Lessons Learned

Been a bit since the last post, mainly because I hate posting about doing poorly. Even after I dug myself out of the hole, my laziness set in, but here we go.

I've mainly drawn back from NL 200. I'm not sure if the success was a fluke or people just adjusted to my play, but I can't seem to maintain a decent win rate up there. I'm making a little under 1 bb/100 at NL 200, which isn't as bad as losing it I guess, but considering I'm making about 6 bb/100 at NL 100, it clearly benefits me to play more at NL 100 than NL 200.

I closed out September fairly well, up $7,100 on the month. Just under 100k hands in 139 hours, and all in all, a result I'm more than pleased with. It's certainly more than I had hoped for when I decided to play to pay the bills.

October has been a different story so far. 92 hours, 71k hands, and I'm only up about $500. The first 2 days were the worst, dropping about $3,100 during that time. Looking back on my play, there were definitely some times I could have folded and saved some money, but the overall picture was pretty clear: aside from getting into it with the weak players when I had the nuts, I wasn't playing well, especially against the regulars. I shifted my focus back to NL 100 and NL 200, looking for fishy tables/players and trying to minimize losses to regs. NL 100 has given me no trouble at all though; my nittiness gets paid off enough by the players down there, or maybe it's just the lack of as many good regs. Whatever it is, I can grind out NL 100 in my sleep and make a decent hourly rate.

As happy as I am with the NL 100 hourly rate, I'd obviously prefer to be able to hang at NL 200 and make more, in theory. I picked up Harrington on Cash Games, and I'm almost done with Volume 1. A lot of solid concepts in there; some I knew already, but a lot of his assertions on hand stregths are things I hadn't given much thought towards. They sound like good ideas, but I'll definitely need to put in some practice before I'm ready to implement those ideas with 700+ hands per hour. I'll probably give them a try during the early afternoon, when there seems to be the most regulars around. Hopefully I'll have the patience to play only a few tables.

In other good news, the FT store added a new 24" monitor. It seems to be a pretty solid monitor, and it's certainly cheap enough (88k points, RB hit of about $120). I'm headed home this week, and I'll check out my brother's setup with his 24"; if I dig it, I'll probably get a monitor or 2 to replace my 17" and 19" behemoth CRTs. I've resisted the urge to do so before because it doesn't really up my productivity, as I don't need more screenspace; but it's not like I have anything better to spend my points on yet, and at some point, I'm gonna want/need better monitors. At the rate I'm going, I'm earning enough points for a monitor about every 3.5 weeks, so even if something else good comes along, I'll be able to grab it.

I'm visiting home this week before I head to a wedding, so I won't be able to get my usual quantity of play in. I'm shooting for 20-30 hours or so, but that might be too optimistic.