First off, Hannes' posted a question in my last blog entry asking why I play 4 tables if I play better poker when I am only playing 2. The reason is that although I play better poker when 2 tabling, my hourly winrate is still bigger when I 4 table. As long as my winrate is over half of what it is when I 2 table then I will make more money by 4 tabling. This is why I usually 4 table, but go down to 2 tables when I want to tweak my game.
I have played a total of 20074 hands in March for a profit of about $500. I don't know the exact amount because the rakeback calculator in Holdem Manager is not 100% accurate.... but $500 including rakeback should be pretty close to the actual value.
Although this is slightly more than my February winnings, I have played more hands. I feel that I have been playing better poker, but (as always) I still have a long way to go. In my defence, I ran really badly in the middle of the month, and then ran breakeven for most of the rest of it.... but that shouldn't be an excuse.
Through recent discussions on MSN with James, I think that I have identified 2 major leaks in my game:
The first one was my blind play when there were late position limpers. I was reminded of a comment I once made at one of the uni tournaments: "Any time you get more money in while you're ahead you're playing well", I would like to retract this comment as it is very over generalised and does not take into account many other factors, the most important being that playing hands out of position vs an aggressive opponent who knows how to use position to their advantage has a huge effect on the relative strength of your hand. With hands such as KTo I would often raise in the BB if the CO or BTN limped, but playing a hand as weak as KTo out of position vs even semi-aggressive opponents is very difficult and almost certainly -EV because of their positional advantage. Versus very loose passive opponents position is not as important because they do not know how to bluff or semibluff and so its much easier to know if you have the best hand, but vs good aggressive opponents, raising KTo out of position is bad because it is very rarely going to make a very strong hand, and it will not be difficult for an aggressive opponent to push you off the best hand using their positional advantage. The discussion concluded that position counts as a 2:1 advantage in the hand and so to play a hand out of position, you should add 33% to your opponents equity which I think is a pretty accurate estimation.
The second leak I discovered, was that I was making very little money on the button, much less than in the cutoff, I think this is due to coldcalling raises with hands such as QJs, ATs and AJo where I didn't want to 3-bet or fold. I think that this is a pretty blatant leak, and it has had a really significant effect on my winrate. This month I have made a whopping $728 in the CO but lost a total of $82 OTB, clearly a massive leak as I should be making even more from the BTN than from the CO. By using the filters in Holdem Manager, I discovered that I very rarely coldcalled from the CO but often did from the BTN, which is where most of my losses have come from. I need to learn to let go of hands such as QJs when there is an early position raise because my postflop edge is not enough to play these hands profitably when I am not the aggressor. I believe that I am also 3-betting a little too liberally from the BTN and am loosing money in 3-bet pots from the BTN too.
I have qualified for Ironman 'Silver' status on Full Tilt, not really a great achievement because the 'medals' are worth very little, but I guess every little counts.
As always, I have learned a lot about poker in the past month and I think that I have improved as a player. I am going to try to fix the two leaks identified this month and attempt to boost my winrate a bit, however I have an increasing amount of work to do for uni at the moment and so will not be able to play very much poker over the next two months, but I will still be keeping my blog updated with the small amount of poker I do play.
As much as I am embarrassed to show it, I can't really write a March review without posting my very unimpressive graph. The green line is winnings and the blue line is winnings + rakeback (though rakeback is not 100% accurate). As you can see from the graph, its one big horrible breakeven stretch, but I'm making money so I can't complain, and I have learned a lot about my game.
Quickpost this image to Myspace, Digg, Facebook, and others!I am going to Spain for a week on Thursday, so wont be able to blog for a week, but will be back around the 11th with some news.
Happy grinding :)
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