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!