I'm very happy with what I accomplished in January. It feels like my play to build from the ground up ($40 sitting on a poker site) is working better than I had hoped. Committing an entire year to building that $40 into much more without investing any more money than was already on the site was a leap of faith. If I had spent all that time and nothing much came of it I would have been devastated. It was a big kick in the teeth when I had a significant net loss in December.
The long slog of 2017 was one of those times when I had to trust the math and trust the process, even when I wasn't sure that it was going to work out. It is working out and January 2018 was a big fat example of that.
I know that I'm only playing (mostly) $1 tournaments but I seem to be dominating the field almost every time that I play. I used to hope that I would make it to the final table a few times a week. Now I'm disappointed when it doesn't happen every day--and it is happening almost than much (see total net wins versus losses, below). In January played two tournaments a day and usually cashed in at least one of them.
There is one player online who I think has switched to some other tournaments partly to avoid being at the same final table with me so often. That happens a lot and I wasn't surprised. I considered considered making some changes in my schedule to avoid him.
Good players often can spot each other, in fact, I always check to see if he is signed up for a tournament that I want to play. It's not uncommon in tournaments for the best players to leave each other alone and pick on the weaker players.
Here are the numbers for January:
| January 2018 | |
| Profit and loss | |
| 18 net win tournaments | $144.15 |
| 21 net loss tournaments | -$67.46 |
+$76.69
That was my best online month ever except for when I made it to the final table of a tournament with 4,200 players. That was in 2006. I've never done anything like that since and I hope to change that someday.
Sometime in February I will be posting about changes that I want to make in 2018. I was hoping to get my bankroll above $300 at the end of the year but I just missed. My last cash of the month got me up to $294.90, which is a lot more than the ~$40 that I started with a year ago.. I will making some process decisions to take advantage of having more money to work with. That could include playing more expensive tournaments and/or different types of tournaments and what or how I study. I have a lot of ideas running around in my head. I have to pull out best ones.
I already made one important change. Instead of playing two tournaments starting at 1829 and 2214 and putting all of my poker time in one block, I now play tournaments at 1014 and 2214, 12 hours apart. My reason is simple. I found out in mid-January that they are the same tournament. The tournament that I have been playing at 2214 has the best structure for how I play. What I didn't know is that it runs twice a day, 12 hours apart.
Having two good tournaments to play, instead of one good one and one that's just OK, is definitely part of the reason for my results last month. I'm hoping that I can start cranking out some $100 months sometime soon.
When beginners in a poker forum ask what it takes to make money, good tournament selection is almost always mentioned in the responses. I take it very seriously and it's literally paying off.
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