November in the Books

I'm happy with how the month turned out all things considered. I got really sick after my last blog update. I couldn't play any poker for about four and a half days and went from being a few days ahead of SNE pace to a few days behind. Today was actually the first day since then I've felt 100%. I got sick on Sunday the 14th so for 15 days or so I had various ailments. There were quite a few days where I was playing with a fever and sweat dripping down my face.

I ended the month almost exactly on SNE pace - I'm at 916K Vpps at the moment. I'm heading to Boston for about 6 days for Christmas. Then it's back to San Francisco for a couple days, off to Miami for 3 days, Puerto Rico for another 4 days, and then the PCA in the Bahamas for 10 days. So I really need to play a lot of poker the next couple weeks to make sure I'm ahead of pace before all my traveling. I've been multitabling more of the lower limits to earn VPPs faster and I imagine I'll be doing a lot of that in the next couple weeks.

I'm pretty excited about playing the PCA this year. I feel really good about my tournament game. I've been watching a lot of videos and thinking about my game. My NL game itself is not great but I feel like my tournament game and grasp of the concepts needed to be a winning tournament player is at an all-time high. It's 95% luck in any given tournament of course but I'm still looking forward to it either way.

Here's what November looked like:

November Update

Things seem to have returned to "normal" at least for the time being. With the exception of one 150 big bet downswing at 50-100 in the span of about 400 hands, it's been a relatively tame month. I think I'm running fairly well and playing well.

The games just seem to get tougher and tougher. When I think back to almost two years ago when I started playing on PokerStars, the games were much, much softer. The player pool of good regulars was probably half of what it is now, and there were many more fish. I used to open a 15-30 and 30-60 table for heads up games and I rarely had any competition. Now there are days where 5 or 6 guys are doing the same thing as me, opening tables, and trying to get in as many hands as possible heads up before someone sits. When I started it wasn't uncommon for me to play heads up against players for extended periods of time. Now I'm lucky to get 3 hands in before someone sits. And in some instances the entire table fills with regulars before I finish the first hand.

I'm hoping the trend of improved play and less fish doesn't continue much longer or I'll give serious consideration to splitting my bankroll across several different sites. SuperNovaElite is great and works out to almost 80% rakeback but another six months of this trend and I'm not sure the rakeback would compensate for the increased earn I could find at other sites. For now though I'm still on Stars. And on the subject of SNE, I'm now 1 day ahead of pace at about 872K VPPs.

This is what the month has looked like so far: