Poker Update: Up and down... and knockin' fools out!

The good news is I did it! I ground my bankroll up to $750 and moved up to NL 25 in short order.

The bad news is I hit a downswing and promptly lost 6 BIs in ~4,000 hands to knock me back to a measly $596 (hah, alright, so I'm still happy I've come so far). My confidence was pretty shaken. Although a good amount of it was unavoidable (I lost 2 buy-ins with 99 on a J92 rainbow flop... he had JJ), I was wondering if there were too few fish for my style. I rely on the stations paying me off with their whole stack to make a profit, and there just weren't enough of them willing to give me that. May be variance, may be not.

Either way, it's a habit that I've picked up on my path to continual poker improvement; I won't chalk it up to variance unless I actually start winning with the same game next time I try.

I took a bit of a break, went back to the very comfortable NL5 to grind up to $600 (I actually made it to $601!). Then I decided to move half my roll back over to PokerStars to try some tournaments. I've been eying the knockout tournaments lately and decided to try mass multitabling tournaments this Sunday, trying out both Stars and Full Tilt. I'm glad I did; I made another $23 on 20 games of assorted $1.75, $3.30, and $6.50 90 man knockouts spread out over both Stars and Full Tilt. Stars treated me much better, really. I only broke even on Full Tilt; all my profit came from Stars. The Stars structure is slower, and therefore has less variance, but it takes a good deal longer to finish a tournament... I'm on the fence as for which structure I like more.

On a related note, Rush Poker prepares you really, really well for some important aspects of mass multi-tabling tournaments. Solid fundamentals and quick decisions are all you really need to win at these low level stakes. The fish are plenty, and the bounties really bring out the crazy in people...

Also on a somewhat less related note, the inspirational true story of Boku87 gives me hope! This crazy robot (because really, what human can play that much?) took a $100 bankroll and turned it into $10000... all in 15 days, over about 7,000 sit n gos. How he fit in that much volume (50-tabling 500-600 games a day) boggles my mind...