The Winter is Coming!

Hey!

Well it's really starting to dawn on me now that the winter is arriving. For starters, my annual cold has come around turning me into some snivveling dribbly mess. I guess it also didn't help that last night I was pub-crawling around Nottingham in the cold with just a t-shirt on most of the night, but that's another story :). Anyway I'm cool with getting the occasional cold as it gives me the excuse to slack around the house and play some online poker!

So that's what I've been doing. I put in a longish session today registering from 2pm-9pm and after a couple of final table bubbles I managed to get a decent cash in the $25r on iPoker coming 7th and more importantly a second in a $109 freezeout on full tilt for just over a $4k payday. I would show a screenshot but for some reason its not uploading on blogspot. Meh, you'll have to just trust me on this one!

But it's not all good news. Since being back at uni I've put in a few sessions and really not pulled anything together, resulting in quite a substantial downswing of about $8k. The bankroll has dipped below the $50k mark again, so I'm going to move down slightly and drop the $50r's from the schedule. I think partially why I've not done as well since being back is from playing so much more infrequently and perhaps losing touch slightly with the flow of MTTs, but who knows, the variance in these things are ridiculous.

Whilst playing today I was listening to the 2p2 podcast which this week was actually really interesting featuring top MTT backer Sheets as well as some entertaining stories by Neil Channing. Anyway, as Sheets was discussing about the live tournaments in America doing so badly with getting field numbers and a massive lack of fish resulting in the $5k side events just being filled with regs, it got me thinking a lot more about game selection.

Game selection can be applied to MTT's but rarely is by many people. This is basically trying to find the softest fields to play in to maximise $/hourly rate. For instance, the weekly sunday million on pokerstars is going to be a lot softer than say a weekday $100 rebuy which is filled with the top MTT regulars in the world who apart from a select few seem to just pass money between each other on a sick variance rollercoaster. Then again you do get the sickos like Gboro and Moorman who seem to consistently crush these $100r's despite the lack of evidential dead money.

Now I do game select a bit. For instance, when I had the bankroll for the $50rebuy I would exclusively play the euro sites but wouldn't touch the Stars/Full Tilt $50rebuy due to the much tougher fields found there. Yet it also concerns me that leaving out tougher field tournaments that I am rolled for may well hurt my long-term $ as it can be a very good learning tool to see what the better regs are doing in these higher buy-in tournaments and implement the better parts of their game into my own overall tournament strategy. There is of-course also the lure of being one of the "regs" of the high stake scene.

In reality though from a strictly monetary point of view, for the meanwhile I don't yet have enough money and can find enough softer tournaments to settle my craving without having to play in reg-infested tournaments. Yet due to my approach to the game of wanting to be the best and striving for this I think I will eventually start playing some of these tougher tournaments. On the other hand, reading about some of the better high-stake regs swings they have is also mind-blowing with $100k+ swings placing quite a strain on even the most solid of players.

Anyway, I guess I don't yet have to worry about this just yet. Just got to keep focusing on the softer tournaments available for my buy-in range of up to $200 freezeout and $30 rebuys and if I do manage to be lucky enough to earn a lot more money at this game, I will take shots in the future at some of the tougher fields but try to keep playing the lower-variance and softer fields which are available out there on the internet. If I can keep my ego under control I believe I can go a long way in this game.

Onto the future. This weekend it looks like I'll be playing this new tournament series at Dusk Til Dawn. 20/20 or something like that. It's basically a 1-day £100 freezeout on both the Saturday and the Sunday. I expect I'll just hardcore out on Saturday playing the tournament followed by cash and leave Sunday to the online grind as my hourly has to be greater there (see game selecting already!). I'm not sure how the structure will be but I'm almost 100% sure the field will be soft. I'de much prefer if the buy-in was higher but whatever, maybe this way the field will be a bit bigger and a bit softer than the DTD Monthly £300 deepstack which I love to play.

A good poker friend Ant also won a package to a tournament series in Slovenia during late November which would be good fun to go to for a long weekend, but from what I gather the buyin for the main event is €1k, which is still a bit of a strain on the bankroll to be honest. So we shall see, maybe if I win a lot at cash in the next few days I can take a shot but we shall see indeed.

Hope everyone has been keeping well and running good!