November Review

Everyone loves payday, I mean why would you not?  It is the day that rewards all that time you spend doing something that, however much you love it, you would probably like to spend at least a little less time doing.  Poker is not like a job in some ways and exactly like one in others.  Unless you are one of a handful of uber geniuses then you will be putting in as many hours as a full time job, maybe more.  Sometimes you can earn very consistently, other times you will have big rushes or long droughts.  I say all this because my November threatened to be rubbish, turned back to being okay, then threatened to fall apart again, and was salvaged by a decent tournament win in the last week.

My cash game play was dominated for the third month in a row by running extremely badly at all in situations.  I only played two sessions at $2/4 and both times I lost a massive pot with the best of it.  I did though also play my single worst hand of the month here. I only step up to this level when I spot extremely soft tables.  One afternoon the stars had aligned and I was playing two $2/4 tables and two $1/2 tables without a cash reg in sight.  I made $600 in an hour and was thinking about leaving as the regs started piling in.  Of course I stayed ten minutes too long and stacked off $400 of my profit to Wongaman playing Jacks extremely badly.  I really should have got away with just a $100 hit but bet too big on the flop and made my decision on a low board ten times more difficult.

It might surprise you to see that I put in volume as low as $0.10/0.25.  There are a number of reasons for this.  Firstly after a prolonged period of run bad it is nice to put in a number of sessions where you see the green line on your graph moving in the right direction.  Secondly the standard is so soft you can hit a pretty huge win rate compared to higher levels.  Thirdly I have centred all my cash game play back onto PKR for the moment and often during the times I play there are no games running higher than $0.5/1 and these tend to be nitty reg-fests.  Of late I have got much better at table selecting and swallowing my pride and feel that my cash play is benefiting because of it.  So taking cake into account it wasn't a terrible month with a $1,000 profit but it would be lovely to just crush cash for a month to prove that I actually can and that the Poker Gods do not hate me.

Tournaments started terribly, I couldn't hit a barn door and nothing was going right.  The one moment that threatened to get interesting was a deep run in the Sunday Million on Pokerstars.  My radar was on song and I had a well above average stack going through the money bubble.  Sadly I lost a massive 70/30 for 150,000 chips when the average stack was 75,000 after beautifully trapping an aggressive player who had position on me.  I bounced back but then found myself on the wrong end of another 70/30 for 150,000 chips with the average stack at 150,000.  I was extremely short after this and lost a flip several hands later exiting 449th out of 6,967 players.

Things turned around in amusing fashion when I beat an 800+ field to win the $5 Friday night Mini-Primetime Deep Stack on PKR.  On many levels I don't know why I play it as you have to finish top three to make it worthwhile but the structure is good and the players are bad.  This is the second time in a few months I have won it and for an investment of about $25 have seen a return of just under $2,000.  Sadly as the winning hand was completed the game crashed so I missed out on the money falling from from the sky and it has not been recorded either on my Sharkscope, probably about $5k lifetime PKR profit not showing on there now, or on my all time PKR tournament earnings.

Having taken down the Mini-Primetime on the 25th I then had a Monday the 28th that threatened to get epic.  You can never tell when a good poker day is coming, generally you grind along and small cash loads of tourrnaments and don't kick on.  On this day I found myself heads up for a $5,000 WPT Ireland package and won the Monday night Primetime for $2,052.

The WPT satellite was extremely frustrating.  This was only either my first or second attempt at qualifying and with a one in twenty people qualifying structure this could well end up being my only shot at the package.  I was playing really well up until the tickets bubble but then made one large error.  I kept calm though and bounced back and kept picking on the right people.  Once Barkieboy was eliminated I really fancied my chances of winning.  I got into the heads up with a player who had been running hot and he had a two to one chip lead on me.  I quickly got on top of him and ground out a two to one chip lead.  We got all in on a flip where he decided to call my 3 bet jam with Jack ten suited and sadly my pocket sixes failed to hold.  I was back to being a two to one underdog.  The match then lasted for about another forty minutes, a huge length of time for a PKR tournament.  I kept grinding back to level but then dropping back as he hit flop after flop.  I wasn't catching much and he wasn't folding second pair to great lines.  I only really needed one hand to value town him and it just never came up.  He didn't fold his small blind much but managed to twice when I held pocket Kings!  It just was not my night, I am proud of the way I stuck at it and as usual it will make the next package win taste all that sweeter.

Below is my Sharkscope for November, though less the $1,000 for the Mini-Primetime.