I've come a long way...

January was an extremely busy month for me. Generally, January, April, July, and October sucks. Those are all the months following the quarter end and since I work in financial reporting, we're generally swamped for the entire month. However, this January, I also got busy clearing the massive bonus I got from FullTilt. I'm not complaining but I really pushed aside some work to clear that bonus. And as such, I kinda paid the price over the past few weeks where I had to work weekends and work late nights (past 10pm qualifies for late nights). One night, when I was at work and it was close to midnight, Fuel asked me a good question. "What are they paying you?" I certainly make a fair amount considering I'm a CPA with 9 years of experience, you can generally look up those career sites and guess what I make. Obviously not a killer but not a bad salary to live on. Especially here in nowhere-ville, VA. Anyways, that's not the point of my post today. Since I haven't posted much lately, I have a feeling this could get long. Just to warn you...

Recently, I've been getting more frequent inquiries on HH analysis. I've also noticed myself leaving even more thoughts on other peoples' blogs about my thoughts regarding how the hand progresses. I know cool guys like Don don't appreciate HH analysis but I freakin love them. Of course, that's why I'm a degenerate. And it makes sense right? I mean for a guy like Don who plays professionally out in Vegas where you can play live poker, there's so much more than just simple hand analysis. But as an online degenerate, what else can you go by? You can't make out any physical tells. Only thing you can really use in terms of reading players is really how the hand progresses. Their betting sequence, the texture of the flop, if the player betting strong = strong or otherwise. These are all tendencies that I use to figure out what the other player may have. That makes the difference in terms of when to overbet for value or make a value bet.

The funny thing is that just one year ago, I was a total donk. I was a moderately profitable donk but a donk nonetheless. Don mentioned to me that he had notes on me from like 2 years ago on FullTilt. I would love to know what his assessment of me at that time was. I know "tight" has to be one of them. Weak tight maybe? Nonetheless, I'm pretty sure I was easy to read. And it was rare that I put up a fight without a hand. Just generally weak player but again, just by playing tight, I was able to make profit up to the 1-2NL level. But that was it. And I wasn't sure how to progress further than that.

Fastforward one year... this January, I played over 25k hands at 2-4NL. I took a plunge into the world of 6 max and in the beginning, I was overadjusting to the aggression level of the 6 max play and I was down $3k for the month. I thought about dropping back to 1-2NL but I felt that I wasn't really getting outplayed as I was just making bad plays. I thought about them, did a few posts on adjusting to 6 max and plugging leaks. And stuck by what I said. And it all turned. I had a monster run and after being down $3k, I ended the month up $4k or $5k (somewhere in between). And this was before my $1,175 bonus kicked in. And you know what? I'm actually upset at myself. Considering how much I played, I felt that I should be up a lot more. Before the month started, I was thinking about the number of hands I would have to play in order to clear my bonus and I had visions of having the best month ever, surpassing my previous best that I posted here. I had visions of a month with 5 digit winnings... instead I played 4 times as many hands and made the same amount...

Funny thing is that a year ago, if someone said I could average approximately $3k plus in winnings each month, I woulda been fairly happy with that. Now, it frustrates me. And that makes me think that I've progressed as a poker player by a fair amount this past year. However, I am also very aware of my many weaknesses at the poker table and so one of the things I have to do this year is to really plug that leak. Hopefully by next year, I would take another big step towards being a better poker player.

And also, during that span, it looks like I picked up a fair amount of readers. I don't know how many people reads through bloglines or google reader or whatever else is out there so I'd like to think that there are even more readers than this site indicates. Nonetheless, I appreciate all those that frequent my site to get whatever insights they can get from my blog. I will try to continue to post more HH's, much to the chagrin of some of my nonpoker playing friends that read my blog.