Poker-wise, the past two weeks have been pretty incredible with my bankroll growing about 20% during that time. I’ve admittedly been lucky and I’m well aware that I’m riding an upswing, but that doesn’t have to mean that I can’t be happy that it’s been going well.

I’m not letting it - or at least consciously trying to not letting it - affect my game. I’m still playing only one or two tables, I’m still thinking through most decisions more than I used to and since about two weeks back I’m also playing on a “100 Hands Only” rule. When I sit down to play, I only play 100 hands, simple as that. I load up PokerTracker so that when the hands-played shows 90+, I simply uncheck the “auto-post blinds” option and wait for the big blind to come around, then I’m done.

I do this, because I’m positive that I can keep 100% attention on the game for 100 hands. I’m not sure where my upper limit goes, but I know that after about two hours without breaks, I’m no longer fully there. I’m thinking about other things, maybe surfing the web (now THERE’S a sign that I’ve played for too long) or just generally can’t be bothered to think things through. I’m, simply put, not playing my A-game after 120 minutes. So I play for 100 hands, then I get up and do something else. It’s possible that I go back later in the evening and play another 100 hands, but since I don’t play for a living I can freely choose not to and not worry about it.

This has done some very good things for me. Since my upper limit is 100 hands, I try to make the most of them. And since I limit myself like this, I don’t really care if I’m up or down as much. I don’t go by “I get up and leave when I’m up $100″ or “cut losses at -$120″ or anything like that, I just play the 100 hands that I’ve set out to play, and then I’m done. It feels good and relaxing.

The downswide to playing a relatively small amount of hands on a table - if I play two tables, it’s only 50 on average for both of them - is that I miss out on some profit that I might find if I notice that some guy starts to tilt. I don’t get as solid reads on people as I might if I sat down longer. I play a larger portion of the time against “unknowns.” It’s hard for me to assign value to exactly how much this costs me, but I have a feeling that it’s not necessarily more than what it costs me to sit for too long and start to lose focus.

One other thing that is easier for me to do now that I’m playing shorter sessions is to think about hands that I’ve played poorly. If I play 500 hands in one go, it’s difficult to afterwards remember that hand where I fucked up a value bet on the river. If I play only 100, I more easily remember to think it through away from the table later on. That’s a nice side-effect that I wasn’t aware of before I started this… I dunno, can you call it an experiment? I’m not sure if I’ll always play just 100 hands from now on, but I’ll probably at some point start to up it a little bit. Right now, I play 100 hands in about 25-30 minutes and perhaps I’ll try to go for 45 minutes or an hour later on. I’ll let you know how that turns out.

I’m now playing mostly at $5/$10 by the way. As you may have guessed from the first paragraph, my first couple of sessions have ended up ahead which is always a blessing when you’re moving up. I don’t have a problem moving down if it should turn poorly, and I can always go back and re-build but it still feels psychologically very nice to get a nice buffer in my bankroll the first thing that happens when I move up. I wasn’t so lucky when I started playing $3/$6, heh. I moved up having been a big winner at $2/$4 and the cards just had it in for me. I won small pots and lost huge ones. Initially, it was mostly bad luck, but it was only logical for me to assume that I had to adjust somehow to the new opposition. So I overadjusted. Then I lost even more money and then I became weak and played scared. I went through about 20k hands before I was back where I started. Ugh.

The 8GB iPod I ordered from Stars (FPPs!) arrived in the mail yesterday. Anyone have any tips as to what I should be saving up for next?