Back To Work - January Review

January proved to be a swingy month full of awful play, great play and pretty much everything inbetween as I had to endure running well below EV the entire time. As I mentioned in my last post, the month ended up being profitable due in large part to a couple of sessions that went particularly well and held things together for me. I got off to a pretty good start and climbed to around $2,500 in profit over the first few days of playing, only to lose most of it back in short order right after that. I then swung back in the good direction to basically bring things full circle and ended the month with about $2,500 in profit before bonuses kicked in. Graph:

By Stakes

As you can see, the majority of the runbad was all at 100nl, where most of my volume was played. In 82,000 hands I was down about $70 (although I actually won a buy-in when HEM wasn't running :)) but up almost $1900 in EV. At the end of the day I'd rather run poorly at the smallest stakes that I'm playing obviously rather than the higher but it's just very frustrating to run so bad at the stakes that I'm playing the most often. Anyways, I know that this sounds like a lot of complaining but I'm actually pretty stoked on how the month turned out. I'd much rather run below EV and know that I'm playing EV+ poker than run way over EV and actually be playing break-even/losing poker. The fact that I ran lousy and still made a decent profit in a short month makes me even more optimistic for things to come and now the challenge will be to stay mentally sharp as I increase my volume significantly in February, March and pretty much the rest of the year!

January

$2,496.69 Table Winnings
$1,262.80 FPP Value
$332 tournament Winnings
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$4091.49 USD

Factor in some coaching and salary and a very favourable US exchange rate at the moment and that number is much prettier. I ended up only earning 22.5K VPPs in January and have got to get at least 60K to keep myself in the hunt for SNE in February. Now that my ankle's busted up, I really don't have many distractions to deter me from logging in some heavy hours. There's the Superbowl this Sunday and Valentine's Day mid-month but other than that, I'm going to be pushing 8-12 hour days while I can! I'm going to try to not check my results very often but I will post them mid-month at the latest and update inbetween as to how things are going both on and off of the tables. Anyways, hope everyone had a solid start to the new year and keep going strong in February!

gl at the tables!