A New Challenge on the Horizon

Despite what I previously posted about challenges and not really being able to see them through, I'm now embarking on a new one. The reason is two-fold:

a) I'm sick and tired of playing tournament poker. I've been on a huge cold phase that's been going on for about a month now and I'm running from the aggravation of elimination for a while. Just sick of so many incredible bad beats in recent times. Nonetheless, I'll still be playing tournament poker live, just not online.

b) I believe that to be successful you have to pick yourself from the floor many many times and try as hard as you can to learn from your mistakes. This is so much a cliché as it is one of the simplest truths in life. The rate at which you learn from mistakes is directly proportional to the quickness of your development, in this case as a poker player.

So basically for the time being I'll be playing tournaments live and cash games online, particularly at PokerStars. So far, since I started playing poker, 99% of my focus has been tournament-oriented and now I feel it is time to pay more attention to cash games. This goes hand-in-hand with trying to develop my post-flop skills.

Now that I'm using Hold'em Manager, there's a huge wealth of stats readily available to help me analyze my game. Because I'm still quite inexperienced using it, for now I'm using some basic stats on my HUD: VP$IP, Preflop Raise, Steal, 3-Bet, Agg Factor, Flop CB, Fold to flop CB and # of hands. I think for now this is more than enough and later on I should be paying more attention to positional stats, eg., how many times a player has raised pre-flop from the button, versus from UTG and so on. The other aspect of Hold'em Manager that is really nice is the winning graphs, which you can display by # of hands, days or months.

So, as with any challenge worth its salt, I'm putting down a few rules for this one:

1. I'll be playing exclusively on PokerStars $0.05/$0.10 6-max tables, with 100BB as a buy-in, thus $10.
2. I will play for sessions no shorter than 1 hour and no longer than 2 hours.
3. If I feel I'm catching entirely too many bad beats or that I'm obviously off my best game, I will stop playing immediately, even if breaking rule 2.
   
4. The challenge is over when I reach 10,000 hands.

So the idea here is to see how I do over a 10k hands sample in NL10 on poker stars, a sample big enough to eliminate most variance. By playing somewhat short sessions and trying as much as possible to be honest with myself when something is putting me off my game, it'll also hopefully eliminate most silly playing on my part from the sample.

I'll be posting regular updates with my progress. To kickstart things, here's the first sample, not really representative because I've only playing for about half an hour.