May in the Books

I finally rebounded a bit in May and had a pretty respectable month.  In terms of big bets won, it's one of my best in the past couple years.

Overall, I'm still very concerned with my mental state.  I'm completely unmotivated and going through the motions way too often.  My primary focus is on VPPs every day and it feels like torture trying to reach the VPP goals I set.  I have some moments or hours of clarity where I'm thinking clearly, focused, and know what's going on at my tables.  But those moments are few and far between.  Far more often I'm in sort of a haze just going through the motions and struggling to focus.

As I mentioned in my last post, there's nothing left in the game for me except money.  There's no other incentive or motivation at this point.  Despite some of the obvious problems with PTR, it at least gave me something to shoot for - being the leading $ winner at the various limits or racing for the all-time $ lead.  I wish that aspect was brought back, it least would give me something else to shoot for.  As it stands, my poker days are numbered.  When I get home in the fall, I'm going to work hard to transition into some other forms of gambling that I enjoy more.

As far as my mass multitabling plan of low-limits, it lasted about 3 days.  I believe I won 510 BB's in 3 days 6-7 tabling 5/10 to 15/30 but I'm confident it's some of the worst poker I've played in a long, long time. I have a lot of difficulty committing myself to doing something where I know I'm not doing it to the best of my ability.  It frustrates me to know I'm making countless mistakes that could be avoided by dropping tables and slowing down. There's a trade-off of course which is I earn VPPs at a much faster rate.  So at this point I've modified my plan and am alternating between playing some "mindless" sessions where I'm 5-6 tabling low limits and focused (at least trying to focus) sessions of 3-4 tables from 10/20 to 50/100.  I'm done at the moment playing 100/200 and 200/400 and it's unlikely I'll play very much more in the future until Poker Stars fixes their non-random button issue.  It's to the point where many of the games are totally unplayable because of the rec players hopping tables - this inevitably causes the players that aren't starting the tables to play more blind positions than non-blind positions.  Additionally, it's a lot less stress not having $40K-$100K swings every month or two.  Ultimately it will mean less money but I think the tradeoff of less stress is worth it at this point.

On the VPP front, I'm about a month behind pace, currently at 340K VPPs.  It seems like every day I wake up with a goal to do at least 5K VPPs and I consistently fall short.  It's very hard to believe that I once did 7K per day for 3 months straight.  5K seems like an eternity these days.  I have no idea if I'll make SNE this year, at the rate I'm going, it doesn't look like it.  Hopefully I'll find some motivation and drive somewhere.

Good Luck to everyone at the WSOP and online in June.