January in Review and Good Start to February

Sorry for my short post yesterday, it was pretty late at night/early in the morning and I was not really in the right mental state, hopefully this will be a more comprehensive post.

I played a total of 10,738 hands in January: 5,766 of 10NL, 4,872 of 25NL and for some reason I managed to play 100 hands of 25PL. I think 11K hands is not bad for a month where I didn't play a huge amount and I am pretty sure that it will be one of my lowest volume months. I played 10NL at the start of the month and netted a modest $35 + about $40 in rakeback for a total of about $75, not bad but I think a 10NL winrate should be a bit higher than this.

For the second half of the month I played exclusively 25NL and ended $76 down (3BI). Given that this was my first serious shot at 25NL, I don't think it was a disaster... I ran pretty bad at times and tilted a bit, but I think that my game has improved a huge amount in the 5K hands of 25NL and being down 3BI in such a small sample is almost meaningless. On the up side, I earned $40 in bonuses and about $20 in RB at 25NL therefore only putting me about $15 down, turning a loosing month into a slightly profitable one.

Playing at Full Tilt has been especially beneficial to my game due to the general tightness of the games. It seems that at 25NL it is difficult to find tables with more than 2 fish and so I often find myself playing pots against regs, something which I didn't have to do at 10NL. Most of the regs at 25NL are pretty bad, but since they are a new specimen that I have not previously encountered, learning to beat them is a challenging and high variance experience. I have started 3-betting more from late position with a wider range, protecting my blinds from habitual stealers and not c-betting flops which are either very unlikely to have hit me or very likely to have hit my opponent. These new adjustments have taken a while to get used to, but I can't say I have had any major trouble at 25NL so far and I am confident that my anticipated leap to 50NL will go smoothly.

As far as criticizing my play in January goes, I think that I still find it difficult to play weak hands out of position against aggressive opponents and I am still playing my draws too passively on the flop. I have gone from playing 18/16 at 10NL to 21/19 at 25NL, which may not seem like a huge difference but bear in mind that 18% to 21% is a about a 15% increase which is not insignificant and I think that this comes about from isolating with weaker hands than I did at 10NL due to the reduced number of fish at 25NL.

Febuary has started well, I have played 707 hands of 25NL and 1 hand of 50NL when I accidentally opened up a 50NL table and didn't realise until I had posted the big blind. Luckily I was dealt JT and flopped TP and so currently have a $1 profit at 50NL over 1 hand which means I am running at 100ptBB/100 hands (sustainable?). At 25NL I have made 4BI in 2 sessions and it looks like I am finally running well again. I hope to play between 15K and 20K hands this month and it looks like I will be moving up to 50NL very soon so things are going to get interesting.

Until next time...