#22, 4/25/2010--A crazy month and a crazy schedule

I mentioned in my last post that I have been culling the nonperformers from my tournament schedule. I started out as a one-table specialist, and now I'm converting to being a multitable tournament player, which usually means hundreds, or thousands, of players.

That hasn't been a problem, but to but it bluntly, I looked over my records and discovered that I stink at the in-between sizes, from around 2 to 5 tables, that is, more than 9 or 10 players, but less than 100.

In fact, this month those "in between" tournaments killed me. I lost $60 (about half my bankroll). That happened in the first ten days of the month. I cut the nonperformers out, and in the next ten days I played only MTTs with a good structure (the smallest was 1,000 players), and satellites (where the fields are unusually weak, more about that in a future post). In the second ten days of the month I won back most of what I lost in the first ten days.

Between about the 10th and the 20th of the month I got small cashes in about 1/3 of my MTTs, which was enough to be up a little bit, and I tore through the satellites to win back most of what I had lost.

After that, not much happened. I've barely been able to play. I've had to go through a schedule change again, which always messes me up, and I'm now a daytime person for a while. I had to switch because there were a lot of things that had to be done during so-called normal working hours.

There are some family things coming up. I have a twice-a-year job delivering neighborhood association newsletters, and I did that this week, going door-to-door with about 900 of them. (The association is going to have to get someone else to do it next time). I have to go to the neighborhood "dumpster day" on May 8 (it only happens twice a year) and get rid of some of the junk in our basement.

There are other miscellaneous things going on, a day here and a day there, that pretty much commit me to being up during the day, and not playing many of the late tournaments. It's almost 3 A.M. as a I type this (these schedule switches aren't easy!) but I'll set my alarm to be up later this morning, and I'll try to keep myself on my daytime schedule. My wife even expects to go out for our 30th anniversary tomorrow--can you believe it? (Just kidding dear.)

Anyway, here are some of the numbers for this crazy month so far:

Start-of-month bankroll: $140.87
Bankroll ending 4/11: $85.37
Bankroll as of 4/25, 3 A.M.: $133.00

At least I won't be hitting the streets with the newsletters now, so that will give me a lot more time. But I'm really suprised at how hard it seems like it's going to be to set aside at least an 8-hour block of time every day to play MTTs, at least for the next month or two. There just seem to be so many things, like the dumpster day, that are going to cut a big piece out of the middle of my work day.

But it won't always be like this (I hope). I understand now why some authors sequester themselves in a cabin somewhere so they can get their books written!