I just got home from a short holidays at Germany and Netherlands and although a little tired I wanna type a post at my new awesome blog, because during the flight back home I was having a lot of thoughts that I wanna share.
My holidays were great and I really enjoy to know new places. I was for first time in Amesterdam and I must say that its very beautiful and I hope I can go back there again soon. I was also in a small city in Germany called Kleive that I already know quite well and as usual I had some nice time there. I didn't play much in those last days and I'm anxious to attack the tables very hard.
I used to play a lot of Rush back on the days when FullTilt was running and I had good success on those games so now that PokerStars has launched Zoom I am very anxious to play those games. In my first post I said I was going to talk about my goals but now I think that probably its better that first I give a little of my background as poker player.
I been playing poker professional since 2008 and my main game its been always cash games on-line NLHE 6max, but of course I also played some other games like SNG,MTTs, Omaha and some HU, especially when trying to create new games, something that with zoom I don't need to do anymore.
I'm always trying to improve my game and thinking in ways of maximize my hourly rate and because of that my approach to poker its been always evolving. Right now I'm ready to give a try at zoom which in future posts I will explain why I belive its the best for me at this moment. But well lets return to my poker story short version, where I tell you guys what I been playing. (congrats and thanks for all that are still reading)
So what I been playing?
Well, last year was amazing, it was my best year ever with some nice results. I started 2011 grinding a bunch of tables of NL200, changed to rush and had good results. Than I decided to move up to NL400 a limit that in the past I always struggled and because rush NL400 was not running much I returned to "normal" poker and this time I crushed that limit.
One or two months after blackfriday I started to mix some higher stakes like 3/6 and 5/10 and occasionally even 10/20, I had three good months and than I had my first downswing/breakeven stretch at 5/10 and I finish November down 12k which is not much in terms of buy-ins and I knew sooner or late could happen so was not a big deal. In November I end the month again down 8k and now my confidence was starting to get really down. Although my bankroll was still better than when I moved up I was not feeling good with my game and decided to go down to 2/4 and regain my confidence. Most of my losses were coming from HU at partypoker when I was starting tables against good regulars so i decided not play HU anymore. I also decided to be more rigorous with table selection and I started playing in different sites at same time. In December I came back to positive months but I noticed that I was having a hard time putting volume because even using different sites was not easy to find good games running at NL400+. Also my winrate was still very low compared to previous months and I was still not happy with my results. In poker sometimes we can go from a sensation of "I'm the king of the world" to "Man, I suck at this game" very fast and that was exactly what I felt in these period of time. I start having some coaching lessons with a very well known and respected player and I realized some important things that I was missing that I might talk about other day.
During January I had some more coaching sessions and I was working very hard on my game and my main goal was work my ability to play more tables at same time. I had two main reasons pushing me to increase my number of tables. 1st - I wanted to have more control of my monthly results so in order to do that I needed to play more hands per month or increase my winrate and I thought that was easier to increase volume than win rate (this subject deserves an own topic) ; 2nd In terms of hourly rate I realized that with games being so tough at NL400+ (at least for me) by playing NL200 I could have a similar or even better hourly rate by playing a significant higher amount of hands per month.
So this last couple of months I been grinding at NL200 and NL100 and at begining was strange to play this limits because last year I was playing much higher but as a professional I must be able to play where I can make more money, and fortunately I have no problems in moving down when necessary. I still played some NL400 - NL1000 during this period but only when I was feeling good and could get a seat at good games. So far my yearly results although not great are still good and with the zoom poker I have a new plan that I hope can make me win much more in the next months. But that is something I will talk about in my next post...
And because all poker players like to see graph pictures, here is my yearly results so far in big blinds:
Normally peolpe say that if you are down a lot in the day that it's better to take the day off but when you have a goal of making 500k VPPs you can't stop playing when you're running bad. I knew that most of my losses came from coolers and some bad variance and although losing I was still feeling very good and confident with my game. I believe I have a very strong mental game so like planned I played my next 4 sessions of the day and BOOM. I started running really well and also having better feeling of the players so as a result I still finished the day 8 buy-ins up 
