I’ve been a bit lax on the blog updates as a few people have pointed out, and I can hardly claim to have nothing to write about with 6 weeks plus of poker which included my 5th place cash in Ipoker’s $2.5m. However, the longer I leave my blog updates, the harder I find it to write them.

In my last entry I outlined February’s goal of buying into $100k worth of tournaments. I didn’t manage it. It would be easy to say I failed in this goal, and technically I did, but I gained a lot from it.

The figures:

$89700.28 in buy ins
$9528.47 in profit @ 10.62% roi.

The month was going pretty well, I peaked at a $25k profit, but from there it all fell away and was the first $15k of my eventual $23k downswing. The idea behind attempting a $100k month was pretty simple – to motivate me to play more having had far too much time off. In that way I succeeded, February proved to be my biggest month in terms of buyins. However, I found by setting these goals I wasn’t enjoying it as much.

I enjoy being able to set my own schedule, I love having no boss, and being able to take days off when I want is great. This challenge erased all that. If I was to complete it I had to put off other social commitments, and it meant when my alarm clock went off at 8am I felt pressured into getting up. It was like I actually had a real job! While I certainly didn’t deliberately play badly, or start making large mistakes, I do not doubt it contributed to me playing badly in spells and not getting the results I should have been.

Another part of my game that suffered was game selection. I found myself playing in too many tournaments at once, and I doubt if I have a very large expected roi in a $500 Stars tournament when I’m 16 tabling.

However it is not all doom and gloom, and I’m glad I did it. I set no goals in March, and after 20 days I’ve bought in to $55k worth of tournaments and am on course to have my second biggest month of buyins. In contrast to February, when my alarm went off this morning and the previous few mornings I had no problem jumping out of bed. No one was making me get up, there was no pressure there. Perhaps this is all rubbish, maybe when I got out of bed this morning feeling fresh it was merely due to me luckboxing my way to my 3rd 6-figure cash 2 weeks ago….

My progress in the Ipoker $2.5m was very similar to that of my breakthrough cash on Party last May. I won a couple of flips very early, but after that I wasn’t all in until I busted. There were no do or die AK vs QQ moments or any flips against shortstacks. Don’t get me wrong, I was obviously very lucky situationally. For example with 40 left I got it in with AA against KK, then again with 20 left I picked up AA and got it in against 99 in a spot where the villain quite simply could not fold due to my image, but it just felt like I was going to go deep as soon as I got the initial double.

The structure of the tournament was incredible. With 15 left I 4 bet in the sb with J6o and only had ¼ of my stack in the middle. At the final table, the average stack had 60bbs, there was so much room for creativity. Unfortunately I didn’t find many spots at the final table, and found myself laddering a little, which wasn’t my intention. Having said that I did find myself with 750k in chips 5 handed, a double up away from the chip lead.

Shortly after doubling with T9s against AJ it was folded to me in the sb with A8o. I raised 2.5x, the active chip leader re-raised to about 180k and I moved in for 750k, he had AK and held.

The feeling was a strange one, had it been a bad beat I think I would have felt the knockout a little stronger, but in truth I didn’t really deserve much more. I played really well the whole tourny, but perhaps I needed to find a few new gears at the final table, and that is something I will be working on. I am without doubt inexperienced when it comes to playing deep stack poker at a final table, and despite having two 6 figure cashes before I think the pay jumps affected me. If the average stack had been 15 bbs, then I would have in no way been affected by the money, but when you know you can sit around because you have 40bbs it is a different story.

I’m off to Auckland for the weekend to play in the North Island Championship. It’s a $1k buyin, which roughly equals $500 US. The play there was very weak when we played in the APPT, so I would expect the play to be even weaker this time around. Thehills is joining me up there, so hopefully we can chop it heads up.

Round up of the weekend will be posted next week – I promise!