July Review - 3/10

July had the potential to be a strong month as it contained five Fridays and five Saturdays which are typically the strongest days for game selection. Additionally, I was inevitably going to hit the 300k VPP milestone bonus during the month, so I was hoping for big things.

Unfortunately, I ran pretty terribly for much of the month, finding myself out a little north of 1bb/100 in AIEV along with being on the wrong end of a ton of coolers. Plus, like every month if I pot/pot/shove QQ on Q82r into a whale's A5o that isn't folding I am drawing stone dead to his backdoor gutshot.

On the positive side, the last two days of grinding were pretty successful, and I did bink $444.50 for being involved in a promotional milestone hand this month. Last year I was dealt into a milestone hand holding 62o and took the thing down for double prize money, but this year 62o was drawing to two outs on the river and couldn't connect for sweet victory. Still a nice bonus though!



The bottom line:
$4850.36 table winnings
+$2897.27 FPP value (51,737 VPPs * 3.5FPPs/VPP *1.6c/FPP)
+$2800 300k VPP milestone bonus
+$444.50 milestone hand #64,985,000,000
+$100 deposit bonus
----------------------------------------------------
$11,092.13 USD total profit.

Not a pretty number considering the potential, though five figures is never a complete disaster. I do not have high expectations for August, as I'll be taking a week of vacation near the end and I'll also be cutting at least half of my usual grind on the first Saturday to take in a Stampeders game. With a little run good hopefully my table winnings rebound some during the month, but even if that is the case it'll be tough to reach ten dimes simply because the volume won't be there.

As for the remainder of 2011, I'll have something of a decision after August, when I figure I'll be sitting around ~350k yearly VPPs. In order to maximize relative rakeback level (and as a result, hourly), I should either slack off mightily the rest of the year and only put in another 150k VPPs worth of volume over the final four months finishing at the 500k milestone, or grind quite hard (not quite SNE level volume, but not terribly far off) to reach the 600k milestone putting in ~62.5k VPPs/month. With my girlfriend starting school in September, getting myself into a better routine and playing more hours might not be a bad idea, but currently my gut feeling is I'll be going the former route and spending the extra time looking at some business ventures outside of poker.