- May's over. Yay.

Even though the last 3 and a half weeks of May sucked completely, I still profited plenty and actually improved a great deal. It won't show on the stat sheet, but at some point the math will even out (maybe this month will be a 4k game upswing...). I really hope it does soon, because I'm leaving near the end of the month for a wedding in Missouri and then getting back just in time to move to a new house! Sweeeeeet! Hello trombone. The excitement is palpable.

I'm still pretty disappointed that the swing affected me as much as it did. I mean, I've gone on some ridiculous swings before, but nothing that lasted 5k games and nearly a month (without playing losing poker for some of it). The real frustrating part is that I took a two day break right at the end of the month to get my head straight. While I definitely liked the time off, I missed two bonus cutoffs by the thinnest of margins. My rakeback provider runs a monthly "rake chase" with the top 25 spots getting a cash bonus for how far on the leaderboard you finish. I finished fourth which is good for $425 bonus. Normally, I'd be happy, but I missed 2nd place by less than $100 in rake paid. That means if I'd played 50 more $50 games in the month I would have gotten an $850 bonus. Sure, I could've lost over that last 50 games, but a $400+ jump would've been nice even if I hadn't won much over that last 50. The other bonus came from full tilt's leaderboard system. By placing on the high limit board, you get a % multiplied by your finishing place's average buy-in. So, I played more $50 games this month than anything which means I would get my finish spot times $50 as a bonus. I missed 5th by less than 1k points (don't know how little that is, but probably could've taken as little as 30 games) and finished in 8th instead.

The goal for this month is just to relax and not worry about when this will turn around. I'm super-rolled to play these and have enough in my bank account to cover the move/bills/rent/food/burritos/pizza parties/monkey bars. Oh, I just got my new matrox dualhead2go system set up so my monitors work perfectly with my laptop now! I know that might not seem like a big deal, but I'm excited.