2011 Review - Weathering the Storm

In 2009, the thing I remember most regarding my poker career is busting my ass in my successful pursuit of SNE. 2010 is most memorable to me for the live events I was able to play due to my SNE status earned the year before. Unfortunately, I get the feeling I will remember two things about 2011: Black Friday, and the current Pokerstars VPP distribution issue.

That isn't to say 2011 was a bad year for me, though it most definitely was a terrible year for online poker. I put in less hands than in 2010, though this was mostly due to cutting tables due to game quality. I probably put in a few less hours in total, though I get the feeling there wasn't a huge disparity in that regard.

On the bright side, my winrate was significantly higher in 2011 than in 2010 or 2009. In the 1.2 million hands I played, I took more off the tables than in the 1.5 million I played last year, and only $80 (lol) less than in the 2.5 million hands I played to get SNE in 2009. I ran decently on the year overall compared to the two previous, with the best aspect of my variance being that my runbad more often than not came at 100NL and 200NL while in the small sample of hands I put in at 400NL+ I ran fine. I think my results really improved when I started accepting that cutting tables wasn't the end of world, which came in September. Since September 1st, over 400k hands my winrate has been 3.81ptBB/100, which is pretty nuts - I'm below AIEV in this sample also, though that wouldn't surprise anyone. Hopefully I can continue to crush in 2012, as a huge chunk of my rakeback is being taken away by Stars so table winnings are going to be front and center.

Reasonably sexy graph:


One of these years I really need to crack 100k table winnings, just because. Breakdown of winnings below:


The bottom line, month to month style:
January - $10,033.32
February - $7403.85
March - $10,418.20
April - $15,940.70
May - $14,538.19
June - $1848.83
July - $11,092.13
A&S - $18,207.70
October - $11,742.25
November - $17,176.61
December - $19,360.69
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$137,762.47 total profit.

I'm feeling pretty good about the year, though that's mostly because I finished so strong from September through the present. Hopefully online poker has a better year in 2012. If the US doesn't mess up their regulations, FTP relaunches, and Stars gets its shit together, good things could happen. The realist in me doubts more than one of those three things will actually happen though (I think FTP relaunching is more likely than the others), and things could definitely get worse.