So the first two months of 2010 have already flown by so it seems like a great time to review how the year has gone so far. I have travelled to three live tournaments (PCA, EPT Deauville and EPT Copenhagen) and bricked all of the main events and a had some insignificant cashes in a couple of side events. I busted relatively early on day two in all three of them (88 vs AK for 70k at pca, KQ vs JJ for 60k at Deauville and AK vs TT for 65k in Copenhagen) and while it's getting a little annoying to lose all the crucial flips you need to build a stack there really isn't much I can do besides keep trying to put in some volume and hopefully bink one sooner or later :)

In general live tournaments are something I have put a lot of thoughts into since it's something that I have (and will continue to) dedicate both a significant amount of time and money in.

Since everyone has so small sample sizes live and they are spread out over a very long time frame it's so easy to lose confidence if you brick ten tournaments in a row, or if you have a negative roi after playing a hundred of them. Obviously you can't completely compare online and live tournaments (live tends to be softer, have a deeper structure and to a certain extent requires a different set of skills than online) but no professional player would ever doubt their abilities or lose confidence because they bricked ten online tournies or because they lost money over a couple of sunday sessions.

Still even when I try to approach it logically I can't help but be a little annoyed and disappointed in the lack of succes I have had and that I have basically broke even playing live tournaments over the last year or so. I have had a couple of decent scores and a few deep runs but nothing too amazing, looking at my finishing distrubition over the last eighteeen months since I played live for the first time (12th,14th,12th,8th,5th,24th,4th,10th,35th) shows just how swingy tournaments are. If you remove the two biggest scores I would be a significant loser playing live and if I had ran a little better with two tables left in one of them I would be a significant winner, such are the swings. I am not apologizing for my results though, I am by no means an amazing live player (yet anyways ) and like with everything else I have gone through a period with a lot of trial and error. Id say that at an avarage EPT table I will very rarely be the best player but nearly always in top three which is more than enough to give me a pretty good expectation in those tournaments because the skillgap between me and a world class player (with relatively short stacks) is nowhere near as big as the gap between myself and the avarage qualifier/amateur. This rant ended up being a lot longer than I expected and even though all of what I said is common knowledge it still feels pretty good to type it out all.

Anyways on to online, both January and February have both been solid winning months where I had a couple of shots at some really big scores but unfortunately fell short (20ish MET Mulligan, 6th 1k Tuesday and 11th Ftops 100r rush). I am gonna start to make it a habit to post my monthly graph in the blog so people can some insight into the awesome upswings and brutal downswings I go through on a monthly basis. The numbers are from Sharkscope so they are gonna be off by a bit since the way they calculate rebuys is flawed but it should still be a pretty good indicator.

January:

February

Thats all for now, thanks for reading.

Mickey

ps. Sorry for the delay with part three of me and Mikes video. With all the travelling I have been doing and Mike's school and the different timezones it's been really hard to find a time where we were both avaliable but part three will defintely be out this month. I'm also in the process of making a video of the deep run I had in the Super Tuesday yesterday so hopefully that will be out soon as well.