New Changes

I know, I'm all over the place with my decisions, but I really needed to find what might work. A few weeks back, I changed from NL to fixed limit. I am convinced this is the right move. The skillsets between the two are very different, and I couldn't see abandoning my FL roots just because I was running bad. My switch was ugly, however. I continued to lose at an alarming rate, and even bonus money wasn't enough to cover my losses at FL. I really started questioning whether I should even be playing poker any more. I was losing at every table, every site and almost every session. Before going onto my latest change, I want to go over what I did earn in bonuses. I got some real sweet deals:

Fulltilt: On 4/1, I got an email from the VIP department at Fulltilt. They offered me a choice between some FT Gear or $100, if I made a deposit and earned 300 Fulltilt Points. This was an incredible offer. In order to earn the 300 FT Points, I had to be dealt cards in enough hands to where a total of $300 was raked from tables I was playing on. So early last week, I deposited $300 to chase this bonus at the $1/$2 FL tables. It took 921 hands to clear enough points to satisfy the requirements. I already have the gear I wanted at FT, so I went after the $100. The average bonus out there clears at about 7xhands/bonus to 10xhands/bonus. Meaning, that for every $1 you earn in bonuses, you have to participate in 7 or 10 raked hands. Initial Party/Empire bonuses are 5x bonuses, which are phenomenal. 10x is acceptable and is generally a decent bonus. This FT bonus was simply incredible. At 921 hands this bonus figured to be a 3.07x bonus. This is, without a doubt, the best bonus I have ever received.

Party: Party swallowed Intertops, PokerNOW and Multipoker last week. They also moved Empire onto their platform, so now, Empire and Party share the same tables and players. When they did this, I had a measly 88 cents in my Intertops account. I decided to see what would happen if I attempted to log-on to Intertops. Well, what it did was take me to Party, where I filled out a form to transfer the 88 cents to my Party account. I had recently lost what little I had at Party, so when I logged onto Party, I expected to have the cashier show me an account balance of 88 cents. Not quite! Party put $25 into my account, with the stipulation that I had 10 days to accumulate 250 raked hands. So I played off the raked hands, and profited by $5.50. So another sweet little bonus.

Against $166 in losses last week, I managed only $88 in bonuses. However, I got the $100 Fulltilt bonus credited today.

So what's the big change? I have decided that multi-tabling isn't working out. I'm finding that I am relying more on Poker Tracker[PT] and GameTime Plus[GT+] while multi-tabling than anything, and it doesn't allow me anything but sub-optimal reads at the tables. It is impossible to take notes at a level I need to in order to keep up with the idiosyncrasies of the players. Although initially I thought it was going to bore me out of my skull, I actually enjoy taking these notes, getting a good read on my opponents, and making the right decisions at the table. So, Sunday, I started the process of designing shorthand for my note-taking, and started single-tabling. One thing I need to mention is that I play at each site with 150 Big Bets [BB], rather than 300 BB. I do this because I currently have a little more than $4K in my bankroll, which, considering I am playing mostly $.50/$1 and $1/$2, figures out to be 2000-4000 BB total. Since I don't play at just one site, my chance of ruining my bankroll is virtually nil, considering I will drop down a limit on any one site, if it comes to this. The other decision I made was to stop moving money around to take advantage of all the reloads. The reasons are quite simple:

• It requires me to have $500-$1000 available to do so. This was too much money to have sitting idly waiting for reloads. Money that couldn't be used for other poker purposes.
• The constant movement of money almost ensured that I would never progress past the current $1/$2 level at any site, as I was constantly moving all but around $300 out of each site once the reload bonus was finished.
• I already have $2500 in bonuses pending, plus the monthly Cryptologic bonuses which add up to around $225 each month. A little over $1900 of this is Ultimate Bet bonuses. I want to work UB down to about $1000 pending, and clear up the other bonuses before starting to reload again. If I can finish this by the end of June, I will have cleared around $2100 plus any profit, and increased my sites to where some of them will be capable of allowing me to progress to $2/$4 or higher. Once I can start playing higher, where my profits will also be higher, then I can return to start chasing reload bonuses and start chasing new initial deposit bonuses.

I know my work is cut out for me, but I think I can attain these short-term goals, and get myself back onto the right track towards making a good earnrate each month. My long-term goal is to be able to play $5/$10 at a few of my sites.

So, where do I stand so far?

Sunday, 4/8. I played around 4.5 hours of $1/$2 FL at PokerStars. I made $32 in the process. That's about 3.5BB per hour, which is darned good. I moved over to the Gaming Club for an hour and lost $1.50 playing $.10/$.20. Not so good. I need to plunk an extra $100 in here to make my bankroll because I don't want to wallow here or Royal Vegas [another site where I have a sub-$150 bankroll]. Doing so will allow me to play $.50./$1 at each, which should allow me to progress to $1/$2 that much quicker.

Monday 4/9. Great day. I got my $100 Fulltilt bonus, and for the first time in a long time, actually made more money playing for the day than I received in a bonus:

• I started the day playing at PokerPlex. I need 250 MPPs, which takes about 1000-1200 hands to complete. So, time to get started. Problem is, traffic and good table selection was really horrid at the levels I am comfortable with. I decided to take a stab at $2/$4, despite only having $100 here. I played an hour, before the table started turning bad. I finished up $20, or 5BB.
• After returning from the grocery store, I decided to go to Holdem Poker [a Pokerroom skin]. With $75 and $100 bonuses pending, I decided to play here a bit. With only $237.60 here, I stayed within my 150BB rule and played $.50/$1. I realized I would earn a lot of points toward my bonus, but I decided being safe was better, especially considering I have over a month to complete both bonuses. I had a fantastic one hour session, before my table broke up. I couldn't fins one that was as good, so I left up $30.45. Yeah, an unheard of 30BB/hour rate. Wow!
• After fixing lunch, I settled into Paradise Poker , where I still had $20 in bonus pending. Once again, due to my bankroll limits here, I sat at a $.50/$1 table. I played 3 hours, cleared $10 of my bonus and made another $44.50. Another fantastic session. I only stopped because I had been keeping my eye on another Crypto [Sun Poker], so that I could start that monthly bonus chase.
• So, finding a juicy $.50/$1 table at Sun, I settled down to finish my pokerday until my wife came home. This gave me an hour and a half to play here. I made another $19.88 before leaving.

So, for the day I made $124.83 at the tables, and received my $100 bonus from Fulltilt. Fantastic!

Tuesday, 4/11. Today didn't go as well. Back at the Gaming Club, I managed to lose a further $5.41. Not good. I am wallowing here. Playing 3.5 hours, I couldn't get anything going. Perfect example was raising preflop with AQs, and flopping QQ2. However, this was a big loser, as my lone caller had 22! Ouch. I quit Gaming Club at noon, and ate lunch.

When I finished lunch I returned to the tables, but went to PokerPlex, to work off some more hands towards the monthly $50 bonus. Once again, I had to play over my bankroll limit. There were just too many loose tables at the 1/2 pounds tables. So I settled into one. I made little more less than 17 pounds before the table started breaking up. this worked out to a little more than $29. I then moved down to a .50/1 pound table . I finished my day here, playing 2.5 hours, and only finishing up $1.13. A very poor playing fish kept laughing at me when his cheesy hands held up and he won some money. He kept it up, and despite being down, I landed a huge pot when my AKs flopped AKx. I got the pot capped on the flop, then kept betting into 3 callers, and ended up winning a huge pot [25BB]. The poor playing fish wasn't in it but I thought it quite funny when he typed how lucky I got in the chat box. My only reply was, "Indeed. Best hand on the flop held up. Quite lucky." This brought out a lot of "LOLs" from the others at the table. He kept needling me. I wasn't about to educate. my opponents? 65s in my suit, A6o and KQs. I was 84% to win with that flop. Yeah, I got lucky!

Despite not equaling yesterday's results, I'm quite happy averaging about a BB/hour. I know it is early in my change, but why not look at this optimistically? I am doing quite well right now. I'm owing it to being able to really watch the table, taking notes and establishing very good reads on my opponents. I think, that if I can continue to maintain this level of focus, that my downturns in the future will be both shorter and less damaging than they were in the past.