Update and Goal for April

Hello!

As you may have noticed, I didn't make a post last week. That's because I was running pretty bad and it was starting to affect my mood and the way I played, so I decided to take the week off. Initially, I was planning to only take a couple of days, but eventually I decided to only go back to the tables when I was feeling ready for it. I enjoyed some days of sleeping until late, spending time with friends and organizing things that I was always postponing because of lack of time. By the end of the week I was feeling much better and the downswing was like a distant memory. I came back to the office on April 1rst, all ready for a fresh start. But for the record, here's the graph for the month of March:

As you can see, it's not very pretty. I played around 2K tourneys and ended up losing $461. That was quite a hit for me, cause that amount represents almost half of my bankroll... Ouch!

Fortunately, the month of April started a lot better, and I have been recovering some of the money I lost. So far I am up $197 for the month, which is pretty good considering that I have only played 4 days. Also, I'm pretty comfortable with 6tabling now.

Another big change was that the MicroMillions events finished on the 25th of March, so lately I have been grinding the regular hyper-turbo satellites. It was quite a challenge at first, cause with the MicroMillions I was used to playing the same thing all day long and only unregister once at the end of the day. Now, I have to constantly change stakes and keep looking at the tournaments that are about to start so that I unregister on time. It definitely demands a tighter schedule than before. It took me a bit to figure out when each of the satellites were running. There is no schedule available online, so I had to be monitoring the games day after day and taking notes. I have most of it figured out, although I'm still missing some information. It is very important to do this though, otherwise you can't really plan anything. Since I have decided that I'm not going to play any tournaments with a buy-in higher than $10, that leaves me with three options: the $3s, the $3.74s and the $7.49s. I'd say that most of the day I'm playing the $3.74s. It seems that I'll be playing these stakes for a while, cause then you only have the $18.77s, which is quite a jump and I don't see it happening anytime soon. I pretty much need to double up my bankroll to get there.

Apart from that, I've been quite disappointed at Hold'em Manager lately. I mean, it still is good to study your game and the game of your opponents, but it fails to do one simple thing: monitor results. That thing is simply not made to monitor hyper-turbo satellites. And the results it gives are so misleading, that just to give you an example, on a day that I'm winning $100 Hold'em Manager says that I'm losing $300. Nowadays I rely on SharkScope which is pretty accurate for graphs and stuff like that , and of course the only 100% reliable source: the cashier.

As far as April is concerned, I have one goal: to reach GoldStar. Last month I made it to SilverStar without much of an effort, after all it's only 750 VPPs. GoldStar is going to be more difficult though, cause it's 3K VPPs and I only get from 0.33 to 0.83 VPPs per tournament (depending on the stakes). To make the situation even harder, I'm visiting my family in Greece this month. I'll be in Athens for Easter and I'll stay there for a week, during which I can't see myself playing much, if at all. It's not that GoldStar holds such amazing benefits (although it is an improvement comparing to SilverStar), but going for it will keep me motivated to put in more volume of play.

That's all for now... See you at the tables! :)