July 2008 - my best online month so far

**Chipless Wonder** · 08-01-2008 10:12 AM

This is pretty kind of a brag post, so please excuse that.

It’s also a post that should be able to help others who are interested in benefitting from my experiences.

Four and a half months ago I made the decision to start taking bankroll management seriously and do my best to make some money online. Here’s a link to that thread, along with monthly updates:

http://www.badbeatspoker.net/forum/b...ying-sngs.html

Since then, I’ve been profitable every month. And each month my profit has grown. In fact, July was my best month to date.

Here are some of the factors that helped me to make July so successful for me:

1. ROI by field size – I started to notice that like most players, I’m much more profitable in bigger fields. So I’ve gradually shifted to playing almost no 9 and 18 person games. Here are the games I played in July:

2-player SNG = 0 games
9-player SNG = 1 game
18-player SNG = 0 games
45-player SNG = 65 games
90-player SNG and larger MTT = 45 games

2. Larger Buy-ins – now that my bankroll has started to grow, I’ve been gradually increasing my average buy-in. For July, my average buy-in was $42 (compared to $16 a year ago).

3. Multi-tabling – as I’ve logged more games, I’ve slowly moved from playing one or two games at once to four games. Now that I’m totally comfortable with four games, I plan to try six-tabling for the month of August.

4. MTT strategy from Sparks - I spent an hour with Chris via phone about a month ago, and this helped my overall tournament approach. Thanks Chris!

5. Post-flop play from Nutini – I feel like I usually make correct decisions pre-flop, but my post-flop play has never really been that strong. Spending 20 hours playing and discussing hand play strategy with Dave Nutini in early July has definitely helped my game. Thanks Dave!

6. Relentless bubble and end game play – Looking at my statistics, you’ll see that I bubble a lot. And that’s part of my strategy. In games where I make it past the bubble, I often win. And one win easily offsets several third or fourth place finishes.

During the month of July, I played for 110 hours, and averaged $63 per hour in profit. I played 111 games and cashed 27 times, for an ITM (in the money) percentage of 24%. Of the games I cashed in, here is how my finishes were distributed:

1st place = 11 times
2nd place = 0 times
3rd place = 7 times
4th through 10th place = 5 times

Looks like my end game has gotten a LOT stronger!

Here are my July numbers from Official Poker Rankings: