Results for week of 10/10-10/16

I forget to do this earlier. I was looking at my results so far for this week, then realized that I never posted last week's results. So here they are:

POKER HOURS
Administrative 2.50
Study 4.50
Playing 25.50
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TOTAL HOURS 32.50

PROFIT AND LOSS
10/10 starting bankroll 35.28
10/16 ending bankroll 45.04
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+$9.76

Everything went fairly well. It was an uneventful week. Nothing dramatic, just a fairly study grind toward a profitable week. I'm still having a lot of fairly deep runs in large MTTs, most of which have been just out of the money, or very small cashes, which this week included:

212 of 3,879
32 of 1,000
33 of 1,000
954 of 9,088
190 of 3,996

I'm not sure if my not quite breaking through for a big cash yet is due to luck (statistical variance) or if there is something I could change that would get me over the hump. Without a sample size of at least 100 of these in a month (so that the way I play hasn't changed much during the sample period), it's impossible to tell. Actually, 100 MTTs isn't any kind of a scientific sample size, but I think that it would give me a decent, unscientific feel of what's going on.

I think that I need to open up my game a bit more, and take just a few more risks, but I'm not sure what form that should take. It could be bluffing a little more, but the standard poker wisdom is to never bluff against someone in the micro (<$5) tournaments. Fancy plays are pointless when a micro player mostly looks at his cards, decides whether he has a good hand or a bad hand, and acts accordingly.

I think I'll just start working on the other possibilites, maybe concentrating on one possible improvement each day. I think that one big possibility is tartgeing indivual players.

I do some of that of course, but that has mainly involved trapping maniacs by letting them lead the betting, and just coming along for the ride with my monster hand. But the tables have been breaking more slowly recently, and it's not uncommon for me to be at the same table with several other players for 75 hands. I think that working on getting good reads on more players might be just enough to start putting me in line for some big cashes.

I can think of some other tweaks as well, but along with working on those, I'm going to give it some more thought. I have a feeling that I'm missing something, that there is something I'm not doing, or that I could do a lot better. There are a couple poker books that I would like to read through again, maybe that will shake something loose in my head.