September Overview

Hello everyone!

I'm back with another review post, this time for September. As you all know, this is the month of the WCOOP which means tons of extra tourneys running and a great opportunity to make more money. Last May during the SCOOP I set a goal of beating my monthly VPPs record and went for 50k VPPs. I hit my goal, but it didn't turn out to be a great month results-wise and by the time it was all over I was feeling exhausted.

There were a couple of things that went wrong during May and I decided to make a few changes this time around. Both months are more intensive in terms of work but instead of focusing on VPPs, I focused on improving my daily schedule. The most important thing other than having a schedule is sticking to it. Here's what I was careful with:

Studying 

The great variety of games and the increased traffic means that there are great games to play pretty much all throughout the month, any time of the day. But it's important to keep working on your game too. During September I studied a significant amount of hours, made some improvements to the way I play and changed my spreadsheets. That gave me more confidence at the tables since I was sure I'd taken the right decision even when I was taking bad beats and it allowed me to play my A game.

Exercising

It's easy to get lazy and not work out, especially if we rate work higher than exercise in our priorities. And when it's time for the daily work out but you see a ton of good games running, it's hard to click that X button on the PokerStars lobby and turn the computer of for a couple of hours. But since I had a schedule and was sticking to it, I did it. When it was time to go to the dance school, it was time to go, period. I even increased the total number of hours I exercised during the month.

The results were better than I could have imagined. I mentioned in a previous post that I suffer from vertigo. It's something that I've pretty much accepted to live with and most of the time it's not a very big deal. I'm used to feeling a small vertigo every time I get out of bed in the morning or when I am in certain positions. Since it doesn't really affect my every day life but it's only a small inconvenience I try not to think too much about it. My doctor has advised me to exercise which I do, but without seeing big improvements.

Since the beginning of September, however, that I started a more intensive work out routine, the vertigo was miraculously gone. In fact, September is the first month in 2014 that I haven't had any dizziness at all! We're in the beginning of October and I'm still vertigo-free. That to me is priceless. And mind you, I still spent an enormous amount of time in front of my computer screen (probably even more so than before). It's just that by including 2 hours of physical exercise per day it balances out.

Eating healthy

During the whole month I think I only ate "bad food" once or twice. I was very careful about the proportions of my food, making sure I eat lots of salads and vegetables. I also paid extra attention to all the snacks I had throughout the day, eating only healthy stuff like yogurt, fruit, toasted bread with a bit of cheese etc. I was feeling a lot better at the end of September health-wise than at the end of August. When I visited my nutritionist at the end of the month, I had only lost half a kilo which is close to nothing, but she assured me that things were going well. My body fat percentage is lower, the water percentage is higher and I gained half a kilo of muscle. As long as I can keep eating well like I did during the past month, it will just get better and better. And considering how well I feel on a physical level, I have no reason to stop my good habits, really. If you're a poker player and you're interested in nutrition, check out the article I wrote for PokerStars blog.

Poker

Before I get into more detail about poker, I think I should share with you my graph for the month of September. If I had to describe it in one word, I'd say it's... Beautiful! Take a look:

Pretty neat, huh? I finished $14.1k up after 9383 games. I'm actually $15.6k up at the hypers for the month, but I lost $1.5k at MTTs. Big tournaments have not been very kind to me this year overall, but since it's not my main format I don't really worry about it.

What I did worry about though, was moving up on stakes at the hypers. I've been playing mostly midstakes since the beginning of 2014. Sometimes I add small stakes ($9s and 12s) when the traffic at my regular games is low. But overall, I play from $18s to $74s. Since it was going pretty well overall, at some point André told me to give a shot at higher stakes. I started by opening the next stake after the $74s, which is the $109s. It could have gone both ways (up or down). I was heavily table selecting those games so I wasn't playing many of them. Short-term variance doesn't allow us to get any conclusions. Fortunately, I was running hotter than the sun. Since it was going well not only at my regular stakes but also at the higher stakes, Andre told me to take a shot at the $181s. So I did. And once again, it went well. The story repeated itself at the $238s where even though I felt my heart's rhythm pick up every time that one of those tables popped up, I seemed to be doing well. At some point I even entered the top 20 list of Profit at Hyper Turbos between 100-300 on Sharkscope. That's how hot I was running. To top it off and finish the month in style, on the last day of my WCOOP grinding André put me opening some $357s. That went awesome as well!

So all in all, this was an excellent month. Actually it was the best month of the year and my second best month ever! So I'm very happy with the results! For now the plan is to slow down a bit, take care of some errands and household chores that got left behind (I never seem to be able to do well at those!) and later on in October André and I are taking a week off and heading someplace we can lay on the beach and do nothing all day.

Before we leave though, I'd like to hit my first ever milestone! Here's were I'm at right now:

I'm missing less than $5k VPPs to get to a total of 200k VPPs for the year. That is the first of the milestones and it's a sweet $2.600!

Speaking of milestones and VIP rewards, I spent $8k on rake during September. That means that I got a ton of FPPs! I usually spend my FPPs in tournaments when the traffic at my games is low. Last month the regular games kept me busy at all times, so I still have all those FPPs to spend. One more thing to look forward to when I'm back!

That's all for now guys, I'll talk to you soon with another blog post!

Good luck at the tables!