June and year-end recap

June recap:
Hollywood: ($136)
UB: $2398
PS: $925
Misc: ($125)
Total: $3065

To start the month, I had two consecutive $1k weeks ($1037, $1501). I've been on such a ridiculous tear, I didn't want to stop. But alas, life got in the way. Work has been picking up to the point where I'm working from home a couple of nights a week. Then, for the last week, I was down in Lake George with the family. While they did have internet access and I was free to myself for an hour per night, the connection was too flaky to risk any money at the tables.

I haven't playing Hollywood in a long time, and apparently as a result, they deducted $10 from my inactive account. So, rather than just cash out the rest, I went and bought into a 100 PLO8 and proceeded to donk it all away. Stupid, but now I don't think I'll go back. The past couple of months, they've been sending me emails with a no-load bonus, but every time I clicked the link to activate it, it takes me to the site and there is no such bonus there. I've made a nice $1235 profit there over the years. Time to close the spreadsheet, and add it to the other sites I no longer play (Empire, BoDog, Noble, Superior).

For UB, I played mostly 200PLO8, but I've started to add the 400PLO8 game as well. On the first night I played, I ran into a lunatic. Granted, I didn't know it was a lunatic until I made a curious/loose call that won me a $550 pot. I had never seen this person at the 200PLO8 level, so either they are very good, or just play the 400 cause that's the level they like. There is another player, a UB pro, who only plays the 400PLO8 game, so I didn't dismiss either possibility.

Getting back to the hand, I raised coming in, as I do most of the time, w/ AhTd2s5c and she (assumption from the username) called from the SB. The flop came Kc 7h Tc. She checked, I bet 2/3 of the pot with middle pair + backdoor nut low draw w/ no club draw, and she re-raised me the full pot. Now, at this point, I have about 1/6 of my starting stack in there ($50) , and it's a $100+ raise to me. Either I fold, or raise the rest of my stack and get an insta-call (there's no way anyone folds there, even on a dead bluff because you're getting almost 3:1 on your money with 2 cards to come). I decide that there is something not right with that play and so I call. In the 200PLO8 game, I will likely fold this against most opponents. They know me for being aggressive, so they can expect my bet and thus can slowplay big hands. She doesn't know me well enough to expect that. So this is screaming flush draw to me. The reason this is a loose call is that if she has FD + a K in her hand, I'm a serious dog and I know it. She turns over Qc3cTh4d for middle pair, weak kicker, and weak flush draw (anything but nut flush draw, NFD, is weak here). So, it turns out she is just another lunatic who chases their FDs. The turn is a 5 and river is another K to give me the scoop. Ended up winning $700+ from that table that night.

On PS, I continued to play the $100+5 HU game against my favorite opponent. Ended up +$373 for the month on HU SNGs. I started to play some more cash at PS. Clearly I needed to adjust as my earlier results there were poor, so I became a little more patient. It paid off with a +$400 session in the middle of the month. I'm now profitable again on PS after being negative for a while.

Finally the misc... That amount paid for the latest version of PokerTracker: PT3. I bought my first version of it about 2 1/2 years ago, and it improved my game tremendously. At the time, I was playing 25PLO8 and 50PLO8. There were a bunch of players whom I thought were solid and profitable, but when I installed the software and reviewed their histories, it turns out they were not as good as I had been led to believe. I used the software to determine their opening hand requirements and as such began to understand where I was in a hand against them and my results improved immediately. I wrote down all the important information in their notes: VPIP (how often they come into a pot), PFR (how often they raise coming in), PFRw (what they raise with coming in). I used this information and began to know where I was at more often, thereby being able to fold hands I know were losers, raise with hands which I was sure were winners, and bluff with hand I know they couldn't call with.

The latest version has all the same functionality, with additional features which I use, and help me when I'm multi-tabling. I use PFRw less, and really only care about PFR and VPIP, and AFQ (Aggression frequency). The latter is very important to know whether or not an opponent will bet out or raise on the flop/turn/river, and helps determine value bet vs slowplay/check-raise strategies.

So that's June. For the year....

I started this blog with a race to 10k. I abandoned that in August (http://secondnutsux.blogspot.com/2009/08/abandonning-race.html) after going the wrong direction for about 1k. But it turns out, I'm not that far off. I started around $8k and am now at $15.5k lifetime, so I've doubled my stack with a 7.5k win. It doesn't matter that 6k of that is the past 3 months, or the profits came from a different strategy than what I originally had planned. I came close, and I'm happy about that.

I'm aiming for 2 goals in the next 12 months:
1) A large final table score, preferably with a 5 digit payout. So this means I'm going to play the nightly 70k and 100k on PS more often. I'll look for other tournaments on other sites to achieve this as well.
2) Win an entry to a live tournament.

Again, I may get derailed, or I may get there in a different way, but that's what I'm targeting. I'll continue to play my PLO8 of course, and see if I can continue to move up and play the more challenging games.

May Recap

UB: +1245
PS: +785
Total: +2030

That is the best month I've ever had, bar none. Played a lot of PokerStars at the beginning of the month and a few HU tourneys on UB. Things were going alright, nothing spectacular. Up a couple hundred on PS, down a couple hundred on UB. Then things changed.

The first thing sucked. UB decided to pull their higher stakes PLO8 HU tourneys around the 10th of the month. No more $50+2.5 or $100+5 tourneys. Only $24+2. WTF?! Those were good for around 2 wins out of 3 versus some opponents, in about 1.5 hours of play ($33 or $66 per hour!). I was pissed. That meant only cash at UB. While not so bad, there are some nights I know I'm a little overly aggressive, and a HU tourney is a good way to release it, without losing your entire bankroll.

What I don't get is:
1) How much does it cost them to have that tourney in the lobby? It's not like they have a dealer sitting at the table doing nothing, right? I just don't see why it costs them anything more than pennies to leave that as an option.
2) People played almost every night. It's not like the game was never played. I averaged about 15 games a month (for about $50 in rake for them), and I'm sure others more.

Given what had just happened, I came up with a plan that I would go to PS first every night and check out the HU tourneys. If I saw an opponent that I liked, I'd play them, otherwise, I'd got play cash at UB.

That worked out very well. Except for a losing session on the 7th (-$323), the next 9 sessions at UB went as follows (not including bonus cash): +151, +26, +45, +203, +32, +710, +185, +130, +150. I was averaging about a 2 hour session each time, and with bonus cash, was close to $100/hr .

If things weren't going good enough, on the 18th, I found my favorite UB opponent sitting at the PLO8 HU tables on PS. I could not have been happier. I swear I was so giddy when I saw him there, my wife had to ask me what was up. I was happy for good reason; so far (including a little of June), I'm 4/1 in the $100+5 and 2/1 in the $200+10.

...

In the middle of the month, as I was entering my stats, I found an interesting weekly pattern. I did very well ever fifth week. I can't exact figure out why, since it didn't correspond to anything in particular. The pattern was
-275, -8, +175, +203, +751
+428, +784, -469, -623, +1324
-805, +139, -185, +321, +656
+22, -79, +28, -85, +602

I'd say the only anomaly to the pattern is the +748 in the second group, but since the biggest total still happened on the 5th week of that sequence, it's good enough.

I've heard of biorhythms, which are natural highs and lows of different parts of our existence (energy, emotional strength, concentration), and just decided that part of it must be at work. So, since I was about to start the first week of a new sequence, I tried to be conscious of it. I wanted to see if I was more irritable and prone to go on tilt and see if I could control my emotions better. I'd like to say that helped with the results, but in reality, I just ended up in a great session on the 22nd where I got one opponent on UB with second best every time I had the nuts. I took $500 and $400 pots on separate tables within minutes of each other.

That said, I'm still going to try and monitor this. If I can figure out when I'm more susceptible to poor play, and not play at those times, I'll improve my results.