It's been a pretty slow month for me so far. I've played most days this year but had just two winning sessions. On both of them I won the MicroGaming 16,50 rebuy for $8k. Every other day I've lost pretty heavily and thanks to those two big scores I still think I'm only breakeven for the year. I've had quite a few deep runs, including some Sunday majors where I've got 6th, 11th, 15th, 21st, 22nd and 24h so far this year out of huge fields. So close but yet so far :(

I've been studying a lot lately, doing hh review sessions via TeamViewer and Skype with good players and discussing hands a lot in general. I've significantly toned down my 2+2 posting and selected a tiny group of very smart people to talk to instead, it's both more effective and they understand my spewing better than the good old HSMTT nits. (Sorry.)

As a result of studying I feel like my game has continued to take big leaps forward in recent weeks, and I have every reason to believe this is going to be a good year. I should still try to cut down the spewing slightly, for example I could maybe not do this the next time when I'm 2/17 in $22 rebuy: http://weaktight.com/4267182 how come they always have AA?

My next grudge tournament I really want to win is the 109r. So far I've got 11th AAvsAK and 12th AK
vsA4. Today I got 15th or 16th losing JJvsK8o and A5vsK5o in two almost consecutive hands. It's the one tournament where I always seem to run awful, and I have yet to final table it despite having a go at it every day and statistically I should have ft'd it ages ago even if I was a massive fish. I'm pretty sure that the one time all my bad run in that gets counterfeited and I hit the ft I'm going to bink. Fingers crossed!

I finally got HEM2 installed properly and I've spent quite some time exploring it. It's such an amazing program, although it's still full of bugs and always freezes my computer. The features and especially the hud are just amazing. For the first time I've built myself a really massive hud for an MTT player with close to 20 stats displayed all the time, and after getting some help from guys who use HEM a lot playing MTTs I've added some stats to my arsenal that I don't think many regs use. You don't usually ever get much of a sample of people's post-flop play in tournaments and I've always been really skeptical about the usefulness and accuracy of post-flop stats (apart from really simple ones like c-bet% or AF), but it's been working amazingly. I still need to get used to everything, but I have a really good feeling about my new-found HEM obsession and I think my custom hud will help me significantly in the future.

I've found it a bit hard to find stability in my grinding all year for some reason. Either my mind isn't there and I'm playing like a nit, or then my mind is all over the place and I play like a super LAG idiot (see the HH above). I guess it's good in a way to have two personas so my opponents won't be able to read me easily, but I'd like to be able to have a more solid standard of play that I wouldn't deviate from that much in both the good and the bad. I feel like I'm only truly unleashing my potential in maybe 30-40% of my sessions, and in the rest I just click buttons. I've been trying to figure out what it could be about but I haven't found any explanations so far. I did buy a cool numpad (like a keyboard without letters) and I'm going to have only that and my mouse available during sessions from now on, so I won't be able to use MSN/Skype/Facebook/Youporn while I play. I'll also try to take a walk before each session to get air, since way too often I've started playing almost immediately after eating breakfast (at 6PM). When I think of it, most of the days when I've had good results I've actually been doing something in the daytime and I might even have been a bit tired from waking up early. I don't know, maybe it's a some kind of hyper-activation mode that I get from concentrating too much on poker only that stops me from just chilling and playing my A+ game every day.

If anything's got better for me recently it's definitely Sundays. If it wasn't for Seabeast I still wouldn't have understood the importance of the Sunday grind and how profilically it's different from any other day's grinding. For example, I always used to fire all kinds of random tournaments at the same time with the early majors to have enough action on the screen. I've only recently realized that it's actually important to have a slow, chilled start where you have just a few tables and who cares maybe even surf online while playing. Brain power is an asset that you run out of quickly if you overload your brain all day long, and to be sharp in the endgame you need to use as little brain power as possible early. It's simple really, but it took me almost two years into my MTT career to realize that and even then I needed someone else to almost force me to skip the 5rs and whatever I used to play on the side early on Sundays.

It's those kinds of small changes I've made in recent months - dropping most 6max tourneys, dropping smaller tourneys, scheduling better with less tourneys at the beginning of the session and loading it up towards the end, customizing my hud, looking up people on OPR, talking to people on Skype - that aren't worth much on paper but combined have had a really good effect on me. Now I'm just waiting/hoping to get more results.

I must say that for the first time I've also really, really enjoyed online grinding in almost the same way in which I enjoy live tournaments in the past couple of months. Everyone who knows me knows how I always go on about how online is shit and live is the real thing. I guess I still feel like that at heart, but making my sessions both more enjoyable and interesting by cutting off tables and so on I've come to realize that online is pretty damn awesome too. There aren't many better feelings in everyday life than the one when you're about to start a session, you're brewing green tea, you know you've got all the 60 tournaments of the night ahead of you and that you'll be having fun playing poker AND making heaps of money for the next 12 hours or so. Damn I love my job.

PS. I finally managed to record a new video series that should be coming out soon. The first part is called "Sunday LAG". I 3-bet 63o in the first hand it keeps going on like that throughout the video where I'm 4-tabling. It was definitely fun recording it, I hope you guys get something out of it. The next part is going to be called "Weekday LAG", concentrating on the slight differences in aggroing it up on weekdays as opposed to weekends (random Sunday fish vs. weekday regs). At the very least neither of them will lack in action :)