July 2010

Had an absolutely sick month . Running real good at the $25NL and stepped up stakes early about a week ago... ran good there too! The field is still terrible and I'm learning a tonne as I'm going as well as turning a solid profit!

+$610 in 15,005 hands. I'm running above EV (EV line is at around $475) and I'm also conscious of running extremely well in terms of connecting with boards and coolering people (something which isnt measured by all-in EV). Definitely been on the right side of preflop confrontations more often than not this month, and got paid off on a bunch of sets etc. The results of this month are encouraging but I'm under no illusion that I can keep up this sort of winrate. I'm just happy to keep on grinding and if I'm making good decisions then that's enough for me. It's also important to me that I keep learning as much as I can to make sure I don't start autopiloting or getting into bad habits, which I think is far too easy to do. And hey, I exceeded my volume target for the month too (albeit only by 5 hands :P)

Added to this month I've got ~$120 of rakeback coming in. Given the fact that the majority of my month (10500 hands) has been at $25NL, this means that if I continue grinding exclusively at $50NL I can only expect this to increase in future months! Rakeback is a sweet thing to have, giving you a load of buy-ins for free to get you through bad months, put you in profit when you break even and add to the profitable months to make them extra sweet.

I also went to a casino last night and ran deep into the tournament which they held. I'll give a tournament report as a separate post, but that netted me about £310 profit. Its all a bit overwhelming if I'm honest because as I'm only 18 and not yet at uni its all a huge amount of money to me. I guess the utility of these winnings will decrease once I'm at uni and having to pay a load of bills!

So I guess converting the live winnings and adding it all up puts me up $1200 this month... it took me the best part of a year to make four figures when I first started!

August is going to be more of the same for me, though i won't set myself any strict volume target. I'll keep grinding the $50NL, watching training videos and posting hands in forums to improve and hopefully I'll continue to run well. GL to all of you, hope you all achieve great things in August 2010!

-Alex Burlton