700 club?

So on Thursday night/Friday morning I reported that I fell short of $600 and had been kinda treading water for a few days having breached the $600 mark but without closing above it. Fast forward 24 hours or so and not only have I pushed past the $600 mark but I drove straight through it and passed the $700 mark as well. That puts me across the half way mark of the approximately $400 starting point and the $1000 goal. I am (temporarily) killing these $5 Super Turbos. 128 games (meaningless stats-wise), in the money 41%, a wholly unrealistic 16% ROI, and a housing bubble looking graph. The red line indicates my luck adjusted winnings which shows that I should just merely be doing well and not outrageous. I know this ride can't last forever and I'm not wanting/expecting it to. I'm just glad to be EV+ at all and would be completely satisfied with 1/3 the ROI that I'm currently enjoying. I'm just hoping to avoid a giant crash and would prefer that when the tides turn that I regress into an EV neutral player until the graph flattens out to something more normal looking. But for now I got a huge spike that puts me about 12 days ahead of pace for the Labor Day goal so I'll try to nurse that cash infusion across the finish line.

Monster day

$56 added to the bankroll Friday. Yeah, I know this is an aberration. Adding 10% to the bankroll is obviously a pace that cannot be kept up. But I'm totally willing to soak up the positive side of high variance when it happens to balance out the times when I'm totally getting coolered. Still, 111 $5 tourneys running at a 8.9% ROI clip, I'll take it. Currently at $662.28.

Closed short of $600 again

I ended up dropping a few buy-ins...actually quite a few. At one point my cashier window read $514, which is one heck of an upswing from the $14 I had in June but still well off the peak for the day of about $570. Those $5.30 buy ins add up quickly and going for a streak without cashing will drop my total down quite a bit. The good news is that picking up a win adds $20 (OK, $19.50, but close enough) to the roll and gets it healthy in a hurry. Those are the biggest swings dollar wise and not that trivial percentage wise either. Even after getting some of that money back my HEM chart was well off of the previous numbers. Just like spring training, it's easy to either embrace or ignore the numbers...whichever makes you feel better. I dipped down far enough that my cash line actually submarined my EV line which is not all bad since I was still EV+ even "running bad" and the numbers imply that I am even more EV+. Even though I fell short of $600 by $11 bucks or so I still cleared my daily quota and retain an approximately three day cushion compared to the pace line.

Shifting to Super Turbo Sit and Go tourneys

Based on the previous success that I'd had with Super Turbo SnG tourneys I've decided to concentrate all efforts on that front. I have even put promotions and bonuses in second position which is a pretty big move since those are basically got me where I am now. So far it seems that my previous theory is correct - that I am going to be more profitable playing higher quality/less quantity since my game fell off considerably as I tried to clear points. So for now all I'm going to "push" for is the Iron Man one-a-day bonus which just means earning one point/day (which one SnG clears) and the minimum bronze level in order to keep my overall Iron Man monthly streak intact. Bronze level only requires 20 days at 50 points which I've been clearing lately without difficulty.

The other big news is that I'm moving on up stakes to the $5 + .30 SnGs. There are a couple of reasons for that. First of all, keeping the stakes relevant to my roll helps to make sure I don't fall asleep at the wheel. Being excessively over-rolled leads to a laissez-faire attitude since the stakes are too low to make bad play really sting. Secondly, the rake is slightly lower percentage-wise. $2+.15 is a 7.5% rake whereas $5+.30 is only 6%.

So far so good. Granted this is a near meaningless sample size of only 50 of them but my stats at this point are 12.6% ROI which is way good, unsustainably good. 38% in the money, which is normally scorching but considering that 33% of the six man field makes the money is merely just good. According to HEM all that adds up to $33.50 of profit and a $8.97 hourly rate. HEM also says that I am an essentially break even player after adjusting for luck. I'd say the the truth lies somewhere in between me just treading water and being an SnG savant but we know more after I get more tourneys under my belt.

Oh, and one other thing. I am currently at $613.97 and hope to close above six bills tonight. After flirting with the $600 barrier for almost a week I feel like I got the ship headed solidly in the right direction and hope to get that milestone further behind me.

MMM: Bronze, silver, gold, iron?

Sushi,


Congrats on clearing your Iron Man mid-year bonus. Are you going to go for the full $600 year end bonus by clearing the iron level each month for the rest of the year?


Allen C.
Riverside CA

Allen,

Unsure. I cleared 200 points for every day so far in July and have already qualified for iron level. However, I'm pretty sure that grinding out that many points is detrimental to my roll since I'm just odometer watching instead of concentrating on playing well. Since I've ground out my status for this month already I'm going to take it easy for the rest of the month and see how my roll does. It's hard to quantify how much the perks are worth for iron level since there are so many factors involved. But as far as the year end bonus goes, getting the entire $600 bonus equates to about $3/day. Considering that I reach silver level ($1.50/day) without much of an effort, the incremental difference is not that much. I've just noticed too many times when I've played poorly as I am reaching the last 10%-20% of my points for the day. Since I've finally found something that I'm reasonably EV+ at against the rake I feel the best thing to do now is concentrate on making money from that and let the bonuses come as they may. I will still be participating in Iron Man but just not pressing to max it out.

Sushi Cowboy

600

Made up a lot of ground at the STs tonight moving from the mid $550's to cresting above $600 for a while before giving some back. Still have a bunch more to play today and might close the day over $600 but for now I'm just glad to have cards fall my way enough to make up so much deficit from yesterday (and then some).

Down a bunch, all at ST SnGs

According to "the data" I am EV+ at the Super Turbos so I decided that today I'd play only STs and see how EV+ I am. The answer, for today at least, is not much. Down about $35 for the day which takes my total down to the $550-560 neighborhood after having stood at the edge of $600 earlier today. Very disappointing results given how close I was to getting past six bills.

The nice thing about the Sit and Go tourneys is that it is more difficult (not impossible mind you) to tilt off chips. Steam calling is tempered quite a bit by the fact that you need to return to square one if you biff of that tourney by making a stupid move. I don't really feel like I played poorly or tilted. I definitely noticed when someone caught a two or three outer but I don't feel that it changed my play. Just couldn't keep dominated hands from pulling out victories and kept finding players in the blinds with huge hands. Cards just didn't go my way but the chart says I'm up $150 in STs this month so I'll stick to the program.

Bam! That was quick.

New cashier total reads $512.00 after gluing the $250 mid-year bonus onto my existing cashier total. Sweet! Looking forward to the year end bonus since I'm planning to have $600 waiting to clear in January.

Release the bonus!

Just got done with today's 200 points which also happened to be enough to reach the 5000 points needed to clear the mid-year bonus so sometime in the near future I should see another $250 plop into my cashier window. I made about three shiny dollars at the tables today but add in bonus and rakeback and I'm up about $20 for the day which pushes the chart up to a new high water mark of $568.88.

Got some back

Played some more and SnG'ed about $20 back for today to bring my balance for the day back to a more respectable -$12 which would have been pretty much dead even on a normal rakeback day so I'm feeling OK about today even though it ended up in the red. Considering how badly I tilted off chips to come back to even (apart from RB aberration) I feel like it's a win.

Steaming off some chips

The tilt session was inevitable I guess and it was today. I'm down $30 for the day and that number is exacerbated by the fact that I got negative rake today. Instead of positive $6 like normal I got about the same amount but in reverse since my $50 bonus was applied against yesterday's rake. Not a good combo and that marks a two day losing streak.

Week 1 check-in: Up $172.94

Totally satisfied with where I am so far. Only had a few tilt hands but mostly have been keeping everything even keel. Funny that I made basically the same profit in the past week as I did in the first three months of the year during Cake II. Had a bad day making kings hold up yesterday which contributed to my overall loss at the tables of about seven bucks. Everything else is from RB and bonuses, which will be drying up in a little while. In an effort to backfill that revenue stream I've switched my Iron Man preferences to taking bonus medals instead of participating in the freerolls based on advice from the 2+2 forums. For bronze or silver levels they recommend the freerolls but for gold or iron they say that the tourneys are much tougher and not the easy money that the other tourneys are. So I think the lower variance way to monetize my Iron Man work is to get bonus medals and buy tourney tickets from the store so I can play in matrix format tourneys and hopefully get some cash out of the Iron Man work I've done.

Back up to being down three bucks

Played some more this morning. Had Rush come out OK to add a few bucks. Ran pretty good at the ST SnG tables. Add in six bucks of RB from yesterday and some more mid-year bonus and I'm only down three bucks for the day which is way better than being down thirty. It is actually my first net loss day on the chart but I'm trying to make rational decisions about not trying to chase down a winning day at the expense of playing poorly. I cleared my 200 points for the day, and incidentally cleared gold level Iron Man already this month, so I'm content with just taking a loss for the day and not worrying about it. I got other stuff to take care of today so I'll just write this day off as being largely due to a few suckouts for stacks. Not worried about it as I'm still over $100 above pace which translates to 9+ days of cushion.

Calling it a night

Spent a couple thousand hands at .02/.05 Rush and basically treaded water. Nothing much to report. Switched over to ST SnG play and ended up a little. Went over to .05/.10 Rush and things started to fall apart. Top set gets sucked out by flush draw. KK vs Ax loses three times after getting them in light pre flop each time. Finally get KK vs QQ and he spikes a Q on the flop. AK vs AA on a K high flop. Stuff like that. Decide to switch back to ST SnG to change things up...except nothing changed. Dominating hands don't hold. Premium pair loses against A/rag. Reasonable shove hands running into AA in the BB. End up losing a bunch there as well. Down about $30 for the night and I'm going to pull the plug on myself before I do any more damage to the roll.

MMM: $564?

Hey Sushi,


Me again. Well it looks like you've had quite the month taking your $14 cashier balance to 40 times that now. So now I have a different bankroll management question for you. When are you going to move up? You're still playing the same Rush levels and SnG tourneys as you did over an order of magnitude ago.

Jesus F.

Pacific Palisades, CA

Hey Jesus,

Yeah, I know. Actually I moved *down* in stakes at Rush. I am back down at .02/.05 instead of the .05/.10 tables in an effort to be more EV+. But you're right, I am buying into them for the minimum $2, roughly the same as my $2 + .15 SnG tourneys. I know you're good enough at math to see that those buy ins are about 1/3 of one percent, a far cry from having 15% of my roll riding on one table, and well below usual BRM standards. Right now I'm so focused on the Cake 1000 challenge that I don't want to mess with the success I've been having. I'll probably move back to the .05/.10 tables for Rush and see how my progress goes. I'm still working on my Iron Man quota for the month and the nickel tables take...well...about twice as long to churn points as the dime tables so moving up will save me some time.

The ironic thing is that I think being too overrolled was what led, in part, to my earlier downswing. When the stakes just seem too irrelevant then my play gets sloppy and the bankroll takes a hit accordingly. Having more pronounced consequences for a bad call keeps your game sharper since you know it will take a chunk out of your roll instead of just a sliver of it. Moving up stakes might also be part of the equation of how to make up for the absence of bonus income coming up soon. I think I'll ride out the current stakes for the rest of July at least. That will finish off my mid-year bonus and give me some time to see where the chart goes without assistance.

Thanks for the mail!

Sushi Cowboy

I, too, will miss week one I'm sure

Adam had posted over at his blog that he misses week one. I'm not looking back at week one but I'm sure I will miss it as well. I had a couple hot sessions, one at Rush, and one at ST SnGs, but mostly have been pulling down bonuses like a banshee: $50 for playing Rush and my mid-year bonus who's time is running out. Fortunately those perks have given me a huge head start and it's better to be ahead of the curve than behind it but I'm also very aware of the fact that if I cannot match the slope of my goal line then I will eventually run underneath it. The good news is that I no longer need to play as much Rush since I cleared the Rush Week bonus so I can put in more time a more EV+ endeavors like the ST SnGs. I'm also have a few days of slack for hitting Iron level this month since I've cleared 200 points every day of July so far so I am running bad I can just pull the plug early and play another day.

Worried about where the other $500 will come from. I have a 50 days left and bring in about $6/day in rakeback for $300. I have about $50 left on my midyear bonus. That leaves me $150 short assuming exactly break even play. I have my August freerolls coming up and my August and September Iron Man medals that I can use to enter into Steps tourneys and, if things go well, move up the staircase and convert a Step 3 ticket over to a cash tourney like I did last month for about $28. Not sure if that will make up for the difference or not.

One half K

Just passed the five century mark. Lost about $7 at nickel Rush thanks largely to a my kings getting cracked by an untimely queen showing up on the board and the same thing when an aggro got caught overplaying his jacks then got rewarded for it. But I put in my 100 points worth of Rush play which got me the other half of my $50 bonus so my current roll (including cashier, rakeback, accrued mid-year bonus, and the Rush bonus) is currently $500.27.

No sooner said than done

As mentioned previously, it would take me punting off huge chunks of my bankroll to miss the 1/2 K mark in the next three days. Well, I did just that. A combination of suboptimal play, being tired, too long of a session, bad luck, and a slight flirtation with .10/.25 Rush dropped me down about $50 today. Fortunately I went on an absolute torrid run on the Super Turbo SnGs and patched up most of that. I'm net up for the day so far but considering I got about $10 in rakeback and another $10+ in mid-week bonus for the day I'm actually doing rather poorly and could not even sustain break even today. Still considering that my progress line took a big dip down earlier in the day I'll settle for coming out ahead after having the extras thrown in.

The "other" Rush poker approach

So occasionally I mix up my approach to Rush and get uber-aggro. That was much of my profit over the past day. The alternate approach is pretty simple: if it is folded to me then I will open with a pot sized bet with any two cards. If I nail the flop I will continue with pot sized bet on the flop and re-assess from there. If I miss then I just dump it and move on. I will also re-raise with JJ, QQ, and AK and mostly shove with KK and AA. Nothing but good ol' aggression which actually ends up not being that high variance either since, at .05/.10, you're only investing .35 at a time pre-flop most of the time. Granted, you are doing it a ton of times but such a small amount means very small moves in the graph. Though more profitable, this approach is far far slower than my normal one since you not only need to wait for the action to get to you but also have to wait for everyone behind you to act as well. Furthermore, if you do take down the pot without a fight as desired, you will pick up some change but get no Full Tilt Points to show for it since there was no flop and thus no rake. I play either way, just depends on my mood and the amount of time I want to spend.

Big uptick

Today has been very good for the bankroll. I'm up three cents shy of $30 on the tables. I'm worked off $17.77 more from the mid-year bonus. My morning rakeback report gave me $8.34 for yesterday's play. And since it was my fourth day of clearing 100 points or more at Rush I've earned $25 of the $50 that I will get for playing all week. All told that's an $81.08 push in the right direction and it puts me way ahead of pace for now. Grand total now stands at $469.80 and I have my eyes firmly set on going through the $500 barrier within three days since I'll get another $25 from my Rush week promo bonus, about $30 from mid-year bonus, and about another $20 in rakeback. As long as I don't punt off huge amounts on the table then it should be a milk run to half a grand.

Blog...now with pretty picture at top

Got my act together and made a chart for tracking my bankroll while also tracking it to my goal of hitting $1K by Labor Day. The straight blue line is the pace I'd need to meet or beat to take my roll from $388.72 that I closed at yesterday to the $1000 that I hope to reach by September 6. I am adding in the real time accrual of my mid-year bonus since that money is already earned even though it isn't yet released into my account. The $25/$50 bonus for Rush week I am omitting since that has not technically been earned yet though I see no issues to doing so. The red line is my current progress. I had things go well for me today at the super turbo SnGs and I busted through the $400 mark today. It is still seriously hard for me to cope with the fact that I was staring at $14 in my cashier window less than a month ago.

It's nice to be ahead of pace of course but I also am cognizant that I am getting an extra $10/day boost from my mid-year bonus currently and I have about ten more days where I will be getting that tacked on to my roll. After I play through enough to clear my entire bonus I'll get a gigantic $250 added to my cashier but I will also stop getting a head start on each day. The pace I need to track to is $11.32 per day. I usually get six bucks and change from rakeback per day which means I'm going to need to actually play well enough to snag a few more bucks per day to make it on time. The chart will tell how things are going.

Playing Rush hands

Adam said he was thinking about straying back into Rush poker and was looking for advice so I figured I'd just go ahead and publish my hand standards.

I basically fold everything except:

AK raise or call a single raise then play if I hit A or K. Possibly cbet a miss in position but usually not, but that's just my style. I know I'm giving up some equity here but it is just easier and faster for me to bail on the hand and move on to another.

AA raise, re-raise, or shove pre. I don't try to play these tricky because anyone who will go broke with their hand post-flop will usually do so pre. If there is already isolation I might flat instead of four bet so I don't scare off JJ or QQ but that's rare. Usually I just shove when I find someone that interested because some many donks shove AK trying to look strong and other players know it so a shove can induce a call from even small pairs even though, if they'd think about it, they are a flip *at best* but once you make a big pot people get greedy.

KK, actually more likely to shove pre here than with AA because I don't like getting bluffed out by an A on the flop.

22-QQ raise if first to pot and in MP or later. TT-QQ raise if first to pot in any position. Small or mid pairs limp if previous limper(s) and set mine. If there is a raise in front of me I'm pretty much dumping 22-QQ and moving on. They end up playing much the same since anyone who is getting frisky has AA, KK, or AK and there is no substantial difference between ducks and queens at that point. Every so often you'll catch someone with JJ or TT but not enough (in my book) to justify stacking off in coin flips or with an underpair. I used to get real defensive about getting re-raised with QQ and get stubborn with them then stack off to AA or lose a coin flip with AK. It's taken a lot of lost hands and money to finally just condition myself to ask "would I put money in here with 22?" because that is basically the same hand.

Steals. I used to steal a lot more in the hi-jack, cutoff, or button when it was folded to me. A min-raise is not going to cut it. Yes, some people will have the auto-fold button on but a min just ends up getting called and you'll have to play poker. If you're going to steal then just pot it. However, steals are so common from there that re-steals from the button or blind makes stealing a hassle sometimes. Nowadays I pretty much don't bother because of the playback and the fact that you need to wait for everyone to fold to you all around the table (I play full ring Rush) until you can try to steal.

I also buy in for minimum and cash out after doubling up as long as I double up to more thank 150% or so of my stack. You have to close your window but once you do you can buy in for min again. Rush is a rat holers paradise. As such their min buy is larger than at the normal ring tables, 40bb instead of 20bb. As the saying goes, I'm not here to make friends.

I know that this is suboptimal play but those are the guidelines I use because my goal is merely to break even and plow through as many hands as possible in the shortest amount of times. Playing four tables in the Rush format also means that I do not bother trying to get reads on players. I focus on my cards and my cards only. When I'm making origami and folding everything due to either nitting up or being card dead I'll clear 2000 hands/hour (500 hands/hour/table). Average though is closer to 1600 and on a slow day because I'm having to play hands out it can dip down to even less than that.

Other tidbits:
For whatever reason, re-raising the very deep stacked players pot sized bets very often gets them to fold. I don't know why.

I have found that the stereotype of aggro Europeans, especially eastern, is true enough that I will knock my standards down half a notch for them. i.e. stacking off with QQ or AK.

According to HEM and my (admittedly not huge sample size) numbers, stacking off with AK pre-flop is EV-. I forget the exact numbers but QQ was either EV- or only slightly EV+ that I also have stopped doing that in favor of finding spots where I am a substantial favorite. The only winner when playing tons of coin flips is Full Tilt.

.02/.05 is, not surprisingly, softer than .05/.10 which I normally play since players will stack off lighter. If I am looking to do a little bankroll repair I might move down to playing nickels but usually I stick to dimes because it takes so long to accrue points at .02/.05.

Well, that's all I can think of for now. Comment or email if you have any questions.

1K by Labor day?

So I brought up the 1K race idea at poker last night and after giving our target dates Marshall quipped that it was more like a walk than a race so I'm going to set a much more aggressive end date now. Instead of mid-February I'm looking at Labor Day (2010 that is) as my new target date for hitting $1000.

Here's the basic components of how I hope to get there:

$200.48 Current cashier balance
$250.00 Mid year bonus which will clear before the end of July at current pace
$50.00 Rush poker bonus which will clear next week
$405.00 in rakeback at approximately 45/week for nine weeks (including the previous Tue-Mon period which hasn't been paid out yet)

All that totals up to $905.48 assuming that I do nothing more than break even on the tables. I'm looking to make up the difference in EV+ play and freerolls. Reviewing the numbers makes this seem reasonable enough on paper. Profiting $10/week between now and Labor Day seems plenty doable but the challenge is going to be, as it always is, to not tilt off huge chunks of bankroll and to do that will require a lot of discipline. Fortunately, having a set goal and a set date will help me keep things on track I think/hope. Even Cake Challenge II didn't provide as much guidance since it only provided an end date without a target dollar value. Having both will provide a roadmap to the target so I can easily detect if I am straying off course and put in corrective measures quickly.

We'll see how this goes...

MMM: $14?

Mr. Cowboy,


Could you explain your bankroll management standards while playing $2+.15 tourneys when you only had $14 in your account?


Jesus F.
Pacific Palisades, CA

Jesus, it's good to hear from you.

Well to be honest I did have have rakeback coming to me as well so I knew that worst case scenario would be that I would have to wait until that got credited to my account. Still, a $2 tourney is not proper BRM even with the rakeback accounted for. I realized at the time that I was violating my BRM rules but there were a couple things going on. First of all, I felt that I was EV+ against those SnG tourneys and that I had just had an extended stretch of run bad. If you're going to give me 2:1 on heads or tails I am going to take it because there is an edge. If I lose a bunch in a row I'm still going to take it because I know the numbers will even out eventually. Secondly, after winning the April 1 deadline prop bet I really had just been aimlessly wandering and decided that I'd be better off bumping up the stakes so that I pay more serious attention. When losing a microstakes buy in is so insignificant to overall bankroll it is easy to play poorly because any one buy in does not impact your roll very much. But like death from a thousand cuts it will eventually ruin you. So I increased the amount at stake and it shook me out of my funk. Yes, I took a serious nose dive but I have come back with a vengeance and am surging like a banshee. As I've noted before, the biggest challenge is all mental game management. Though poker skill is part of it of course, the biggest risk is going on tilt or other mental lapses. We'll see how my head holds together on the way to $1000.

Sushi Cowboy.

Rush Week

Yet another bonus available to me this week. Playing Rush poker is worth anywhere from $5 to $250 depending on how many points you earn and how many days you earn them. Entry level is 10 points/day, mid-tier is 100, and the big bucks go out to those who churn 1000 points/day. I'm targeting 100/day for all seven days of Rush week which will be worth $50. A nice chunk of change for clearing points that I am already cranking out.

Nice day at Rush today. Played nitty and raked in KK over QQ four times today. Also got KK vs QQ and AA vs KK but lost when they hit their sets. Still, solid progress.

Cashier is at $225.58 and I've passed the halfway point of my mid-year bonus which is now at $126.88. Throw in an esimated $24 in rakeback and I'm sitting $376.46 and should tick past $400 sometime this week. Really feel like I should be able to get halfway to 1K by the end of July. Sorry I don't have pretty charts currently. Part of the problem is that my SnG stats don't roll up on the same chart as my cash game play so I'll need to cobble something together but I'll throw something up on the blog before too long.

This...is...POKER!

OK, I had that one all saved up for when I break the $300 mark. 300. Get it? Like "This is Sparta!"

Have to say that it has been a rough ride and I didn't really think that the road from $240 at the end of Q1 to $300 would go through the $14 neighborhood. Not by a longshot. But now that I'm back on track, in the right bankroll zone, and headed in the right direction, I'm really locked in on the $1000 barrier and want to reel it in.

What's been happening?

Yes, I know that the blog has been on a rather extended hiatus. A few things have transpired since last post so here's the update on the past couple months.

* Still playing every day. In order to qualify for the One-a-Day freeroll I need at least one Full Tilt Point per day and I have been clearing that by a comfortable margin. On an "off" day I may only get 30-40 but usually I have 50 minimum and more often 100 or more. Beginning in July I have been targeting 200 points/day which qualifies me for "Iron" status, their highest rung in the Iron Man ladder. So far in July I've nailed it every day.

* I've added in playing $2 + .15 Super Turbo Sit and Go tourneys. T300 starting stacks, 15/30 starting blinds, 3 minutes per level. Feel quite comfortable with these. I play them four at a time and need 1 win or two seconds to basically break even. Anything above that is sugar.

* I absolutely torched massive chunks of my bankroll. I certainly will own up to donking off plenty of it but I will also give credit to epic run bad. You know, two outers, three outers, runner-runners, etc. The suckouts we all know and love but just in such historic proportions that it was ridiculous. At one point my cashier total was $14 and change though I had some rakeback in my back pocket. Still buying into $2 tourneys with $14 in the bank is questionable BRM.

* Cashed in 7th in a freeroll, good for $45.

However, Adam has lit a fire under me since he started talking about going $1000 or bust so I've jumped on his bandwagon and have the same target in sight. From my nadir of <$15 I am now well above that thanks to shedding my run-bad, more focused play, and having a carrot to after. In the past few weeks my cashier window has been run up to $205.23.

The big news though is that I am currently clearing my mid-year bonus. Since I had two months of silver and two months of gold I have $250 worth of bonus available to me that I clear at the rate of one nickel per FT point. Since I've been churning 200 points per day that is about $10 per day and I'm halfway done and will have no problem clearing the full amount by August 14, the deadline. Combine the bonus with roughly $6/day in rakeback and all I have to do is break even at the tables to net out about $16/day while still clearing my bonus.

My total assets at this point are $205.23 (cashier) + $21.64 (rakeback) + $118 (bonus) = $344.87.

I have another $132 coming from my bonus which I have not cleared yet so my projected total in a couple weeks should be about $475. ASSUMING that I don't decimate my roll and can stay on the current pace I will qualify for a $600 year end bonus which I can start clearing in January. I would need to push 267 points/day in order to clear the full amount but if I did then that would put me well above $1000 so I see mid February as the latest I should hit one grand. If things go well and I can pull in some more freeroll cashes then so much the better. Heck, if I start playing poker well then I might even get get there much sooner.

To my loyal reader(s), sorry for the extended absence. Now that I have a goal to shoot for I will be updating the blog regularly again with news.