November was a funny month for me poker wise. Our trip to the south island meant I missed a week at the beginning and my upcoming trip to Vienna means I will miss the final week. That being said, I still got in $52k worth of buyins, an almost identical figure to September. Results were similar to those of September as well. A measly 4% roi saw returns of $2124.

My Pocketfives score has dropped a few hundred points during this time, as all of my scores came on non tracked sites. I won the Boss 50 euro rebuy for 7.5k euros, came 3rd in the Crypto Major for 4k pounds, and won the Crypto Daily 10k for 3k pounds. Obviously I care more about how much money I’m making, but I’d really like to crack the P5s top 100, and after October I thought it was just a matter of time. I guess it still is, but more time than I thought!

At points this month I got really pissed off with poker, and uncharacteristically took a few days off here and there to get away from it. At it’s worst I was on a $15k downswing, and while obviously this isn’t an issue in the grand scheme of things, it can be pretty irritating.

Playing 25 games of poker a day means that most of the time you be eliminated from a tournament 25 times in a day. A lot of these will be after desperation shoves on my part, but a decent number will be from coin flips, coolers or bad beats, and I’ve found that there’s only so many times I can take losing before it affects me. Every time I think I’m immune, the poker gods conjure up new ways to tilt me. Their favourite one at the moment is the set on the flop, then running perfect cards for them to hit their backdoor straight. As I always say – “it doesn’t matter how the cards come out, it’s about the percentages when the money went in”, but sometimes it is difficult to practice what you preach.

It’s safe to say I’m pretty pleased to be coming out of November with a black number on my spreadsheet, and I’m glad I can draw a line under it and start in earnest again in December. It is a little silly really, as I have mentioned before – I record my results on a month to month basis and have been obsessing a little lately over not having a losing month this year. But the reality is that if months started and ended on the 20th and the 21st I would have had 2 or 3 losing months this year. In essence, it boils down to a sample size issue. I can’t play enough tournaments in a month to anywhere near guarantee profit, and as I said before I just need to be looking at the bigger picture. The irony of this is though, that a large component of the bigger picture at the moment is one six man sit and go in Austria and the possibility of a $285k first prize.