Ahead of pace and a great week

I finally got ahead of the SNE pace a few days ago. I've now earned 49607 VPPS which puts me a whopping 292 ahead of the 49315 needed to be on track for one million. I've now played 40,770 hands between Stars and UB this year. I played the bare minimum (2,000 hands) on UB again this week and still managed a 10K freefall and rebound within a few hundred hands. The 10K swing took place in a 100-200 game Phil Hellmuth was playing in. I got in the game partly for entertainment value and partly because it was a good game. It took Phil all of two hands to start berating my play in the chat box which is one more than it normally takes. I ended up leaving the game after getting back to even and I felt great after having been sick to my stomach when I was stuck 10K. Even after all the gambling I've been through in my life, more 50K swings then I can count and even a 500K swing, I will never get used to losing ten thousand at poker.

Aside from the 200 hand super swing on UB, things went incredibly smooth this week and I won big almost every day. I have been 4-5 tabling the 15-30 games on PokerStars and have been absolutely crushing them. Ironically, I've been doing very little game selecting at 15-30 since there aren't typically more than 5-6 tables going at any given time. I have been running extremely well of course but I also feel like I'm playing very good poker. I have been working a lot on my game, watching videos and making adjustments. I made a fairly significant change to my pre-flop strategy about ten days ago that is paying dividends. It is contrary to what most players do at my limits but something that several successful high limit players are doing so I feel confident about it.

So as of today, I'm up 562 big bets on the year which translates to $24097 and adding in rakeback and bonuses I'm on pace for about 55K month. If I can get there, it will be my third best month since I started about 5 years ago. I just went through the worst two month stretch of my career so it couldn't have come at a better time.

My plan is to continue playing about 10% more hands than I need to per day in the hopes of getting several days ahead of pace since I know there will be a lot of days this year where I can't spend 6 hours playing. Hopefully my good fortune continues. Poker can turn on a dime so I'm always prepared for the worst. I haven't been challenged in that respect yet - it's easy to put the hands in when I'm winning but the days where I'm losing 100 bets will be very difficult. I will very likely come back to this post when that day comes and try to focus on the bigger picture.