Febuary Review

Febuary has been a very important month for me. Up to the 6th of Febuary ,I was playing 25NL on Full Tilt to get used to the software until I started playing 50NL. I found the players at 25NL to be mostly weaktight, often raising or 3-betting preflop, but playing very poorly postflop when they did not hit a hand. Having had a bit of a tough time at the end of January, I managed to adapt my game to the 25NL players, and over 6000 hands of 25NL over the month of February I ran at 9.2ptBB/100 hands, netting a total profit of $275.

On the 7th of February, the money for my stake arrived, and I entered the world of 50NL. It was very quickly clear that 50NL was a very different game, with the average player being fairly loose and very aggressive. I would regularly run into 60/30 type opponents against whom I had had little experience playing against. The end result of all this extra aggression was higher variance, since bluffing and semi-bluffing were used much more frequently at this level, I would often find my self putting my stack in whereas I would have probably folded at 25NL.

As would be expected, I struggled to do well at 50NL. Initially I ran very well and managed to suckout a few times with KK vs AA and quickly ran up a $250 profit. However, it was clear to me that my good results were due more to running well than to playing good poker and on reviewing my sessions I could see that I was spewing a lot of chips playing medium sized pots. I was giving up too easily and regularly getting pushed off the best hand and finally, I dropped $300 in 2.5K hands.

After 8000 hands of 50NL, I had only a $100 profit and so decided to spend the rest of the month playing 25NL. I signed up to deuces cracked and watched some 50NL as well as a lot of 200NL videos in the Unconventional Wisdom series, and I slowly managed to understand where my leaks were.

All in all, February has been a great month, even though I did not do very well at 50NL I have learned a huge amount and am confident that I will be able to beat the game. Pre February 7th my winnings were $156 + about $40 in bonuses and from the 7th until the end of February I netted another $220 + about $80 in bonuses and $100 in rakeback, taking my monthly total to about $600 of which $200 is going to my staker (50% of the $400 from the 7th to 29th).

Here is my graph and stats for the month