August Wrap Up

I'm happy w/ how the month went although there was a lot of dead time I could've spent grinding.

































As mentioned in my previous post I started adding in some low stakes plo into my grind. I'll probably learn to play the game and play some more the rest of the year. It really is a fun game to play and I enjoy playing it more than nl. Most of my play will still be at nl because that's my strongest game.

Also I elected to leave out my limit results because there are some nuances that are so different than nl and pl that it skews the #s and graph. Looking at my HEM I lost $970 playing limit hold'em and limit omaha 8 after 2100 hands. Guess it's a good thing I just primarily play nl and pl. Actually I know I'm pretty good at limit games and my loss is mostly attributed to the variance over the small sample.

As for tournaments I had that nice live score for $25,400. I also had a cash of $2k in the FTOPs horse. I actually counted how many mtts I played this month and it was a lot. I played in 93 mtts w/ 91 of them online vs 2 live. The total cost of buyins was $8704 so almost $100/mtt. It's kinda skewed by the fact the 2 live mtts cost $900 total. If we just look at online, it's $7804/91 = $85 for the avg. buy in. Nearly all the mtts I played were on sundays w/ the exception of the FTOPs which ran during the week + weekends. Based on HEM I played 66 hrs but some of that was at the same time I was grinding cash games so it's hard to assess how much total time I put in last month playing poker. HEM shows I spent 77 hrs playing cash games. Also I spent 3 days playing live tournaments which I don't mind to get away from the monotony of playing in front of my computer. It's nice to actually see real people when playing poker!

What can we take from this? That grinding mtts online is a waste of time! No, seriously it's always been considered that winning in cash games is a more stable and profitable way than winning in mtts, especially for guys that can win at both. There will be exceptions but for the most part it's true and that's why I would suggest for most aspiring poker players to focus on cash games 1st, even though the learning curve is longer than mtts. A side benefit is that if you win in cash games you should be +ev in most mtts, while that's not true for winning tournament players wanting to play cash games. Heck most good cash game players welcome and want tournament players, inc. the winners, to join their games.

So for the month of August, looks like I won $38,549 in cash games + $2540 in rake back + $21,747 in mtts (after all buyins) for a total of $62,836. Again I'm happy w/ the month but looking to focus more on cash games and less on mtts going forward.

Also I know a lot of guys use PTR to check to see if a guy is a winning or losing player (esp. bumhunters) but it does seem to miss hands from time to time. I checked it to see how I stood among $2-$4 and $3-$6 winners for the month and it had me winning $7000 in August at $3-$6 which is only half of what I really won. Just to show how off it is (in my case anyway) it has me listed up $381k since March 18 '08 when in reality I'm up nearly double that (posted snapshots of my HEM since Feb '08 few months ago). It goes both ways though. My friend is listed as being up $350k or so when in reality he's only up half of that. It does a decent job of showing who's winning and losing but you can't really rely on the site for true winrates nor total $ won/lost in most cases (maybe winrates might be more accurate than actual $ won/lost though).

Finally even though I'm behind my goal of 7 figures, I am at about $250k for the year which seems to be a magic # for poker players, according to this thread anyway.

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/56/medium-stakes-pl-nl/making-250-year-844863/

I did offer some insight in the thread starting at page 10 for those interested. I talked mostly about how hard it was to retire from poker after 10 years (assuming you never have to work another day in your life).