New Month New Hope

I didn’t play as much as I had hoped to in June, but I did get in a sub-par number of hands for the month and an above par (for me) number of MTTs.  The first 1/2 of the month started out fairly break even, but the final 1/2 finally saw me start to win some money.  I ended up winning 4.46 bb/100 at the $25NL tables for the month over about 5,000 hands.  I won at a rate of 76.57 bb/100 over 350 hands at $10NL (sustainable?),  Add in about 100 hands of limit poker running at 15 BB/100 or so and I have $175 or so worth of profit from the cash games.    PT3 still can’t handle Stars tournaments correctly and I refuse to manually enter MTT results, but from my calculations, I netted approx. $75 in MTTs after all was said and done.  With rakeback, bonus money, and my play, I think I made $400 or so.  Not life changing money by any means, but a good shot to the bankroll.  Now if I can only find some time to get in some hands.

July is actually exciting for me.  I want this to be my “breakthrough” month in poker.  I want to take that next step  in becoming a winning player.  I have been working on my mental aspect of the game, mostly the “playing scared” aspect that drives me away from the tables when I’m winning and keeps me at the tables when I’m losing.  I want to get in more hands, but I always seem to be finding excuses not to play.  Theoretically, real life does get in the way of me playing poker.  I have a full time job (that I hate and would love to replace with poker), I have a dog now that consumes my time, I have parents and friends that I visit on a regular basis, I have my own house and all the chores that is in involved in maintaining it.  To put it bluntly, I’ve become an adult and have responsibilities.  I have no clue how you guys/gals that are married with kids find time to even think about poker.  That all being said, I really do have time for poker.  It’s like the person that tells you that they don’t have time to exercise….but yet they never fail to find time to watch Deal or No Deal every night.  There is time for poker.

After working with Jared Tendler’s videos a little bit over at Stoxpoker.  He’s a golf psychiatrist/psychologist/whatever that has turned into a golf/poker shrink.  He has some fantastic videos about how the mind and brain work and relates them to the poker game.  I just made it through the 1st video.  I really think these videos will help my game.  He seems to know what makes up a “grinder” and has a good understanding of how poker works.  I had avoided these videos for a while, because I thought they really just dealt with Tilt, but they deal with all the brain functions during a poker session.  Pretty neat stuff.

So, now that I’m back in the swing of things, I want to set some goals for July.  I definitely want to up the number of hands I play.  I want to see that number quadruple this month.  I’m going to be out of town only twice this month and only 1 of those is for more than a day.  I will be playing solely at Stars this month.  As I was typing this paragraph, I got a response from Full Tilt on how long their bank transfers were “temporarily down”.  I got a canned response that didn’t relate anything to my question, so now I move on.  This might slow me down here at the start of the month as my bankroll will be in transit from Full Tilt to Stars.  I’ve got a little bit on Stars, but not enough to properly multitable.  I might just work with what I got and hope for the best while Full Tilt sends me the rest.  If I get low, I can reload out of personal funds and then let the check recooperate those funds.  I have no faith in getting any type of money from Full Tilt by the end of the month.  But I’m not going to let that be an excuse.  If worse comes to worse, I can grind $10NL until I get things straightened out.  It’s not about the money right now, it’s about playing winning poker.

Here is what I want to accomplish during July

• 20,000 cash game hands
• No shortened sessions.  I will sit down and say I’m going to play until X:00.  I do not stop until X:00 regardless of my results
• No reviewing of hands or anything else in Pokertracker prior to finishing my session
• Profit

July is going to be all about getting my head on straight and not letting it get in the way of my poker game.  I think once I learn how to do this sort of thing, I can sit down and grind out some pretty long sessions.