At that start of the year, I set some year-long poker goals for myself. One month into 2008, I’m pretty much on track, though it’s close and there’s plenty of room for improvement. I averaged only about 16 hours of playing per week, well short of my goal of 25. However, it was a very full month for the Boston Debate League, which took up closer to 25 hours of my time each week, and I don’t expect always to be that busy.
I played about 22,000 hands of NLHE, which puts me on par for my goal of 250,000 in 2008. However, a fair number of these were full ring, which weren’t supposed to count. Unfortunately, I don’t have an easy of disaggregating them, since Poker Tracker groups full ring games on Full Tilt with short-handed games on Ultimate Bet.
With results like what I saw in January (not sustainable, unfortunately), I wouldn’t need to play anywhere near that number of hours or hands, though. I earned better than 6 PTBB/100 for the month, which at the higher stakes games is definitely well above my true win rate.
My goal of improving my Pot Limit Omaha game is not coming along so well. Over 2000 hands (a minuscule sample, especially for a high-variance game like PLO), mostly at 3/6, I was at -10 PTBB/100. I did read Jeff Hwang’s Pot Limit Omaha: The Big Play Strategy, though, and I think that will help me improve my game in the coming months.
I played 25 tournaments, which should bring me in under my cap of 400 for the year, though FTOPS VII begins tomorrow night, and that will likely see me playing more tournaments in February.
Overall, it was a great month, topped only by July and November of last year, both of which were marked by big tournament wins. My central goal for 2008 was to focus on NLHE cash games over tournaments, which until recently had been my bread-and-butter, so it’s great to see my new game of choice delivering comparable results so quickly.