August overview & SilverStar in a day!

Hi everyone!

So, August is already in the books and it's been a pretty good month for me poker-wise. Actually, it's been the best month I've had so far. Here's my graph for the month of August:

My total profit was $2.2k which still seems kind of surreal to me. André says I shouldn't be results-oriented but hey, I think it's only natural that I get a little happy with a graph like that one... I'm obviously on a good run but that said, I believe that all those studying hours and coaching above all have paid off. 

Also, I made it to GoldStar somehow. As you know during most of the month I spent more time away from the tables (studying) than I actually spent playing. Towards the end of the month I was slightly past the SilverStar status, but then I started playing the $18s and increased the number of hours I was playing. I randomly realized that I was really close to making GoldStar, so I made an extra effort on August 31rst to get it. It would be kind of silly to lose it for 50 VPPs or so! There's not much more to say about August since I covered most of it in my previous post, so I'll move on to  what has happened in September so far.

September 1rst was a Saturday, so André and I took the day off. September 2nd though was a Sunday and therefore one of the busiest days of the week for poker people. I went to the office around 11.00 o'clock and was surprised at how many games were running. Of course the beginning of the WCOOP had a lot to do with it... The following equation says it all:

September = WCOOP month = Happy times!

With August's good run, my bankroll had hit the $3k line which according to my bankroll management board meant that I should stop playing the $7s and move up to the $35s. Because of all the WCOOP tournaments and special satellites I got many different buy-ins around the $35 stake: there were $28s, $37.50s and $40s which André said were also ok to play. I mixed some $18s (but not many) in all that and played all day long.

The first observation I have to make is that playing above the $18s feels like you are on fast forward. In terms of money, it comes and goes a lot faster simply because you are playing with higher amounts. At the $3s your buy-in is the cost of a pack of chewing-gum. Yeah it adds up, but still... When you think of it independently, $3 simply doesn't sound like a lot of money. $40 though... That's a little bit of something. 

Since the buy-ins were higher, the VPPs per tournament should be more as well, right? I didn't really check how many VPPs each one of the different buy-ins was giving, I hit the VIP status button instead. Imagine my surprise when I saw... that I had made SilverStar in a day. Okay, this may not sound very surprising to some of you especially if you are used to playing higher stakes. But to me, SilverStar is quite a lot of effort. Getting it in a day almost felt like cheating! I was doing some calculations, and at that rate GoldStar should be like 3 days' work while Platinum a bit over a week! I've only made Platinum twice since I started playing poker and both of the times it took me a full month and was extremely hard.

I bet you are wondering about what the results were... Well, it was not anything very interesting, I finished the day break even. But take a look at the graph:

This graph is unreal! As you can see, most of the day went pretty well. Unfortunately, during my last session for the day (that lasted around an hour) I had a $500 downswing. I took the video back to André cause I was really interested to see if it was my fault that I got that downswing or if I was playing fine but getting unlucky. There were quite a few mistakes in there and André asked me if I was playing tired which I guess I was a bit, but I think that there was quite a bit of bad luck involved...

Wanna know how I got myself grounded? Yeah, I'm grounded, you heard me right! While we were reviewing the session I was continuously complaining about a certain player. I think that that particular person sucks out on me very often. We're also talking about a good player here so it's not exactly easy competition. According to André's perspective I should stop tilting and focus on the decisions I make, because after I make them I have no control over what happens. That is completely true and I totally agree, but in this case the person does not make me tilt. Yeah, I'm a bit of a whiner afterwards but at that particular moment I don't start making bad decisions because I tilt. I define tilt as not playing your best because you are angry which is not the case here. I may have made mistakes during that session, that I admit, but they were either cause I was tired or because I didn't think about the play enough, not because I was angry. And it definitely had nothing to do with one player in particular.

Anyway, another thing I kept repeating over and over during yesterday's coaching was "I can't believe I lost $500 in an hour". In terms of buy-ins that's really not a big deal and not anything that hasn't happened to me before in poker. It's like what, a 20 to 25 buy-ins downswing? Big deal! And in a day, I've even lost more than $500 playing much lower stakes. It's just the -$500 in an hour that bothers me. This is not chewing-gum level anymore and I just can't forget that and put a distance between me and the money. It is a significant amount of money (at least to me) and losing that much in an hour simply messes with my head.

I think it was those two points that lead André to his decision of forbidding me to play above the $18s for the rest of the week. I'm not emotionally ready yet. Which I'm ok with, but I don't know if there will be an improvement by the end of this week. Emotions are not something you can control 100%. You can learn how to manage them, but it takes time.

Anyway, I'm really excited about September. The WCOOP should make things more interesting overall. I hope this month is as good as the last one, or even better! :D

Good luck to you all and see you at the tables!