Crazy Weekend

In some people's vocabularies, "crazy weekend" would mean lots of partying, fun, drinks and possibly a hangover. For online poker players though that spend the biggest part of their weekend in front of their computer screens, "crazy weekend" probably refers to poker action. With a lot more recreational players at the tables and all the special Sunday tournaments, there's a lot of reasons why we like to play on a weekend.

But before I go on about my weekend, let me tell you about what I've been up to lately. Until the end of 2013 I was playing the $12 hypers. With the beginning of 2014 (new year, new me, blah blah blah), I decided to take some more drastic actions, study more and move up in stakes. So I've been playing $18s and $37s (mostly) and occasionally $56s and $74s if the traffic is good and they're not full of good regulars.

January was a pretty good month for me. Here's the graph from last month:

A total of 2.1K games and $2.8K in winnings. Not bad at all considering I had just moved up in stakes! Plus, a good part of the month I was at the PCA so it's even better considering I didn't even play the whole month.

And that brings us to February. Things had been going pretty smoothly this month, until last weekend happened. Let's start with Saturday.

Almost 600 tournaments played in one day and an awesome profit of $1.7K. Why can't all days be like that? Also, to put things in perspective, my winnings on Saturday were around 47 buy-ins. Which is as sweet as it sounds! I went to sleep pretty happy that night. I'd charge my batteries and wake up prepared for and even bigger grind on Sunday!

Then of course reality happened. I woke up on Sunday feeling good an prepared for a long grind since it's the day of the week where I play the most hours. At this point I'd like to remind you that the graph above and the graph you will see below are only separated by a day, or to be more accurate, a good night's sleep. Here's my graph for Sunday:

Yep, that's as tragic as it looks. 738 tournaments which is a very good volume for my standards, but a devastating -$3.3K result. This day was my worstest day ever, which unfortunately beats my previous record of being in the red. And yes, I know that "worstest" is not proper English but I'm in distress so I think I'm allowed to invent words that best describe my situation. So, not only was that the biggest amount of money I've ever lost in a day, it was also the biggest amount of buy-ins.

When you start playing hypers you hear those urban legends about people swinging100 buy-ins or more in a day, usually followed by a comment in the lines of "variance in those games is brutal, man!". And most of the times, you only half believe what those people are telling you cause winning or losing 100 buy-ins in a day is pretty crazy, right? Unfortunately, it was my turn to prove that urban legend to be true. If we divide the losses by what Sharkscope says was my average buy-in for the day, we get... The outstanding number of 108 buy-ins. In case you don't remember, my previous lowest of the low was -60 buy-ins and that was not a record I was looking forward to breaking. At least that was back in May 2012, so these things don't happen that often.

I don't think I was playing badly, even though I'm sure I made some mistakes. I also had a couple of problems with my internet connection during the day, but nothing major to justify the outrageous result. I don't think I was tired while playing either. After all, you can see that the steepest downswing was towards the beginning of my session where theoretically I was more rested than towards the end of it. Which brings us to the only logical explanation... Variance. I'd say variance is a b****, but I'd like to have her on my side today so I'll just say she's a lady with crazy mood swings. Around tourney #550 I decided to cut down on the higher stakes and stick to the $18s. When I hit a new low for the day, I decided to stop. It was getting close to midnight anyway.

So yeah, can't say that I'm very happy about how this weekend went by. Right now I'm $1.2K down for the month, which will be hard to recover although not impossible. After all, we've seen what variance can do. I just need a bit of good luck coming my way.

Today I've decided to take it slow. Even if I wanted to play right now I couldn't, cause my computer is being torn to pieces. It has been freezing quite a bit lately which is not good, especially if you're playing the hypers that have a tiny time bank. The other day I folded QQ preflop, then I folded another hand when I was on the big blind and the blinds were so high that I only had 40 chips behind, and I folded AK at a very profitable spot in the Guiness world record attempt yesterday (we didn't break the record btw, where were you guys?!?). So yeah, my computer definitely needed to be fixed so I got my personal technician to work on it. I'm also getting a new disk installed, which should improve the computer's speed.

PC technician at work. Doubles as a poker coach/boyfriend.

By the way, I don't understand a thing about computer hardware, but duct tape? What's up with that? Anyway, I hope that my computer will be working soon so that I can get back to work. My plan for the rest of the week is pretty much the same it has been since the beginning of the year: play 6 hours, study 2. For now since my workstation has been taken over I'll busy myself with different activities, such as preparing lunch. So yeah, that's all for now. I hope this week will be better than the previous one. Wish me luck cause I'll definitely need it!