The Good, The Bad and The Ugly in Two Days

March 26 and March 27 were certainly interesting poker days.

I'm not making money nearly as fast as I need to, so I decided that it was time to work on playing multiple tables on Juicy Stakes poker.  March 26th was a train wreck.

I knew that it would take me a little time to get comfortable with two tables, but it was a lot harder than I expected. Things were happening faster, but more important, it was an information overload.  I watch  nine different statistics for each player on my HUD (heads-up display.)  I pan to add another statistic to track sometime soon.  Some players track a lot more stats than I do.  There is a  link to an example of a poker HUD display is at the bottom of this post.

The trouble was that I wasn't adding 1 new stat for each player, as I plan to do sometime soon., I was adding 9 statistics for each of 9 new players,which comes to 81 more numbers for me to sort through. That sorting has to be done quickly.  Once it's my turn I have 25 seconds to act.

When I added the second table (9 more players) I had to scan the stats of 19 players instead of 9. That's a lot of extra information to add to the other things I have to think about at the table.  I crashed and burned at both tables, getting knocked out of two tournaments pretty quickly.

I didn't make huge errors, just a lot of small ones.  For example, I missed that someone's stack had become small enough that he was in all-in or fold mode, which affected how I should have reacted to that player.  That particular situation didn't cost me a lot of chips, but a lot of small errors added up to big trouble, and soon it was over.  I failed to cash twice, in the only two tournaments that I play which can draw over 100 players (more players equals a bigger prize pool.) I was down for the month with just a few days to go..  I had hoped to string together a few winning months, but March was in trouble.

I turned all that around in less than two hours.

On March 27th I played a bounty tournament.  The idea is that there is a prize pool, but each player also has a bounty on himself.  In this case, I could get a $1 bounty for each player that I knocked out.

I don't consider myself to be a good bounty tournament player.  I am so focused on making it to the final table and getting a big cash that it's hard for me to get excited about picking up an extra dollar or two in bounties-but hat night, everything came together.

It was a $2.20 tournament.  I jumped out to a big chip lead after 15 minutes and I was somewhere in the top ten for the rest of the tournament.  I made it to the final table as one of the smallest stacks but that didn't last long  I knocked out 3 players at the final table and I won the tournament.  First place paid $21.45,  I also knocked out 3 players at the final table ( I had knocked out 2 earlier) giving me a total of 5 bounties, adding $5 to my winnings.

I'm now up $17.45 for March.  That's not a lot compared to January or February, but it gets me closer to my bankroll goals.  Once I get comfortable with playing two tables, things should move a lot faster.

One more thing.  In an earlier post I said that I started with $34 on the site, then ran it  up to $100 in early February.  I said then that the next goal was to have $150 on the site.  My Juicy Stakes Poker bankroll is now.$158.62.

Now that my Schedule C poker business is better capitalized, I have more leeway in my tournament choices as well as with other business decisions..  Add to that the extra profit that I will make once I'm comfortable playing two tables and things should start moving faster very soon.

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https://www.google.com/search?q=holdem+Manager+HUD&safe=off&rlz=1C1CAFA_enUS667US674&espv=2&tbm=isch&source=lnms&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi2-ezy-PXSAhVK6IMKHfUxC6cQ_AUIBigB&biw=1920&bih=974#imgrc=gaPvAjc8tpzuAM