Stephen Groom Taking a shot at becoming a Poker Pro

Day 24 playing on my own

I have been playing on my own without a backer for the best part of a month now and with some significant changes coming up to the way I work I figured that today would be as good a time as any for a quick blog update.

The past month I've been on the biggest heater of my life.  Not anything superuser like where I can feel myself winning lots more pots than usual, hitting more draws and sets than usual but when I look at the results I've achieved I can speculate pretty well that this is just me running incredibly well overall and that these results won't continue in the long term.

On SkyPoker alone I have earned around 3 months wages from when I dealt poker at the casino.  Add to this my play live also and I have had a very comfortable 4 figure month.  Only time will tell if this is sustainable but I can confirm that I would be extremely happy with half of the money I have earned.  A sick hold'em session down at Gala Teesside this week was worth about 1/3 as much as I have earned on sky which has allowed me enough liquid cash to split my online money into two seperate bankrolls.

I chose to deposit on a second site in addition to Sky for a number of different reasons.  Firstly the traffic.  Sky Poker is a very low-volume site.  Right now it is reporing that it has 1,399 players sitting across all of it's tournament and cash game tables.  According to Poker Scout, Sky's average cash game player pool in the last 7 days was 345.  Comparing this to 888poker (my new site) who achieved 2,200 gives an idea of just how small Sky is.  At peak times I play on Sky exclusively as I believe the games are more profitable.  During the afternoons and early hours of the morning however there are often as few as 3 tables, sometimes even 0 which makes grinding impossible.  It is at these times when I will add 888.

The use of Hold'em Manager is also a big reason for chosing to play on a second site.  On sky there is no tracking software available and the only measure of your success and results is the account balance at the end of a session.  I could have glaring leaks in my game and be losing a ton of money which I feel that I will be able to identify better if I have a tracking app such a Hold'em Manager for post-session reviews.

The fact that I am now using HEM2 on 888poker means that I will have some statistics, hand replays and graphs to post within this blog for all of the results-focused readers that I have.  (Yes I mean you simmy!)  I expect to play around 15k hands on 888poker over the next 30 days so I won't have too much to post on that front in the near future though.

If you have any opinions about my choice to play on multiple sites, and the choice of 888poker please leave me a comment below.

Thanks for reading
Stephen
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