January SuperNova Quest Results

Well, the first month is in the bag and the final results are in. I’m very pleased with the results and feel as if I’m playing almost as well as I did when I stopped six months ago. You’ll recall that my goals were to make SuperNova, which requires 100,000 VPPs and I also set a profit target of $40,000 in poker winnings for the year. To be on pace, I’d need to have 8,333 VPPs and $3,333 in profit. Realistically, though, I really want to earn 10,000 VPPs a month, because that maximizes my earn of bonus money. I feel like I need to load a drumroll sound to the post. At the end of January, I’ve accumulated 14,454 VPPs which is 45% above the stretch goal of 10,000 and I’ve booked $8,756.40 in profit for the month which is 263% above goal. If I could maintain that pace, I’d actually earn over $100,000 for the year. Of course, that is very unlikely to happen. Here is a graph of my dollar results for the month:

If you like, you can click here to see the graph in full screen mode.

I hope I can maintain my focus and motivation, which is probably the most difficult problem. I played for a while tonight and it was clear to me that I was not playing my “A” game. I missed value bets on the river at least three times and I’m pretty sure they would have called every one, so that was $90 left on the table. I won $254, but it should have been $344. I didn’t need to review my sessions to see the mistakes, either. I knew as soon as I clicked check that it was a mistake. I decided to stop playing and start preparing this post instead. I thought it might be fun to look at the data a couple of different ways. For instance, here are my results broken down by limit:

So, apparently I can’t beat lower limits. Probably they don’t respect my raises. I think it is primarily a function of the fact that I’ve been trying to play $5/$10 four tables at a time and I don’t seem to be able to do that very well. Interestingly, I play NL four tables at a time and have no problem. This is mostly because I don’t get involved as often and subtle reads don’t make that much difference. Later I might go back an analyze it on a dollar per hand basis, because NL might be pretty solid for me. I also looked at things by number of players. I’m calling any table with six or fewer players “short handed” even though some number of those hands took place at full ring tables that just lost a few people.

Clearly, heads-up was a mistake for me. This makes sense because I have very little experience at the form. You also have to take some of the data with a grain of salt, because some of them have very little data. I believe that I only have 23 hands of $50/$100 (of course, this results in a very lofty bb/100). In fact, I only have around 11,000 hands at all levels, so even my bottom line total is quite insignificant. There are some guys online who play considerably more hands than that in one day. But it has been interesting to take some time to review these results. Honestly, I thought I had done worse short-handed than I did. In fact, in bb/100 it is probably my most profitable discipline right now.