I haven’t had the desire to play much poker this month and my bankroll has suffered. Last month I decided to work on my bankroll management by playing turbo sit n gos on PokerStars. I went broke once and then redeposited $25 in early January. I built that up to about $125 and have been playing level 2 according to my Turbo SNG Spreadsheet. In February my playing has went way down. Here’s some comparison and the goals I previously outlined.

SNG Challenge Goals:

  • Record and maintain spreadsheet
  • Track all tournament ROI, ITM, Finishes, and Bankroll
  • Play nothing but Turbo SNG’s on Poker Stars
  • Play a minimum 25 tournaments a week (work is kind of crazy right now)
  • Play a max of two tournaments at a time and work on improving Multi-Tabling
  • Have 20 buy-ins before moving up to the next level (adjust once higher levels are reached if needed)
  • Reach Level 3 by the beginning of 2008


Smart Buddy Universal Poker Buddy List

January

I managed to keep my spreadsheet up to date and finished +$75 for the month. I played 82 tournaments which was well short of the 25 a week I outlined. I’m finding that I don’t have the time to play more than 5 tournaments a night with my current schedule. A more realistic goal would be 10-15 tournaments a week.I really need to find a better method to track ROI, ITM, and finishes. My spreadsheet is nice and works for a general purpose. I really want a program to automatically grab my hand histories and update all this information automatically. I have Poker Tracker but I’m having a tough time setting up the tournament tracker for it. I’ve read some articles and posts about how to set this up, but nothing has worked for me. If anyone has done this, I would appreciate your advice. I’ll be looking into alternatives to PT as well.

I played a couple cash games and did very well. In doing this SNG challenge, I found that it was necessary to break the monotony occasionally. I sat in games that my bankroll could handle. In most instances, I doubled up and left. Amazingly, this happened in 15-30 minutes in all the games I sat in. As you can see, everything has been pretty much going to according to the plan I set out with in December. It’s been the best thing I’ve done so far with poker. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to hit level 3 by January and I realized that I would have to play in more tournaments for that to happen. I don’t have the time to play that much poker right now.

February

I have only played 14 tournaments this month. I recently found out that my Grandmother is very sick and has been put on hospice. This news came the day I arrived back from a business trip in which I had slept 4 hours the last 2 days. I’ve been visiting with her and trying to focus on other things in my life than poker. When I have played I’ve been extremely bored and unfocused. I can’t seem to concentrate and frankly I just don’t care about poker right now. It’s definitely caused a significant hit to my bankroll. I’m basically back to where I started at the begging of the year.

With all that said, I’ll be taking the upcoming month off from playing poker. This blog won’t suffer though because writing and becoming a better writer has been one of my hobbies that has temporarily taken over. There are still a lot of posts in my drafts folder to plug through and I have a friend who will be guest posting as well.

I’ll end this post with some musings by poker bloggers who have been at this a lot longer than I have been.