January 2009 - Taking Stock

The first month of the New Year has come to a close, so it’s time to take a look back and evaluate the good, the bad, and the just plain ugly poker play I’ve been a part of.

Cash Games
Well, January has come to a close and I’m feeling somewhat conflicted about my cash game play. On the one hand, I’ve finished the month up roughly $86 in ring play from New Years Eve to now. That’s a gain of almost $3 per day. I also averaged 230 hands of poker per day for the month, which is above my stated goal of 200 hands. My VPIP and PFR numbers look pretty good, too, at 18 and 10.5, respectively. Aggression is also fairly solid at 2.45 for the 7100 hands played. So I should be happy, right? Well, yes and no. While I’m certainly pleased to be playing regularly and, more importantly, be up for the first thirty days of 2009, I can’t help but feel that my ‘roll should be about $200-300 fatter instead of just $86. Why, you ask? Because about halfway through the month, I was up nearly $170. But, once again, Success Syndrome or Bug-Tilt or some other bizarre psychological factor affected my game and I started losing—big. In fact, at one point I dropped from positive $170 all the way down to negative $23. That I finished in the black at all is a minor miracle. Once I figured out (again) that I was tilting, I righted the ship and played my way back up into positive territory. I’m happy that I finished with more money than I started the month with, but I’m pretty unhappy with my failure to perform as well as I should have.

Sit and Goes
In this area, I’m fairly disappointed. While I was able to get in one game on average every day, I ended up down about $19 overall for the entire month’s effort. This represents roughly 22% of my cash game winnings, so it hurts just from a bankroll point of view. More painful, however, are my In The Money (ITM) and Return On Investment (ROI) numbers. Both are dismal, and my Official Poker Ranking (OPR) numbers are even worse. Part of the problem is that the opp has seemingly gotten better over the past year, as I used to see much worse play at the tables (yes, even the $1 tables). But that’s not the entire story; a bigger part of my losses are simply due to my poor play. Impatience during bubble and near-bubble play has cost me a lot of money. My average finish place is 4.3, or just outside of the money. More importantly, when I do make it into the money, I tend to die in third place much more frequently that in second or first. In fact, I had 6 third place finishes, 4 second places, and just two first places. This is area I definitely need to work on during February. Super tight play early in the tourneys, followed by increasingly looser and more aggressive play as the blinds go up… but not too loose. Like Goldilocks, I need to find a balance in VPIP and Aggression that is “just right.”

Omaha
Been trying to learn Omaha in my spare time, and the results have been so-so. I’ve occasionally won some sizable pots, but I’ve also just as occasionally donated them back. I’m getting better at reading the board, and I also working pretty hard on playing positional poker and staying away from trap hands. Something I read about Omaha last month has helped, too: on each street, ask yourself what is the nuts or near-nuts. If you don’t have it, get out of the pot. Omaha really is a game where monsters like full houses, straights, flushes, and even quads and straight-flushes seem to come up much more frequently than in hold’em. The reason of course is that everyone has four starting hands, so you effectively have six “hold’em” hands to consider when evaluating the board. Six multiplied by nine players is a lot of possible big hands. I’ve been burned a few times by top two pair and the like. Overall, I’ve probably dropped $15 or so during the month to the poker tables in this experiment, which isn’t good news, but I kinda feel like I’m paying tuition while I learn a new game. In that regard, it hasn’t been nearly as expensive as it could have been.

Stud Hi/Lo
This is usually a game that I can play for a steady (albeit small) profit, but this month hasn’t turned out so well. Some of the losses are due to impatient play on my behalf, and some if it is simply due to inattention, but the biggest problem has been simply a run of bad cards. A number of times I’ve held the second nut low and/or the second nut high only to see the opp turn over slightly better cards for scooped pots. I think this coming next month I will probably curtail Stud in favor of focusing on working on my Omaha game when I feel the need to play outside the usual Hold’em box. Net loss was probably around $20, which is a sizable bite out of my winnings.

Bottom Line
Taking my cash game winnings and subtracting out the SnG, Omaha, and Stud losses only leaves a net gain of $32 for the month, or a little bit over $1 a day. Not too impressive, but at least it’s in the black. I won’t quit my day job anytime soon—and there is a ton of room for improvement—but overall, I feel not too terrible about the start of the New Year. Now let’s see if I can keep it up during the cold, dark days of February and post some bigger gains.

All-in for now….
-Bug