Saturday 28 February 2009

February review

Its been an odd poker month.

My play has been up and down as have my results from losing quite a bit at 50NL and 200NL, playing mainly 100NL pulling 1.84BB/100 and having some amazing but foolish and tilty shots at 400NL. I lost a chunk playing STT when I was struggling with cash games but then recovered some with the MTT prize below. In hindsight I seem to have been tilted after having a bad start to 100NL dropping a couple of BI in my first big session. I'm sure wanting to beat my record previous month was a factor but this results-orientated kind of tilt I need to work on. It was only 2BI after all and hardly a bad downswing!

All in all I feel slightly lucky to come out of the month being +$400 ($1000 above EV!) in around 21k hands and it was cool to win my biggest pot ever ($803 as I cracked AA with KK after putting in $400 preflop!).

In the last few days I've had a coaching session and I'm feeling more grounded again and the MTT & casino wins are filling me with good feeling for the new month.

Next month I'm going to concentrate on a couple of things. I HAVE to be more disciplined so no more 400NL! In fact I'm going to restrict myself to 100NL FR and 25NL/50NL 6max exclusively, the odd cheap MTT and no STT. Along the same lines I'm going to more disciplined with my decisions at the table and take more time to make them watching out for the Invisible Information. In turn this will require sessions to be more focussed so I'm going to enforce a 2hr max on sessions with mandatory 30 min break and no on-screen distractions (IM, email, video etc..). These all seem to be essential skills to master to really get value out of poker. Many people say that online poker is much harder than it used to be in the past and I'm sure its true. However, the game seems far from dead and there is money to be made but every small edge needs to be taken. A very solid 200NL regular posted his monthly stats and its an inspiration and something to aim for (+$25k, 100K hands, 6hrs a day 16-tabling). His 800k hand graph has lost the signs of variance is a straight line moving ever upward.

2 comments:

Bazclef said...

I think your goals for the month are good and solid. The odd MTT here and there certainly seems good to keep, and it's good to focus on, err... focus.

A couple of suggestions I might add too would be to have a couple of education type goals in there as well. I think watching the whole Tubasteve series on DC would be a solid goal, and also reviewing all of your big hands after each session to look for leaks.

Good luck this month. A good one will lead to moving up, which is always fun! Working on 6m should be a blast too...

James P McAteer said...

Good luck in March!