Mediocre Poker

I wish I would update this more often. I didn’t give an entire recap of September, and I didn’t even mention my numbers for October at all. I guess that isn’t important though. I suppose it’s not necessary for me to give my bottom line for the month because that just gets old. Maybe I’m saying this because my pc crashed and I had trouble getting it on the new laptop (yes, I bought a new laptop yesterday, a Sony Vaio, it’s pretty nice). So I had some issues getting the hands to import, mainly because of an annoying user access control issue with Windows 7. So I decided, fuck it, just not gonna worry about having my database for now. I’m going to start fresh with a new database (I recently revamped my game completely so this database should be an interesting and more accurate view of my winrate). If I need all my old hands, I can always e-mail stars again. So yeah, sorry for the lack of updates, I’ll try to keep a better handle on that in the future. As for now, just know the BR is at about $1.4k (will be $700 after I cash out the money to pay for this laptop). Kinda sucks, but I’ll work it up again and be at 25nl in no time.

First, I actually ended up playing a few more sessions after I made my last post last month, so I should probably update that sometime. Meh, it’s probably not that important. As far as this month, I’ve been super bogged down with school work that I haven’t been able to play much. The past few days I’ve caught up a little though, so I’m at 14,754 hands this month. Despite my lack of volume, it’s been quite a nice month so far. Here’s a couple of hands to give you an idea of how the month is going.

Hopefully I’ll be moving up soon, but I won’t hold my breath on that quite yet. Will update again soon.

September wasn’t a very good month. Both poker-wise and life-wise, I kind of just downswonged into oblivion and at one point I didn’t think I could be any lower. I won’t go into detail, but basically I’m single now for the first time in years and it’s a weird feeling, but things happen and we have to adjust to them.

As far as poker goes, this month was the worst I’ve ever run. Here are my stats for the month:

And graph:

Also lost $52.50 buying a piece of someone’s seat to one of the $1k WCOOP Events, but that an investment I felt was worth it, it just sucks that I ended up losing there. Throw in -$25 for coaching (again, worth it but still a net loss for now), and -$22 (played the $4.40 180-mans like five times, cashed once) and also -$11 after busting out in the 1/4 Million and I’m down even more this month. Here’s the breakdown:

-$289.68 (cash)
-$52.50 (buying a piece of action for WCOOP)
-$40 (bought an e-book with poker money)
-$25 (coaching)
-$11 (1/4 Million)
-$4 (shipped to a friend after donking around playing live)
+$40 (bonus)
+46.80 (tourney win)
———————-
-$335.38 for the month

So seeing as how I started with around $860ish at the beginning of the month, my roll should be around $525ish, right? Nope. It’s $765. I won’t go into how I managed to only be down 4 buy-ins this month after such a horrendous swong, but let’s just say I have a poker guardian angel that looks after me . I put in very little volume this month and my head has been kind of all over the place, so that probably explains why this month’s numbers really sucked. The plan now is to just play sparingly for the next couple days and just take it easy. Next month I’m going to delve back into 25nl 6-max and work on clearing my bonus. After I clear the next two bonuses I’ll be closer to my goal of $1k! Oh yeah, ignore the fact that I played 50nl HU this month, I’m not very proud of it . So there you have it, September in review. PLEASE POKER GODS LET OCTOBER BE GOOT FOR ME. Also, hope I run awesome in life as well. Here’s to success.

Worst month of my career. Worst downswing of my career. Most money I’ve lost in poker. Yeah, September ain’t fun. Since last post, I’m about 4 or 5 buy-ins worse off. But to be honest, I’m not in a panic, nor am I in a rush to cash out all my money, or give up playing. Not sure why, but I’m at a pretty calm state right now. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been frustrated as hell this month. But what the hell can I do? I know variance exists, so all I can do is grind right through it. Anyway, BR is currently at $600ish (yes, $323 lower than it was a the peak of the month). This means a couple things:

1) Time to move down to 10nl to build the roll and get some confidence back.

2) Time to face the fact that my game needs some serious help. Variance has screwed me over this month, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have leaks. This Saturday, I’ll have my first coaching session. I’m pretty excited about the idea of getting expert help and finally taking my game to the next level.

In other news, life is good and I’m happy. That’s all that matters! Sorry for being vague, but I seriously don’t have a specific reason for being happy. I just am. Take that!

Well September started out kinda shitty. I dropped almost 5 buy-ins right off the bat, then made a rally to come back to profits again. Then something bad happened.

Yeah, I don’t know what happened exactly, but I’m fairly certain this is my largest downswing to date. In the past, I usually just cashed out in a panic before it got worse than 3 buy-ins . So yeah, I’m down a little over 8 buy-ins in the past two days, which really sucks, but shit happens. I think I might have a small clue as to what might be contributing to that as well. I shipped my laptop back to HP last week, so I’ve been playing on my old desktop which runs extreeeeeeeeeeeemely slow. Because it sucks so bad, I can’t run HEM and therefore, can’t use a HUD while playing. This obviously affects my decisions a little bit. So I ran pretty bad on Sunday and after dropping several buy-ins I told myself I’d switch to FR today today. That didn’t work out so hot. I was initially up two buy-ins my first session, but then dropped four last session, which makes for a grand total of -$223.90 the past two days. Not fun :-\. FR has treated me like absolutely shit, with every overpair I have going up against sets like EVERY time. I figured I would try FR to see if I could run good one time, but nope. It sucks so hard to have fish show up with the nuts every single time you guys get it in.

On the bright side, I haven’t cashed out (lol) and although I feel pretty shitty for losing that many buy-ins, I know what I need to do to regroup. Here’s my plan:

1) Stay away from poker until I get my laptop back. Playing without a HUD has proven to be extremely -EV.
2) After maintaining Gold Star and clearing next $100 of bonus, dedicate less time to playing and more time on studying, particularly DC vids.
3) If necessary, play 10nl to get confidence back up and pad the roll, then attack 25nl 6-max again.

So hopefully my laptop will be fixed soon so I can start properly grinding again. Even though I’ve been running terribly, I see a light at the end of the tunnel. Here’s to a massive comeback for September!

Just wanted to add that I cashed in six more 210fpp sattys and played (and lost) a $2.20 shootout today. So that adds $62.48 to my bottom line for a total profit of $612.48 for the month. Weeeee personal recordaments! That is all.

I wanted to go ahead and post this before I forgot all the stuff to include for this month. Here are the results for this month’s grind.

As you can see, the month as a whole was pretty swongy, but overall a pretty decent month, especially considering the $100 bonus I cleared a few days ago.

Here are the stats by breakdown of each stake:

Losing at 2nl and 10nl is just lolstandard. But I’m happy about winning at 25nl and even 50nl. I’m feeling really confident about my game and this month has been a great experience since I finally dedicated an entire month to playing mostly 25nl. I’d like to be crushing it harder, but 4bb/100 is still a decent showing. So that makes $379.35 + $114 (MTT cash) + $53.90 (took down 5 of the 210fpp sattys) + $13 (shootout cash) – $10 or so in various micro tourney entries and that totals to roughly $550 in profit for the month. Not too bad! This is a new record for me but I feel like this is going to become the norm as I continue to play 25nl. I’ve got two more $100 bonuses to clear and afterwards, I plan moving up to 50nl hopefully by early November. I also cleared Gold Star for the first time ever and I’m looking forward to playing in the weekly and monthly VIP freerolls. So yeah, great month poker-wise.

I want to talk about school but since this is mainly a poker blog I think I’ll just save those thoughts for another blog or facebook or something. Anyway, thanks to all you loyal readers out there for tuning in.

Woot! Classes are interesting so far. Have already made a few friends and was actually surprised to see a few familiar faces from UNCW, so that was cool. The assignments look challenging but interesting, so looking forward to the semester. Also, I’m getting better navigating my way around Raleigh! YAY.

Poker is not going well. Early in the month I was on pace for my most profitable month ever, but that quickly turned sour within the last week. I shouldn’t care about results as much as I do, but naturally it was disappointing to see my profits shrinking day after day. Just finished a session that lasted about an hour and a half and to be honest, I have no idea how I did. I decided not to look at my cashier or HEM since I’m trying to not be so results-oriented. I believe I played fairly well, but the session started out pretty bad. At one point I had 3 buy-ins on one table and 2 buy-ins on two other tables, but who knows how I did overall.

Oh well, off to grocery shopping with the sister. Food is goot.

So I decided to buy-in to the $2.20 6-max $4k guarantee today. For the first 1.5 hours it’s going great, I’m stealing tons of chips, winning all-in showdowns against shorties, etc. Later I get A10 spades and raise in EP, one caller. Flop comes all low cards and I c-bet and the guy min-raises me. Now, my image was probably really really laggy, but I had been showing good hands at showdown. I tank for a bet because I’m certain this guy is just making a play at me, then ship it in. He snap calls with the flopped straight. Boom, I’m drawing dead and out of the tournament. 17k chips gone! Pretty sick. I almost never make that play and the one time I decide to do it the guy has the freakin’ nuts. Also add that I lost a stack at 10nl (standard) and half a stack at 25nl earlier today, and it turns out to be a pretty fun day! No worries, though. I’m not really in the mood to play anymore today so I’m going to go check out Southpoint and then downtown Raleigh later tonight. Went out last night and it was a good time, hopefully Saturdays are goot around here too.

Both to the new city, and my poker game.  I’ve recently gone out exploring instead of staying cooped up in my room all day.  It feels good to get temporarily lost in a big city.  You kinda just drive and enjoy the moment.  I feel pretty comfortable with the surrounding area now so doing things like going to the grocery store or getting a quick bite to eat somewhere doesn’t intimidate me anymore.  I’ve got about a week left before I start graduate school.  This summer has FLOWN by.  It’s pretty crazy to think it’s already mid-August.  On Tuesday I met up with an old high school friend and she kind of gave me the tour of downtown Raleigh and all the hot spots.  It was pretty cool and I definitely think I’ll be checking out some of the venues there when I get the chance.  Thursday I met up with Grant and we ventured on over to Durham where I checked out Chris and Blake’s new pad.  Then we headed out to Chapel Hill and kind of just chilled at a bar where I enjoyed watching the both of them get drunk and talk in extremely hick accents.  Also ate at a supposedly world famous restaurant called “Time-Out”.  Food was good. 

As far as poker, I won another 210fpp satty today.  So that makes about $160 in tournament wins (the $3 rebuy, two sattys, and a shootout cash) plus $261 in cash game profit so far.  Not too bad considering it’s only the 14th.  I had an interesting hand come up in one of my last sessions that was sort of LOL.  I’d explain my thought process behind it, but I don’t want regs looking my screen name up and exploiting my game .  Just enjoy the ridiculousness of how it played out.

Anyway, here’s the graph so far this month:

Oh, and I guess I should highlight my six hand foray into 50nl

That’s all for now. Tomorrow I achieve SilverStar!