Midway February

Looked at my results for the month so far yesterday afternoon and I am virtually break even for the month. I thought I was up a bit more so a little disappointed by that (although I ran like a good last night so finished up a few buyins) I've played around 15k hands, an vast improvement over last month. I have upped my game on that score. A slight annoyance is a cold I have picked up over the last week which I can't seem to shake off but it doesn't seem to be developing into anything worse.

Being somewhat disheartened with my results I decided to look at the biggest winners on Ipoker in my Holdem Manager db. What I found most interesting is that all the biggest winners at 400nl seem pretty average. There are guys I wouldn't worry about having on my table at all. The sample sizes are still smallish relatively speaking going from 10k-25k in some cases and people can run hot over that amount of hands but it just goes to show to beat 400nl doesn't require anything spectacular. A lesson for me.

At last a routine!

It's been a good start to the month. Results wise, nothing much to speak of but I am up overall. I think I have been playing decently, pretty solid although there are 2 or 3 buyins which are questionable on my part. By far the best news of February is my acquisition of a proper daily routine and sleep pattern . It has meant I feel better and I have played far more hands then I did in January. I am currently on for 30k+ hands although it's still early days. I have found myself 8-9 tabling for an hour and feeling comfortable. I am playing 3 sessions a day and feeling comfortable and most important I want to play. I really haven't had a proper routine of any sorts since I did my exams last May and I have never really had a good routine which facilitates maximising the number of hands I grind out. It's amazing the difference it makes. I am just hoping to keep this up and if so February could be a very good month.

January

January was a decent month. Main points are

• Finished up an reasonable amount
• Finished up big at 400nl. My first decent run at the level
• Finished down big at 200nl
• Played 16k hands, meh
• Sleep pattern were all over the place which caused the poor number of hands but did mean I watched a lot of the Australian Open which I thoroughly enjoyed.
• Ran like an absolute god for the 2nd half of the month
• Received Leprechaun contract for Irish Open
  

So January was a mixed bag. I am not happy with the number of hands I played. It's just not enough. Part of it is due to not playing until the 8th and as I said my dodgy sleep pattern. I need to deal with the sleep problem. It affects my play too much. I need to keep it stable and if I do the number of hands I play with easily increase. I see no reason I can't play 25k hands this month even though it's 3 days shorter if I keep a stable sleep pattern. To help me out I bought a Sleeptracker pro which HJ recommended in his blog, hopefully that keeps me in check and if not I will send him the bill.

After that I need to try to find a way of wanting to play more. I simply don't play if I don't want to. There is an argument for someone in my position should just grind it out more even when they don't want to but I still enjoy poker and I want to keep enjoying it. When I enjoy it the most and really want to play is when I am at my best. I may look into joining a gym. I started an evening course that I am enjoying. I am doing something totally different which is challenging me but it's a lot of fun and a really good group of people. I want to do more of that type of thing.

I started to look into coaching like I said I was doing. I found a guy on 2+2 who offers to do a total database analysis of your hands along with some coaching. The database analysis is interesting as he does a z score which means he analyses how reliable the data is. So if you check how often someone check/raises the flop and bets the Turn you may have say 15 examples of that but it's hard to gauge how reliable that is. It will help a lot to learn this. I am pretty excited to get that done and hopefully a lot of leaks I am not aware of are discovered.

Finally, I got the contract to play the Irish Open. It's not perfect and looking to get 1 part of it changed but think in the end everything will be good and I am now 99% certain that I shall be playing it!