Party Poker | April Cash Game Results

Playing poker can take you up and drag you down. Playing poker at the micro level can speed up the process. And playing poker at Party Poker at the micro level can make the journey a maddening ride of wildly swinging fortunes with no real way to stop it.

April began smoothly enough with the Party Poker micro stakes faithful behaving themselves and predictably handing over their cash. Then I hit a black patch for about a week there and slipped into the red for the first time since January. Five days of suffering had me readjusting my poker strategy as I was going over old hands to find out where I could have improved.

As it turned out my poker play has been pretty solid. Apart from a couple of times where I called when I was 95% sure I was beat, I had played pretty good poker. It was just that there were an inordinately high number of poor calls by opponents who then got very lucky. I just happened to run into a lot of people who would be short term winners, long term losers right at the very moment that they were short term winners...at my expense. You get this fairly frequently at the micro stakes level, after all, the place is littered with rank beginners who have no idea what they’re doing. It’s just unusual that I came up against suck-out after suck-out.

So the Party Poker $5 NLHE cash game tables have once again been kind to me with a double digit profit rewarding my persistence. Now that the bankroll is beginning to grow to a reasonable size, double digit profit for 1 month's work is proving to be a worthwhile return.

I've scaled back significantly on the number of hands I play each night. With time available to play poker very much restricted these days, I can really only afford an hour or two at the most. As an hourly rate, I guess, my return is looking even more impressive given the stakes games I'm playing.

Raw numbers for the month have ended up looking fairly solid thanks to a much improved last week and a half. The turnaround has been due to a couple of important factors. Patience, I seem to say this every post, as I’ve been diligent in waiting for a good starting hand and then I’ve played it aggressively when I’ve hit the flop. During my little bad beat period it occurred to me how many times people were calling and betting with 2nd or 3rd pair and I’ve exploited that fact to great advantage. The odds of playing quality hands swung in my favour (as they statistically should) and I’ve made hay.

So, anyway, my return for the month of April turned out to be a smidge over 14% and I played just under 1,500 hands which isn’t terribly many. My Poker Tracker stats reveal that I made 18 BB per 100 hands and it seems that I am slowly becoming more aggressive, raising pre-flop 9% of the time which is higher than previous months.

My plan going forward is to continue what has been successful for the last 6 months. Hit the Party Poker micro stakes cash games. Take the profits when they present themselves, practice sensible bankroll management and aim for another double digit month.