January Review - Starting Slow

Rather than go into a full blown tirade about my already well documented runbad in the previous month, I'm going to instead try a point form good/bad/ugly format for this review.

The Good

• Managed (barely) a five figure month in spite of everything.


• Finished the month with 12 consecutive winning days. Unfortunately many were of the insignificant variety, but it's still a positive.


• Game quality improved to start the year, as it typically does after degenerating in November and December.


• Stars finally announced that they are going to fix their NLH cash game structure, a year later than the other major sites. See you hell 95%+ of shortstacks, cap poker is going to obliterate your edge which was due to little more than a flawed aspect of the game in the first place.


• Heading into the All-Star break the Flames have done enough to give the fans hope for the rest of the season. This may actually be a bad thing in the long run, but I live in the present!

The Bad

• Put in a hair under 120k hands for the month. Last year I got off to much stronger start very much due to putting in high volume during January, February and March. While I may be crippled by unthinkable variance for eternity, if I want to make more money I can do so by simply working more. It can be tough without a significant goal to shoot for though.


• The Patriots choke job against the Jets was not cool. Brady's recent playoff history is starting to look a little suspect which is surprising given his performances from earlier in his career.


• The strength of the Canadian dollar relative to its US counterpart hurts my bottom line. It has been at or above parity for nearly the entire year so far. At least it will make my time in Vegas for some of the WSOP cheaper in a sense.

The Ugly

• Ended up out a little over $4k AIEV on the month. There are a lot of regulars at my stakes who would kill to win that much over 120k hands. Instead, that is my handicap. It would be a much easier pill to swallow if I had say run at or above EV in just one of the 9 months previous, but that would be silly!


• Predictably, to go along with my $4k AIEV gap comes a $5.5k Sklansky gap! Obviously the two are closely related.

The Bottom Line:
$6465.66 table winnings
+$2914.86 FPP value (52051 VPPs * 3.5 FPPs/VPP * 1.6c/FPP)
+$53.90 FTP rakeback
+$600 stellar bonuses
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$10,033.32 USD total profit.

I'd certainly like to play a little higher volume in February, which should be a bit easier once the structure changes are implemented on the 10th and all my tables are deepstack. Deep tables tend to break a lot less quickly when compared to the current 20-50bb variety, and as such it will be easier to keep 22-24 tables open at nearly all times, thus increasing volume. Maybe I can only be out $2k AIEV in February too, it has to happen occasionally right?