The effects of reading SSH and multi-tabling (excel chart inside)

[Xiphoid]

The graph below represents my relatively short poker career. I logged my first poker session (.50-1.00 Party) in Excel on February 2 and have since logged hundreds more. I've always been a winning player; however, the rate at which I was winning concerned me and I became tired of the constant grind. A few factors contributed to this slow growth... first, due to reading HPFAP (great book, but at the time I didn't know it wasn't tailored to micro play) and an overly tight mentor, my VPIP was around 12-13%... you could have put "Mt. Everest" in your notes for me. The combination of playing one table and often bleeding from a lack of good hands and the blinds led to a very frustrating experience.

Around August, I was at my wits end after flatlining for months. As a result, I decided to totally revamp my game and follow the posts of many people here... pick up SSH and multi-table. SSH enlightened me to some things that would drastically improve my win rate... things I wasn't doing in the past because of my lack of knowledge or fear. These things were:

- playing low and mid pairs PF
- playing Axs PF
- playing overcards better
- realizing just how good big suited hands are
- playing all suited hands in the SB, given a few callers
- adding more hands PF
- buiding big pots on the flop with draws
- and so many more...

As the points in SSH began to sink in and as I was seeing many more hands (I started playing 4 tables of .50-1.00), everything seemed to fall into place. My VPIP quickly rose 3% to 15-16% (I'm still working on making this 3-4 pts. higher) and my profits went through the roof, as you can clearly see below. Terms like "implied odds", which I heard many times in the past, but didn't quite understand became fundamentally clear to me. The action of automatically folding all gutshots was replaced with counting odds. In short, I am at a different level in poker now and I will let the results speak for itself:



A big thanks to Ed Miller and everyone else here who has helped my game.