Back from my blog hiatus

In case you haven’t noticed I’ve been AWOL for the past six weeks. Blogging is kind of a vicious cycle where when I’m super busy I have all these things to blog about, but not much time to do it OR I have all the time in the world but nothing new is really going on in my life so I have nothing to blog about. I needed a little break from blogging anyways, but now I’m back and have all these fresh new things to talk about!

What have I been up to you say? Well, in mid-December I flew out to Philadelphia to visit an old college buddy of mine and spent a week hanging out with him seeing the sites and checking out Atlantic City for the first time. After that it was back to Seattle for a couple of days followed by a ten day trip back to the east coast to North Carolina to spend Christmas and New Years with my family. I came back to Seattle for about a week and then it was straight off to the other side of the world to Melbourne, Australia for the Aussie Millions with serbie for ten days. I just got back from that a week ago and am finally settling into a normal routine again which I haven’t had in what seems like ages now. I’ll probably write up a couple trip reports for those as a lot happened, but my hotel in Melbourne cost $27/day internet(excuse #3 for not blogging) and while they suckered me into it twice, I wasn’t about to pay for it every day just so I could give you all daily tourney updates like I do during the wsop.

2009 Results? 2010 goals? December 2009, January 2010 results? You wonder? I played a lot on both my laptop and desktop during these months due to traveling so I can’t really post a monthly graph or stats without either double posting from both databases or combining databases, neither of which I am prepared to do. December ended up being my 3rd losing month of 2009 with me losing around $29.5k. January I bounced back a bit and won something like $17k online, but lost about $3k playing live along with having another couple grand in travel expenses, accommodation, food, entertainment etc.

2009 was an okay year monetarily wise, I made more than most of my real life peers, but suspect I made much less than I lot of my poker peers. I’d rather not go into specific numbers for the year (yes, I pay my taxes btw I think I’ll owe something like 33 cents for every dollar I made in 2009) but I will say I ended up making <100k which is kinda meh for me. I played bigger than usual in December which I realize now may have been a mistake. I was reading in the wall street journal in December about how most traders tend to avoid placing risky or high volatility bets in December simply for the reason that they want to lock up their gains for the year and not destroy all their profit for the year in the last month of the year. While this is somewhat fish talk (lol locking up wins your poker career is all one big session, right?) I do see some merit to this and I may consider dropping down instead of shot taking next December for this very reason. 2010 goals. First I'd like to look back at my 2009 goals They were to
1. Not play any 10/20 until I make a post showing I have 100k online
2. Stick to my new schedule and focus on getting 25-30 hour tilt free poker playing in per week
3. Always maximize my hourly rate when playing. If this means 6 tabling 2/4 because that’s the best games running now so be it. If it means 2 tabling 5/10 so be it. The one exception I will add to this is learning a new game. So for example I’ve been playing some more PLO recently and obviously 1 or 2 tabling 1/2 HU PLO is not maximizing my hourly but hopefully this will improve my lifetime hourly rate as a poker player. This also means game selecting well, playing longer when winning, quitting if I am starting to tilt etc.

I’m pretty sure I failed miserably at #1. I’m a sucker for good games what can I say. I had some good sometimes month long spurts at #2 which would inevitably be interrupted by travel or visitors or staying up late one night and ruining it for the next three weeks. I’d really like to get better at keeping a schedule and sticking to it in 2010. If you want to make a lot of money at online poker, you really have to leatherass it up and grind 40 hours a week. I did okay at #3, though lately I’ve been playing some regulars in headsup 7 game and losing a bit to them overall which I’d like to stop. It’s really a waste of time and I’d be much better off grinding some lower 6max games. One thing I am proud of from 2009 is all the new games I learned. I think I paid a lot both in opportunity cost, and in “tuition” (losing a lot when first learning) but I think my newfound skills will really pay off for me in 2010 and beyond. I see a lot of the pure nlhe guys struggling these days and it’s nice to know I can table select a much wider range of games and limits than them and can usually find good games with fish instead of figuring out how to eek out that extra .02BB/1000 vs the 5/10 regs every day.

I’m still debating what I want my goals to be for 2010. Realistically if I wanted to make 1/4 a million I think I’d need to put in at least 500-600k hands or 40-50k hands per month. I’m not sure I’m prepared to do this so I have not committed to it yet, but it’s still weighing on my mind. The only goal I KNOW I have is I’d like to final table a wsop event. I plan on playing as many events as I can this summer and giving myself a real shot at a bracelet. That’s it for now, happy groundhog day everyone!