A man with a plan

I've got my drive back to play poker now that I've started grinding the Sit and Go's again. I'm currently still on the $11 games but have worked out a plan to move up the stakes.

Having played the last few nights I've managed to get my Party bankroll up to over £500 and about $900. In that time I've played 19 games, cashing in over half of them (10), winning 4, coming 2nd in 4 and 3rd twice. So over this small sample I've managed to win $171 with a ROI of 81%!!! Obviously I'm loving the fact that I seem to be running so good and hope that is in part down to playing good as well so long may it continue although I expect that ROI to drop when "variance/doomswitch" inevitably kicks in.

So to the plan...

Basically I'm going to focus on Party Poker again as it seems the softness of the games there far outweigh the fact that I can get bonuses elsewhere. My current bankroll is around $900 and my plan is to move up stakes when I have 50 buy-ins for the next level and if I move up and hit a bad patch move back down if I drop 40 buyins for that level.

Move up to $22's @ $1100 (Move back down @ $900)

Move up to $33's @ $1650 (Move back down @ $1320)

Move up to $55's @ $2750 (Move back down @ $2200)

I'm pretty sure that the games are going to get tougher as I move up the stakes so each jump will represent a new challenge. For the first time in my poker career I feel like I actually have something to work towards though as in the past I've been happy to just grind out at small stakes without any thought of moving up. I'm not setting any timescales to achieve this though as I do not know how regularly I'll actually be able to play and I don't want to force myself to play.

Looking at the first goal I need to make about $200 at the $11 tables to move up to the $22's so I did a few calculations to estimate how many games it may take me to achieve this goal.

At my current Party ROI of 80% - 23 games.
At 50% - 36 games
At 30% - 61 games
At 20% - 91 games
At 15% - 121 games
At 10% - 182 games

Hopefully I can consolidate somewhere in the region of 10-20% ROI minimum. I usually fire the games up in sets of 6 which would mean returning $80 from my buy-ins for a 20% ROI.

Wow...I love my stats...

On a related note I've been reading PokerPlayer magazine recently and found an interesting article from Jennifear on Heads-Up play in SNG's when the blinds are high, basically involving a chart based on pushing or folding every hand depending on the relative stack sizes compared to the blinds. The chart is devised from the "Nash Equilibrium" theory (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash_equilibrium) and is basically a how to on perfect shoving heads-up. I'm going to try and find the chart and print it off so that I can refer to it tonight when I get heads up and see if that works for me! Often when I've got a lot of games going at once and a couple are heads-up things get a bit manic so hopefully this will allow me to calm things down by just refering to the chart as to whether I should push or fold!

Till next time...