I’m a little late making my end-of-month post for July due to a couple reasons.
1. I was in Las Vegas for the first week of August.
2. July was so god-awful that I really didn’t want to talk about it.
All in all, I’d say I lost between $800 and $900 in July. At first I was just running bad, but then I started playing bad too. I wasn’t getting crazy or making any bad moves. On the contrary, I was playing too tight. It’s easy to get lulled into a fit-or-fold TAG strategy when you’re playing a lot of Sit ‘N Goes. After all, weak-tight is the right way to play in SNGs. But I was folding even when my reads told me I could take the hand away. Even folded several times when I had less than 10 big blinds in the small blind and only the big blind was left in the hand. That should be a shove with any two cards.
Anywho, here’s the graph (green is actual winnings, red is luck adjusted winnings):
Kill me now.
So what am I doing different in August?
As I mentioned before, I’m playing a more aggressive game and going with my reads more often. Every once in a while I look like a horse’s ass when my read is wrong, but my ROI is climbing back to where it used to be.
I’m also setting a time goal to spend on poker. Before I’d just set a number of SNGs I wanted to play, but winning isn’t enough for me. I want to CRUSH the game. Not just Hold’em; but Omaha, Razz, 7-card, whatever. I love poker and I love the challenge. Forcing myself to play a set number of games meant I had less time to study poker books or review my play. After reading this article on Ansky and Gugel’s blog, I decided to dedicate 100 hours out of every month to poker whether it’s playing, reviewing my play, getting coaching or studying the game. I think it’ll be beneficial in the long run.
Hopefully August will be a better month for me than July. It sure as shit couldn’t be much worse.
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