25K hands, reality and keeping on...

This week has been a bit rough but I did get in over 5,000 hands. Of course I'm a tiny bit in the red but after getting down to -$50 I ended only .44 cents down for the week. The reality of variance set in but I definitely admit to plenty of play bad thrown in for good, or bad, measure. I really don't feel that I ran that bad overall but a few days I just played spewy and my losses were the result. This is what playing like a fish will do for you...

Luckily I've ended on a good note with the last three sessions being positive. I have four more days to complete 10,000 hands and I have to be in the black at the end so I'm hoping for a sweet heater and no more stupid playing.

As for MTTs well every time I play one I certainly remember why I decided to play cash. Sometimes I wonder why I didn't switch to cash a long time ago. MTTs are just gross! Well except when I bink a nice one but that just doesn't happen often enough.

Onward and upward with the cash grind, at least I'm hoping for upward...

Another week complete...

Another good week of cash games finished. As you can see I fell quite short of my goal of 7500 hands, I suck at volume. I only got in about 4200 hands but with a nice profit so while I'm disappointed in myself for not meeting my volume goal I can't complain about the profit results.

I've hit 20K hands and am still running pretty decently. I've had a few losing sessions of course but many more winning ones. While I very seriously doubt 10BB/100 is at all sustainable over a larger sample it's certain nice for now.

As for MTTs I really am not playing too many. I'm getting more and more hooked on cash and I love the freedom I have and not being stuck in MTTs for 5 to 8 hours straight. I get to eat at a normal time and play in 2 to 3 hour sessions and can actually work my games around my life instead of my life around my games. I might turn out to be a cash game player after all. We'll see how I feel around 50K hands.

I made a prop bet for the rest of the month with a friend. We have to play 10K games with a profit by the end of the month. We did a $5 bonus bet for the most profit. I need the motivation and I hate to lose prop bets so hopefully I'll win this one. I have 1K hands down so far.

Hopefully my graph lines will continue to climb, so next update at the end of the month unless something really spectacular happens between now and then.

Cash games - one month in...

Yesterday was one month since I started trying to grind up $11 on Carbon playing cash games. I have to say it's gone way better than I expected. I've tried a few MTTs here and there but I'm enjoying cash so much more now that I can't wait for the MTTs to be over so that I can get back to the cash games.

I have a confession, I wasn't going to move to 10NL until I had 20 buy ins but I got so bored with 4NL that I moved up at around 13 buy ins. I set a strict stop loss for myself of a 1 to 2 buy in loss to have to drop back and so far so good. My Carbon roll is now $188 so I'm almost to the 20 buy ins. Hopefully one or two more sessions and I'll be there.

Of course I've been lucky and running pretty well at 10NL so I'm really keeping my figures crossed that the run good continues for awhile longer. Of course it's poker and bad variance could be just around the corner.

I've been reading Jared Tendler's The Mental Game of Poker and it's great! I've also tried to watch some cash game videos and I've found a few good ones on Drag the Bar. I'm also following Jared's advice and reviewing after each session while the hands are fresh in my mind and I'm finding that it really helps to pin point leaks and such.

Getting in decent volume is still my worse hurdle. As you can see from the graph over the last 30 days I've only gotten in a little over 16,000 hands. So my goal for this week is a minimum of 7,500 hands between now and next Saturday at midnight. I'm going to have to really push myself to keep from being lazy but hopefully I can do it.

Well here's to volume and continued run good.

Day 21 Update

As you can see I'm actually able to post a PokerTracker graph. I was able to get the PT4 beta and it's running great. It has some really nice improvements over PT3. It is so nice to have it back. My HUD was working on PT3 but I couldn't get to any data without it freezing up my computer.

As for the cash grind as you can see it's been going pretty well over my small sample size. I'm still enjoying playing cash, which is surprising since normally around this point in the past I've gotten bored with it. I've had one or two not so great sessions but still stuck it out and luckily it was only a couple of sessions. I'm sure some worse variance will hit eventually as it is just part of poker.

I've played a few MTTs on Carbon over the last few days and have made some money from those. No wins but 2 final tables and one 13th (18 paid) in the $11 $750 gtd super turbo luckboxament. I was staked for 2 of them and satellited into the one tonight. So with my part of the profit from those games my Carbon roll now stands at $139.

As for my Hero account, that hasn't fared as well. My Hero account balance is a big fat zero. Oh well at least the Carbon balance has fared much better. Unfortunately I prefer playing on Hero because the customer service is 100% better than Carbon. I'm still playing the Hero freerolls so maybe I'll bink the 6 max one for $50 one of these nights.

Being broke on Merge is no fun but having to grind back up is forcing me to work on some issues and leaks in my game so all in all it may turn out to be a good thing.

I finally bought the Kindle edition of Jared Tendler's The Mental Game of Poker and it is amazing. I highly recommend it to anyone who has issues with tilt or other emotional aspects of their game.

Time to go grind some cash so until next time...