August Review - +Life EV, -Poker EV

My original title for this post was going to be "(Second) Worst. Month. Ever." When considering only poker results, said title would have been entirely accurate. Whenever I have an awful month, I inevitably have to think back and and decide if it was worse than February 2009, which set a standard pretty tough to beat. During Feb '09 my results were I believe as much dictated by bad play while adjusting to painfully high volume as brutal variance. This month however, I ran as poorly as I ever have in terms of just about every aspect of variance that is close to measurable or even roughly estimable (meaning stuff like AIEV, set% in the first category, or set over set coolers, KK vs AA coolers and such in the second). It's been a real downward slope for me variance wise this year, as I ran pretty well from the start of January (especially the first three days) through the end of March, and haven't managed a month out less than 2000bbs AIEV since.

Anyway, it all boiled down to be a downright terrible month at the tables. It didn't help that I had two major downswings (/salute Major Downswing: if you don't watch How I Met Your Mother, you won't get this), the latter of which has got to be one of my three worst ever. Fortunately, I had a lot of other positive stuff going on which I'll talk about after I get the numbers out of the way.



The bottom line:
$4662.60 table winnings
+$4239.28 FPP value (52,991 VPPs * 5 FPPs/VPP * 1.6c/FPP)
+$400 quarterly freeroll cash
+$348.79 credit from Stars busting the shortstack bot ring
+$375 coaching
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$10,025.67 USD total profit.

Some of you may be interested to note that of my hands played this month, ~5.5k were on FTP. During the last few days I set up everything necessary for me to play cross site, and I've had some decent results messing around with it. The 35-100bb 100NL games on FTP seem much better quality wise than Stars, but the FTP software really is something of a turnoff. I'll likely split my volume a little bit next month, and perhaps significantly more after my SNE status lapses at the end of September.

While it was a disgusting month poker wise, I did have a lot of other good things happen in August. The first episode of my Cardrunners video series launched and has been well received - look for Episode 2 in the fairly near future. My best friend who had been renting my basement for the past year and a half moved out and into his own place close by, so I now have another 800 square feet of house, which is likely going to be turned into a poker room/bar. My girlfriend and I (particularly the former) have put some effort recently into redecorating/organizing, and I'm really thrilled with how the house is looking. I picked up Ys 7 for the PSP midway through the month, and it's a damn good game, I'll talk more about it in a future post. All in all, lots of positives to take from August, and it is actually something of a reassurance that I can have a borderline disastrous month where I don't even put in much in the way of volume and still ship five figures, not needing a milestone bonus to so.

On that note, I expect much greater things from September. I'm hoping to increase my volume a bit compared to both July and August, and I will be clearing a milestone worth just over three grand which should help out. I imagine being able to put in a good 20-30k hands on FTP when I'm having difficulty getting 24 tables open on Stars is going to help things too. It's even possible my variance freefall will hit bottom soon and I'll bounce, you never do know! September will also contain my final SNE perk: I'll be freerolling the $5.2k WCOOP main event. This will be my last SNE 2009 sponsored chance to seriously luckbox (granted, I did cash at EPT MC but I'm talking final table quality luckboxaments or better)! Lets do this thing September!