EWC Day #4

My resolve to continue this experiment at full force is fading as the days go on. Today was a casual Thursday and instead of sporting a shirt and tie, I came in to the office wearing a fire-engine-red Party Poker Sweatshirt. On day 1 I played for almost 6 hours straight to start the day. Today it was about 2 hours and 45 minutes before I took my first break. I managed another 58 tournaments and had pretty steady success.

I did have one major bump in the road when I came back after lunch. I jumped into 6 tournaments and found myself bounced from three of them within 5 minutes. Getting three 9ths in a row may be a first for me. In the preceding 258 tournaments I'd played this week up to that point, I'd only ended up with four 9ths so three straight was a real shock. If you consider the fact that I only get 9th about once in every 25 tournaments on average getting 3 consecutive 9ths is a 1 in 15,625 occurrence.

At the end of the day even though I felt like I got pretty screwed a dozen times I still managed to win $530. I'm ahead $2,357 after 280 tournaments which is right in the range I'd hope to be. While winning $8.42 per tournament is pretty solid I'd like to get close to the $10 range and I think I might even be able to get it to the $12 range. At first glance this might seem like a major jump since I'd have to increase my profits by 43%, but when you include the juice I'm actually beating the other players by $13.42. So a jump of another $3.58 is really only a 27% increase and given the fact that $3.58 is only 6% of the buy in I think it's possible. Even at $8.42 I should be able to make 8 grand a month which is just fine with me.

On a completely different note I was playing against a guy who's name was FishNBarrel today and I had the thought that the expression "as easy as shooting fish in a barrel" is totally ridiculous. First and foremost why is anyone SHOOTING fish? There seem like much easier and less expensive ways to kill your fish (bullets aren't free you know). The first two that come to mind are sharp objects or removing them from water. Now we have to ask ourselves is there water in the barrel? If there isn't, then the fish are going to die on their own so there is no reason to shoot them. It seems like it would make even less sense to shoot dead fish in a barrel so it's fair to assume that there is water in the barrel. Do you know what water does? It refracts light. This makes the fish appear in a slightly different position then they actually are. This means that if you shoot directly at the fish (which should be moving by the way) you'll actually miss. The shock wave from the bullet might be enough to kill them anyway, but I think shock waves are pretty far down on my list of ways to kill fish (I'll publish the full list upon request). If we're going to use analogies to express how easy thing are let's stick with taking candy from babies. After all that ends with candy and not a leaky barrel filled with bloody fish guts.

Getting back on topic. I've worked about 36 hours so far this week and I can't see making it to 10 tomorrow (my brain is turning to mush faster and faster every day), so it looks like I'll be facing at least a 5 hour Saturday.