January Review & February Goals

Hey everyone, sorry it's a been a while but I was extremely busy putting in a ton of hours at the table's last month as your about to see :) January was probably the biggest fail of a month in terms of money earnt for hours put in, in the history of poker haha. But in some ways it was also a very good month for me so i'm really not too disheartened. 

In January i experienced my largest ever downswing by some margin, from the peak of the month to the trough it was almost exactly 90 full buy-in's! By a full buy-in i just mean 100bb's. In term's of actual dollars lost that is $16,100, pretty scary huh :( Though it's not all bad new's as roughly $8,100 of that money lost was below expectation or in big blind's that's about 45 buy-in's, don't forget i play a mixture of 100nl and 200nl. Just to put that into perspective I've ran pretty horribly in some month's in the past and my previous largest downswing was roughly half of this one! and less than 1/3 in term's of dollars. I'll stop procrastinating and post the monthly graph: 

This is January's graph in big blind's, so as you can see if i take EV into consideration i should only be down 14 buy-in's which in the grand scheme of thing's really isn't all that bad at all. I actually finished down 44 buy-in's for the month, which obviously isn't all that great hah. So my winrate for the month at 200nl ZOOM was -1.58bb/100 with an EV winrate of -0.68bb/100, at 100nl ZOOM it was 0.46bb/100 and almost indentical in terms of EVbb. Here is that same graph in dollars: 

I actually also played a little bit of 200nl 6-max (non-zoom) in the middle of the month and that is included in these graph's. I found the table's a fair bit softer and the vpp rate a bit higher also. The problem for me was it takes a while to get all my table's up and running there, i was trying out 16 tables at once which actually seemed easier than i thought. I only tend to play a 2 hour session or so sometimes a little longer as i get hungry, so that time it takes to get everything up and running at the start makes my hands per hour considerably less, so i only manage roughly the same vpp/hour. And for me stacking and tiling 16 table's of regular 6-max games is much more difficult than just firing up 6 ZOOM table's and getting the vpp's and hand's going immediately. Another thing with stacking is, i'm pretty good with taking notes, i have tons on most of the regular's in my games and when i stack my table's i can't see some of the showdown's and what that player decided to do, so it hinders my note taking. I also ran really bad at 200nl 6-max i'll do a screen shot of result's so you can see: 

So as you can see if i didn't try out the normal table's and move away from ZOOM i would have lost $3,310 less and actually made a bit more money this month after rakeback. So i ran like 11 buy-in's below EV there in 11k hands which obviously isn't great but i'm still 100% certain that those table's are softer than the ZOOM 200 ones. I'll throw up a graph now after rakeback so you can all see my sick hourly wage for the month :D 

After rakeback this month then i made a whopping $1,395, i have entered the rakeback figure for SNE which i believe to be 58.1% for 6-max cash game's, obviously if i end up not making it then this month would be a losing one even after rakeback. So about my hourly last month:( I put in by far the most hour's that I've ever put into anything in my life last month which ended up being 233 hours played. I made $1,395 so my hourly for the month was a heart racing $5.99! Pretty impressive if you ask me :D Now just to beat myself up a little i want to see what it would have been if i ran at expectation, just so i know that although i had a bad month it's not really as terrible as it seems. So i would have made $7271 which means my hourly would have/could have been $31.20 which is actually pretty respectable. So enough of the doom and gloom and EV talk haha. 

This month was also a very good one for me in some ways. January was the first month in my poker career that i had set myself a vpp goal, that goal was to make 100,000 vpp's by month's end which is far and away more than any other month so far, and i'm extremely happy to say that i did infact achieve that goal last month, and i made it with about 20 minutes of January to spare :D

On top of this, January was also the first month that i have played more than 130k hands, and i hadn't even played that many since way back, when i was still playing full-ring, so at least 18 months ago haha. Think i just about cleared the 130k this month with the 307,612 hands that i ended up getting in :P 

January also taught me that even though i was incredibly lazy last year, (to be honest i probably played the same amount in the first 6 months of 2012 as i did in January) when i put my mind to something and i set myself a goal that i can achieve anything i want to. And that in it self is really refreshing and self-fulfilling. People always tell you, and i see tons of these motivational YouTube videos telling me that you can do anything you want to if your willing to make the sacrifice and just be dedicated to the task at hand. Well for the first time in my life i did this, i made the sacrifice and in one way or another i did exactly what i set out to achieve. While i am disappointed with my results' at the table's i am still confident i will be able to turn things around, even if i don't have a very good winrate at all this year. 

So after feeling a little down in the middle of the month i decided to go to evplusplus.com and use their variance simulator to remind me of the swings that i would be facing this year. And also just to remind me that it's a year long goal and i'm only (was) 2 weeks in at the time. So at the start of the year i set myself a goal to achieve an overall winrate of 0.75bb/100 for the year as whole. While that doesn't sound like a lot at all, and indeed it really isn't a very good winrate compared to winrate's I've had in the past, with the amount of hands i'll be putting in this year that tiny winrate would get me a table profit of ~$50k so including SNE benefits would get me a total of $155k, which i thin by almost anyone's standard's would be a very successful year. So i used this variance simulator just to give me a clue as to the swings i would have to face this year and to keep me brimming with confidence even through these tough times. This first calculation is over 300k hands with an expected winrate of 0.75bb/100, i use 300k hands as this is roughly the volume i will be putting in each month: 

So this simulation suggest's that with my (hopefully) expected winrate my worst month in term's of bb's could be -7500, or -75 buy-in's, and seeing as i 'only' lost 44bi's this month, really puts things into perspective for me. Having said that when the good times roll the best possible month i could expect with that winrate is +135 buy-in's, which in terms of $ would be far and away my best month ever so i'm just hoping thing's change for the better at some point and i get to see the friendly side to Mr variance. 

The next simulation is the one that really surprised me, and opened my eyes to the cruel world of poker haha. I ran this one for the year as a whole, i figure i need to play ~3,120,000 hands this year to make SNE, so that is the figure i used along with the same 0.75bb/100 winrate: 

So in this simulation it says across the whole year with that expected winrate i could either make over $100,000 at the tables or almost exactly breakeven!! Which seems pretty incredible to me, that one player with the exact same play style and skill and mind set could make $100k more just based on how the cards are being to dealt to them. Let's hope i'm on that red line hey :) The red-line also starts out with a pretty shitty 400k hand losing stretch then goes into God-mode. Whereas the green-line basically continues to lose about 140 buy-ins gradually, before breaking even for 1 million hands or so and then just about getting back to break even before the years end! Pretty sick how much actual luck there is in poker in my opinion with a small winrate. 

Oops, this post seems to be dragging on a bit, for any of you that made it down this far i guess i'll move onto February goals now before you all fall asleep :) 

February Goals

• 90k VPP
• Make more than $1 at the table's
• Make fewer retarded calls on the river vs reg's
• Keep a solid diet and gym routine
• Try and cut down a little on sleep so i have a little more free time 
• Stack LeJean80 at 200nl ZOOM haha i have nothing against him, it's just that i don't think I've ever seen him lose a stack so just a mini goal hah :) 

Also forgot to mention that my training in the gym is going really well right now, i'm currently the heaviest I've been weighing in at 15 stone 12lbs :) My training partner Lewis is also the heaviest he's been at 13 stone 12lbs so were both really happy with it right now, although both of us are carrying more body fat percentage wise than we would like, that will be no problem to shift in the summer when we cut out some carbs and up the cardio. 

Also really happy with the weight i'm lifting, I've been regularly squatting 140kg pretty low for like 6-14 reps. I've always struggled with bench press, just not very good at it at all, Lewis crushed me on bench :( but i'm now getting a lot better there too, been pressing 100kg for 8+ reps reasonably well. 

I'll try and update this every week or so but obviously nowhere near as long as this one, this post was a bit of a vent and to any of you that made it this far i thank you and hope if you like reading it you follow and share it around :D Thanks again

Mike

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