The Eye of the Storm

So far April seems to have been the calm after the storm. I think I burned myself out more than I realised after putting so much volume in during March. The $4000 pot of gold at the end of the Gladiator rainbow was such a good incentive that I tricked myself into believing I had overcome the motivational issues that have plagued me this year. As it turns out... I haven't, and with the promotion over they are back with a vengeance. The good news is that another promotion is starting next Monday and I plan to get back to some major grinding. So maybe April is really the eye of the storm?

Interestingly, the new promotion is VIP only (Palladium+), and to get max value from it a truly epic grind will be required. Pushing myself hard last month worked really well, so I'm going to give it my best. I'll need to rake $15,000 in 21 days (about 1500 party points per day). I was raking 1200 points per day in March so it should be easy, right? The problem is that I have a friend's wedding and other commitments that will mean I can't play at all on probably 4 of the 21 days, meaning I'll have to rake closer to 1800 points per day, which will be really tough. As I'm typing this I read an interesting quote on the Party Poker thread on 2p2:

I was thinking about grinding those 60 cards but then i realized i don't hate myself that much.

 -OMGKaraScott

A fair point. I'm going to hit it hard for the first week and see how things go. On the plus side if I succeed I think all the bonuses will tally up to over $10,000 (depending how lucky I am with the random prizes). Not bad for 3 week's work!

Although I haven't been playing a lot of poker this month I've been using my time fairly productively getting on with wedding plans, home improvement and spending time with friends and family. I've also upgraded my setup with a new PC tower. I went for a fairly basic model and with the help of a friend installed a better graphics card and an SSD to run my OS and all my poker software. So far I'm loving the SSD: Windows 7 Ultimate loads completely in under 10 seconds and it should handle mass multi-tabling a lot better than my poor laptop. I'll post a few pictures of my setup in a future post.

So wish me luck for grinding my ass off for the next 3 weeks! Today I just feel like doing this...

Palladium Elite, Gladiator and Pussies

Well so much for more regular updates in 2012! Must try harder...

Poker Updates

At the start of the year my plan was to multi-site Pokerstars and Party Poker, with the aim of retaining my Supernova status on Stars whilst attaining Palladium Elite status on Party. I found it harder than I expected to juggle 2 sites, so I've focussed most of my attention on Party. As a result I sadly lost my Supernova status at the end of March. However, I was successful in attaining Palladium Elite on Party.

Turbo SNGs on Party have very short levels which leads to smaller edges and lower attainable ROIs. Therefore my income this year will be much more dependent on rakeback. Fortunately, in my experience so far, Party have been really good at providing regular bonuses and promotions.

In March Party Poker ran a huge promotion called Gladiator. This promotion was heavily dependent on volume of play, leading to a lot of grinder regs making the games extremely tough. A lot of the turbo games running were -EV to play pre-rakeback. However, with all the bonuses I accrued translating to a rakeback percentage of over 80% there was still a lot of money to be made.

Raking $15,000 in a month to reach my Gladiator goal meant some serious grinding, so in March I put in a lot more volume than I ever have in a single month. Pushing myself in that way has been a real eye-opener for me to realise what I'm capable of, and I plan to push myself to keep volume high throughout the year. So far including all rakeback and bonuses I'm up around $22k this year. I'm actually above EV (!) although I'm down a bit at the $109s and $210s. Fingers crossed for some run good in those in the months ahead. My EV line in Party turbos is worryingly low, although perhaps partly due to the toughness of the games in March. I think card distribution is also a massive factor in those games so it's hard to know how much to read into it.

Life Updates

In other news, my fiance and I bought 2 kittens at the end of 2011 which we've named Leia and Starbucks. I've never been a big animal lover, but these two have really won me over. They're playful, full of personality and good company. It's hard to be too annoyed by a downswing with a kitten purring on my lap.

I'm also very excited for the return of Game of Thrones this month. I started reading the books last summer and pretty much lived and breathed them for a few months. For anyone who hasn't checked out the books or the show I highly recommend both!

Good luck at the tables

David