July Results

Posted by icemonkey9 on Aug 1, 2009 in Results | 1 comment

I remember a year ago when I would eagerly post results and my lovely graph.  Ooooh - I won $109 this month!!! Ahh those were the times, moving up to 50nl and thinking "dammmmmnnnn this is some money baby!" and now I'm totally jaded at 100nl.  Unfortunately in today's climate and my new standing in the poker industry as a well known writer for a multitude of websites, I am forced to withhold any information specific to how much I profit in a month.  At this point, the game has gone from fun hobby to actual part time income for me.  I can say that, of course, after having a great month!

Here's the quick recap of events ...

• Went to Las Vegas for the CardsChat meetup.  Hung out with Zachvac and ChuckTs, with the rest of the CC crew.  Meeting and getting to know Fredrick Paulsson turned out to be the most pleasant surprise of the trip.  So many others made it special including Debi, Joe, Curtis, Tammy, Nick .... omg I can't name them all...
• Got back from Vegas and did some real hard thinking about my poker game game, online poker topics and everything involved with being a good online player.  I decide to ditch the Cereus experiment and move to a site with good traffic and rakeback.
• In order to get my game going and bring in some bonus dollars I had received I decided to play Full Ring 100nl ($0.50-$1 blinds).
• I read Fredrick's post "Why Tight is Right (A Nit's Apology)" finally and was probably the site's last regular to read it.  It blew my frickin' mind man.
• I ran an analysis for all the hands at 100nl Full Ring and examined in detailed utilizing HEM filters exactly what the top 10 winners at this level do.  Turns out they are all, for the most part, giant nits.
• I decide to cut the number of tables down to 7 from my normal 10-12 for Full Ring in order to focus more on what's happening and to make better reads.  I also decide to play about the nittiest game possible.
• Through a good stretch of hands (13,000-ish for a ballpark) I ran well and played better.  The result was a great month in terms of profits.
• I'm still not drawing any conclusions about this style of play, site or anything else until I've put in 20-25k hands.  It's just too soon to tell.
• Wrapping up the month in this blog post.

So that was my month in a nutshell, or to be more exact, a bullet-point HTML list.  The highlights included the Vegas trip to be sure, and my newfound abilities in tilt control (taking it day by day, session by session, hand by hand) and nit-playing with post-flop uber-aggression.  The lowlights included the banning incidents at CardsChat and the site's loyaler base basically being torn apart.  That sucked.

What's on Tap for August?

Good question.  There's some friends I have that are all participating in volume-based prop bets in order to motivate themselves to play more (and ideally profit more).  I would have jumped at that opportunity before, but I've come to realize such things are counter productive to me.  If I'm feeling bad or the "mood" isn't right, I should not play, and therefore I do not.  I should only be playing when I know I can play to the maximum of my abilities ... a forced prop bet would only force the issue in my mind.  I will say that I am looking to duplicate the pace that I put on after getting back from Vegas which would definitely put me around 20,000 hands for the month.  In an ideal world, that would mean that I have a regular poker playing schedule and continue to make the best plays possible (whether or not the results are positive or negative is really secondary).

Can We Have Another Bullet Point List of Things You Learned in July?

• Sure!
• You really don't need to rent a car in Vegas.  Use the monorail and cabs, you'll be fine.
• Always sign up for the players card in Vegas casinos, especially if you grind the cash game poker tables. You'll probably be comp'd a room!
• Live poker is lol
• Apparently I run great at live tournaments and terrible at live cash games, which is opposite of my online life.
• Tight *is* indeed right. REAL tight.
• We all have a game that makes us as profitable as possible.  We just have to find that game and stick to it and remember it.  I'm a nit.
• Being tied to a subjective period of time, like "July of 2009" is no real means of measuring poker success.
• Mental exercises for getting over tough hands.  I'll post about this one at a later date.

That's it.  Let's bring on August!