MTT Time?

Just played a 2.5 hour session and lost $4000, though EV-adjusted I was only down $29. The EV-differential pretty much comes down to losing both my preflop flips and also losing two postflop flips (not quite flips but close enough; I had about 40% equity in both). Here’s the graph for the session.

I actually didn’t intend to stop when I did because I literally was not tilted at all, which is pretty amazing given how tilty I’ve been over the last week or so. But I ended up quitting anyway because after going downstairs to get some food I returned to find myself kicked off half my tables. I thought PartyPoker had a 20 minute grace period but evidently it was closer to 10. Oh well. The waitlists were pretty long by this stage too so rejoining the waitlists wasn’t a particularly enticing option given that it was 3AM already.

With that 4K loss I realised that I’m actually in pretty rough shape bankroll wise. Once I spend 13.3K on the PCA package (which hopefully will occur on Tuesday once I get my passport sorted – fingers crossed) I will only have about 23K online. I have money in the bank which I can resort to if really necessary but I don’t particularly like cashing back in money I’ve cashed out, especially with the exchange rate at the moment. So what I’ll have to do I think is drop down and play 3/6 and 2/4 only and leave the 5/10 games for the moment.

My other option though which I think I might pursue is to play more tournaments. Though I know I said I never wanted to play another online tournament again, I figure that if I’m going to play the PCA I might as well give myself the best possible chance at succeeding. It really is a once in a lifetime event for me so I really want to give it my best shot. I’d only be delaying my cash game development by one month anyway (all of December) so it’s really not that big of a deal. And sure, I might bust out within an hour of the PCA and feel like I’ve wasted a month learning tournament strategy, but I think that’s better than the alternative: making a deep run in the main event and then blowing it all (as well as thousands of dollars in equity) on some stupid amateur mistake that could easily have been rectified had I taken the time out earlier to learn some basic tournament strategy. I know that if that happened the regret would far outweigh the regret of wasting a single month learning tournament strategy instead of improving my cash game.

Anyway, I haven’t decided definitively yet, but the more I think about it the more it looks like this is going to be an MTT December for me.