Midyear Update

Well, the first half of the year was nothing like what I expected, but I guess there is a damn good reason for that. For those that haven't heard, there was a huge cheating scandal in the double or nothing SNGs on PokerStars. Basically there were about 40 players, all from the area of Wenzhou, China, who were playing these SNGs together and colluding together. When one of the "team" needed chips, then a teammate would fold their BB to that player. If one of them had a huge stack and another was shortstacked, they would take extra risks to try and knock players out and help their shortstack friend make the money.

When all was said and done, those players profited about $750,000 from the double or nothing SNGs. The peak of their activity took place in January and most of them were finally caught by PokerStars by February 18th. I guess I'm relieved and disappointed at the same time. There is a sense of relief b/c my results were very poor during those first 6 weeks of 2010, but now I know that it was not all my own doing and that the cheating scandal caused many of the players in the DoNs to perform much worse than usual. I'm extremely disappointed though that something of this magnitude could go unnoticed for so long. I understand there will always be a couple players who attempt to collude, but never would I imagine that it could happen to this extent with so many players and for such a long time.

I am also disappointed b/c I had pretty high expectations for 2010, but they took a severe hit due to this scandal. I had planned on achieving Supernova Elite (1 million VPPs) this year, and I was well on my way towards that goal early in February, but I pretty much lost all desire to play when I was losing quite a bit of money early on, which I now know was caused in large part by the cheaters. As of 2/14, I had 120k VPP, but I pretty much gave up on poker for awhile and as of 6/30 only had 155k.

I've debated whether or not to make another attempt at SNE. Now that I know the games are safer than they were in January, I may move back primarily to the $104 DoNs and play 25-32 tables at a time. This would give me anywhere from 700 to 900 VPPs per hour depending on the time of day, and mean I'd need to play approx. 6.2 hours per day for the rest of the year in order to hit SNE. I feel like I've been taking it way too easy since 2/14 and I need to buckle down and work hard for the rest of the year, and having SNE as a final goal is a good way to motivate myself.

So the new plan for now will be to try and get in 8-10 hours on Sunday-Thursday and get in about 4 hours on Friday or Saturday. Hopefully the games will be safe enough and easy enough where I'm able to be a slight winner in them. I probably can't tolerate losing in order to get SNE, but it would surely be worth it so long as I can breakeven or be a slight winner in these games. So that's the plan for now, time will tell if I can consistently put in 6+ hour days with no break and get the job done.