Wickss

Early in May, I left Indianapolis. I helped my fiance move and found her a place to live until we got married. We decided to go ahead and have a wedding instead of eloping. So we planned a small wedding for this weekend with just my family and a few friends.

May started off strong. I got a platinum star on the Sharkscope $2 leaderboard. I have been playing some $3 45 mans to fill up my stack when I don’t have enough tables running. This has increased my hourly rate by $5.

I’m pretty sure I’m going to slip back to 2nd on the leaderboard. After the wedding, I won’t be grinding for at least a week. We are going to spend about 2 months traveling around for our honeymoon. I’ll have to spend part of the time grinding so I don’t go broke. But I’m really looking forward to having a great honeymoon.

Once again, I failed to follow through with my resolution to grind more.  I only played about 90 hrs in March.  By the 15th, I was up $1500 for the month.  Then I broke even for almost two weeks.

I need to get in a habit of regularly grinding about 3000 tourneys a month.  If I did that, I would be putting in the hours of a regular job and making >$3500.  To make up for my laziness in March, I am going to play ~2000 tourneys by the middle of the month.  Then I plan to go to Wichita for a weekend.

I have started to play a lot of $3r 180s in addition to $2.  I am still trying to determine the best re-buy strategy.  If I always double re-buy and add-on, I would probably spend on average $12+ per tournament.  However the field is spending $9 on average.  So always re-buying max is probably a leak.  Recently, I have been playing with single re-buys and never re-buying past BB150.  If I get to the end of the re-buy period and I have <2000 chips, I will add-on.  But it seems that I am frequently below average chip stack after the re-buy period.  I think a more balanced strategy is needed.

February was a decent month.  I mostly played $2 180s.  Easy game.  So far, I’ve averaged $1.3 a game playing them.  My hourly rate is just under $20.  That’s really sick for a $2 tournament.  I should probably play higher, but I love the low variance.  If I spent more time grinding, I could have a good month.

Last month I also played some Super Turbo 45 mans on Full Tilt.  I’ve been running pretty well.  But I don’t have a large sample size, so I don’t know what a good ROI is.  There may be easy money there.

SNG Madness starts Friday.  I’m planning to grind that pretty hard this weekend.  I’ve ordered an external video card so I can add a third monitor to my laptop.  That way I’ll be able to tile my tables and play better.  USB video cards often don’t work well for video, but hopefully it will be good enough for grinding.

I’m planning to leave VA early next week and head west.  I am considering going to either Nashville or Shreveport.  Maybe I’ll flip a coin.

Last Fall I took a seasonal job driving a truck for a harvest crew. That ended just before Christmas, so I started grinding again. I started off with $2 and $3r 180s on Stars. I was immediately successful and was up ~$1100 the first week. Then I lost $400 in one day. That wasn’t a big downswing considering my average buy-in in a $3r is probably $10-$12 once you factor in rebuys and add-ons. But I was a little discouraged and gun shy. So I decided to experiment with other games. In January I spent about three weeks going from game to game. I played short stack NLHE cash games, Super Turbo STTs, Super Turbo 45mans, and the new Rush Poker on FTP. I finally went back to $2 180s because I had a very high ROI. I have been playing them ever since. My total profit in January was ~$1500. Most of this came from finishing third in a $2 MTT on Stars for $1300.

So far I am up about $500 for February. I plan to grind mostly $2 tourneys this month. My goal is to be at the top of the Sharkscope leaderboard by the end of the month. So far I am only about $1700 behind the leader and he hasn’t been grinding for a week or two.

Recently I have been living in motels and traveling. I’ve found that I can live at Value Place or Studio6 for $800 to $1200 a month. This isn’t much different than renting an apartment once you factor in utilities. I spent most of January near Springfield, MO. Then I went to Cincinnati, OH and Erie, PA for a few days. I am now staying with my family near Roanoke, VA. I plan to stay here for most of February. Then I may go to FL for a month.