Secrets of the Amateurs

2008 wrap-up to follow [1], but first the month of December ; thanks to a storming run on Full Tilt (of all sites), I ended up $38.9K in, $55.5K out for a $16.6K profit. It's been insane on FT for the last 10 days or so, as you can see here. It's even better if you check out the monthly summaries, which show a profit close enough to zero for 23 months, and then $28K in December.

What We Learned This Month

Quite a lot. While of course the FT run was mostly due to massive rungood, it was also slightly down to perseverance on the site, after reminding myself that there was really no reason I shouldn't be winning on it, and a general tightening up/slowing down that I have been implementing in the last couple of weeks. Basically trying not to re-steal every single time it looks on, and convincing myself that not everyone is always re-stealing on me either, especially in the smaller tournaments. I think the games are getting softer and softer (more on this later), and the softer they get, the better it is just to play ABC and wait for them to spew horrifically.

I have also formulated some better ideas for dealing with limpers pre-flop, and am finding more and more spots where I auto-call (or auto-shove) and suddenly think "oh no, he must have X", which he does. There's that AK play below, and there was another on Party a few days ago where I should really have found a fold with QQ even though I was only 16BB deep. The more of these spots I can turn into actual folds, the better I should do, at least until I actually fold something wrongly, which generally aligns the subconscious properly anyway once it happens enough, if you see what I mean.

[1] Cliff notes : I played twice as many tournaments as in 2007, and made twice as much money. Who'd have thunk it.