First off, I’d like to apologize to the blog readers for my long absense and the lack of writing here. To be honest, I was trying to keep away from poker for a while, and for the life of me couldn’t think of anything to write about.

For a while there, I had found myself in a tilt-induced pitfall with my SnGs. I was doing fine at the $35 6-seaters for the first while, but the buyin was just big enough to make me tilt if I lost a few to beats or even poor play on my part. Needless to say, I’ve lost quite a bit from my initial deposit at Stars from that terrible streak (which also included a move - mostly unsuccesful of course - to cash games for a change of scenery). I mentioned in a previous thread about detaching your emotions from your game and that I could not bring myself to do so! I have a passion, coupled with a very impatient mindset, for the game that doesn’t allow me to win little bits at a time. My poker mind says “I want it all, and I want it now”. Of course this isn’t always the case with poker; at least not with single table tournaments. You win 3 or 4 times your buyin if you place first, which of course does not happen every game. The wins at the $35s were enough to satisfy that part of my mind that was so impatient; yet it was way too much to lose - if not in relation to my bankroll size, then in relation to how much my impatient mind could handle.

Anyways needless to say, I had to do something about this downward spiral to bankroll bankruptcy, and I moved both to $5 instead of $35, and changed to 9-seaters instead of the shorthanded 6-seaters. Only 11 games into my new games, hardly enough to make any assumptions that my play will continue like this, but I’ve been doing very well by my standards. ITM of %73, ROI of %86, net winnings of $52 - and most importantly I’m learning to be patient. The 9-seaters have a maximum return of $22.50 - or $17 profit - not much compared to the ~$100 profit at the $35s, but solid, consistent profit nonetheless. Another thing is that they take much longer than 6-seaters, and so require more patience aswell; many of my 6-seater games were done within 20 minutes as opposed to the usual 50 minutes or 1 hour the 9-seaters take. This patience is teaching me the important lesson that with SnGs, your profits come in small, consistent chunks. They’re not like MTTs where when you hit final table, you get a very nice payoff, or like cash games where you can profit nicely if you get your hands paid off well enough. Of course any fool knows this, even me, but I got too involved in my SnGs and was just plain too impatient.

The main point I am trying to make is: poker requires patience. Alot of people hear this, but they don’t take it to heart. It’s something I’ve learned with personal experience as of late, and although I’m still an restless, $6000 bankroll-chasing poker fanatic, I now realize that my goals cannot be reached without patience. People don’t get rich overnight with poker (ok that’s a lie…how about “most people don’t…”), but rather make their profit through patient and solid play over the course of months.

On a sidenote, I’ve decided that I also might play two tables instead of one to increase my winrate, as I don’t have as much time to play as I used to. As I’ve previously mentioned in the forums, I’ve recently found out that I have a slight case of ADD, and my own attention span could definitely not deal with two tables. I’ve decided to buy PAHud ($25 USD) for this purpose, so as not to have to try and get reads on 18 players simutaneously by myself, and let the software do the work. I’ve been using the demo version of the software to test it out, and although SnGs are not it’s ideal application due to players changing speeds and such during the game, it’s still very helpful.