- It was the best of times

False. May sucked. Definitely the worst of times. Kinda felt like I was going crazy for several different parts of the month. Let's go through a "hit-list" of all the awesomeness that was the not-so-merry month of May.

- Kicked the month off with a four day losing streak (not even a single winning session...bizarre to say the least)
- Had 4 different $1000 downswings within the month (at buy-ins of $27 and below, that's more than just variance, but really didn't play bad enough to have that massive of swings)
- 18 mans - 997 games with a loss of 198...pretty surprising considering I'm still averaging $3/gm for the year. Maybe it's just a readjustment period I was due for, but I'm sure I shouldn't have actually lost money at these for an entire month (actually just 3 weeks)
- 45 mans - 463 games with a profit of 213. The lone bright spot has to be the $27 with a profit of 570 over 183 games. Of course, that means that the $12 45's were abysmal. Weeee.
- To top it all off, the computer I finally bought really doesn't work too well with the Pokerstars client, but Dell won't let me return it because it just past the 21 day policy period. Son of a monkey crap.

Hokay, now that that's over, we can move on. Toward the end of May, I started to pick apart a few of the leaks. While I can't attribute the entire month to bad play, there were definitely several days where I lost every other overpair/underpair all in pre-flop situation (as a reference point, I should win those 80% of the time, but it was certainly closer to 50-60% - over the course of 200 games, that will kill you). Fortunately, after discussing several spots with Yard, I'm pretty sure I was sometimes taking unnecessary risks too early.

The players in these low stakes games are terrible (in general). It's not uncommon for someone to go all-in on the first hand with KTo or to call your utg raise w/ 84s, flop bottom pair, and call through the whole way for pot-sized bets. So, I found I was compensating a little heavy by really trying to get too much value in spots where I figured I was not best - just under the assumption I was because of the copious amounts of donkish play. To complicate things, when the cards continue to beat you down like a kitten leg punching a bowl of grapes, you kind of have a tough time delneating borderline/unnecessary aggression from stupid beats. Anyway, that might not be too cut and dry, but May was the painful combo of variance mixed with confused, overly-adjusted poker. Winning mixture? I think notsies. Nazis? No, just sounds the same.

In other news, Cone-zone is back! I know he was saying it for weeks, but I'm really glad he hasn't adjusted his show to account for the blue-hairs. They tweaked the band's opening arrangement (still sounds great), but they should make sure to keep getting full band shots whenever possible (yes, I'm biased, but sweet jebus they're funny).