Update!

Haven't posted in a bit, for which there are several good explanations. To begin with, I dropped about $800 last Friday.....couldn't seem to catch a break, ran into better hands like crazy, and capped it off by slow playing a flopped set into a runner runnered one card overpair straight for a full stack on NL 200. The best thing to do of course was take some time off, which I did. I helped a business colleague of mine run his laser tag event all last weekend; was a load of fun, I can't wait to do some of my own. I was sore as fuck for a few days afterwards though; taking cover behind 4 foot obstacles as a 6 foot tall guy is hell on the legs. Needless to say, I was way too tired to play during those days.

For most of this week, I've been in Indianapolis doing some training for work. a combination of being too tired/too drunk kept me from playing much; I finally managed to log a session yesterday and it turns out like this:

Brutal....easily the unluckiest I've been for a long time....runner runner flushes, 2 outters on the river....just silly. Gonna try and get some hands in tonight, but it ain't lookin good for the EV challenge.

Recovery

Trying to grind out some hands to recover from my spill at NL 100. Working out fairly well; netted $300 today. My EV did great at first, but after a silly play or two and some hand over handage I couldnt get it much above $200. Still, that seems to be enough to increase my lead over PokerxPro, so good enough!

So I played almost exactly as long as I had budgeted today and did fairly well. Happy with that, and hopefully I can keep it up. I am gonna have start putting more time into the business though; I have a lot of design work to do with my prospective field. It has no natural cover at all, so I pretty much need to build everything. I think I can build a decent map for relatively cheap, but I don't really know yet. Hell, I don't even know if the landlords will be cool with me using the property, so one step at a time I guess. In the meantime, I plan on focusing on squeezing the max amount of $$ out of poker....to do that, I need to minimize my bad plays. I've made some progress with this lately, but I still have a ways to go I think.

Whee

As you can see by the graph above, my stellar performance suffered a bit of a hiccup...to the tune of -$500 or so. I did well in NL 200 despite quite a few hand over hands, but NL 100 was KILLING me.....straights vs boats, donks hitting a hand vs my AA, and more than the 20% of 2 outters I should expect. The hand over hands and the stacking off with straight, AA limited my EV gain, allowing PokerxPro to catch up :( I have to admit some of that was bad play...despite trying my best not to tilt, I shoved a few places I shouldnt have, catching once or twice but netting a loss and even more importantly losing EV. Ah well, guess all I can do is keep trying.

Played a bit more tonight and did well; not a lot in the way of cards, but I was fortunate enough to have donks involved in my good hands and pay me off with the usual holdings (gutshots, bottom pair worst kicker, etc). End result: I picked up about $150 EV, which should put me in the lead for now. It's definitely a close one though; this is shaping up to be a pretty good competition.

After the $500 shakedown 2 days ago, I'm nowhere near as far ahead of my goal as I was; at the moment, I'm actually slightly behind pace. I'll be trying to put in more hours to compensate for it. Not that I wouldn't be happy with another $5k+ month, but a) I'd like to maintain a positive trend and b) every extra buck I make and invest in the business will get me a huge return and move my success timeline slightly closer. To this end, I'm going to keep my online bankroll limited to about $4,000; so in addition to withdrawing $500 a week, I'll withdraw anything in excess of $4,000 once a month. Only makes sense; I shouldn't experience any 100 buyin swings, and that money could be put to better use than making me feel important with a bigger bankroll. If somehow I do have a huge downswing, I can always dump it back in.

Sleep time!

The Good and the Bad

Well...bad news, I used up 2 $26 tokens playing 90 man KO SNGs. Fairly uneventful for the first one, was blinded down and sucked out on when I made a move. 2nd one sucked....was 3 outted instead of tripling up and moving in the top 10 or so :( Ah well.

The good news is that I kicked some ass in cash games....lil over $800 in winnings and $115 in rakeback. I was very tempted to stop after I was up $400 or so, but remembering my goal of getting my time in while the money is good (so to speak), I perservered and did great. My best single day performance to date....previous best was $130 less and took me 4 hours more playing as well as 10k hands compared to 3400. So obviously, I'm pumped about that....exceeding my target winrate by a little bit, lol. 18% done with my goal for the month and I've only logged 8% of the time I plan on....good times.

I also racked up some more EV for the challenge....tragically, I started running well towards the end, so my showdown winnings pulled ahead of my EV by about $75. Oh well...I guess I'd rather have the extra money, and besides, there's still a lot of the month left for some unluck and a chance to dominate the 'Worst Luck' Category.

Oh yeah, and I'll be keeping an updated February pokerEV graph on the top of the blog to facilitate following along with progress in the Challenge, and also to remind PokerxPro how hard he's gonna lose everytime he reads my blog ;)

Bang bang bang!

Man....seems like ever since I started focusing on it for the challenge, I've been racking up EV like crazy. Pity my showdowns aren't the same, but my total winnings are close enough to exceed my goals, so it's all good for now. After getting sucked out on twice on a donk-y table, I bought in for a full stack and more than doubled up over the next 80 hands or so.....this was an idea I was experimenting with a few weeks ago, but I was a little worried about stacking off $200 at a time. I was plenty comfortable with this though, so perhaps there's some full-stack NL 200 in my future.

I normally don't play this early on the morning (per my population-conspiracy theory), but I was lured by the fact that Full Tilt gave me a $75 bonus out of the blue for being such a stellar customer (read: person who plays too much). So I did exactly what they wanted me to do and promptly logged on and started messing around with tables. There was more action than I expected, so I ended up putting in almost 3 hrs. That, combined with the several hours I put in last night while on the job, puts me up $380 on the month. I'm about 7% of the way to my goal and I've only put in a little less than 4% of the time; so far, so good.

Just as importantly, I've racked up some nice Sklanksy Bucks! Check it out:

At this rate, those pizzas are mine! I wonder if it's too late to up the wager to include a 12-pack too...

January in review and the Sklanksy Challenge!

New month, new start! (Kinda). January treated me fairly well, netting a hair under $5,400. That's pretty good considering I played pretty badly for some of that; if nothing else, I've learned to be more attentive to when I'm not on my 'A'-game (if I can be said to have one) and stop making dumb plays. The earnings exceeded my hourly goals by about $2,000 and my monthly goals by about $3,300, so I'm doing ok there.

For February, I'll try to focus on playing smarter and getting my money in better (see below) as well as improving at MTTs. I'm looking to play the same volume (about 100k hands), but I'm shooting for $6,000 net this time. I think this is completely attainable if I play smarter and avoid tilting when I get luckboxed out of big pots (strange, when I luckbox out I never go on tilt...so I'm halfway there ! guess!). Another area I want to address is volume...often in january, I would find myself putting in far less time some days than I had allotted; I would make $200 or $300 in 2 hours and stop playing....basically, I made enough to reassure me I was doing well and then stopped instead of continuing to make money, for fear of losing and 'ruining' my winning session. This month, I'm going to make sure I keep playing....as long as I play well, I've got nothing to fear.

To facilitate getting our money in better, PokerxPro and I are undertaking the Sklansky Challenge; 'Sklansky' because it's a competition to see who can earn the most EV and 'Challenge' because it sounds more meaningful with 'Challenge' on the end. We'll be competing in 3 categories: Most EV earned, Best EV/100 and Worst Luck (Showdown winnings - EV). As I play higher stakes, I should (hopefully) win the Most EV Earned category. PokerxPro's a pretty good player, so it should be a good comeptition for Best EV/100. Worst luck, of course, is anyone's race.

We'll be posting updates every monday as well as a recap at the end of the month. The winner of the majority of the categories will have bragging rights, with further awards being mutually agreed on at some later date.

Think you've got what it takes to try the challenge? Well, tough cookies, this month is only between us....but let me know and next month we'll hook it up.

Update: We've both agreed to additonal terms: winner receives a large 3 topping pizza! Now it's on ^_^

OK, maybe I'm a newbie, but still...

....it felt good to rock this tourney. 90 man turbo double stack KO SNG...was bored, cash games were dead and couldn't sleep, so milled about looking for tourneys to waste some money on. This one was one of 2 that were filling up, so I registered for this and the $3+0.3 version (a not-so-surprising 67th in that one). This one was smooth sailing the whole way though; took the chiplead with KK over AK over QT and pretty much held it all the way to the end. Going into the FT, I had about 70k chips, only a few k more than the 2nd stack...but from there I knocked out 6 out of the 8 other players and just rolled over everyone. Heads-up has always been a weaker area of mine; plenty of times in SNGs I would be too agressive or not agressive enough and end up giving away 1st. This time, the guy was passive enough where it worked well....nothing fancy for a finish, just A8 over JT that held. Between the prize and the 11 KOs, a $240 return.....but more importantly, I feel good (despite not always playing optimally; I donked off some chips trying to bluff the 2nd stack when I should have learned a little quicker). Was a great feeling just destroying the table like that, and of course, it makes me want more...so perhaps I'll try to work a few more tourneys into the schedule. Nothing big of course; perhaps the SNGs are the right fit.