Micro Millions Summary/6 Max Update

The Micro Millions has come to a close and although it was a lot of fun again, I did very poorly in the series this time around. I initially wanted to try and make a run at a top 10 leader board finish and as a result, I ended up playing almost all of the MTTs over the first 3-4 days. Unfortunately, I didn't end up racking up very many cashes over this period of time so the thought of placing high on the overall leader board started to look dim at best. I continued to play most of the events over the next few days to see if I could put some kind of hot streak together but alas, that didn't happen either. I think that my play was fairly decent throughout the series at least and I wrote down a bunch of my bustout hands...lots of bad beats, a decent number of flips and a few spots where I got my money in bad but still feel ok about the situation. All in all, it can be a tall order to land a top 10 spot on the leader board when there's so much variance in each and every MTT...however, on the other hand, variance can also be the beauty of MTT poker and the cause of excitement when things go your way and you make a deep run or tally up a bunch of cashes. I'm already looking forward to the next Micro Millions series so I can try all over again lol.

The Last Longers that I were running out of my facebook page were a big success! Participation was high for each one and when it was all said and done, 8 people were freerolling the Main Event after winning a ticket from these LLs. I think that all of the feedback was entirely positive about this promotion so I'm glad that you guys seemed to have some fun and I'll definitely look into running this promo again, or something similar, possibly for the SCOOP or the next Micro Millions series. Promo-wise, this was also a pretty big success for me and the series I think. I picked up a decent number of fb/twitter followers and saw many tweets and retweets about my last longers with the hashtag #MicroMillions flying around cyberspace-so thx for that!

Cash games at 6-max have not been going well for me this month. I'm not overly discouraged yet because a) I haven't really lost a lot in terms of buy-ins or dollars and b) I'm actually playing EV positive poker so that's all that I can really control and focus on...hopefully the variance evens out sooner rather than later. Here are my results for this month and then since I started my 6-max adventure in the end of February:

 

 

 

As you can see, I'm running about 12.5 buy-ins under EV this month and am close to being out 28 since the end of Feb! That's pretty gross but I also just don't care or put too much emphasis on my results at this point because I know that I'm not playing that well and am still learning the game. I feel like I'm just starting to play fairly well now and am getting used to people's ranges in various spots but still have a lonnnng way to go. It's quite possibly for the better that I stay playing 100nl for a while to get better before tackling higher stakes where the players are much better and the swings will be higher. The thing that I find quite difficult about 6-max is that at 100nl, the player pool is relatively large compared to say 500nl (where you're battling a smaller number of regs over and over) and you're facing so many different regs with different playing styles it can be hard to nail down pre-flop ranges. For example, there are some regs where I'll be wanting to fist-pump 4bet/call AQo in late position because they 5bet shove A9o and seem to basically just be clicking buttons but then there are others where I'll be hesitant to even stack with QQ because they're so tight. I'm not trying to say that 500nl is easier because there are fewer regs lol, just that there are a lot of spots where it can be hard to play based on a small sample size with various opponents.

Anyways, I'm going to continue to work on my game away from the tables by watching some training vids, going over my results etc and most importantly I'm going to keep playing to get more live experience, as this has usually been the best way that I learn in the past. I'm still feeling very driven by the thought of moving up stakes aggressively and am basically planning on making up SNE pace this way as the year unfolds. Who knows though, at any point in time I might just give up on 6-max and go back to full-ring :) We shall see. Grinding zoom is pretty much the nuts though...so easy to start/stop sessions and need to pay 0 attention to the lobby. This is coming from someone who completely table selects when playing normal tables too.

Away from poker, the month has been run and fairly eventful but nothing too crazy has occurred. I'm still nursing my healing ankle but have gone out a few times and it's been a blast. It was my 2nd year anniversary with my gf this past weekend and also her Bday around the same time so we went out for a nice dinner at the Keg to celebrate. I'm going to Mexico for just over a week in April with my gf for a friend's wedding and that should be awesome and something that can't come soon enough...I have a small sweat waiting on my new passport to arrive via mail but it should be here with plenty of time before I leave. I think that it's really nice to have trips planned here and there to use for motivation for playing poker. I'm going to try and log a bunch of hours before I go away because I know that if I'm feeling burnt out that I'll be able to refresh myself on vaca anyways. With that said, time to get to work!

gl at the tables!

Micro Millions 7 Promo!

The Micro Millions series is back on March 13th-23rd and once again I will be playing a significant number of events in order to try and place well on the overall leader board. Despite this being my 3rd time trying to do well on the leader board, I'm not discouraged much at all by my previous two failed attempts. There's always going to be a lot of variance in MTT poker so even if I'm not a top-ranked MTT player, I still feel like I have a decent edge in all of the tournies so we'll see what happens. The last two times that I played the MM series, I've kind of hung around in the hunt a bit for a leader board top 10 finish but ultimately have never got very close. I think that the last two series have been profitable (the last one definitely was, can't totally remember how I did the first time), however, and I did make a really deep run last time in a 6-max event where I eventually finished 36th in a huge field with a first place prize over $15K.

Anyways, what I'm excited to tell y'all about is a pretty sick promotion for you micro grinders that I'll be running throughout most of the series. Basically, what's going to happen is that for certain events I'll be running a freeroll "last longer" from my facebook page. As the name says, it will be totally free to enter and anyone who's playing the event can sign up. If you win the last longer (for those who don't know what a last longer is, it's self-explanatory...everyone joins before the event starts and the person who lasts the longest in that tournament is the winner), you're going to be credited with a Micro Millions Main event ticket! So yeah, no strings attached and zero downside...again, this will be ran from my facebook page and I haven't 100% decided on what events that I'll be doing this for but I will be starting with the very first event of the series. I'll open registration for the last longer 2 hours prior to the first event so keep your eyes on my facebook and twitter if you'd like to join. Hopefully this will be fun and a nice way to keep everyone motivated, including  myself. Oh yeah, if I end up winning the last longer, I'll make sure to give the ticket to someone else ;)

6-Max has a bit frustrating but not too discouraging thus far. I'm trying to win 10 buy-ins before jumping up quickly to take a 5 buy-in shot at 200nl but winning those 10 buy-ins is proving to be no easy feat. As you can see from the graph, I got close pretty early in the month and then swung back down pretty hard and have been on a bit of a break-even roller coaster ever since. I'm becoming more comfortable with my play at least but the variance is fairly high so we'll see how things shape up over the rest of the month. My volume has been pretty unspectacular but I expect that to pick up significantly over the rest of the month, especially since I'll be grinding throughout the Micro Millions series a lot.

I had a doctor's appointment for my ankle recently and was told that I could ditch the crutches and start walking on it a bit but was also told that It's going to take another month+ to be back to where it was. That was a little discouraging but it didn't stop me from going out both Friday and Saturday this weekend! On Friday I went out for dinner with three friends + my gf and after a couple of fish bowl sized drinks, dinner turned into a night out on the dance floor. One of my friends is recently single so I volunteered for wingman duties if called upon. This would later prove costly for me and is probably worth noting that talking to other girls in the presence of your girlfriend is actually not as good of an idea as it might sound. All that happened was that I was doing my thing on the dance floor, in my walking boot (no idea why it's taking my foot so long to heal), and then some girl dropped her drink behind me and it broke. When someone came over to clean up the drink, the girl started jokingly blaming me for causing the mess and then started asking me about my ankle (sympathy time!). She was with some friends and I thought that this would be a great in for my single friend so I started talking to her...sure enough, my friend came over shortly after and started chatting with one of her friends. What a great wingman I am. Unfortunately, my gf didn't see it that way and claimed that this girl was staring at me for a while and then purposely broke her drink to talk to me lol. I mean I know my dance moves are pretty good but even that seems a bit far-fetched. Also, at one point this girl brought out her phone and it looked as if she was giving me her phone number but in actuality she was digging up a picture of her knee that had some stitches in it to show me...one of the more questionable pick-up moves that I've ever encountered. Anyways, the conversation was dragging on for a while so I excused myself to go to the washroom and came back to my gf. All was well (except for my friend, who failed to land any #'s :( ) but I might need to holster these dance moves a bit more in the future. I forgot what kind of affect they can have on the ladies.

I didn't get to work at all on Sunday because I was dealing with an unexpected problem with my apartment. I was sitting down enjoying a nice breakfast when all of a sudden I heard this weird tapping noise and looked over and saw water pouring out of my ceiling! Obviously I panicked and had no idea what to do but I grabbed a bucket and towel and fortunately the leak stopped on it's own. There's wasn't very much water everywhere but there was a hole in my ceiling and the roof was wet in a confined area. There are 2 apartments above me so I went upstairs and told them about it and they said that they had a "leak" in their bathroom, whatever that meant. I called my building manager and they sent a handyman over and basically what had happened was that the people above overflowed their toilet and the water had gotten underneath their baseboards and came down through my ceiling...wonderful. Right now I'm waiting for someone to come back and cut out the rotten parts of my ceiling, make sure everything is clean and fixed and then patch everything back up. The good news is that this won't cost me a dime since it's not my fault but the bad news is that I have no idea how long this will take to get fixed or how distracting it will be to the poker grind. The joys of being a homeowner I guess.

Alright, that's all for now...

gl at the tables!

Down the Mountain-February Review

February is in the books and I'm disappointed with my results in the second half of the month but am pleased with my effort throughout the entire month...for the most part. I could have played a bit more, especially over the last few days but I was still entirely focused on poker and just chose to watch some 6max training videos and vastly improve my HUD instead. Without further adieu, let's get to the results and talk about em a bit.

 

6-Max

 

Starting by looking at my monthly graph, you can see that my results take on the shape of the dreaded mountain. I guess it's better than a slide but I'd much rather have a ladder...

I wasn't very surprised by the time I checked my results. I felt like I was slowly losing money since mid-month and was checking my 6max results anyways over the last week or so and had a ball-park idea about where I was at. I was running pretty hot for the first couple of weeks but the slide in my results is almost entirely my own doing. As I've mentioned in previous blog posts, I began getting away from my game plan and started playing way too fancy and sub-optimal in the full ring games and then switched games entirely to take on 6-max.

The full-ring play is whatever, that can easily be corrected and I don't regret switching over to 6-max. The thing is, I need to start thinking longer term sooner rather than later if I want to make SNE. 6-max might not be the answer but I want to play something that earns me more vpps/hand and I think that my results would be better by sticking to NLHE then playing PLO or something. Like, ultimately making SNE is 99% about the money (maybe 1% status bragging rights) so I'm not going to play some game where I'm losing money or breaking even when I could be clicking buttons in my sleep and printing money at full-ring (slight exaggeration). That said, I'm pretty turned on by the thought of moving up stakes aggressively at 6-max at the moment so that's what I'm going to try and do at least for now. I think that the profit ceiling is higher at 6max and the convenience of 200nl/500nl zoom is something that isn't even an option at full-ring, unfortunately. On the other hand, Stars is rolling out their anti-shortstacking measures in early March, which is obviously awesome in every way (especially at full-ring, where there are an abundance of SSers). I don't know how/if this would affect my win-rate but I might be tempted to find out, especially if 6max is going brutal.

As for volume, I fell well short of my 60K VPP target but did end with my highest total in a LONG time, clearing a bit over 40K. I actually feel pretty ok about that number considering that it will be easy to make up for lost time is I can do alright at 6max/higher stakes. If I do poorly, I'll have to either try playing something else or just stick to my profitable games and see how many VPPs I can grind out by the end of the year. I'm going to give 6max a pretty legit shot though, like I'm willing to stick it out until I lose something pretty demoralizing I think...probably like 50 buy-ins or so but we'll see. Usually a downswing of 10 buy-ins tilts me for a week lol so I can see myself calling it quits a lot sooner than 50 BI. At the end of the day though, it doesn't matter if I clear 8k or 14k over the first few months if I can be cranking out 5-figure months for most of the latter part of the year through playing higher stakes.

Oh yeah, almost forgot the numbers:

February

$3, 217.93 Table Winnings
$2, 240      FPP Value
--------------------------------------
$5,417.93 USD

Factor in some coacing, other stuff and a sexy USD/CDN exchange rate and I'm approaching 10K so I'm pretty satisfied with the money when it's all said and done, even though the total could have been much better given how things started.

Away from the tables, things really weren't all that exciting considering that I've been grounded in my own house due to my fractured ankle. I try not to think about all of the hockey games that I've been missing and about how long it's going to take before I can do anything active again. The foot's feeling a bit better everyday but is still pretty useless when it comes to doing anything remotely taxing. I've got a doctor's appointment on the 4th and if things look alright at that point I'll be able to start doing physio on it. I'm hopeful that I can be back in action before the end of the month but really wouldn't be surprised if that's not the case. I have managed to watch the 2nd season of House of Cards though and actually finished the finale yesterday...fantastic show.

As for March, I'm going to set my VPP target at 70K. I really think that I can attain this but it will be very challenging. I'm going away for about a week in early April so I'll have enough motivation to grind hard until then before taking a week off to recharge.

That's it for now,

gl at the tables!