The Shark Tank

March was a month that went more or less to my averages, so I guess I have learned a few things about my goals that I originally set. I expected to be able to get in more hands at my preferred limits, so I expected to play fewer hands than I have. It also twisted my money winning target because I need to run hotter to win the same money at lower limits. For instance, I ran right about 2 bb/100 this month which is pretty much what my target is, Despite playing 7,000 hands (my goal was 5,500) and running at the expected win rate, I actually only won what I expected to win in fewer hands. This was primarily a factor of playing at lower limits that I hoped. The vast majority of my hands were at $15/$30 and I actually had more $10/$20 than $30/$60. The $30/$60 doesn’t run a lot of the time I play and sometimes when it runs, I think my expectation is better at the $15/$30 game. Here is my month in pictures. The massive downswing in the middle was an especially brutal $50/$100 session.

If you would like to see this in a larger and more legible format, click here. To review in detail, we can compare to my original goals and look at my YTD progress:

I was basically right on track for all my goals and remain ahead of schedule in terms of my YTD goals. This is really good, because as I write this post, I have not yet played a single hand of poker in April and we are already one third of the way through the month. If I end up playing no poker at all in April, I should still be on track for SuperNova, although I will fall behind in money. I was a net loser at NL, although I played very few hands. Many of those were experimenting with some NL short-stack strategies. I actually won money with the short stacking and lost money playing “real poker.” I had no more than 1,000 NL hands in total, so the sample sizes are quite small.

Broken down by limit, my month looks like this:

Broken down by short-handed and full ring, it goes like so:

I just bundled heads-up into short-handed. I was a net winner heads-up, but it was against a particularly fishy player who stayed behind at a busted short-handed table. I didn’t play more than 100 or so HU hands this month. As I reported last month, I’m quite happy with my play and confident that I’m a winner in the games I choose. If I had not been unlucky in my one $50/$100 session, I could have had a really great month. I dropped over $2k in just about an hour and a half. It was a good table and I just had a couple of tough breaks. If I break even, I have a $5k month. If I win, even better.

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