Black Friday , the challenge is dead. Long live the challenge.

I have not posted in this blog since before Poker's 'Black Friday' which was over seven months ago now. Athough I do not live in the US and I am still able to play on PokerStars, Bleck Friday did still affect me. If you have read my blog you will know that I was happily grinding the 0.25c 45man sit and goes when Black Friday hit. When this happened PokerStars must have pannicked and put up their rake. These tournaments that were previously rake free, suddenly had a rake of 20% (0.05c). So this had a serious affect on my ROI and I starterd losing and I went on serious tilt. I thought it was all over. I was previously makeing 30% ROI and now this would have been cut to about 10% assuming all the player were of the same skill level, so I over reacted. I did not want to play these games anymore if I did not think I had a edge, so I started looking for something else. I went and played a few $1.00 sit and goes and nearly busted! My bankroll was down to about $3 from a high of $55. So I was really bummed and stopped playing.
I stopped playing for a while and then I notices that PokerStars had reduced the rake to 0.02c so I started grinding again. I got the bankroll up again to about $15 but with the reduced traffic on the site, the tournaments were taking longer to fill up, that combined with the slighltly lower ROI it was becoming a real grind, so I went back to the $1 S&Gs and started losing again.
So, dues to Black Friday my pervious strategy of grinding the 0.25c 45 mans is now abandoned. While on tilt and playing other games I lost track of my challenge bankroll and I am pretty sure that I busted. So oficially I failed, however, the purpose of the challenege is to motivate me and accepting failure when it was partly due to unforseeable circumstances is not very motivational so I am going to continue/start a new challenge, starting with a virtual bankroll of zero. By virtual I mean I am not going to start with freerolls but with money that I have deposited. So the figure I will be tracking will be my profit/loss and could be negative.
More about the new challenge in the next post.