Friday night, went to play a $10 tournament at my parents' place. Horrible players, and I've finished top two every time I haven't received some horrible bad beat. That wasn't the kind of night it was. I lost about 80% of my chips when I flopped a set of 5's on a 10-5-4 board. I eventually lost the hand to 10-7 when the turn and river came a 3 and 6. Suck. Lost the rest of it with AK against the same guy when HE flopped a set of 5's and I couldn't go runner-runner on him. Oh well. Went home to play PLO in not the best frame of mind. I had some crappy situations, lost a few pots where I was a decent favorite, but I also played badly in a number of spots, especially in 3- and 4-bet pots preflop, and my lessons cost me a little over 4 buy-ins. Bleh.

Won about half of that back today, and I'd had a decent run before that, so I finish January up the glorious sum of $20! Yes!

I ran some numbers, but without a program like PokerTracker, they're just estimates (I know hours played, dollars made, etc, so I have a rough estimate of number of hands). But based on those estimates, at $25 PLO I'm running at about 7-9 PTBB/100. Not too bad. It's less impressive at $50 PLO, but I haven't played quite as much of that, and between the two games I'm averaging about 3.5 PTBB/100. Not bad, but room to improve as well. That stretch covers somewhere in the neighborhood of 48000-50000 hands, so I feel like I'm getting some reasonable experience.

So far, I have a slightly different style from a lot of people I've seen. I c-bet more, I 3-bet preflop relatively rarely (even with Aces I often prefer to flat and just play postflop), and I take stabs with mid-strength hands a lot more than many players (I will bet a lot of 2 pair hands, and non-nut straights and flushes until I meet resistance, where a lot of players at this level frequently check). So far, those strategies have served me well, but I know there are times where I play too many hands, and I should be learning to 3-bet parts of my range more effectively.

As long as I stick to Hold'em and Omaha, I should be fine, as all my losses in the last 14 months have been in the other games (I'm probably not as good at the limit games or Stud games as I initially thought). Maybe February will be the month I rebuild enough to take more shots at $50 PLO. I dropped one of my classes this semester, so hopefully I'll have a little more time, even though I'm serving as a TA for another class.