So a couple weeks ago I chopped the sunday million for 208k. This was the first time ive ever had a substantial cash in an online tournament. It felt great to get the monkey off my back per se, and while I have no delusions of cashing for 50k every week or being one of the best online mtt players in the world, I think there is far too much value in too many online tournaments to play as little volume as I have in the past 18 months.

From the 2009 wcoop main event up until the november 2010 ftops I believe I played 4 online tournaments. While it doesnt make sense for me to be playing things as small as the daily 50 freezeouts or things as hard as the daily 100 rebuys, I should definitely be playing sundays and big tournament series with lots of soft tournaments. Despite my lack of playing I have improved in tournaments by watching some horses deep and noticing changes in the game such as vastly different betsizing, but I think I have fallen behind the top tournament players and am really lacking in some areas.

In the past 2 months I have probably played 200 tournaments and am starting to get a feel for the adjustments I need to be making. But its not really enough to just learn through trial and error as its too easy to become results oriented in a variance fest like mtts. So im going to start watching a couple videos a week to try to get insight into some of the better tournament players games, because the muscle memory I have built up through the years works against me finding creative new spots that are second nature to some of those guys.


My desire to improve in tournaments also comes with one to improve in NL cash. About the same time I gave up tournaments, I kind of gave up NL for PLO cash. It just seemed like there were too many shortstacks+regulars and not enough fish in the NL games. And while that hasnt changed too much, its resulted in me falling behind a lot of people in the no limit realm. Partially due to ego and partially due to the value I see in improving my NL game ive decided to put in a lot of hard work into getting back near the upper echelons of poker.

Along with watching some videos, Ive been playing in some tougher midstakes games to get in there and battle a bit and toy around with different things I need to work on. I have a long road ahead of me, but I think it is worth the effort to get better at NL in the next few months with some good opportunities to play live cash games at LAPC and WSOP coming up. Hopefully in a month or so I can post some positive results.