thisfool's microscope

I accidentally went on a nine day hiatus from blogging. My bad. I was on spring break! This was not only my last spring break, but my last break as a dental student.

As you may recall, it's my goal to reach Supernova this year at 100,000 VPPs on PokerStars. During the first two months of the year, I had just started at 50NL with a history of two unsuccessful shots in the past. With an arbitrarily chosen $1,000 initial bankroll after switching from Full Tilt, I decided to allow a five buy-in shot before switching back to 25NL. Unfortunately, while I oscillated heavily in the first weeks, I ended up losing the shot. I had to adjust and clean up my game as I felt lost and exploited for a while at first.

While regrouping at 25NL multitabling, I was also studying for my national boards. I took those at the end of February, by which point I was again committed to trying 50NL once more. It went better this time, and luckily, I was able to stay there. Because so much of my time had gone to studying and playing at smaller stakes, I had only earned about 10,000 VPPs in the first two months, far below the SN pace of about 16,600. But I was committed to my volume goals and armed with a little bit of free time (especially with my spring break).

With March drawing to a close, I racked up about 14,000 VPPs to add to my total this month (with a few days to go). I'm almost exactly on SN pace now.

Unfortunately, during my finals week and over the break I felt gutsy enough to take a really aggressive stab at 100NL to see how it went. Due to 40% runbad and 60% playing errors, I lost more than I had planned, and wound up stuck ten buy-ins in a short time. This negated most of my winnings of late, and I vowed not to try it again until I had a more suitable bankroll and proven experience at 50NL.

This month I ran at 4.75bb/100 over 56,000 hands at 50NL. Overall this year I am at 2.25bb/100 over 85,000 hands at the level. I am fully comfortable now, happy with my results, and planning to continue to move forward.

In other news, I have purchased THIS:

 Actual link to the website