Encouraging SNG Stats

I've been meaning to dig into my SNG spreadsheet for some time now, and in particular take a look at how I'm doing now, relative to when I started playing seriously a few months ago. Now, before I started looking at this tonight, I had no real hard evidence on my progress either way, except for recently starting to see my overall ITM and ROI grinding slowly upwards. For the record, I'm sporting a modest 36.04% ITM and 6.14% ROI (based on 197 SNGs). Nothing to get excited about there, but hey, at least it's not zero, or worse.

Now to my calculations I did tonight... I decided to take a monthly look at my stats. Here's the results:

Month	ITM	ROI
August	33.82%	-01.72%
September	38.38%	10.91%
October	40.00%	11.89%

Now that's pretty encouraging stuff, and certainly reason to believe that my year-end goal is easily obtainable, provided I can quit giving back my SNG winnings in the ring games. A few other points:

1. The stats above only take into account half of this month so far, so it's possible that the October ITM and ROI may end up higher or lower than reported above. Ideally the numbers will be higher than September (as they are now) indicating progress. We'll see.

2. I can't and don't expect forward progress to be linear. It's one of those things where improvement is vast in the beginning, but quickly tapers off to small or negligible gains eventually. I'm just hoping to taper off somewhere in the 45-55% ITM range, and whatever ROI that might bring about. If other player's blogs are any indication, this is possible, but I don't expect it to be easy.

3. Thinking a bit about point #2 above, I think improvement is largely a factor of discipline at this point. I'm well on my way to learing what the right moves in the right spots are, and what the wrong moves in the wrong spots are... but having the discipline and focus to follow this knowledge is where the money is.