Interesting month… and I am taking an indefinite break from online poker.

April was a good month result-wise (15BB/100) – and May started the same running at 20BB/100 for first 10 days of the month (+$700) at 100NL 6Max.

Negative variance was well overdue and arrived in a series of bad beats and losing the entire $700 in one day. That hurt, but was cool – my play was fine and was due some retribution for running hot.

I decided to grind hard the next day and get some profits back. Easily got $450 of it back in quick time but got greedy and refused to leave a table when I had 450BB+ - and a good aggressive player sat to my left. I felt like he was making plays, pushing me around and could see into my soul (and cards). ‘Screw him’ I thought, I will destroy him and show him what I can do. He took $500 from me. It was awful, greedy, egotistical, tilty play. It affected my other tables too.

This was a shock for me. I had never really experienced severe negative variance, nor bad tilt while losing 7+ buyins twice in 2 days.

In the end – I was only down 2.5 buyins for the short month (4k hands) – but have now stopped playing since then. A couple of weeks later and I still think about those 2 days and the $900 I dropped – I feel a bit more time is needed to purge the bad thoughts and enjoy playing again.

It all sounds a bit wussy when considered in the long term game – but I cannot play well on tilt and would rather wait until I am fresh and the desire returns.

Its also summer, and would rather be outside golfing and working on my business. Its amazing how much extra time I have each week without poker and how much less pressure there is on me in other aspects of life as I can get so much more done. No reading FTR, no watching poker on TV, no reading books etc.

Best of luck to all. I want to post my losing month so I have a record of this interesting month psychologically. I will post again when I play my next hand.

Profits to date >10k - roll >6.5k