April + May Review - Travel, Mincashing a Major, and Ultimate Doomswitch

For the first time in the history of this blog I'm doing a combined review for two months. This is caused by the fact I was overseas for the last week of April and the first week of May. The trip, which took myself and my girlfriend to Monaco for the EPT Grand Final (using the second of my SNE packages earned in 2009) and then a week of Euro vacationing in France and Britain, was in all a great experience. To top things off, I managed to mincash in the EPT Final Main Event for 15,000 Euros, and luckboxed my way in an SNE freeroll event to an additional $1k USD in bounties and a $530 tourney ticket that I've yet to use and just reminded myself that I have by writing this! Hopefully I'll remember to use the ticket to play the Sunday 530 one of these weeks and maybe bink some extra cash. Anyway, It was both an enjoyable and profitable two weeks.

Unfortunately, online poker during both the months of April and May was horrific. May was a little worse than April, but overall I'm not certain I've ever run this bad, though February of 2009 might object to this claim. My volume through the six weeks and change I was available to play ended up being what would have been a high volume month or so for me last year - so it's a decent chunk of hands. I've certainly got some interesting whine graphs for the review that you'll see below!




4k AIEV discrepancies are good times. For fun, here's a SECT graph of my Sklansky EV over the two months. Yup, that's close to a 6k gap. Good stuff.



The bottom line:
$8648.15 table winnings
+$4327.92 FPP value in April (54,099 VPPs * 5 FPPs/VPP * 1.6c/FPP)
+$4286.24 FPP value in May (53,579 VPPs * 5 FPPs/VPP * 1.6c/FPP)
+$18825.49 from 15k Euro EPT Final ME cash (Ended up converting the Euros in small chunks as Stars had limits in place. As the 10k BI was part of my SNE package this was in a sense a freeroll, or more accurately value I earned last year but couldn't quantify. There's no other place to put this chunk of profit so it's going here to make me feel better!)
+$1000 from EPT Final SNE freeroll bounties (gogo 7 way 1st hand flip!)
+$100 deposit bonus
+$2800 300k VPP milestone bonus ($3600 cash - $800 FPP value to purchase)
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$39,987.80 USD total profit. At the current exchange rate that has been starting to get a little better for me lately, this is ~$42,181 CDN.

It looks like a big number and I'm happy I was able to mincash the ME, but in all I feel like the two months have been a disappointment from a poker perspective. Time to put it behind me though, and on the positive side thanks to the strong first three months of 2010 I've broken the 100k profit barrier on the year 5 months in. Would be nice to close out the year at an even 200k, though that certainly won't be an easy task despite my current pace, as I'll be losing my 5x FPP multiplier at the end of September and I'll inevitably play less volume the last couple months of the year when the games get more lousy than usual due to people putting mad volume chasing milestones/SNE.

Now that they've been in place and tested for a reasonable amount of time, I'm going to comment quickly on the changes Stars made to their table structures. They suck. They didn't make things better, which simply copying Full Tilt's model which was released several months EARLIER would have done guaranteed. They very well might have made things worse. It seems that Stars has acknowledged that they screwed the pooch on this one however, so hopefully things change. With the amount of time it took them to make these incredibly flawed changes in the first place, I doubt it'll be any time soon though.

Finally, I guess I'll also mention that there's a good chance I'll have a fairly major announcement regarding something poker related I'm producing sometime in the next week or so. Stay tuned.