Pair the Board: September Review

As I don't intend to play at all this evening, my month finished with an hour long mini-heater last night. September as a whole has been an extremely refreshing month after running so bad during the bulk of July and August. I also cleared my first ever Supernova milestone bonus, which contributed an early $1200 of free money (if all goes according to plan, I'll hit the $2200 bonus near the end of October).

To begin, here is a breakdown of my play in both tabular and graphical form:

That's one sexy graph.

Because PokerEV can't handle extremely large volumes of hands, I posted mid-month EV and luck graphs back in this post. At that point overall, I had run very close to average (marginally bad, if you want to be picky). Here is my EV and all-in luck for the 2nd half of the month:

As you can see above, during the 2nd half of the month I ran well in terms of Sklansky EV, and marginally good in terms of all-in EV.

Here are my Set-o-meter results for the entire month:

Wow. Looks like I had damn bad luck flopping sets this month. Heater versus cooler hands seem to be pretty much neutral.

Combining my first half EV/luck, second half EV/luck, and Set-o-meter results, I think it is fair to say I probably ran very very close to dead on average this month. That said, even running average feels amazing after July/August.

Time to look at my September goals:
1) Play 150k+ hands.
Uh, I could have sworn I met this goal, but my table/graph say different. I guess Pokertracker's original filter I was using was counting hands played between 12:00AM and 6:00AM on Sept 1st, while the filter used in the graph/table exclude these (correctly, as they were counted in August). Failed it seem, though marginally. Oops.

Note that this since I've started playing, this is the first month I played less hands than the month previous. I'm ok with this to be honest, the 200k I put in during August was too much (and was a result of how abysmally I ran). 150k seems like a good number for a month while playing part time.

2) VPIP > 13, PFR > 10, ATS > 28
Fail. Sometimes I play a 13/10 ATS 30 game, and sometimes I end up around 11/9 ATS 25. They don't feel terribly different when I'm playing them. It may be result of whether or not my session is during a weekend, where I tend to focus on stealing/exploiting regs less and valuetowning the donks more. Who knows. Either way, obviously I need to make a better conscious effort here.

Unofficial 3) Make five figures of profit
Achieved and exceeded by a non-trivial margin. See below.

The bottom line:
$7844.40 winnings + $3074.06 rakeback* + $1200 milestone bonus + $30.90 staking profit** = $12149.33 total profit

*54,894 VPPs x 3.5 FPPs/VPP x 1.6c/FPP = $3074.06
**25% of the profit made by my single stakee at 10NL. He has since been playing 25NL under a stake from myself, so I expect I'll have some staking related profit next month too!

Earnings wise, a very solid month. I think the 2.68ptBB/100 winrate is a good value for a 24 tabler, and quite accurately reflects where my game is currently at. The one thing I'm concerned about going forward is finding the motivation to play higher and keep improving. More on this when I address my October goals in an upcoming post.

Finally, as one of my October goals will be to start a "fresh" DB (I'll actually import my last 150k hands or so into it for HUD purposes), I decided to do another lifetime graph.

So, here is the start of my career through the end of September 2008: