Closing out April 2012 on a High

April 2012 was non eventful losing month for me at the tables. I guess the biggest positive I can take out of it is mentally I think I feel ok about it. Usually constant losing for a month really gets into my head but this month I did not think about it much. I still think my Q2 goal is very attainable and I am working hard to get there. One thing I was guilty of was not putting in enough volume. I always tell people who ask how to get better or improve results that they should play more. I believe that playing more often and more tourneys gives you more of a chance to beat variance by getting enough chances at a score. There were a lot of reasons I did not get volume in but mostly was the Ottawa Senators playoff run. I watched every game with our 12 year old son. My fondest memories of my pre-teens was watching hockey with my father who passed away in 2001. Nothing reminded me more of being a kid than watching hockey with my boy who did not leave my side for any of the games. We even went to game 6 together and lost our voices cheering our hearts out. By now you are probably wondering what the heck is up with my title of this blog when I was a losing player in April and I cheered for a hockey team that lost. Well what I have not mentioned yet was my month as a poker coach. As I mentioned before I started private coaching about 4 months ago. I felt like I was making good progress before this month and I had worked out a style that could be successful as it has worked for me so many times coaching other things in the workplace. The method was all about ownership from the student and action plans that were easily attainable before we met again. Things seemed to be working and by the last few days of the month I had 2 players turn a 1k profit for April which is very respectable for Small Stakes MTTs. Then it happened, on Sunday April 29th I had a session with a player I am sure you will hear lots about. We were in our 5th session and this student really seemed to be clicking on his own play and picking up on some really small things I had pointed out that could make some significant changes to his game. It seemed like real minor adjustments but it kind of felt like he was really catching on by the end. Fast forward about 12 hours later and he sends me an email to look him up on stars. About 15 mins after our session he started to play the bigger 8.80 which had over 10000 runners and he was at the FT with a chance at a significant payout. After a lot of back and forth he took down a serious chop score of about $6800. I have to say that since I started playing poker this was one of the best feelings I have ever had and it rivaled some of my own big scores as far as sense of achievement. I really felt like I could be a good poker coach even though I had coached for awhile without any kind of quantitative results it is just speculation until my students actually get results. So even though as a player April was a fail, as a coach April was a huge success. With our newly renovated cottage opening in May I really hope this month is great both as a coach and a player. I hope to update later on in the month on my progress.