January Review - Almost Average

The first month of most small and mid stakes NLH cash game regulars having their effective rakeback reduced is in the books. While we'll be seeing some rake reductions in February (amounting to around ~4.5% at 100NL and less at 200NL), they won't come close to closing the gap of what was taken from the vast majority of regulars.

The games in January may not have been quite as good as December, but probably weren't too different than the last couple months of 2011. For someone playing 12-16 tables, things are in a pretty good place.

Unfortunately, I didn't run terribly well in January, and I'm definitely missing November and December already. A tiny bit of this is reflected in my AIEV gap, but the majority of the runbad came in the form of Sklansky EV. Stuff like getting 50bbs of a 125bb effective stack in preflop with AA against A7o repeatedly and having them flop 77x every time - in fact, 77x is more like the bottom of their flopping range, 777 far more common! I ran pretty awful at 200NL, but well enough at 400NL and 600NL that things evened out with regards to stake specific variance I think.

I'm reasonably happy with my volume on the month though I came up slightly short of my goal. I averaged 29 hours of work per week in January. I'm actually a little surprised I wasn't slightly over 30, but 29 is a lot better than the ~23-25 I grew accustomed two over the past couple years.



The bottom line:
$9198.66 table winnings
+$1615.88 FPP value (28,885 VPPs * 3.5FPPs/VPP * 1.6c/FPP)
+$300 stellar rewards
---------------------------------------------------
$11,114.54 USD total profit.

It's worth mentioning that as I exceeded 25k VPPs for the month I'll qualify for a $300 "pace bonus" in February due to a promotion. Since there is a clearance requirement and I won't actually see the cash until the later stages of February I won't be counting that profit until next month.