Great success!

I am pretty proud of my first day of the challenge. I took two of the worst beats possible and I still won $880 on the day. I am proud to say that $400 of those winnings came without a show down...woot! woot!. I don't usually talk about bad beats, but these two were pretty spectacular so I'll give you a brief summary:

I got it all in on the flop with 88 on a 8c 4x 2c board against a short stack that had the nut flush draw and another full stack that had a set of 4's. The set of 4's made quad 4's to win the $2400 pot.
http://www.pokerhand.org/?3814216


I got it all-in on the flop for $1k each with AA vs. AKs on a As 8s 4x board. It came running spades and he scooped the $2k pot. I shouldn't have been surprised though, because my roommate Kevin was sweating that hand and giving me advice about how I should just call and check raise the flop and blah blah blah. Anyway, Josh and I can both confirm he is certainly a black cat when he is watching you play.
http://www.pokerhand.org/?3814204

I was about a 96% favorite in the second hand and 70% for the main pot and 95% side pot in the first hand.

Neither one of them really bothered me too badly. I get much more affected when I make poor plays that cost me money than I do when I take a bad beat. I played really well all day and I am happy that I managed to win today despite those two hands. Those two hands could have easily went my way in which case I would have won well over $5,000 on the day.

So far in my challenge I am almost exactly on pace. I played for 4.9 hours and 2463 hands. My red line is in the positive, but I am only running at 3.58bb/100 (winning either one of those hands would put me well above the 8 I am shooting for).

Quick poker experiment...

I really want to raise my overall win rate (obviously), but I am going to spend the next 8 days focusing on maximizing my win rate instead of maximizing my potential money earned. Hopefully, my experiment will help me maximize my potential money earned in the future. I am going to limit myself to only playing 8 tables, because I think my overall quality of play suffers significantly when I play 10 and especially 12. I am also going to only play 2/4 NL for these next 8 days and I hope to play 20,000 hands during this stretch. A while ago I put some serious effort into increasing my money won without showdown and I think it had a pretty positive impact on my overall win rate. Since then I have sort of let that mind frame go by the wayside and I have started to suffer in money lost without a showdown. This is referred to as "the red line", because it shows up on graphs in red. My goal for these 20,000 hands is to actually show a profit with my red line. I think I can get my win rate up to 8bb/100 at 2/4 NL if I can make this improvement on my red line.

I haven't done a poker challenge like this in a while so it will be kinda fun to have something to shoot for instead of just playing to make the most money everyday.

Summary of Goals through February 11th (in order of importance):
1. Show a profit with my red line
2. Play 20,000 hands
3. Achieve a win rate higher than 8bb/100

Rules for Goals:
1. Play no more than 8 tables.
2. Play only 2/4 NL, (unless a huge fish is playing higher).

This is quite a bit of playing for me and probably will take about 40 hours in the next 8 days. A win rate of 8bb/100 should result in around $6,400.

I am going to hit the sack for now. I have a good feeling about my chances for success in this challenge and I think it will help my motivation having something to shoot for.

EDIT: When I woke up today I decided it was silly to drop down and play 2/4 NL instead of just doing the same experiment at 5/10. Since I am a winning player at 5/10 I will just do the same experiment here and hopefully win double (or more) the amount of money.