4-5

Yesterday played 10,000 hands for a marginal profit and 4,500 VPP's. Today played 8,000 hands for a marginal profit.

Marginal profit is my biggest fear with playing 6-max. While the number of hands and VPP rate is phenomonal, the game just isn't very profitable. I have played about 40,000 6-max hands and have a good feel for the game and the other professionals playing the game. I have looked up all the pros and very few are winning players, the ones who are are marginal winners at best.

While breaking even and taking $100,000 in bonuses is great, the swings involved with being breakeven are huge and create an incredible emotional rollercoaster. When you are a significant winning player, you will go through downswings but they are short in duration and light in volatility. When you are a breakeven/ slight winner, your downswings can be very damaging.

I have a couple options, I can go back to playing full-ring and play 40% more hours to get to SNE but with a considerably higher hourly winrate. I could also try to breakeven at 6-max during the week, hit my VPP goal and then use the weekend to work on my profit. I'll keep grinding 6-max until Friday and see where I'm at.

4-3 - End of the Week

Day #2 of 6-max went very well:

If I hadn't dropped over a grand to ikasaxd (top profit player of the day) I probably would have been first instead of third. I actually didn't plan on putting much volume in today since I was already at my weekly VPP goal but I still wound up playing 6,500 hands for 3.600 VPP's.

This week I played 50,000 hands and made 26,500 VPP's along with a profit above expectation. Next week, I would like to play at least 50,000 hands again and be over 180,500 VPP's or 18.5% of the way to SNE. I didn't clear any bonuses this week and I won't next week but in two weeks I will clear a $2,600 milestone bonus and a $4,000 standard bonus.

4-2

Forgot to post last night, yesterday was a pretty standard day playing 8,000 hands and posting an average profit. A nice start to the month.

Today was much more interesting. When I started playing cap, I decided to play full-ring (9 players at a table) instead of 6-max (6 players at a table). A month ago there were 24+ full-ring tables to play between 11AM and 10PM. However, over the last week I have really had trouble getting 24 tables going so my VPP/rate was lower than I had planned. This forced me to play a lot more hours this week which is not good.

I decided today to try 6-max which usually has a lot more tables running. I have avoided 6-max because there are a lot more good professionals playing on these tables than the full-ring tables. Win-rates are usually considerably lower on 6-max than FR. However, I am going to have to learn to play this game if I want to get to SNE without playing all day everyday.

9,000 hands and 5,200 VPP's today. 16.2% of the way to SNE.

The benefit of playing 24 tables of 6-max is you get 2,000 hands/hour as opposed to 1,500 hands/hour. The VPP/hand rate is also higher so I can get 1,100 VPPs/hour at 6-max versus 650 VPPs/hour at full-ring which means I need to play 40% less hours to get to SNE.

For my first day of 6-max, I posted my first losing day in weeks. I would have had a profit if I hadn't tried to play at home with the kids running around. Playing 1,500-2,000 hands an hour requires all my concentration and emotional control and playing at home isn't conducive to that. My dad was in Italy for the last couple weeks which allowed me to play at his house in quiet which I think is a large part of my profit last month. I will have to figure something out going forward. Don't be surprised if you see A and A on ebay in the near future.

March Wrap-up

I started the month learning a new game cap because the game I had been playing for the last year was eliminated. When I first started cap, I wasn't sure the game could be played with a profit. I thought breakeven would be best case scenario living off bonuses and SNE milestones.

About half-way through the month, I was significantly in the red but I really started to gain a feel for the cap game. At that point, I was hoping to maybe get back to even. Fast forward to the end of the month and I am fourth in the world in profit. Having played a little high stakes cap, I know I still have some learning to do but I am ecstatic where my cap game is at currently. I still don't know what my long-term winrate will be but breaking even is no longer my goal.

Here is my graph for the month, it's a good visualization to see where I started to figure out the game. I am really struggling with the question of if I should post my profit amount. I firmly believe that people should be more open with money and maybe if our society wasn't so secretive about finances we wouldn't suck so bad at it. However, my beliefs don't currently outweigh my hesitations so I am going to keep my loss/profit off this blog for now.

I played 178,000 hands this month and made 76,000 VPP's. Next month, with no hockey and no vacation planned I should play over 200,000 hands and I would like to be in the top 3 for profit. I cleared $8,000 in bonus this month and next month should clear $6,700.

3-29

First two days of the week have been pretty uneventful. Running well and good profit for the start of the week. I have been having a tough times getting 24 tables at my normal limit so I have been mixing in a lot of higher stakes games which has been good for my profit but bad for my volume. I did hit my fifth ever royal flush:

C has to work late tomorrow so I will miss my afternoon session which means I need to put in extra volume this weekend. Currently at 147,000 VPP's and need to be at 163,000 by the end of the week.

3-27 - End of the Week

Another good profit day mostly from higher stakes. No complaints about this week overall, starting to look more and more like midstakes cap is a game that can be beaten for a profit and not just bonuses. C has jury duty starting Monday so I hope this won't interfere too much with my schedule to get my hands in. 14% of the way to SNE.

3-26

I am not even sure where to start today was so crazy. I put in a couple hour session before the kids B-day party. As I was winding down my session, I noticed one of my tables was blinking. When I opened it, there was a note saying I was taking part in a promotional hand and everybody at the table was going to be awarded some money. Whoever won the hand would be awarded double. Results:

Won the hand:

Receiving a bonus $3,200 is always nice, especially when it is in conjunction with running hotter than the sun and posting another monster day:

That is 5 days in a row with a top 3 profit which is ridiculous. This is a once-a-decade heater and I am going to enjoy it while it lasts.

For tonight's session, I was going to play my normal stakes which is the highest stakes that I can play 24 tables at a time. However, there were a lot more high stakes games running that usual so I loaded up some big boy tables. There was even some 25/50 games running which is the first limit where the amount of money flying around actually makes me nervous. I played for about 2 hours before my nerves gave out and made a nice profit, mostly from running above EV. Between the last two days, I have completely eliminated my -EV of the beginning of the month and am officially running normal.

Playing a shorter session tonight, I am going to have to grind a good amount tomorrow to meet my weekly goal of being at 141,800. Currently at 138,500.