#23, 5/1/2010--April Results

Bankroll, beginning of April, $140.87
Bankroll, end of April, $151.45.
+$10.58

It was certainly an interesting month. I had huge swings. There were quite a few days when I wasn't able to play at all. I completely changed the tournaments that I played.

I played a lot of $2.20 satellites to the PokerStarts Sunday 1/4 Million, tournaments that usually have anywhere from about 30-130 players, depending on the time of day. I'll play the actual 1/4 Million (that's the prize pool guarantee, but it's usually more than that) one of these days, but for now, I'm cashing the satellite wins out and using the $11 to add to my bankroll.

A lot of players who play satellites aren't very good. They hope to get lucky on the cheap, and win a chance to go for the big money. So, the fields are very soft, and once you understand the format, they are usually a much easier way to make money than a small $2 tournament that is not a satellite into something bigger.

In fact, I'm so good at them that I have a problem. When you cash out a satellite win, you don't get actually money in your PokerStars account, you get t$ (tournament dollars). You can use the money to enter other tournaments, but you can't cash out and withdraw it from your PokerStars account.

That's not a big deal, it's all fungible anyway. t$ are real dollars that I don't have to take out my bankroll to play tournaments. The problem is that since I have to use the t$ for other tournaments, I eventually have to stop playing satellites so that I can use up my t$. It's pretty easy to cash out a few $11 tickets and have have more than 1/4 of my bankroll in t$--which doesn't do me any good when I'm ready to cash out and buy things or pay bills in the real world.

So I gave the satellites a rest and played 5 of the $1.40 90-player tournaments last night before I had to stop because of the possibility of thunderstorms. These are new tournaments. The stucture isn't as good as some MTTs, but it's decent, a much better structure than much of what I was playing in early April. And $1.40 tournaments fit nicely into my bankroll.

I had a slow start and didn't cash until the last one, but that 4th place was good enough to put me up for the session, and it pushed my bankroll over $150.

I think that $150 was a psychological barrier for me, and that $200 might be as well. It's hard having to fight to get back where I was a couple years ago, but things happen. I had to tap my bankroll, and I can 't let myself get discouraged.

Once I get my bankroll up to the $250 or so I had as a part-time player, it will feel like a weight has been lifted. It's crazy that it's so hard to do what I seemed to do easily in the past, but poker can be like that. Just like any job, there are times that it's easy, and times that it's hard. I can keep plugging away, or I can crawl under a rock and eat worms. I choose to keep fighting.