2009 WCOOP Recap and Totals

I'm going to make this brief since I like much more to go into detail about good news rather than bad.

I ended up playing 24 WCOOP events and had 4 cashes: $215 PLO 6 max, $320 8-game, $1,050 limit hold'em and $215 NL Omaha-8. Sadly these cashes were not enough to overcome the 20 bricks. My best finish was 18th of 999 in the 8-game which paid $2,520. The damage or the main tournaments was -$9,085.

I played 15 satellites and while I hit the money is a few, I came up short in the two 50,000 FPP tournaments I played. In the first I was in 1st place with 6 players to go and the top 4 getting $10,300 prizes. I finished 6th. In the second I was even with my two opponents playing 3 handed with the top 2 getting $10,300 prizes. I finished 3rd (at least I got my 50,000 FPPS back in that one!). These were two of the most heartbreaking shortcomings of my career. I lost $758 on satellites.

At the start of the series I planned on playing a slew of second chance tournaments. By the time they rolled around I'd often been playing for 5 or 6 hours and wasn't in the mood to commit to another long tournament. Also most of them had short fields stacked with strong players. In the end I played 3 of the second chance tournaments and lost $955.

One thing I'm taking away from this WCOOP is I'm really down on no limit hold'em tournaments. I'm tired of playing for hours and hours and having one hand decide my fate. Also the level of play at the stakes that are worth while seems to be getting better all the time. I still have an edge, but it's not what it used to be. Maybe I'm not so much down on no limit as up on other games. Along those lines I'm more and more convinced that I need to search out every HORSE or mixed games tournament with decent stakes that I can find.

In the end I lost more than half of my $20,000 starting bankroll and finshed with a net loss of $10,803. BOOOOOOOO! Thanks to all my backers, I'll e-mail you soon.

Now it's back to the cash games! There are 100 days left in 2009. I have 3 week long vacations planned during that time and since I don't have any point pressure I'm sure I'm going to be working less. But my plan is to play 100,000 hands of $10/$20 in 100 days (I'll call it my 100 in 100 Challenge!), keep tight records and see what I think I can expect to make going into 2010.

A standard convention these days is to talk about profit in terms of "big bet's per 100 hands" or BB/100. 1 BB/100 is probably the edge of what's possible at the stakes I'm playing. That would be $100 an hour. Since I'm going to be making $40 an hour (or every 500 hands to be more specific) in FPPs (not counting milestone bonus considerations) even after my supernova elite expires at the end of the month, I don't need to make that much to show a strong profit. I think my goal is to make .5 BB/100 (or ten cents a hand is the way I like to think about it), but I'll be OK with anything over .25 BB/100. I'll do my best to keep you posted.