February

February was a pretty bad month poker wise. Didn't play much, but played a larger than expected number of tournaments, with the following results:


And here are the cash results:


Basically the whole month I felt like I was running bad, and I got tilted way too easily and stopped playing. So the volume is absolutely terrible. Woops. March will be better.

As far as progress on my yearly goals:

Goal 1: Structure my daily routine
A) job-search 60 min per day
B) Play 16 table hours per day
or do tons of push ups/situps.

Result: LOL so far. None of the three have been accomplished. I'm way way way off track. Time to get some focus back. I'm averaging less than 4 table hours per day (in cash) and even less than that in tournaments. Unfortunately in HEM I don't really know how to find multi-tabling ratio, so I'm really just basing the table hours on the fact that I've played a total of 100 hours of poker so far this year.

Goal 2: 400k Hands of 6-max cash.

Result: About 45k behind pace right now as I've only played 19k and should be averaging ~33k per month to reach this goal. No real excuse, reason for my lack of hands is a direct result of being short on goal 1.

Goal 3: Play the SM >2x (or equiv.)

Result: Already played one, the 2.5M guaranteed special (which was 2 weeks before the 4 mil guaranteed special, blah). Played like scared money. Kinda disappointed that I didn't play like I know I can. Next time should be easier. Also planning on playing quite a large number of the low buyin SCOOP events that will be in early May, though these don't exactly count as equivalent tourneys.

Goal 4: Achieve and maintain Silverstar + status.

Result: Got it in Jan, but lost it back after Feb. I just didn't have any motivation in Feb due to my poor mental state. Already feel much more focused in March and am more than 10% of the way to silverstar again, so this should be back on track within a few weeks.

November

As I predicted, November got very busy with my senior design project. I was only able to play about 500 hands of cash. I also played about 25 tourneys, 20 turbo $3 SNGs, 4 11.7 DSO's to the sunday million, and 1 other random tourney. I did the tourney playing because I wanted to try and satellite into the $2.5M guaranteed Sunday Million that Stars put on to celebrate giving out $250M in that tourney through its life. They got 18k runners so it would have been really sick to play in, but I didn't win a seat. I pretty profitable in the SNGs though so it's all good I guess (about 115% ROI through the tourney's combined).

December is looking to be pretty busy again. I have some finals, need to finish laying the bricks in my yard, and am going to NH for Christmas. So I think I'll have around 15 days to play poker, if I can convince myself to actually sit down and do it. I need 12k cash hands to meet my goal for the year volume wise (40k), and I think I can do it. I'll need to focus, and not be lazy, but it's definately possible.

October/November

October was a meh poker month. Played about 3.5k hands and finished up around $55 online. Also went to Vegas at the end of the month and played about 3 hours of 1/2NL at the Mirage. Things didn't go that well and I finished down a buyin. I played a bit too tight, but I didn't run particularly well either. And for what it's worth, the rake was pretty severe at 10% as well.

I'll get back to work on my game online so that my next trip will be more successful.

School is still interrupting my pokering, but I also slacked off quite a bit in October. So I'm going to lower my goals in November in an attempt to actually reach them.

10k+ hands
4k+ hands at NL25
5BB/100 overall winrate
6 table at least 1/3 of the time

A Tale of Two Limits

So August has come and gone, and for once I'm actually impressed with the progress my poker game has made. The results were poor overall, but I feel that my game has gotten significantly better throughout the month.

We'll start by looking at tournaments.

Number played: 56
Number of cashes: 9
Total Profit/(loss): (94.69)
ROI: (38.32)

Blah, run bad and I stopped caring at the middle of the month. Downswings in tournaments suck. I was playing very well in my opinion and just running bad at the wrong times.

So instead of playing tournaments in my newly acquired excess spare time, I started focusing more on cash games especially around mid-month. I had the highest volume month of my career in 6-max cash, which felt good. I actually moved up to NL25 for a fair bit, which is where the title of this post comes in. We'll start by looking at NL10 for the month.

Number of hands: 7,148
Profit/(loss): $163.15
BB/100: 11.41

I am very pleased with this result, and felt that my post flop game was doing very well this month. I still need work on my preflop game though, I'm just way too tight still. Opening up will make my long-term winrate better, and that is obviously a primary goal of mine.

With the positive out of the way, lets take a look at NL25.

Number of hands: 4,781
Profit/(loss): ($204.65)
BB/100: -8.56

Obviously my stint at NL25 didn't go as well as I'd hoped. I played just about the same as I do at NL10, but variance had it out for me, as the largest downswing I've ever encountered (8 BI) met me in my step up the limits. I've dissected many of the major hands pretty thoroughly, most with the help of 2p2, and the general concensus is that I've largely been running like shit. That said, I was displeased with some of my tilted play. I called down in a number of very poor spots. If I had played my A game throughout the downswing may have only been 6 BI. Oh well, it's over now, and it game me renewed vigor and focus.

The biggest area of concern in my game at the moment is my PF range. I have run 15-16/12-13 for as long as I can remember and that's simply way too nitty to be any good moving up. I will be making a concerted effort to get those numbers closer to 22/20 to 24/21. I have to work on post-flop as well, sure, but you don't get post-flop without having a sound pre-flop game, so it suits me to start there.

Also of note is that I made a pretty good run at getting silverstar status this month. I managed to collect over 900 of Pokerstars VIP Player Points where 1200 get's silverstar status (basically extra free stuff). I was collecting 2x FPP's all the time thanks to an online survey I filled out for Stars in July. So I was able to get a new book from the VIP store and still have nearly 2k FPPs for future use.

I'll be moving back to NL25 sometime in September. Since I lost ~200 dollars there, I'm planning on making that back in NL10 before trying again. So far I've knocked out about 70 in 2k hands since moving back down. I've been table selecting very well of late, it seems every table I'm on has at least one, usually two or more 40+/<5s. It's fantastic.

Goals for September:
20k hands of 6-max.
8+ BB/100 at NL10
6+ BB/100 at NL25
Reach Silverstar Status

Notably there are no tournament goals this month. I'm basically fed up with them. Sure I'll play them again, but hopefully not until I buy into them with FPPs. : )
The Sunday Million costs 13,500 fpps, and that very well may be my next tournament, unless I play a few to warm up for it.

Summatime

School is finally over for the semester. The time has come to start grinding poker. I have never been very dedicated to volume, but I think if I want this to start being a significant side income I need to put in a ton of hands over the summer.

As far as my progress on New Years Goals, I think it's safe to say I'm falling short at the moment.

Goal 1) 200 or more tournaments at a $5 or higher average buyin and with a 90% ROI or better.

Progress: 114 tournaments played, average buyin of $3.93, ROI of just 10.12%.

Good volume, thanks mostly to January, but a low average buyin and a low ROI. At least it is profit.


Goal 2) 40,000 hands of 6-max cash at 9BB/100.

Progress: This started out really well, I was up two buyins in under 250 hands. This was followed by a 3.5 buying drop, at which point I essentially stopped playing, due to both sucking and school. At the current rate of play, I'll need about 20 years to get to 40,000 hands. Here's to hoping it doesn't take quite that long.
Hands played: 959
Amount won: $2.15
BB/100: +1.12

That's all for now. I might be posting a bit more often now that I don't have the added joy of homework for three months. We'll see how it goes.

December and 2008 --> 2009

I put in my highest monthly volume ever in December, playing 55 tournaments. This sounds like a lot, but is actually pretty modest in the online world. The results have been confirming my suspicion that I'm actually not horrible at poker and just need to remain focused over the course of a tournament/session and not make any boneheaded plays.

For the most part I played well in December, with a few minor exceptions, and here are the results:

Tourneys - 55
Cashes - 11
Buyins - $260
Winnings - $605
ROI - ~130%

NL $10 Hands - 439
Profit - $24.10
BB/100 - 27.45

Obviously running a bit hot in both tourneys and cash. I think I can sustain an ROI of ~90 in tourneys and a BB/100 of ~12 in these micro cash games.

For all of 2008, this month finally puts me in the black.

Total profit for 2008 - $350.

Not exactly where I wanted to be when 2008 started out. My 2007 numbers were insane, and I was hoping to repeat that in '08, but I highly doubt it would have been sustainable. Nonetheless, I didn't play as high in limits as I anticipated and I played significantly less volume as well. So my 2009 goals look a lot like my 2008 goal. I'm making them a bit more realistic and also more in terms of volume, since that has been my problem.

2009 Goals:

200+ tournaments
Avg Buyin - $5+
ROI - 90%+

40k+ hands cash
9+ BB/100
Start playing NL25 and possibly NL50

Considering my December volume, I think this is attainable if I really care at all about progressing as a player. However, school and internship may get in the way. Hopefully poker can turn into a very lucritive side income for me, but I really do need to work at it much more than I did in '08.

Happy New Year to all! Good luck on the tables and off.

September Results and October Goals

So I ended up not playing any poker whatsoever in September. I was pretty busy with school and work so I didn't even really care about the lack of poker.

I did finally take my remaining cash off UB. Due to the cheating (out of principle, not because I was swindled, I don't play nearly high enough stakes) and the crappy software, I never played there anyway.

For October, my goals are to play a bit of whatever I want. Maybe 5-10 MTTs and some hands of cash. Just so I don't get too rusty for when I want to return to the game for some side income.

But starting October 28, I'm probably going to play significantly less poker, at least for a while. That is the day Fallout 3 comes out for xbox 360, and I've been looking forward to it for months. Hopefully it won't interfere too much with school and work... :)

August Rap-Up and September Goals

In August I failed to hit my volume goals. This is fairly typical of me, because not only am I lazy, but I have a hard time doing more than two tabling. I have a hard time more than two tabling for two reasons. The first is that I suck at multitasking. The second is that it's hard to put much more than 4 tables up on my laptop screen and even harder to run 2 tables with pokertracker etc in the background. Just not enough juice in the computer.

Thankfully, the second part of the above is now remedied. My very awesome girlfriend just got me a brand new MacPro (not that she really has the money, but because I bought her an engagement ring). Anyway, the computer is spectacular and I couldn't be happier with it. I just have to wait about a week to get 64-bit windows in the mail, as they only put 32-bit in the box. Then you have to go to the vista website and order 64-bit with your product key that you got in the box, and they send 64-bit for an additional $10 for shipping.

Anyway, here's how August ended up for me:

MTT's:
Goal: 30 MTT's, no profit goal.
Result: 11 MTT's, at 391% ROI, profit of $207.

As you can see, I ran very well in tournaments for August. I still play way too tight in the mid-stages of tournaments, and it's something I need to remedy.

Cash:
Goal: 1k Hands, no profit goal.
Result: 800 Hands, at ~(-4BB/100), profit of -$15.75.

As well as I ran in tournaments, I ran almost equally bad in cash. I played poorly on a few occasions, but there were several days were I was playing very solid and just not catching well/getting paid. Oh well, not a big deal.

September goals will be as follows. Since school has started up this past week, I'm cutting back on the MTT goals, since I couldn't hit it even when it was summer vacation still.

MTT's:
Goal: 10 MTT's. No profit goal.

I'd say that I'd like to run at ~100% ROI, but thats very unreasonable given that I'll only be playing 10 tournaments as a goal. The amount of variance in such a small number of tournaments means that any ROI I have at the end will mean almost nothing anyway, so setting a goal is pointless.

Cash: 1k Hands, (+7BB/100)

Though 1k Hands is also a very insignificant sample size, this goal is more reasonable. Because of my school time constraints, I should have shorter opportunities to play that lend themselves more to cash games than tournaments. The only problem will be actually playing rather than just blowing it off and doing something else.

So that's that, thanks for reading, and thanks again to my wonderful fiancee, Courtney! You are the best, honey!

Tuesday Tournaments and July Results

I managed to get time to play two tournaments on Tuesday afternoon (since I don't typically play more than two tables at a time). I ran pretty bad pre flop and as a result was playing hyper-tight in each. Through the first hundred hands in each I think I was 7/3 and 8/5, respectively. The 7/3 is an anomoly of completing the SB with marginal hands on occasion, I was running bad enough to be playing 3/3 if people at this level would open instead of limping all time.

In the end though, I made a mistake in the $5.5 tourney that cost me my stack. And in the $4.4 at 150/300/25 I shoved over a limper with A9o and 11 BB's (after losing a flip against a shorty) and he called with QJo and flopped a jack. The end result of the Tuesday escapades was -$10.

I'm getting a bit tired of this year. After having 5 winning months last year, with June and July a combined +1200, this year has been a disappointment so far. Only two profitable months, and only then with ~50 ROIs each. I simply don't get enough volume in to have consistent results. Not to mention the fact that I've been making tons of mistakes lately due to not thinking most of the time. I'm starting to work on that of late. Hopefully my results begin to see a marked improvement because of it.

July this year was pretty bad. I played 29 tournaments for a total buyin of $166. With prizes of only 96, it was a -$70 month for tournaments. I also played 481 hands of $10 NL cash games (blinds of $0.05/$0.10) and was down 4 buyins. -43 PTBB/100. Brutal. Oh well, I made some mistakes and ran below expectation, and since 481 hands is nowhere close to an adequate sample size, I can't really draw any conclusions from it.

My goals for August: Play 30+ tournaments and 1K+ hands of $10 NL, and stay focused while doing both. As long as I'm playing well, the results will eventually come, but playing well hasn't been a hobby of mine lately. Here's to hoping.