VPP for the week: ~63k

VPP for the year: 485, 682.50

Last week I put in no full work days and nearly hit my goal. This week I put in almost all full work days and didn’t reach my goal. The reason? Lots of time with no action. I hope this was just a fluke week, but I wasn’t able to get up to 6 tables for most of the time. I had two regulars say they didn’t want to play me anymore, which certainly didn’t help too.

Despite this, I’m pretty happy. On Monday I should hit 500k VPPs for the year and that will mean I will have a very solid winning month and one where I hit my VPP goal. I’m also 4th in VPPs on the entire site this year. One player ahead of me, Isildur, I’m sure will not be a threat because he will either stop getting action or decide to stop playing. Another player is an unknown, so not sure how much of a threat he/she is. And way ahead of everyone is Azntracker, who can and will beat me if he decides to do so. He is nearly at 1,000,000 VPPs already and is regularly putting in 30k VPP days. But it appears that there is a decent chance he is not going to go for the yearly record, as he wants to travel a lot and play a lot of live tournaments. He hasn’t yet made a commitment either way. Nonetheless, record or not I’m going to keep going with this.

Play quality wise, I was up and down. I intuited that this was true, but I can literally tell in my graph this was so because I have a redline in the shape of a mountain. Non showdown winnings is normally a pretty good indicator of how well you are playing. High or breakeven is good, steadily going down is bad. For me, the first few days it was break even and up, for the last two it was steadily down. However, I do think my spectrum of quality of play has made a jump upward. Even on the last two days where I didn’t think I played as well, I still felt like I was playing winning poker. Previous weeks I don’t think that was the case.

But there were times in my play where I just didn’t know what my opponents were doing and therefore did not know what I was doing. There are two things I’m going to work on this week to improve this weakness. One, whenever I don’t know what my opponent is doing, I’ll try to find out. I’ll look through Pt3 and put a lot of focus on remembering previous hands I’ve played with the player by memory and looking through instant hand history. Two, at times where I still can’t figure it out, or am hazy, I will default to balanced play. I will simply play my own range as optimally as possible. If I can do that, I think my play quality will boost.