Breaking even

It's awesome to break even.

I'm serious.  I mentioned this before - if I can hold my own and not lose any money at the table on the iPoker network, I can make money over the course of the month from bonus awards and rakeback.

I could only be happier with how my bumpy ride through April ended if I thought I was good enough to actually win money in these games.

Never mind the variance (it's a $400 swing from the lowest to highest point) - I lost 93 cents.  How much closer to breaking even could I possibly get?

When you add everything up, this puts me up over $400 on the month; $170 in bonus already released, $115 in rakeback to come, a $100 win from a VIP freeroll in the bank and enough player points earned to put me a quarter of the way to redeeming for another iPod nano (figure it's worth about $30; I got £90 for the last one on eBay).

The freeroll is a $2,000 prize pool, usually with about 100 runners making it worth about $20 per week.  It's the first time I've made the money, and I wasn't sure whether to count it in my monthly haul but as the amount I won is about the same as the EV of playing in it every week I figured I probably should.

I was an overall loser on fixed-limit games but an overall winner on no-limit - but somehow the two numbers cancelled each other out almost exactly.

That 6.76% of hands won figure on $2/$4 is a bit worrying.  Yes, I play tight.  No, I wouldn't expect to win 10% of hands in a full-ring game (I'd hope to win larger than average pots to offset this).  But I need to work out whether I've just had some bad luck, or if I've been giving up pots too easily.

A bit more analysis on Poker Tracker also shows that when you total up all the hands that I called a raise on the big blind, I lost more money than I would have done if I'd simply folded every one of them.  I'm profitable when I re-raise (thankfully - it's almost always with premium cards!) but I need to take more care when it costs an extra small bet to play mediocre cards out-of-position.  I'm happy to have found the leak so that I can try to do something about it.

However it's a reassuring start to the first month that I've played no-limit on iPoker for anything more than a few short sessions.  The sample size is still pretty insignificant, but the row is green and that's about as much as I could ask for.

Let's see if I can't win a few cents this month.