The Lucky Donut

GANS-DEAD.jpg.  All caps.

That's the name of the image that accompanies the headline story on the Las Vegas Review Journal web site to break the news that entertainer Danny Gans died last night.

The LVRJ announced the somber news of his sad and unexpected passing with this picture of him doing jazz hands, and a lolcat-style caption.

UPDATE: Since writing this, it looks like the bad taste police have stepped in and replaced it with a shot of the tribute on the Wynn sign:

http://media.lvrj.com/images/Gans-marquee.jpg

It's awesome to break even.

I'm serious.  I mentioned this before - if I can hold my own and not lose any money at the table on the iPoker network, I can make money over the course of the month from bonus awards and rakeback.

I could only be happier with how my bumpy ride through April ended if I thought I was good enough to actually win money in these games.

Never mind the variance (it's a $400 swing from the lowest to highest point) - I lost 93 cents.  How much closer to breaking even could I possibly get?

When you add everything up, this puts me up over $400 on the month; $170 in bonus already released, $115 in rakeback to come, a $100 win from a VIP freeroll in the bank and enough player points earned to put me a quarter of the way to redeeming for another iPod nano (figure it's worth about $30; I got £90 for the last one on eBay).

The freeroll is a $2,000 prize pool, usually with about 100 runners making it worth about $20 per week.  It's the first time I've made the money, and I wasn't sure whether to count it in my monthly haul but as the amount I won is about the same as the EV of playing in it every week I figured I probably should.

I was an overall loser on fixed-limit games but an overall winner on no-limit - but somehow the two numbers cancelled each other out almost exactly.

That 6.76% of hands won figure on $2/$4 is a bit worrying.  Yes, I play tight.  No, I wouldn't expect to win 10% of hands in a full-ring game (I'd hope to win larger than average pots to offset this).  But I need to work out whether I've just had some bad luck, or if I've been giving up pots too easily.

A bit more analysis on Poker Tracker also shows that when you total up all the hands that I called a raise on the big blind, I lost more money than I would have done if I'd simply folded every one of them.  I'm profitable when I re-raise (thankfully - it's almost always with premium cards!) but I need to take more care when it costs an extra small bet to play mediocre cards out-of-position.  I'm happy to have found the leak so that I can try to do something about it.

However it's a reassuring start to the first month that I've played no-limit on iPoker for anything more than a few short sessions.  The sample size is still pretty insignificant, but the row is green and that's about as much as I could ask for.

Let's see if I can't win a few cents this month.