March recap

During March, my primary online game transitioned to $10/$20 LHE 6max, and my primary live game became $40/$80 LHE full. The most noticible impact of these changes was that the number of sessions with a swing in excess of $1k was almost three times higher than any month to date. My desensitization process for swings of this magnitude is still underway and it may take a couple more months to get past this.

I am very happy with my progress in the $10/$20 6max game over the last 2 weeks. I am getting very comfortable with 3 tabling, and can manage 4 if I am well rested. The two most significant areas of improvement have been:
1) decreased tendency to tilt
2) speed of recognition that I am tilting, and immediately decreasing the number of tables played (in some cases to 0) until my mental state has recovered

#2 is undoubtably the most important "good" habit I have picked up this year.

Other less important improvements have come from:
3) improved preflop hand selection based on position and opponent types
4) slightly improved discipline in game selection (my buddy list at Party is getting very very long...)

With my new "skills" at $10/$20 6max, I have only a small amount of data (less than 5k hands). My hope is that my winrate is above +2BB/100h when 3 tabling and ~+2BB/100h when 4 tabling. Time will tell.

The other significant area that kicked off in March was the 2006 WSOP qualifiers. To date, my net investments in WSOP ME supers is ~$600 (when taking into account booby prizes when reaching the money but not getting a seat). I final tabled 3 times without winning a seat. Those 3 final tables awarded a combined total of 13 ME seats! Just sickening, but I take it as a sign that my chances are decent for winning an ME seat.

I was able to luckbox my way into a $50,000 HORSE seat in a Party freeroll earlier in the month. Assuming I can obtain a ME seat, I am considering taking 3 weeks off from my day job, and entering up to 10 events.
10 events sounds like a lot, but it includes all those el-cheapo $1k and $1.5k events after the ME starts. Basically, I would need to get knocked out of each event quickly enough to enter the following day's event.

In the end, I'll probably end up playing in only 1 event, but it is nice to dream.

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(addendum)
One tool that I have found very helpful in doing efficient postgame analysis, is the autoreplay of hands in Poker Tracker. I usually set the playback speed fairly high, and interrupt and rewind for any interesting hands.

In regards to 10/20 6max statistics, my Fold BB to Steal is a tad high. ~65%. I'll need to do more research on blind defense to get that down a few points. That will basically work out to defending my BB about 2-3 additional times per hour when 3 tabling, so it shouldn't be a significant adjustment.