January 2011

January was very similar to how December went for me.  I went through an extremely long stretch where my blue line ($ won at showdown) flatlined.  In December it was over 30K hands.  This month...50 friggin' thousand hands.  Yep - 50,000 hands where I won a grand total of 6 buyins AT SHOWDOWN.  That is very very low.  This is obviously a huge leak.  When most people have a flat blue line it is because they have a positive redline.  Me... well, I had a flat blue line with a negative redline.  It doesn't take a genius to figure out I'm leaking like a sieve in showdown pots 

In reviewing my showdown hands, it boils down to:

• Getting it AI too light (i.e. with a one pair hand)
• Calling way too many rivers when I'm not likely to be ahead.  I become a horrible calling station on rivers. 

If I can improve on those two areas I think I will improve overall. 

Overall, I played almost 100K hands between my computer and laptop.  And the silver lining to all of this:  I am once again in the positive thinks largely (okay, ONLY) due to bonuses and rakeback. 

I am making a promise to myself this month.  I will simply not play more than 2 Rush tables or 6 tables in total.  Early on, I will only play 4 tables.  It will feel PAINFULLY slow, but I can pretty much pinpoint my decline in winning at poker was when I started multi-tabling.  I probably did it before I was really ready.  I need to go back to playing just a few tables so that I can actually THINK through my lines.  IF I can start winning with less tables I can try to up it again in March.  But February is the month where I forgo volume (and bonuses, and rakeback) in order to fix my broken game.  If I can't, well then I'm pretty much done with poker - at least insofar as thinking of it as a way to make some nice side income. 

2010 Results

2010.  Goodbye. 

Ha.  Yeah, 2010 wasn't one of my best years for the pokerz.  The good news is that at the end of the day I was a winner (thank you very much Rakeback and Bonuses).  As far as the actual poker playing goes, I was a slight loser -- my "winrate" (or should I say "lose" rate) was -0.92 bb/100. 

Volume:  was good.  I played over 1 million hands of online poker.  That does not include any SNG's our MTT tournaments I played. 

December was also kind of a "meh" month.  I felt that I played fairly well, but my blue line (win/loss at showdown) was flat for the last 30k hands.  Some of that was bad luck but a lot of it was making a lot of bad river calls and getting it AI when quite frankly I shouldn't have been. 

2011.  Welcome my friend.  I look forward to being successful with you.