Change in Plans
I've never been one to stick with a plan for very long. Anyone who knows me well can attest to the fact that I will come up with a great new longterm plan, only to abandon it after only a couple days. Well, last blog I talked about focusing on the $52/54s for awhile, but I've scrapped that and I'm back to $104s!
I had a session yesterday at the $52/$54s where I lost $700ish and I decided that if I'm running like crap, I'm not gonna win money whether I'm playing $104s or $52s. I really like being able to accumulate a ton of points which is why I'm back at the $104s, with the occasional $52/$54/$108 thrown in when $104s aren't filling very quickly.
With the new plan in mind, I played a couple sessions today. A 4 hour session during prime hours where I got a whopping 4k VPPs, and a 3 hour session later in the night where I only got 2300 VPPs. That's an average of about 900 VPP/hour, and when you only need 2740 VPP/day to stay on pace for SNE, it will be fairly easy to achieve SNE. After today's big VPP day, I'm now up to 74,100 VPPs, and current SNE pace thru 1/25 is 68,500, so I'm starting to build a nice cushion. I'll be playing in the LAPT Punta del Este at the end of February, so I'd like to build up a 30k or so cushion above SNE pace by then.
You'll notice I didn't mention results from the 2 sessions today. My new gameplan regarding that is to not even glance at the cashier. I'm just gonna put in sessions, focus on playing well and getting VPPs, and let the results take care of themself. A couple times this year, I've felt like I had a great session, only to check the cashier and find that I didn't do as well as I had thought, and it kind of tilted me a bit. Not only that, but when I know I'm running terribly, I tend to not want to play as much, which will definitely hurt the chase for SNE. I will probably check the results for this week sometime Friday afternoon. I'll plan on only checking them once a week or so going forward and just focus on putting in hours instead of living and dying over the results of every damn session.
Comments
The most obvious difference between the 52s and the 104s is the number of regulars I see when the tournament starts. Usually I just put a quick note on someone when I've seen them in a ton of SNGs, so I guess you could consider them a regular. When I play 104s, usually 6-8 of the 9 opponents are regulars, and in 52s that number is probably only 2-5 out of 9.
So in the 52s, I think a lot of the regulars know you can sit back a little bit more and pick spots against the unknowns, or if you've built a decent stack, say 2k chips, then you can kinda wait for the unknowns to make a silly call on the bubble or blow up. In the 104s, you can't really rely on the unknowns to do something stupid, so I think a lot of the regs seem to take a lot more risks to accumulate chips, and this leads to some crazy calls at the 50/100 and 75/150 levels that I don't think they really need to make unless they're really hurting for chips.
Hi, I read you two allways, I hope you do very well with the 104 dons, I usually play the 52, and I think I have a winnning play, but this year it hasn´t been running very well and I am 1.5k down 
heh... I would like to know if you use any software to play the dons, and also how many dons do you play at the same time??
Good luck and thank you
Don't worry about the $1.5k downswing, I've probably had about 4 or 5 of those at $52s.
I usually play anywhere from 25-40 tables at once depending on how I feel at the time and how soft the games are.
The only software I use right now for DoNs is TableNinja which helps make registering quicker, closes all the annoying popups, closes the table when I bust/game ends, and helps a little bit with one button press for all ins and 2.5x BB raises.
Thank you! I had heard about Table Ninja, I ll try it now... good luck!
GL on your journey. oh, and stop calling me light in 104's. it was okay yesterday but i know its not good for me in the long run, it also hurt u.
what do u think the biggest difference is between 52's and 104's?, besides when you first start you get jewed all over the place. session today i played 8 104's. AA lost to 88 AIPF
KK lost to QQ AIPF
QQ lost to JJ AIPF
broke even on 104's though, -$32 is all.