Start of the month moved up to $30′s, and by the end I’d moved up to $50s!   It’s borderline on the $50s really – I think I’ve even dropped back under the threshold already, but it’s all very close. The only thing I’m disappointed about is volume, even though it’s only a few games short of previous months – it is my biggest weakness, and no matter how much I moan about it I still struggle to improve.

The tiny bit of cash I played was just for the Full Tilt  Take 2 promotion, and TBH it was a mistake and I’m thinking that I’ll not take up a promotion that requires cash play again;

Notice the blue line taking a jump at the end – that’s the $25 bonus. The whole reason for playing cash in the first place!  Admittedly the biggest loss in that graph was not while I was trying to clear the bonus (which only took 5 minutes of play each morning) – it was just one  stupid night where I decided to have a quick spin at nl25 and it went really bad! Clearly not my game though.

Final total with rakeback & bonuses = $482, although I also cashed out $120 to pay for some bits & pieces, including husng coaching. So far I’ve only had 2 HH’s reviewed and not a sweat session yet. Taking it fairly slowly as I want to digest properly what I get back before paying out for more. So far so good though, and I’m very pleased with what I’ve got so far.

On Sunday I’ve the SCOOP tournament paid for by the $215 ticket I won at the blogger’s championship. Really really hoping I don’t crash out before cashing, but it wouldn’t surprise me. Nevertheless if I do cash it’ll put a nice margin to play those $50′s with, so I’ve got my fingers crossed.

Just a little ($120) – that’s the first time since I had to take everything out to pay credit card bills and restarted from scratch. It’s not something I really want to do since every step backwards on the BR is time lost in getting to higher stakes, but there was a couple of things I wanted to get. Since they were poker related I thought it’d be reasonable to use some of my BR for them.

First thing was a HH review by a coach. ChicagoRy posts on 2p2 a lot and seems a smart guy. He plays $100s, has a good record and can certainly teach me something. The HH review was $40, and he was clear and it all made sense what he was saying – however to get the most out of it I’m going to have to send him at least one more and then maybe a sweat session. One HH review isn’t going to revolutionise my game (I guess it’s like tennis lessons – get an individual lesson and it costs about £20. It’ll improve your serve a little, but won’t turn you into Federer instantly). Several HH and a session will add up to a fair bit of $$$ unfortunately, but the time seems about right. If the rest of the week goes well I’ll send him a second HH and take it a step at a time. If the rest of this week bombs, then it’ll have to wait.

Second thing was Omaha holdem manager. A bit of a frivolous buy, but during the times when I don’t want to gamble too heavily (ie reg peak times of the US afternoon) I’ve been knocking about with $1 PLO husngs. Cheapest way of playing PLO heads up! Postflop I’m getting more confident, but I’m still clueless about preflop (is it ever worth 3betting?). My opponents seem more clueless though, so it’s hard to know if I’m thinking clearly or if they’re just spazzing out;

lol, to be fair when I chose that HH (mainly just to test if the convertor worked) I didn’t realise he had a straight. Maybe not such a spaz after all…

So much so that my BR is about to tip over $1k which is a massive milestone for me. When that happens I should probably move to $50s with some confidence even though it only just meets the 20 buy-in level. The main reason I should feel confident is that I discovered the ‘Graph Buy-ins’ option in HEM and it shows a really consistent win rate for my husngs;

That seems to hide the fact that my $20 games were exactly breakeven so maybe it doesn’t mean that much. However I’ve not noticed the $30 games to be particularly scary.

I also played my first pot limit Omaha husng today (for a massive $1!). I won, but to be honest I didn’t have a clue to what I was doing. I just have no feel whatsoever as to what a strong hand is. I thought it might be a good route into playing PLO HU cash, but the traffic is very low so maybe it’s not worthwhile.

Half way through that epic streak I started getting jitters about continuing since I didn’t want to break it. That just shows how I need to bolster my confidence – when the player pool is so weak a real winning player wouldn’t even stop to pee.

So I told myself to just keep opening the tables and carry on until it gets bad. As it was it didn’t really turn bad – even the regs who sat me lost. Finally a spewy player beat me (due to a shove called by me with AQ (my spew!) and then a suckout where he paired his kicker). One loss after 8 games in a row shouldn’t mean it’s all over, but I’m a bit played out now I think. I’m going to play tennis in a couple of hours, so that’ll balance the day nicely (as long as I win).

I have made my feelings clear that all-in EV graphs are misleading and erroneous, but maybe I’m somewhat biased – I checked my lifetime history, and for cash I’m $340 over expected $ and for husngs I’m $235 over. If I didn’t believe that those calcs were complete and utter tosh then I’d be deluding myself that I can play poker (so I know which delusion is the healthiest!).

Other news – finally made 5k Full Tilt points so that I could order their security key. Seems to have taken ages to make those points (I think I threw away loads on big MTT satellites before deciding that I wanted a key). While I haven’t got vast amounts of dolares in my account it is slowly increasing. At some point this year it’s quite likely to exceed what’s actually in my regular bank account (British indebted society sucks), and if I’m going to get all paranoid about my personal account being online, then obviously I should take all possible steps to secure my poker accounts.

Now I just have to wait 6 months for it to arrive.

Husngs;

It was another month of trying to push into higher staked games – each attempt busting out and having to back pedal a bit to regain confidence. My enforced goal of 20 games to acclimatise into $20s almost worked, but once I cleared the Full Tilt $50 bonus I switched over to Ultimate Bet (who’d offered me a $100 bonus, which might just get cleared by christmas at this rate). However I’d only left about $30 in that account so it was back to $5s and $10s (whatever was available) to rebuild the account a bit first. I’d just got it built to about $100 when it had dawned on me that my overall roll is over $700 – I should be trying $30s, not $20s!

Consequently the obvious happened and a couple of $30 games later I’d blown the account back down to $20 or so (that’s at the 125 game mark). Crawled back to $5s and $10s. I probably should just transfer a couple of hundred from another account, but whatever.

Despite my poor results, the husng players at Ultimate Bet are really bad. Preflop raises are fairly rare and you can pin them down to bluffer, station, nit etc fairly quickly. It seems though that I’m my own worst enemy. For instance I’ll have ground them down to 1/3 of the chips and then do some fool move like call a shove with ATo and end up reversing the chip count. My opponent has made so many bad moves that I start to treat their raises with contempt, and inevitably walk into a monster. Stupid stuff. I’ve even changed my avatar to a fish to remind me who the idiot at the table really is…

Cash;

No, I’ve not really returned to cash games – as explained in an earlier post I did a bit of rush to clear the last few $$$ of my FT bonus and somehow accidentally won at the same time. The blue line that shoots off at the end is rakeback + the bonus.

So end result is +$100 (rakeback on the husngs is $30 which cancelled out the husng losses). Compared to the last two months that’s fairly poor, but I’m not complaining – it’s still a gain!

Next month? I’m determined not to wimp out of playing the stakes I should be playing. That means $30 games. Unless I get a few games in a row that’ll mean transferring some money to my UB account, but no big deal really.

The last one was for $50 and you had to play 20 days out of the month, this one’s a lot shorter where it’s just 9 days for $25. Still nothing to complain about

I’d only just managed to clear the $50 rush poker bonus. It had been steadily clearing over the last month and I ended up with just minutes to go and 5 Full Tilt points left for the last $5. So, despite all the obvious dangers, I popped open a bunch of NL25 rush tables with the intentions of fold, fold, fold just to get those last few points.

Somehow though I kept getting dealt great hole cards like AJs and I *had* to see a few flops. You’re probably expecting me to say that it all went tits up and in chasing that $5 of bonus I lost over $50, but no! It went my way for a change! I took a couple of 50bb pots and then shoved a TPTK (I know, dodgy) to see my opponent on a flush draw – it held!

So in exactly 3 minutes and 45 seconds I played 36 hands winning $53! Even more importantly I cleared the final $5 of the rush bonus. Sustainable?

It’s perhaps just as well though – this month has been breakeven on the husngs so far. My attempts at the $20s has been quite swingy, and I’ve not had any major heaters on the $10s to cover it. In fact as of right now it’s actually -ve with only rakeback pushing it into the black (well almost. -$0.50 is close enough).

I then was told that I’ve a $100 bonus on Ultimate Bet to be played out. So I’ve switched there for the time being. The bonus isn’t so great though – once I’d figured out how much rake it would take to clear, it turns out that it takes almost three times as much as the Full Tilt bonus took. So pretty much so slowly that it’s probably not worth it. It’s the same thing for the Cake sign-up bonus – I still haven’t even cleared $10 of that and I’m probably close to the time limit on that one.

Since my site is promoting these sites with their bonuses etc, I think I ought to put some work into figuring out how to compare one site’s bonuses against another, and display them in terms of rake. I should imagine there will be some big differences…

Update: Wow, the players at UB are annoying. Some guy limped his AA and unfortunately I walked into it with TP – he then typed ‘f u’ into the chat. Aggressive calling at it’s best. Then today I had a player who showed his hole cards every time I folded my button preflop. I had to explain how meaningless that was since it was getting really irritating (so maybe not so meaningless). I’d made a couple of bad moves and he was ahead 2:1 and he started suggesting I needed to go all-in (blinds were still 10/20 – very slow structure at UB). I obliged him with JJ but unfortunately his 99 hit a set.