September Recap

I didn't hit my goal of 120,000 vpps for the month.  I easily could have though, and don't feel bad for what I did earn, which is 103,000.

Current VPP count: 656,000

End of October goal: 780,000  

Looking to earn 124,000 in October. 

I talked in my previous post a bit about my issues with tilt.  Sadly, I went on a pretty big downswing after my nice upswing, and ended my month loosing a bit at the tables before rake back.  To be honest, I feel like the progress I've been making in poker over the last couple months is still quite vast so I'm pretty happy with my month regardless.  I think it's important in poker to not always look at the bottom line to measure your success.  I can honestly say my game has improved over the month, and to me that's a great thing. Something that I haven't always felt in the past.  I really didn't tilt much at all this month, which is one of the improvements of my mental game I've made.

Not sure if I talked about this before, but I play on a softball team, and we just had our final games of the season a couple weeks ago, and we were the winner's of our league! Winning is fun, but regardless I've met a lot of great friends from the team. 

Here we are the night of the finals:

Our team's golf outing this summer:

and a few of us with our trophy:

Aside from golf and softball, I got into playing tennis quite a bit too. I am so not a natural tennis player though, sadly.  Maybe I just need some formal lessons.  I have a decent backhand, but my forehand is just awful.  I'm struggling to get any topspin so I've been hitting them either in the net, or huge home runs.  I wish I had somewhere close by that didn't cost an arm and a leg to play indoors over the winter, but I don't think I do.  So, my plan for the winter is to just get back into the gym.   The gym I'm a member at has a ton of great fitness classes.  Spinning being my favorite.  Especially once I hit SNE this year, I'm really going to work hard to get in better shape.  It's not that I need to loose weight or anything, but I just need to tone up, gain some muscle, and loose some fat. Online poker does not help with that!

This past weekend, I made a last minute decision to head to Playground Poker club in Montreal, to play the Full Tilt Poker series that was going on.  I had gone to Playground to cash a few years back, but I hadn't been since they expanded and started holding the large tournaments.  I was really impressed, and it's nice to have a great poker room that holds good events close by. One of my favorite things is that the food is great, which is really important to me.  Nothing worse than travelling and being stuck eating terrible food that you don't want. 

I definitely like playing live poker.  It's so different than online, and a nice change.  I still prefer online, but I find live brings me back to my passion for the game.  Online can get so technical and impersonal.  There is something about being in a room with hundreds of other poker players who also love the game.  The passion is contagious.  The tournament didn't go well for me, but I had a good time, and played some interesting hands.  I had to make some painful folds, made a couple pretty sick hero calls, and for the most part patiently grinded the short stack. Just when I would start building a stack, I would loose the next couple pots and just couldn't get it going. I managed to barely make day 2.  I started day 2 with 7bbs, and actually worked it up to 20bbs. I won 44 to A8, shoved a couple times and didn't get called, then ultimately busted AJ to JJ for a pot that would have me around average stack.  You can definitely never give up in a tournament! All it takes is a couple hands to build (or break) your stack.

Here's me playing this weekend, waiting for my turn and probably thinking- 'man, live poker is slow'...