Hello hello!
Wow, can you guys believe that last time I wrote a blog post was precisely two months ago? Time flies! So let's get you up to date on what I have been doing lately...
July was the month of vacations! André and I spent 3 weeks in Greece which was the longest amount of time I've spent there since I moved to Portugal four years ago. It was nice cause I had more time to see everyone so I could afford to take it easy instead of having a hectic schedule and running around like crazy like I usually do. We were invited to two weddings and I was really excited about it cause apart from being happy for my friends that were getting married, I wanted André to see how Greek weddings are. Some parts are like you see in movies I guess, while some others are not (no breaking dishes for example!).
We also had a one-week getaway planned to a greek island, Zakynthos. It's a very nice place, with good traditional food and great beaches but the reason it will be forever in my memory is because... That's where André popped the question!
We got engaged!
It caught me by surprise and definitely took a couple of days to sink in, but it's official: André and I are engaged! I'm happy beyond words and I could go on about the subject for a long time, but this is a poker blog so I'll stop here! :P
Eventually the holidays were over. Back in Lisbon, I realized that I had underestimated the amount of time it would take me to get back into my usual working routine. After spending a significant amount of time away from the tables I was quite rusty. Normally I'd dedicate 100% to studying, but at the same time I had to get some VPPs cause I was falling behind pace.
I mentioned earlier this year that I wasn't sure if I wanted to go for 300k or 400k VPPs in 2014. While I think it's probably too late for the 400k now, I definitely don't want to do less than 300k. So I really tried to balance grinding and studying in order to get as much work done as possible before my parents' scheduled visit to Portugal in the middle of August.
There was a short pause there, but after they left I was down to business again. Unfortunately, things didn't go very well at the tables. Here's the graph for the month of August:
That's -$5.272 after almost 9k games. So yeah, I'm on a downswing again. The worst part of it is that I actually spent a good amount of time studying in August. I did feel like my play was a lot better, especially towards the end of the month and the results do feel a bit undeserved, but what can you do, that's variance.
From the money I lost a significant amount (around 1k) comes from MTTs. I played about a dozen MTTs last month, all of them by mistake because I forgot to unregister from them before they started. That's what you get if you're even the tiniest bit careless when playing hyper-turbo satellites. I know it's a risk that comes with the format I chose and sometimes I play the MTTs by choice but this time it wasn't the case. Making a $1k mistake is quite expensive, but if you make it while on a downswing it hurts a bit more. Unfortunately I didn't make it in the money in any of those tournaments. Every time I think about MTTs I say that I need to spend some time studying them, but I never actually do it cause when it's studying time it always feels like the hypers should be the priority.
Speaking of MTTs, lately I've been playing the
Women's Sunday (this one I play on purpose, haha). If you're following me on
twitter then you're already aware of this cause I tweet about all the important hands through Boom! replayer. Last Sunday was the first time I actually made an ITM finish! I was beginning to think that that tournament was my nemesis. I've made ITM finishes in a bunch of tournaments including the Sunday Million but for some reason, I never seemed to manage to make it in the money at the Women's Sunday. I often came close, but never quite there. Maybe it has something to do with the bounty I have on my head, I don't know! So I was very happy for finishing 28th last week. I only got 100 bucks so nothing to brag about, but it felt nice to break whatever curse I had going on there. Next goal is to get to the Women's Sunday final table!
Anyway, I also played some FPP tournaments last month and won around $3k at those. That helped moderate the loses of August to a total of -$2.2k but still not a great month results-wise.
On the positive side, I feel like I'm on a good path when it comes to improving my skills. Studying is a part of my daily routine and I've changed a lot of things in my game (hopefully towards the better). Also, I finally started putting some spreadsheets on the wall like André has insisted for so long, so that I have quicker access to some information. Apart from that, I updated all of the spreadsheets I use so that should help too.
The WCOOP is just around the corner, so I expect to play a lot this month. Now that we're back to business you can expect to hear from me more often. I'll make sure to put updates at my blog to let you guys know how it's going all throughout the WCOOP month!
Before I go, I'd like to remind you that this Sunday we have the monthly Team Online freeroll. It's a tournament I'm always excited to play! It's fun and I like to interact with all of you guys at the tables. I will be giving away five tickets as usual, so if you want to win one just leave me a comment under this post. It can be about anything you want, I don't have any specific requests this time, just make sure you leave me your screen name so that I know who to credit the ticket to if you win. I will be choosing 5 winners at random on Friday 11.00 Lisbon time.
Most of you reading this blog have probably already made deposits at PokerStars, but in case you haven't or have a friend who's starting out now you can use the code "katerina289" with your first ever deposit and get 100% bonus (up to $600) plus permanent access to the Team Online freerolls for as long as they're running!
Good luck to everyone and see you at the tables! :)
