A Good Day Back in the Saddle

I have a new medium length goal. My plan is to play 50,000 hands of $10/$20 and $15/$30 without playing any higher with the goal of winning $5,000 (not including points).

After 9 years of keeping perfect records of every dollar I won and lost for some reason at the start of this year I totally bailed on keeping strong records. I sitll have a plus minus for every day, but now how it happened. I'd like to see just how much I'm making per hand and while 50,000 hands isn't a huge sample size it should give me a fair idea of what I can expect to make long term.

The problem is I want to play $50/$100 or even higher all day, every day. But even if I can win at that level, I'm not sure it's worth it to face the massive fluctuations. I'd much rather win $2,000 one day and lose $1,000 the next to show $500 a day profit, than win $6,000 one day and lose $5,000 the next. It's much more stressful. Of couse it's also much more exciting, which is why I need to make a concrete goal to keep myself in line.

Before I left for Vegas I played about 25 hands of $200/$400. That is the biggest I have ever played and I realized I'm clearly not ready to mentally handle those stakes. The reason I jumped in was first of all I was WAY up for the month and second of all there was a player in the game who I knew from $30/$60 who is a regular but weak. Along with him and three other sort of regular players there was also a bronze star (who turned out to be a pretty good player). It looked like one of the better games I've seen at those stakes so I figured why not give it a go.

To give you an idea of how big those stakes are let me tell you about a hand I played. I had AK and three bet and early position raiser who just called my reraise. The flop came down K T 3 and my opponent check raised me. I decided to just call and go for a raise on the turn. When the turn came out it was a blank and my opponent bet just like I knew he would. But when I raised he three bet me! ACK! Now I wasn't sure I had the best hand. I called his reraise on the turn and his bet on the river. He showed AK and we split the pot.

No big deal right? Well I put $2,600 into that one pot! That's a months rent, utilities, phone, internet, and cable. In one pot! It wasn't even a huge pot and that's just what I put into it! We split the blinds and I still made $150 on the hand! That's just nuts.

So my plan is to stick to the smaller games for at least a month or so, bang out some steady wins and avoid the massive fluctuations. After the next FTOPS in August and the WCOOP in September if I don't get spanked I'll revist the bigger games.

I got off to a good start today. The exact start I had in mind when I came up with the plan. I played about 2,000 hands and won $950 plus about $250 in FPPs. I didn't run into super weak competion, didn't get expecially great cards, and wasn't exactly making sick reads all day. I feel like I should be able to have results like this almost every day.

48,000 hands left!

Also briefly for Luis and any others who didn't know what I meant when I said I have good "bounce back," I mean that I'm able to put my losses behind me very quickly. Once the money is gone, it's gone and I'm very good about not thinking about those losses once they've happened. If you look at Tiger Woods he gets super pissed when he makes a bad shot or misses a key put. But by the time he needs to hit his next shot you'd never know he was upset a moment before. You should never be happy about losing a pot or a session, but it's important to realize that there is nothing you can do about it and just forget it.