Swings!

So the last few days have been a roller coaster ride. Swing down, swing up, swing down, swing up again. Check it out:




The last 7k hands were especially brutal. Wasn't getting much action good hands for first 5k, missing a lot, having my cbets stomped on, etc. Then, for the last 2k or so, everything went my way and I swung right back up. My gameplay stayed the same for the most part, although I did take it down to 8 tables of all NL 200 to concentrate more. I'll continue to play 8-10 for a bit until I get more comfortable. Yesterday especially, it felt like a lot of my semi-bluffs were either being outplayed (not too likely) or just running into better hands (in which case I'm substantially off on range estimating). I've tightened back up a little and stopped using my semi-bluffs in most cases. as you can also see, I'm running pretty bad, about $900 below EV. That just about catches me up with what I 'owed' in EV this month...not that it actually works like that from any one given point to the next, but it's ahandy assumption to adjust winnings during a given time period.

The good news is that the rakeback alone earned during my few days of pro-dom is enough to cover my living expenses. That certainly makes it a little easier to take the ups and downs, along with the fact that my hourly winrate still exceeds what I need it to be. Kinda funny that I've put in almost as many hands in the last 4 days as the entire rest of the month. I think it's safe to attribute that to the novelty of grinding out poker for a living. once it wears off, as I'm sure it will, I'll probably be hard pressed to play 25 hours a week. But then again, I do like money, so who knows?

As you can tell from the graph above, I've also started using Hold 'Em Manager instead of PT3. For the most part, everything is the same, although I like the HEM HUD a little better. The biggest feature for me is the equity-adjusted stats it computes; makes it a lot easier for me to keep track without having to copy HHs, switch computers, run hands in PT2, then run PokerEV just to find out what my EV was. The layout is also a little better in my opinion. I've got almost 2 weeks left on my trial, but I'm pretty sure I'll be buying it. I need to get a separate hard drive for it though; doing anything else on my computer while I've got poker going is painfully slow due to hard drive usage by the database. I need more storage space too. I don't think I need to upgrade my computer; it's only a year and a half old, and it's not like poker is too intense on the comp. I thought about getting a new one because they're getting rediculously cheap, but why bother? It'll just be outdated again, and it's not like it will get me much of anything performance-wise.

Gonna be busy tonight and the rest of the weekend with the business, but I'm looking forward to htiting the tables hard when I can. It's a shame most of my business work hours are during prime poker hours, but oh well...just have to remember that the business is my path to financial independence, not poker.