Back in Black

In the past month I have not been able to stick to one game and ended up hopping around from quite a bit. Early in the month, I went on a streak of playing $4 180-person SNG's at Poker Stars. Once I got tired of losing just out of the money in these, I went on a mini heater on baby stake single table tournaments, which quickly got replaced by a string of 6-max limit games for a short run. For the last couple weeks or so, I have been messing around with 6-max no limit ring games with some success.

So far so good with the no-limit, as I am running at a nice and unsustainable pace in excess of 10ptbb/100 over a completely insignificant sample size at the $10 max buy in level. I am in no rush at all to move up, despite being severely over-rolled for this limit and am quite content to make all the noob mistakes I can at a level that costs so little. I have been stacked a couple times playing overpairs into sets and am still need a lot of work on a lot of aspects of my game. I tend to have a complete lack of respect for short-stack players and while this has served me very well so far, I suspect it could get me in some trouble at higher levels.

With the exception of tourneys, all of the various games this month have been good to me. I am up somewhere around $100 on the month so far, which is a nice change from the previous couple of months. Somewhere along the way I managed to clear off a $150 bonus at Poker Stars as well. At the much lower rate I am earning bonuses this year compared to last, I expect that my bonuses will come in at a fraction of what I made last year. With the new tougher and tighter games these days, I will definitely have to revise my yearly goal down a bit from my original target of $3.5 million. I would like to make at least what I made last year in total, with a greater portion coming from winnings as opposed to bonuses. At the same time, I intend to play a lot less than I did last year and have moved down in limits, so I'm not quite sure how that will work out.

All kinds of useless (and not 100% accurate) stats to date:
- Gross winnings of just under $8K
- Gross losses of just under $7K
- Net winnings of just over $1K
- Party Poker accounts for $1.2K of my net winnings
- I am a net loser to date at Poker Stars of (-$100) to date, but have earned close to $3K in bonuses there
- Paradise remains my worst site to date with losses of over (-$200)
- Best game to date is 6-max $0.50/$1 LHE with winnings of just under $500
- My next best game is full ring $0.50/$1 LHE with winnings of $280. This is surprising as I haven't played full ring games in a year
- Worst game to date is 6-max $2/$4 LHE with losses of just over (-$200), which I managed to rack up in record time over a two or three day period
- My stats show that I am a net winner at multi-table tourneys but only due to one big 3rd place finish. I am fairly certain that I am dead money
- I am a net loser to date at SNG's (-$5.50). I would have guessed I was a net winner due to winnings of over $200 more recently at the $5.50's at Poker Stars but had an awful start in my first few months of play at Paradise which offsets those results
- Short-handed ring games account for 60% of my winnings to date, full ring cash games make up 25% and MTT's account for the remainder
- Limit games account for all of my winnings, with me being a small net loser at no limit and pot limit games to date
- Hold 'em accounts for virtually all of my winnings, with 7 stud hi-lo adding a very small sum to the total and HORSE, Omaha and Razz eating away at the winnings with combined losses of about (-$55)
- Winnings broken down by day of the week still freaks me out:
Sunday (-$22)
Monday +$149
Tuesday +$155
Wednesday (-$345)
Thursday (-$6)
Friday +$908
Saturday +$164
- Winnings broken down by session end time indicates that I lose money when I play after midnight and win the most on sessions ending between 8 and 11 pm
- Session table hours indicate that I am a small net loser for sessions under 1 hour and make just about all of my money on sessions that last between 1 and 2 hours (+$610) or between 4 and 5 hours (+$350)

All of this basically adds up to say that I should only play limit hold'em with Party Poker drunks on Friday nights at limits that are low enough to attract people who actually manage to play worse than I do. And quit at midnight before I'm too drunk myself.

So, naturally I will go home and play some no limit at Poker Stars.