Just Livin’ Tha Dream

Month Wrap UP

After my session yesterday I started packing up and realized that packing is going to take much longer than one day. So I’m calling it a month and I am going to work on packing up and cleaning up my apartment today.

Because I’m not going to play today I’m going to come in a little short at 37.5k hands this month. But I’m still pretty proud of the volume as it’s the best I’ve done in a long time and it’s my first month back.

Here’s my month at 25nl. I finished +$158.08 which is .84 BB/100. My all-in EV for the month is at $397.48 which would have been 2.11 BB/100. But oh well…

Take a look at the same graph with showdown/non-showdown winnings added.

That black line is when I dropped down to 9 tables. I was astonished by what happened to my non showdown winnings. I guess 9 tables is my lucky number. If I add more I start to play poorly post flop, apparently. Here’s all the data for me while I was 9 tabling.

Overall, it was a good month. The second half in particular was really solid. I started to do a lot of things well that I hadn’t done in the past. In the first half of the month I was more concerned with quantity of hands and it shows in the quality of my play. I feel good about 9 tables and next month I’m going to try to stretch my daily session to 2500 hands instead of 2000.

I am also going to watch Verneer’s climbing micro mountain series and I plan on taking a shot at 50nl next month. However, I’m moving in a couple days and my family is coming to town so I’ll be out of commission for a little while.

When I planned on playing a full month at 25nl I thought a $500 month would be very solid. And I would have gotten there easy if I ran at EV. Oh well, boo hoo. I still came pretty close.

I won $158.08. I cleared $60 in bonuses. And I earned approximately $212 in rakeback. Bringing my total to $430.08.

Feels Good to Win

I’ve been playing 2k hands/day. And I’m now only playing about 670 hands/hr since I’ve dropped to 9 tables and table selecting like crazy. I mean, it’s hard to even keep 9 good tables open so I’m probably only averaging 7 tables at a time.

I’m just doing so many things well that it feels weird. Like I said, I’m table selecting like crazy which I wasn’t doing during the first half of the month. I’m taking notes and marking fish with purple tags. When I step away from my computer I don’t bring any emotional baggage with me or let my results affect my mood. And the thing that I’m now doing that I’ve never done before… I don’t look at my results during a session! I just play as well as I can for as long as I can, which is about 3 hours.

Since I’ve been doing all these things I’ve been winning at 3.16 BB/100 and my EV is at 4.44 BB/100. The sample size is only 14k hands though. And I’m definitely not running well. I’m 4 buy-ins below EV for those 14k hands and 10 buy-ins below EV for the month.

I’ve got another 5k hands to play this month to make 40k. So I’m going to try to play 2500 tomorrow and Thursday so I can spend Friday packing up all my stuff and cleaning the apartment because I move on Saturday.

Emergency Update

Oh. My. God.

Progress

I’m playing much better since dropping to 9 tables and there has been a HUGE change in my non-showdown winnings line. I’m definitely not giving pots up as easily any more and I’m playing a little bit trickier post flop game.

I’ve also been trying to widen my opening range from late position. My numbers are way too tight. I used to like playing from a tight image because it’s easy to play from. You can take advantage of light three bets all day long. However, I was just folding away money and I’m working on opening up my range a little.

Unfortunately I’m still running poorly. I played really well today and got it in good or flipping every time (except one) and finished a couple buy-ins below EV. Which brought me to over 9 buy-ins below EV for the month.

The only problem I’m really struggling with now is my eyes! I can’t figure out how to keep my eyes from hurting. After about three hours I have a headache and my eyes will hurt for the rest of the day. This can’t be good.

I’m moving at the end of the month (just across town) and my dad and brother are coming to help out. Then I’m going home for a couple weeks so August won’t be a big month for me volume wise. So at least I’ll hit 40k this month!

Small Rebound

I took  quite a few days off but I played a session today and finally had a winning day! woot woot! I’m still 6 buy-ins or something below EV for the month but it felt awesome to run good for a change.

I’m definitely still improving too, which feels nice. Each session I pick up on a couple more things. And only playing 9 tables at a time is definitely helping me.

I’ve played 25.8k hands this month and I’m shooting for 40k which I should do fairly easily.  And depending on how the rest of the month goes I may take a shot at 50NL or I may just stay put until I’m crushing 25nl through a larger sample size and while playing more tables. I really feel like watching Verneer’s climbing micro mountain series could help me plug a bunch of leaks but I’m too cheap to pay for a membership when I’ll get one for free after this month.

I’m really not sure about what to do about my eyes either. I can’t play for longer than about 3 hours because looking at the computer screen for that long puts so much effing strain on my eyes. *brag* I have excellent vision too, better than 20/20. ~20/13 vision meaning I can see at 20 feet what a person with 20/20 needs to be 13 feet away to see */brag*.  Could I possibly be causing long term damage to my eyes?

My girlfriend and I saw Toy Story 3 over the weekend and we both loved it. We were both crying by the end. Those Pixar guys are amazing. I watched that special on msnbc or cnbc a couple weeks ago about Pixar and it was pretty incredible how they got it so right on their first try in a media that had never been done before. Toy Story was their first full length film and it was a home run! Nay, a grand slam!

I’m also hearing some incredible stuff about inception that’s peaked my interest. It’s supposed to be “mind blowing”. I’ll definitely have to check it out.