Time for a monthly recap. Let's start with the bad news/whining....
Well, April has come and gone, and so has most of my poker profit for the month. In the last week of the April I gave back nearly all of the cash game profits I had worked so hard to accumulate during the first 3 weeks. As Mr. Multi likes to say, I dropped just a couple of plates while juggling... and everything came crashing back to ground. Ugh.
So what did I do so different at the end of the month vs. the beginning? Going back through my PT3 stats, two things jump out as issues I could have prevented. The first is an old story for this bug: playing at limits outside of my bankroll. Per plan, I didn't play any limit poker, concentrating on NL ring games instead. By grinding steadily at the $5 and $10NL levels, I steadily built my 'roll up to a nice level, averaging over $5 earned per hour of play. But then I got cocky and moved up to $25NL, which in hindsight is insane for the size of my bankroll. (In fact, $10NL is pushing the variance bounds that my 'roll can withstand.) The opposition is absolutely not any better at $25 vs. $10, but the swings are certainly greater. Dumb.
The other big problem was just a couple of instances of not playing at my best and making some bad calls with TPTK. With distractions in the house, or left-over stress from work or kids, I tried to squeeze in some short sessions and make some quick strikes. This unfortunately led me to try to force plays, instead of being patient, sitting back and letting the cards come. In other words, I forgot the mantra to play Perfect Poker, which includes folding TPTK to big shoves unless I have a really strong read. QQ, for instance, cost me $25 in one hand alone. Ouch.
Oh well, what are you gonna do? Answer: get back on the horse for the month of May-- but don't repeat the mistakes of old. I'm going to continue with the NL-only experiment, but this time I will not stray outside of the $5 and $10NL bounds (honest!). I'll also try to adhere to all the 10 Commandments, especially the Get Ready To Play edict. Short, Perfect Poker sessions are also on the agenda again, as this seems to be a winning formula for me. I'm also going to shy away a little from the 6max games that I've been playing and try out the 9-handed fullring games for a while, just to mix things up for a bit.
On the good news front, I've been playing pretty well in single-table and multi-table SnGs. OPR says I'm 46% ITM with a 5% ROI in 48 games of single tables, which ain't too shabby, if I do say so myself. In multi-tables, I'm 31% ITM with an even better ROI of 120% (!), but it's only over 13 games in total, so I can't get too excited.
In other (semi-) good news, I also played in the MPT Wednesday night online game this week under the account of a retired work cohort (Flyboy) who is learning poker and graciously offered an MPT seat in exchange for a couple hours of real-time tutoring during the game. While we didn't money (we finished in a very frustrating fourth place and they pay only the top three), we did play very well, especially considering that we were absolutely card dead for huge stretches of the game. Flyboy and I stole just enough with air to stay ahead of the blinds, and finally were able to double up when we got a playable hand. We then started bobbing and weaving and made a nice run for the money. Our only real questionable play was 4-bet shoving all-in from the button with AJo against The Guru in the BB. We had him well covered, and the Guru is very capable of restealing when he knows his opp (i.e., me) can lay down a shiny-bright hand. But that knowledge works both ways, and nine times out of ten the Guru folds to our shove (even with hands as strong as 77). Unfortunately, this time he had AA and didn't improve. We took a deep breath, and then buckled back down and fought our way up to the bubble with a healthy stack. The end of us was a bad beat, when we got our money in with AK against the opp's A9. As fate would have it, a nine spiked on the turn and we were sent packing. Not much you can do about a hand like that, so I chalk the night up to a moral victory, if not a monetary win.
Anyway.... back to the recap: April is dead, long-live May. We'll see what the poker gods have in store for the bug during the next 30 days. Let's hope I can stay consistent for the entire stretch...
All-in for now...
-Bug
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