor results were just due to running bad in a small amount of hands. I will likely keep a steady diet of PLO in the future just cause it keeps me interested.

Pauly talked a bit about PLO, and I thought it was both insightful and entertaining:

If you master PLO, you’re the biggest swinging dick in town and sit on piles of cash and can pay hookers thousands of dollars to do the most humiliating stuff possible.

If you lose your dignity playing PLO, you end up sucking dick for a min. buy at 50 cent PLO tables. I’ve seen it happen. Hotshot wins huge at NL. Gets hooked on PLO. Wins a bit and then dives off the deep end into the void.

That sounds a bit drastic, but it really isn’t. NLHE has highs and lows, but PLO takes those to a new level. You can know the numbers and play perfect, but at times, those don’t seem to matter. Things shift quickly and the relentless bets of the pot make those swings hard to swallow at times. That’s the drug part of it. The excitement of it. The feeling of being on top of the world one minute and the burning despair of being and having nothing the next. That’s what makes the game great. And for those who can stand it, it’s what makes the game fun as it feels like you lose control and ride the ebbs and flow of chance.

Next item of business is my realization what month this was. It was June. Half way through the year and half my opportunity to meet my goals is gone. For the first time, I really looked at where I was at with poker this year. All told with results, bonuses, prop bets and everything I am just over $500 in the black for the year. That is a bit disappointing for me, but I have to take it with a level of perspective. Out of the 6ths months, I only really played 4 of them (pretty much took April and May off) and one of those 4, I lost money in. Considering those circumstances, I haven’t done too aweful and in fact, am up $725 those 3 months I pulled profit. But still, I need to realize where that fits in with my goals regardless of the circumstances. I’m behind schedule especially considering the last 2 years I have made $4k and $3k respectively. I have historically done better the second half of the year for some reason though, so hopefully I can ride a bit of success and still reach some goals before the end of the year.

I think I have found another point of motivation for me though. And fortunately for me, it comes with opportunity to keep tabs on a little bit more of a granular level, which I think I need. My rakeback affiliate has gotten rid of the freeroll tourney for people who generated a certain amount of points and replaced it with some sort of rake race contest. The players who generate the most monthly gross rake, get an extra cut of a prize pool. At first, I thought this was ridiculous but now that I think more about it, I think it probably fits me a bit better. I always hated playing freerolls and the times they held them weren’t always the most convenient. If you missed it, you missed out. With the race, I can play when I want but the more I play, the more likely I am to get a reasonable sized bonus. This next month, they are giving away $10k split between the top 30 players and I think me getting around 15-20th spot is really achievable. I am gonna try and put the updates of where I’m at in the race rake when they update the standings (they don’t do it daily, but it’s usually every 2 or 3 days). I’m hoping that is enough to motivate me to play a bit more consitently and earn a bit more on top of what I’ll be getting with my rakeback too. We’ll see how it goes and hopefully I can keep the good results coming. $10k bankroll by the end of he year!!!

Remember that $220 sink hole I put myself into at the beginning of the month? Those are hard to overcome when you aren’t playing great and you take a quick shortcut through coolerville in the month too.

::Drumroll::

-$260!!! Woohoo!!! Keep in mind, that is including some really good sessions to finish out the month. Including me banking $190 on the 31st to finish up my points. At one point, I think I was down to the tune of $550-ish.

And now comes the reoccurring theme of me talking about not playing as much as I wanted. Well, I didn’t play as much as I wanted for the month and took like a week off at the end there (2.5 days of it were taken up by being no where near anything that resembles the interwebs, so I have that as an excuse). Still consider, I didn’t do to bad. Pretty well summed up to the following:

4k hands of nlhe for -$90
200ish hands of $50plo HU for -180
20 hands of 2/4 stud8 (played poorly, I might add) for $10 – holy crap!! A positive result!! Alert the media

I had hoped to play about 8k hands, but that just wasn’t in the cards (haha, you see what I did there?!? Cards?… Get it? ::sigh::). I will still continue to try and play as much as I can, but until Amy finally wraps up the daycare, I probably won’t be hitting many of my goals. I’m ok with that. I’ll still keep plugging away and hopefully with better results than this month.

So far in April, I’m a week behind schedule. With a hectic week last week, I didn’t get any hands in and this week will be pretty slim to as I’m in Denver for a conference. I’ll probably get a few hands in, but without my external monitor, I won’t be able to put in the hands/hour that I’m used to.

A third of the way into the year, I’m not doing so hot, but at least I’m in the black. I’m up just over $200 on the year which puts me behind pace what I did last year, but I have yet to have a month where I ran really well. That’ll come. I still just have to concentrating on putting the time in that I can right now. GOGOGO April.

I had goals with my poker to start playing more. More than I had in the past in fact. This last month I put in a little more than 4500 hands. So far, goal met. I think the most I had played before this was somewhere around 4200 when I started 4 tabling last month. The good thing is, I did it in about 20 hours of table time. I did have some time I spent playing some HU sngs, but most of it was ring games. Not to bad for time.

In all, I ended up making almost $350 for the month. About $60 of that was from bonus, $230 from nlhe game, and the remaining $60 was from HU sngs and a small amount of PLO games. If I had just skipped full tilt for the month, I would have been about $130 heavier. Yes, Chris Ferguson and Co. had my balls in a vise for the month. If any one sees me at a NLHE game on full tilt, I give you full permission to taser my ass.

Anyway, I did pretty good with goal 1. I hope to keep it up for the next month and take that a bit further. But I’ll be honest. There really weren’t any goals beyond 1. There was a lot of things that I would have liked to have done, but playing more was my first step to get on track. It helps to meet goals, when you set abstract goals using specific yardsticks to measure yourself by like “more”. For March, I do have a discernible goal though. I want to average 1 hour of play at the nlhe tables per day. 31 hours. Doable, but I need to get back into a regular schedule and stick to it as much as I can.

I had a lot of swings I was dealing this month. Not all of it was due to running bad or bad luck. I’m still trying to get my rhythm back. Nothing puts this point into perspective, like a chart. Ask, and you shall receive.

Remember when I said I only had 1 goal for the month? I lied. I also wanted to get back on to stars’ VIP program and with some assistance to the double points promotion poker stars had for leap day, I did achieve silver star status. For March, I will be playing pretty exclusively at stars and with me playing more time and keeping my table ratio up close to 4 for the month, I hope to make a run for gold star. Still gotta work for that TV, after all.