So glad it’s June! I had my worst poker month (dollar-wise) ever in May. I guess the good thing is that it came after my best poker month ever in April (since playing HU). Unfortunately, both months pretty much cancelled out and I’m around break even playing poker this year. Yawn.
Unsurprisingly, I haven’t played a lot of games so far in 2014. The reason I was able to have my best/worst months despite lack of volume was that I raised my average buy-in due to playing heads-up turbos in addition to hypers. Last month I ran hot at my highest buy-in turbos and this month I ran bad. I also ran bad at everything else I played this month, so there’s also that 😛 Overall I ran 40 average buy-ins below EV which is pretty standard but still pretty annoying.
I’ve run bad all year which has been easy to do since I haven’t played many games. It honestly really sucks being unable to play volume because downswings seem to last forever. I have to just keep telling myself that this is the way it is while I’m sick and unable to put in the hours.
Due to my currently unstable medications, I’m not exactly sure when things will turn around and I’ll be able to put in more hours of poker. I’m really hoping it’ll be sooner than later, although I probably shouldn’t expect it as long as I’m tapering off prednisone. I hope that sometime in the next few months I’ll at least figure out which medication my liver and body can handle. And then hopefully I get off prednisone by the end of the year.
In addition to rust and variance and maintaining skill, I’ve also had to deal with the realization that I possibly can’t achieve what I wanted to achieve in poker before I got sick. Poker has been my life the past however many years. It’s been the only thing I’ve worked on, and it’s been a lot of time and effort to get to the stakes I’m at today.
It’s pretty depressing to realize that because of lupus and the fact that I can no longer put full time hours into the game, I probably can’t move up in stakes like I had wanted to last year. Last year I was playing some $300 HU hypers, but this year I definitely can’t do that. Moving up takes a lot of hours, hours that I don’t have right now.
I don’t think this will always be the case, but for now it definitely is. Thankfully I do well at the stakes I’m at now and I’ve worked pretty hard to ensure that I remain at the top of my game. At least if I keep doing that, I might have the option to pick up where I left off once my medication is figured out and my body becomes stable.
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