I Can Has $5K Month (With Rakeback) Playing $100NL?

I'm a bit close to overdosing on teh poker after taking advantage of the long weekend to grind out a ridiculous number of hands in a mad push to get to 50K hands, so I thought I'd shut it down for a bit, as I'm just a bit over 45K hands at the moment and pretty happy with where things are at.

Here are the stats so far from my binge of playing $100NL this month, 4-6 tabling (more heavily with the 6 tabling from hands 20K-40K), which honestly are pretty surprising to me in all sorts of ways:

Total hands: 45,610
Amount won: $3,972
Rakeback: $713
PTBB/100: 4.36
$/hr.: $25.57

I've played full ring tables the whole month, with stats of 15/11/2.5 as far as VPIP/PFR/AF.

I've run slightly on the good side, but not crazily so, and PokerEV was pretty much a wash (when I was still using PT2, as I can't get it to work with PT3.)

Stepping back a bit and poking around on some random threads on 2+2, the interesting thing (to me at least) is that there's not much remarkable in the above numbers. If you're willing to park your ass in a chair and can grind out hands playing pretty straightforward ABC poker, you can make pretty decent money.

Hmm. Interesting.

Obviously this is something I knew, but I think I underestimated just how straightforward you could play at small stakes NL games and still make a decent amount of money. I definitely trend towards the nittier side, as evidenced in the above stats, and I'll sometimes put in 2,000-3,000 hands in a day and never attempt a single three barrel bluff, and can usually count the total number of two barrel bluffs without using my toes.

Despite that (or maybe because of it), it's proving fairly easy to extract a sum of money from the games that makes me pretty happy when everything is said and done. With close to zero stress, too, as the sums involved are more than manageable at the $100NL level.

Lest I sound like everything has been rosy and a steady upward graph, there were some pretty ugly chunks in that 45,000 hand sample. I had a break-even stretch of about 8K hands (down 7 buy-ins in about 2K hands to start off that stretch), and also managed to lose 5 buy-ins in 5 minutes at one point.

It's not exactly exciting poker at the $100NL level, and I can already find myself slipping into a pretty predictable default mode of play that'd get eaten alive at $400NL and upward, but money is money is money. The weird thing is that I'm still fairly jazzed about playing and grinding out hands, as I've been able to keep my head in the place where I can equate x number of hands with y profit, so it's just a matter of getting in the hands, making more correct clicks with the mouse than incorrect clicks, and letting the results follow.

So yeah, long story short, yay poker so far in this grinding out many hands experiment. Not really sure what the plan is after the 50K mark, as I'd honestly be fairly happy for now if I could churn out similar results on a regular basis at $100NL, as far as $4K-$5K months. The tentative plan is to put in another 50K or so hands and try stepping up the tables to 8-10 at a time, then bumping up to $200NL. Based on some of the 2+2 SSNL regular threads, there are more than a few people making very nice livings from just grinding 10-12 tables of $200NL, and I can think of many worse ways to make filthy lucre.

Planning on getting some more posts up shortly as far as adjustments I've made this time around and some other more nuts and bolts things.