End of an Amazing Month

This was my best online month to date. Words can't describe how well I ran. I hope it continues through the PCA main event. I won't be playing much poker the next couple weeks aside from tournaments but I'll have an update from the PCA.

Happy New Year everyone.

Back to Back SNE

I made it with 6 days to spare:



I haven't decided if I'll go for it again next year but most likely I will.

A couple people have asked me what SNE is. Basically you play a bazillion hands of poker in a year and PokerStars rewards you with a lot of cash and some major tournament entries. More details here: http://www.pokerstars.com/vip/supernova/elite/

Happy Holidays everyone. I'll have a few updates from the PCA.

December to Remember

My incredible good luck continues. In the ~5.5 Million hands I've played in my poker career, nothing tops how well I've run the last five days. If I had a run like this during the World Series, I'd have won a minimum of 3 bracelets and been anointed poker's next great superstar. What a fickle game we play.

I seriously doubt I'll ever go on a run like this again particularly in such a short amount of time so it's well worth reveling in.

Amazing Positive Variance and why I'd Wouldnt Make it Playing Live

The last two days have been pretty remarkable, the best two day stretch I can remember having:





My friend George plays live poker, 80-160 I believe and is likely the best player in the game. I was talking to him recently and he was telling me how bad he's been running and that he hadn't won a single session in a long time. Imagine the flip side of this, having the same variance but negative variance. I'm probably somewhere around a 1.25 big bets per hundred hands winner in the games I play. I've run at 12 BB/100 over 4000 hands so I'm running about 10.75 big bets above expectation. The flip side of this run would be run at about -9.5 BB/100 over 4000 hands. Now imagine you're playing live poker where I believe they average about 30 hands an hour. That means I could play for 133 hours, probably 3 or more weeks and be down 380 big bets or $76,000 if I was playing 100-200. And this all assumes I maintain my composure and play the same game that earns me 1.25 BB/100. I don't think I'd make it through the second week. Kudos to you George, I don't know how you do it.

A quick VPP update: I'm up to 986,500 VPPs, way ahead of pace. I'm leaving for Boston Wednesday morning and I'd guess I'll reach SNE by the end of the week. What a relief.

Happy Holidays to everyone and may you run as good as I've been running.

December Update

I've been playing tons of poker this month - 28,000 hands after 14 days to be exact. It's amazing that I had to average 2,000 hands a day last year to make SuperNovaElite. I really don't know how I did it. I'm exhausted and feel like the only thing I've done for two weeks is sit at my computer playing. Last year I had to do this every single day of the year. Thank god for the changes to Stars VPP structure this year or I don't think there's any way I could make SNE again. So I've gone from being on pace to start the month to about 6 days ahead of pace. I'm at about 970K VPPs as of this post and hope to make SNE within the next 10 days.

I realize I haven't done any strategy posts in a long time, hopefully I have time for one in the next month or so. There really isn't much more to write about that I already haven't written at some point but some topics are worth revisiting. Also my friend Ryan has an excellent blog here: http://ryanwold.com/ and he's already written some good strategy posts.

December has been a pretty strange month money wise. I took off winning 25K after my first week or so and at the beginning of last week I went on about a 20K downswing before recovering some today. I feel like I've run really poorly this week and I'm happy to be where I am. I don't feel like I'm playing my A game, mainly because I'm mentally exhausted but maybe my B+ game. I'm really looking forward to making SNE and relaxing. I need at least a few days where I play very little poker and recharge.

Here's what the month has looked like: