Still running good

Well, what a difference running good makes. I have never run this good, just constantly finishing sessions up 1-4 BI's, and with few hands and little effort usually. I'm pretty sure a stuffed animal couldn't lose these sessions, people just continue to let me run over them or get their money in bad, and I'm holding more often than not. Since moving to NL100, I haven't lost a full stack yet, which is obviously just running WAY over expected value, as even AA vs 88 loses once in every 5, let alone the hands where I'm much closer to 50% equity holding.

I must admit though, I'm really starting to apply reads better. Last night I twice put villain on draws, and value bet very thinly, and both times I was right, and showed down a winner in two 50+BB pots with average hands. I'm also letting go of hands a lot earlier rather than chasing a losing battle against a range. It's a really liberating feeling to let go of a hand that might be good sometimes (against possible bluffs etc), only to get a big pot back later from the same guy. Finally, I'm bluffing very successfully right now. I know a little of that could just be variance, but I'm picking my opponents and their ranges pretty well, and even higher variance moves (like bluffing more than what's in the pot) are successful right now.

So I'm NL100, but still getting to terms with 3 tables, which I will probably be comfortable with very soon (2 seems a bore now). Next comes 4 tables, and then I'll be setting hand targets. It will be roughly in the order of 300-350 hands an hour, so at 10-12 hours per week, around 3000-4000 hands a week. I will see just how reasonable that is, then I'll be setting a hand target for every week once it stabilises, and try to achieve that. Obviously, I will bow out of playing some nights where I'm too tired, or playing/running bad, so I want to be realistic about it all. At 3000 hands a week, 5ptbb/100 (including rakeback), that's a pretty impressive $US300 a week, or $AU450. Very reasonable goal, and one I am striving to get within the next 6 months, after all the variance is ironed out. If all goes well, I'll be taking out anything over about $3K at the end of each month, and tracking how much I've taken out, as it will still act as part of my bankroll if I hit a big downswing and don't want to move down. Once I'm comfotable about moving up a level, I will make sure I've taken out at least $US3K, and put that back onto the site and play NL200. I'll make a tentative target to do that by June/July, so I really hope to have also taken out another $US2K+ for just spending money unrelated to poker by then, or realistically I won't really be ready. That is, if I've only taken out $US4K in total and yet played around 60K hands, that means I will have only won 2ptBB/100 hands (excluding rakeback) and really not worthy of moving up to NL200 after that.