February February

Well, February is coming to a quick close. It's hard to believe that we've already blown through the first two months of 2011; where has the time gone? More importantly, how has my poker progressed? Answer: so-so.

Cash Games. As usual, the bulk of my poker playing has been in cash games. For Feb, these have ranged from $50NL all the way down to $5NL. The higher limits were just normal bug grinding, while the lower limit play was primarily used as experiments on bet sizing, c-betting, and the like. The bad news is that between work and life, I wasn't able to get in very many overall hands of poker. The total number of hands I played was a paltry 7170, which is waaaaay below my usual average of 25-30K. (Having this pesky thing called "work" get in the way is a real bummer ;-)

Okay, that's the bad news. The good news is that I won at an average rate of 15ptbb/100, which equates to about $12/hour. This is slightly higher than I have been averaging over the past couple of months, so I'm fairly pleased with myself. My VPIP was 18% (which is higher than usual) and my PFR was a tad over 13% (which in proportion to the VPIP stat is lower than usual. Another stat that I've added to my basic reports section of HEM is the VPIP/PFR ratio, which I'm trying to keep above 80%. Unfortunately, I barely managed to keep this ratio above 70% for the month; clearly, I've got some work to do in this area.) Anyway, here's the month's chart:

I think the tail off at the top of the chart is success syndrome rearing its ugly head. Looking back through the past year's data, I see that this phenomena happens frequently to me. I tend to think of my poker in month-long chunks, and for whatever reason, my end of month play is of lower quality than my game at the beginning of a month. Weird.

Besides upping my PFR number, I'm also in need of tightening up out of the blinds (I'm playing a bit too loose, especially from the SB), plus I think I've opened up my stealing range a little too far from the the last three seats. Minor tweaks, but important nonetheless.

Tournaments. Most of the tournaments I've played this month have been in the form of Super Turbos. This is mostly due to a lack of available time to play, but also because they're fun and, frankly, kind of mindless. The games are essentially a Push-or-Fold proposition on each dealt hand. Over the past couple of months, I've been dabbling with  a free program called "ICM Trainer" that has a quiz feature based on the Nash equilibrium equations. The quizzes in the program allow you to practice different push/fold/call situations for various SnG end game scenarios, and I think playing this quiz on a weekly basis has definitely improved my game overall. The program isn't perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but it does force you to think about risk and reward for every hand dealt in a tournament, which is the essence of all poker decisions. What does shoving here gain, in other words, versus what am I risking by shoving? Good stuff.

In recent days I've also started playing some of the new "on demand" Rush tournaments that allow you to enter up to four times simultaneously in the same tournament. You can also register late (up to level 5), which is what I've been doing. My success has generally been average in these, but I did manage to pull off a 3rd place finish a few days ago in a 511-person event. Now, the buy-in was only $1/entry, so I only made $55, but still it was pretty sweet. I stood a decent chance of actually winning the thing, but got seriously unlucky on my last two hands (my KK vs.77 and my AK vs. A3).

Anyway, here are my Feb tourney results. ROI was 63%, with an ITM of 46%, which for the data, equates out to $9.21/hour played. (Note the one big score was the 3rd place on-demand game.)

Other. In other news, I haven't had much time to work on the next poker training video in the badbug series, but I have gotten a little more organized about planning the series out. It's really just a matter of discipline now to sit down and start cranking these out.

Finally, I've got to ask the universe: Wassup with Cardplayer Magazine these days? I haven't had a subscription to the mag for over a year, but a couple months ago I decided to renew. This past Friday, I received the first magazine and.... well, it's a piece of crap. The entire magazine is about one third the size of the old magazine, with half of the pages filled up with adverts. Of the few actual real pages with poker talk, over half are recycled articles from previous magazines. CP calls these pieces "classics" or some such bullsh!t. Talk about a rip off.

All-in for now...

-Bug