So we come to the end of another month (and another op) and that makes one year of SHNL play for me.

My first SHNL session I have in my PT database is from august 2006 and I've played a fair bit since then; an average of 10k hands per month.

My entire ring poker career to date (as much as I have records for):
NL


and Limit:


As you can see there's quite lot I'd like to forget. With my database growing and growing I decided to start afresh. A clean break come the first of September and go go go!

I've improved a fair bit as a player over the last year; but am still very much aware of my overall suckage and that's something I need to work on.

At FRNL I did okay until I got to to $100NL when it went all wrong. At FRLHE I was always just a slight loser and rakeback and bonus made it profitable.

At SHLHE I just sucked and so I'm starting from $0.50/$1 there and trying to build my way up.

So I'm dividing up my bankroll as follows:

SH-LHE Roll: $300 (300 big bets for $0.50/$1)
SNG roll: $220 (20 BI for $11 SNGs)
SHNL roll: $580 (~11 BI for $50NL)

Since the SHNL roll is a little short I'm going to move up to $420 of bonus money into the SHNL as it comes in (for example I have about that in bonus left on Betfred).

Once that point is reached I'm trackng bonus money seperately. I've reached $100NL and $200NL before using bonus money and I think I got there too soon. This time I'm using only my poker winnings to increase the individual rolls.

For $50NL I've managed 1.35ptbb/100 over 60k hands. Which means that to add $1k to my roll should take around 75k hands. Since I tend to get in 10-15k hands a month that's a good 6 months project. If I've improved enough to be able to make more like 3ptbb/100 then it'll only take a 2-3 months; so that's going to be the first stage. Make $1k and in the process clear the $420 bonus on betfred.

I'm going to make this my main "operation" thread with regular meaningless updates. I hope it will be a journal of how I finally break into medium-stakes poker. But let's be realistic, it'll probably be another crash and burn, right?

The SNG stuff will be posted in my SNG op at least until I finish the 500 tournaments. But I've especially limited my BR for SNGs so that doesn't become a black hole down which all my roll disappears.

If there's anything like a plan to my play I'm going to try to keep playing this nitty game, incorporating a lot of Sauce's guide ideas into my play. I'm also going to try to practice better table selection, work on my reads, review my hands and try not to go on these periodic meltdowns that cost 5 BI.

Good plan?

So gl me