I thought I’d write out an idea where my current state of poker is.

I switched to Head Up NLHE at the end of March. I won about $2,500 starting in the last week or two of the month. Then had a $5k April, $10k May, and a $7.3k June. Life was good. But then went on a really bad run and actually managed a losing July, -$2.5k. With my recent success, it didn’t financially cripple me, but in no means was fun. Here’s a graph of my over all play of HU:

Some interesting dips in there; the sheer cliff around hand 20k was the craziest session of my life, where I lost 27.5 buyins to the worst player ever (maybe a slight overstatement, but he was awful) who just ran super hot in some VERY big pots. Then there is that big dip after 80k hands. Here I ran about -7.5k under EV in July, which is just absurd for the stakes I play, but that’s poker! Here’s a PokerEV graph for the last month:

Two things in the graph concern me, while obviously the big down swing hurts, the thing that bothers me more is the next 10,000 hands where I break even. The thing I love about pokerEV so much, is when I go on bad runs I can turn to it to remind myself I was just running poorly. However, in this case my equity seems to be holding even, yet I am still not winning. I guess it could be just a bad run of cards, but even so I have been working pretty hard to retool my approach over the past couple weeks. Nothing like a good downswing to make you reevaluate your game.

Coincidentally, right before I went on my downswing, I pulled out $10k from my FTP account to pay for our wedding (getting married next week, congratulations to me!). Because of these two factors it has left my poker roll a bit shallower then I would have liked, and I think I am going to mainly focus on 1/2nl for a bit until I grind it back up, even though my 2/4 win rate is actually higher. Bankroll management has always been of huge importance to me, and plays a large role in me overcoming these bad runs.

So with the wedding and the circius it will bring, I am not quite sure how many hands I am going to be able to get in this month, but my goal is about 25k and $7.5 in cash. $0.28 a hand? Should be quite do-able.