July Review-A Train Wreck

After back to back 10K months, July was a total train wreck. Part of the disaster was my fault but I think that part of it was also just variance. More on that after the ugly pics:

 

So, right off the bat you'll notice the big gap in EV, which is never fun. If you look closer at the stakes, you'll notice that I donated about $2,300 playing PLO in July :O. I wanted to experiment a lot in July with different game types and formats to really try and find a better way to earn more VPPs and ultimately more money. However, the lesson that I learned that I should have already known was pretty expensive...that I suck fairly hard at PLO and the variance is always going to be especially huge in that game. As far as NLHE went, it was a lot of me bouncing around various Zoom games and getting away from my bread and butter regular tables. It looks like I lost in every zoom format lol so I don't have much of a defence for that other than the sample size are pretty small and I think I ran pretty bad. Here is the breakdown for July:

-$6,898.71  table winnings
-$183.70     tournament winnings
+$2,057.30 fpp value
+2,600        200k milestone bonus
------------------------------------------------
-$2,425 USD

The silver lining is that with some salary and coaching I actually turned a -$7k month into a profit of a few hundred bucks :/ To have such an epically terrible month (2nd worst month ever, after my December chasing SNE in 2010) and still pocket some cash is pretty incredible.

Factor out the PLO and consider the stakes that I was playing and the downswing isn't even too far out of the ordinary for a lot of players I think. Regardless, August will see me returning to my comfortable games and to re-evaluate my year end goals at the end of the month. I'm not giving up on the SNE chase just yet but it's looking far more realistic to shoot for 500-600K VPPs and then manage my time much better in 2015 and try again then. We'll see though, there will be no shortage of effort in August. I ended up earning about 40K VPPs this month so obviously August will have to be much better than that :)

Away from the tables life is good but busy. My girlfriend is settled in with my at my place now and that was quite a distraction in July in terms of staying focused on poker. The place is looking good though and although there are quite a few small projects/upgrades on the horizon, everything is comfortable and more than livable (as opposed to looking like a storage locker for most of July). I've been following a pretty awesome routine of waking up at 6:30am and going to crossfit at 7am and did that everyday this week, actually. It feels great to start the day with a workout and just waking up that early allows the day to be so much more productive. I'll be looking to continue the trend in August.

I'm very looking forward to August. I've got 2 small vacations planned and then I'm basically going to be in poker lockdown mode for the rest of the year. I'm going away on my annual fishing trip for 4 days, coming home for 1 day and then heading up to the interior for a guys weekend. The weather's amazing in Van right now and that's supposed to continue for the next little while.

Alright, that's all for now ladies + gents...

gl at the tables!