I have officially completed my first realy month slightly dedicated to poker since black friday. Right after black friday I threw $500 onto merge. I was originially going to focus on PLO, and ran up my $500 into ~$3k pretty quickly. After that tho, I plummeted back down to my original deposit. This is the exact same PLO story I have experienced evertyime I play that god forsaken game. Run hot at the start, then run ice cold and stop playing. After that I hardly played at all over the following months and when I did I played pretty poorly and noticed a ton of rust on my game.

This month, with school back in session and thus the golf season winding down I had a lot more down time to play poker. I decided to challenge myself and see what I could do with my now $500 bankroll, playing NLHE. I was going to use a pretty aggressive bankroll management strategy, moving up whenever I had 10 buy ins for a limit, moving back down if I lost 2 buy ins when taking a shot. I didn't start off that well at .25/.50 and immediately had to move back down to .10/.25 to grind a bit but did make it all the way to playing 2/4 by the end of the month.

Once I started playing a much less auto-pilot oriented game the results started to come. I ended up winning ~19 buy ins over the 39k hands, so that is a winrate slightly lower than 5bb/100. Not great considering half the play was below 1/2, however I was 9 tabling on a pokersite that has terrible software(imo, full tilt was the nuts) so I'm not too unhappy. I also only played about 53 hours so had a decent hourly wage considering the stakes I played at ~$65/hr. Near the end of the month I felt really good about my game, and felt in control at the table the entire time. I definitiely made a ton of really bad plays during the month, mostly a lot of terrible calls as the games just don't play that aggressive. This goes back to how I generally preach bet/folding at SSNL and folding to a lot of aggression in general. They ALWAYS have it even in the spots where they rep really narrow ranges.

Anyway, here is a garph.




When you add in rakeback(~$700) and clearing some bonuses I finished up the month with slightly over $5k in my account. Not too bad after starting with $500. Hope everyone is doing great, looks like the whole FTP situation may be working itself out, and for that I am jumping for joy. This sums up what I was like when I woke up and read the news over breakfast.