January Review

They say January is the cruelest month.  It is winter; cold and miserable. Everyone has just had Christmas and there are now no bank holidays to look forward to for a while.  It isn't the peak month for suicide in the UK though, oddly enough that privilege falls to May.  Go figure that one out.  Poker wise though it was a definite killer.  Whilst not massively down in pure cash terms the amount of buy ins under at most levels hit stupid heights.  Tournaments were also a total wash out.  The run bad went beyond epic fast and then threw in a few one outers just to really rub it in.

Things almost started well.  I got into the cash in the PKR Masters but exited about 50th after running flopped two pair into an on fire KarlTheKiller's overpair that got there on the turn.  In typical fashion he managed to go from having 5 times the average chip stack with 50 players left, with double what the second place guy had, to out in 28th.  If he could just fractionally moderate the aggression in his game I 'm sure he'd bink everything going.  Beyond that I managed to bubble two PKR Primetimes, and several other tournaments, and do an awful lot of crashing out after losing monster pots  .

There are two reasons cash was a particular downer this month.  Firstly I am not sure how is it even possible to run 25 buy ins under EV at $0.25/0.50?????  Answers on a postcard please.  Secondly I put in what is, by my standards, a huge amount of volume at 85,000 hands.  As we all know the more volume a good player can put in the more it should help to reduce variance.  What this month neatly shows is that a) If anyone tells you that 20 buy ins is enough to play any cash level you should just laugh in their faces and b) 100,000 hands is not big enough to draw any conclusions about accurate win rates from.  I also failed in my New Years Resolution to run better at $1/2.

 

 This was probably my worst month for online tournaments since 'I did my bollox', as Neil Channing would say, during SCOOP last year.  The only saving grace this month was that I used up a lot of points on different places for tickets so it wasn't quite as bad as it looks. 

  

  

So #GetThere2012 is not exactly off to to a flyer.  I will mostly be focusing on my new cash regime during February though there will be a break for a live excursion in the shape of PKR Leeds.  Expect a little flurry of blogs in the next week or so as there are a number of things I have been meaning to write about.