February Results and Tournament Selection

In January my online play was +$35.70.  Frebruary was a little better at +$40.70.

It's good that I'm winning, but winning at that rate isn't going to get the job done.  For at least a few months I'll be playing only online and only on one site, Juicy Stakes poker.  The players pools are very soft and I should be able to win consistently, but I really need to start winning at least $50 a month, and there are reasons for that.

I'm depending on building a bankroll on one site and, when I have enough money on that site, cashing out some of that money for things that I need for poker.  The biggest need is to get back on Americas Cardroom.  I need that second site.  And I will have to get up to at least $500 on Juicy States to make that work, because their minimum withdrawal is $250.  I need to have two viable sites.

In 2017 I have my own office and I can devote a lot of time to online play.  This year I have played 55 tournaments on Juicy Stakes Poker.  The main feature of their tournaments is that the fields are very soft and very small.

Since the fields are small, the cashes will be also.  Earlier today I played for about 1.25 hours and played a tournament that had only eight players and three cashing spots ( took third place.)  Once I figured that out, I decided a couple weeks ago that since some of those very small tournaments finished as quickly as 1.5 hours, the best approach was to play as many of those two-hour tournaments as I could so that I could make money faster.

I cam up with a list of eight tournaments that were worth playing, but it turns out that there are some problems with that list.  The starting times are as follows:

0429
0759
2019
2214
2314
2329

There are two problems with that list.   The first is that I included tournaments with a buy-in of $3.30 or less.  That was a huge error.  How many times have I written in this blog that I need 100 buy-ins for the level where I'm playing?  With a bankroll of $130, I have no business investing 2.5% of my bankroll in one tournament.  Most of the tournaments where I didn't cash in February were $3.30, which wiped out a lot of my February cashes playing $1 or $2.

$2 is pushing it, but as soft as the fields are I think that I can get away with it.  I don't have a lot of choices and I have to play regularly.  I can live with a buy-in being 1.6% of my bankroll while I keep grinding it up.

Cutting out the $3.30s leaves me with a big problem, because three of the six cost that much.  That leaves me with three tournaments to choose from every day.  I really can only play two of them in a 24-hour period..

If I take the $3.30s off my list, that leaves me with tournaments starting at:

0749
2019
2214

In my most recent session I played the 2214  followed by the 0749.  That's a pretty big gap but I don't like to start at 2019,because that is one of the longest tournaments and it sometimes is still going when my favorite tournament starts at 2314.  My sleep schedule can get pretty scrambled but I usually can fix that with a nap before my next tournament.

I wish that I could come up with a way to make things happen faster, but I have to be patient and do it the right way.





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