Friday, May 31, 2013

Merciful End to May

This is what my trip has looked like so far:







After winning about 770 BB's in 16K hands, I went on an 770 BB downer over my next sixty thousand hands.  I'll skip the obvious, I ran extremely bad.  But I also played about as bad as I ever played for a 5-10K hand stretch.

I say this every year and I'll probably continue saying it every year.  Do not underestimate the variance in poker, particular in limit hold-em.  However bad you think it can get, it can get much, much worse.  And don't underestimate the impact it will have on your game.  Every time without fail when I go through one of these extended stretches of run bad, my game completely deteriorates and I start making all kinds of errors I'd never make otherwise.

I've learned a couple things from this downswing.  One is that I need to start taking breaks.  I played 335 hours this month which took a severe toll on my game.  At one point, I misread the board three times in the span of an hour.  So starting next year, I'm committing myself to taking time off anytime I start to feel burned out.

The other thing I learned is that I can't wake up and jump into high limit games.  At least ten mornings this month I woke up, immediately sat in 4 high limit games and was down 5k in less than an hour.  I'm always groggy and can't think straight when I wake up.  It takes a while for my mind to get going and to be in a poker frame of mind.  What I was doing every day would be the equivalent of Ray Allen sleeping in the bleachers, rolling out of bed and immediately getting into a NBA basketball game with guys that had been competing for hours.  He'd have no shot of competing and neither do I.  Two days ago, I decided not to play anything higher than 30/60 until I'm confident I'm thinking clearly.

On the VPP front I'm up to 400K which I believe puts me right on SNE pace.  I'm hoping to finish by the end of September and will need to average about 150K/Month to accomplish that.

Good luck at the tables.



Monday, May 6, 2013

Off To The Races in Cabo

It's been a while since my last post.  I'm back in Mexico, Cabo San Lucas this time.  We got here about eight days ago and I've been on absolute tear playing.  It seems like every day I wake up to play and I'm up 5K before I know it.  It's really been an amazing stretch and I'm enjoying it as much as possible since I know it can and will turn at any time.













On the VPP front I'm up to about 280K, far behind SNE pace.  I want to be done playing by October and in order to do that I need to average about 5500 VPPs a day.  That's pretty ambitious considering it equates to about 10-12 hours of playing a day, every day.  So far so good, I've averaged that my first eight days here.  The plan is to stay here three months, head home for a week and then off to another destination for the remaining two months.

That's about it.  I feel like I"m playing some of the best poker I've ever played but I always feel that way when I run this well.  As always the goal is stay focused and make the best possible decisions at the table, each and every decision.

Good luck at the tables everyone.