February Review

February continued to work out very well for me. I'm not entirely sure anymore if it was just the super soft site I was/am playing on or something I changed in my game while simultaneously switching sites. I've put in some hours at Stars and FTP again when my fishy Euro site was down or low on traffic without any difference in winrate.

Granted I've played all of 54k hands this year due to 6 tabling the Euro site for most of it, so it's not much of a sample for winrate, but I may just start putting some more hours and hands in for FTP Rush so we'll see how it pans out. I'm definitely liking how fast I can jump back up the FTP rakeback ladder so quickly. With a few inexpensive mods, I've found I really don't mind the software at all.

Back to results, I find myself being much more appropriately aggressive after putting in some fundamental work on the math behind my actions and my opponents' ranges. For the past 2 months I've felt like I've been "in the zone" when it comes to making good decisions and hand reading like a fiend.

I've had moments of clarity like that in the past, but they'd always been fleeting, eventually leading me back to my breakeven play style. Two weeks here, three days there. I don't know if this will continue, but every few days I find myself thinking back to that basic off the table study I did at the beginning of January, sometimes running scenarios through my spreadsheets, and it continues to work for me. I think I'm a much tougher opponent to play against for it.

What I'm definitely most proud of so far this year is my play from the blinds. It's easy to win on the button, but I think the loss rate from the blinds really shows who feels on top of their hand reading game. Having loss rates of -2 in the SB and -26 in the BB is a huge factor in my overall winrate so far. I have historically run at about -20 and -45, respectively.

It's taken me a very long time and I've done similar work before, but I'm finally fully accepting that the math does not lie, no matter how counter-intuitive it may be at times. For me, the battle between ego and theoretical strategy is a big one at the table. I need to keep that in check. All of your study amounts to nothing if you're going to be making spite calls and spewy shoves.

March has started where February left off. I'm going to have a conservative goal of 40k hands. The game plan for site selection is going to be FTP/Stars and primarily Rush/Zoom due to the increased traffic while my winrate sustains.

Jan.  34 buyins |  16k hands   |    21 bb/100*
Feb.  44 buyins |  32k hands   |   14 bb/100
* modified from last review, forgot to include Stars results.