I Can Go Out Any Night of The Week (June Review)

I decided to load up the last two weeks of June with a ton of hours instead of distributing my time evenly throughout the entire month. The main reason for this approach was simply because I was mentally exhausted at the end of May after my 40 hour, 3 day poker marathon SNE saving session. With that in mind, June turned out to be a pretty decent month, especially considering that after the first of two weeks I was actually down around $1700. Fortunately, things turned around pretty quickly and the second week was much better...netting me a profit of about $8k-setting my winnings for the month at around $5.5k. Combine my winnings with a 4K bonus and I'm looking at a month just shy of 5-figures! Keeping in mind that I didn't even hit a milestone bonus this month, I'll certainly take it!

June
$5,486.42 Table Winnings
$4,000 Cash Bonus
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$9,486.42 USD



I can't believe that the year is already halfway over and after doing a quick review of my results for 2011 so far I'm very satisfied with how things have gone. Here's a quick summary of my poker winnings thus far:

January- $2,064.01 USD
February-$17,918.34 USD
March- $11,002.81 USD
April- $20,300.00 USD
May- $18,243.18 USD
June- $9,486.42 USD
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$79,014.76 USD

I've taken a completely different approach to this year than I did for 2010. Last year, poker was somewhat of a "feeling out process," meaning that I began the year without really knowing what to expect and I put in a lot of effort more or less hoping for the best. I thought that my best chance of succeeding at poker would be to play as much as possible to try and reduce the variance and learn as quickly as I could. Without having very much money in the bank, things were obviously more stressful as well and I couldn't really go against my personality and just take a lot of time off before I had really accomplished anything. The end result was that I ended up distributing my work time evenly throughout the month and while I never had frequent marathon sessions at the end of the month, I was almost definitely logging more hours than I have been this year.

Now that I have a year of experience under my belt and have become a lot more comfortable to the nature of poker (ie. the swings, playing 24 tables, etc.) and with my poker abilities, I have inadvertently been taking "blocks" of time off this year instead of taking routine days off. Although I haven't made a conscious effort to play on and off for week long stretches, it has kind of worked out this way due to a combination of me burning myself out at the end of each month and having less immediate financial pressure-due to not having a ton of expenses each month.

Given that I've played much fewer overall hours this year, it's certainly nice to see that I have results that are almost as good as last year (84K). This can probably be attributed to a bunch of factors, such as me playing much better than last year and playing when I more or less want to instead of when I "have to." Of course variance plays a large part into anyone's results as well and I also began playing the year at higher stakes than I did in 2010. It's worth mentioning that I haven't been factoring my Team Online salary into any of my monthly results either and after taking that into account I've far surpassed my 6-month results from 2010.

I'm optimistic and looking forward to the latter half of the year for a couple of reasons: 1) I'll start to clear the higher milestone bonuses (up to this point, I've only cleared the 100K and 200K milestones) and 2) I have around $7K worth of WCOOP buy-ins to spend in September due to achieving SNE last year + a couple K worth of leftover SCOOP buy-ins that I never used.

I'm finally starting to get a clearer picture of what should be in store for me for the rest of the year. July and August will probably be relatively slow months in terms of playing poker (will still plan on clearing at least 50K VPP's) due to a bunch of reasons, such as my lease expiring/looking for a new place to live, having a bunch of really good friends back in town and having several awesome vacations planned. Come September, however, I'll be ready to work and am looking forward to playing a ton to close out the year.

So far July has been a pretty awesome month. The weather has been amazing and since I'm once again planning on playing around 120 hours over the last 2 weeks of the month, I've been taking time off up to this point to basically just enjoy life without feeling too guilty. I spent some time at the beach yesterday with some friends and then went out for dinner and drinks afterwards, although it was all very low key. I also went on a date a couple of days ago that went pretty well but it was just a dinner. A few days ago I went home to my parents house for a couple of nights to spend some time with family and friends that are still back home and to get my car tuned up. While my car was in the shop, I spent time playing some golf in the park as my dog ran around, I played some tennis and I walked along the sea wall a couple of times, all the while workin' on my tan. Thankfully, Old Betsy came out of the ER in "perfect condition" and all that needed to be done was an oil change.

I'm going to need Old Betsy to run as fine as she can tomorrow because I'm off to the interior with Ben and Brandon for a weekend trip at the lake. I'm super stoked about the trip and the weather's supposed to be awesome. Should be a great weekend for bird watching and I'm about to go put a playlist together for the ride up. Hope you're all having a good one and GL if you're playing in the Main Event this week, I'll certainly be keeping an eye on how things progress!

gl at the tables.