September Review

With the first month over and with just £950 to show for my efforts, September will have to go down as a disappointing month overall. Monday night was encouaraging to start with as I netted £320 following a solid £1/£3 dabble and a mildly successful £1/£2 session at The Vic but seven hours of card-dead frustration at both The Empire and The Hippo in the early hours later that night and last evening has meant the month has ended more with a whimper than the trumpet-blaring fanfare that I'd hoped for.

Nevertheless, there are plenty of positives to take from my inaugural month of business:

1. I achieved the target days and hours played 
I managed to get out and play for 25 days of the month and clocked up over 130 hours of play. This is fine for the first month.

2. I qualified for The Empire cash-race MTT freeroll
With a gauranteed prize-pool of £25k and around 50 to 60 runners, this tournament has an effective buy-in of around £450. This will be on Sunday 5th October.

3. Soft tables and poor players abound
I'm still encouraged by some of the sub-optimal plays and downright bizarre moves by many players at the tables. It is equally encouraging to know that usually, I can count the number of other decent players at the table on just a couple of fingers.

4. Bad-beats will even out
I had three brutal bad-beats in a short space of time: (1) AA < J6 when we get it all-in on a 9 9 6 flop. He hit his full-house on the river. (2) AA < AQs all-in preflop when the villain hit his flush and (3) 99 < KQ when all-in on the 7 2 10 flop after I knew I was ahead. These pots cost me around £600. In future, being ahead when getting it all-in should work out in my favour.

5. I made mistakes I will learn from. 
A recurring mistake I feel I've made this month is not being aggressive enough. The biggest was holding 22 on a 2 10 Q board (two clubs), not re-raising on the flop and allowing an 8 to hit the turn which filled the villain's straight. Additionally, this meant I had to make a difficult decision to call an all-in turn bet. (£250 to win ~£1.1k when I put my villain precisely on the J9).  

6. £2/£5 is not a shark pool.
£2/£5 continues to be good to me. I should play more at this level during October.

7. Bankroll is stable.
If someone had said to me back in April that I'd be sitting on the bankroll that I presently have, I would have thought it far-fetched. Thanks to my April epiphany and around £6.6k in winnings, poker has been good to me. September is the only month in all of this that I haven't received a steady monthly wage - so in the wide scheme of things I'm doing ok.

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The main negative are those card-dead sessions that makes it seem like making a living from the game has to be impossible. Sitting down for hours and hours on end while receiving trash after trash in starting hands and where your cards never (and I mean NEVER) connect with the board when you do decide to see a flop, can be close to soul-destroying at times. But battle on we must.

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And so we arrive at a fresh new month with the slate wiped clean. This month will be hampered somewhat as I need to carry out civic duties in the form of jury service! In the last two weeks of October I have to attend court during the day and listen to lawyers and witnesses burbling on. (Why I couldn't get the summons while I actually had a "proper" job I don't know - I guess we all have to take our bad-beats in life as well as at the poker table.) Thankfully, a special event will make up for this in November when I'm off to Vegas!! Exciting stuff to be related later.

My main goal for October will be to clock up 150 hours and to generally play much more aggressively post-flop.

Onwards and upwards.