Holidays and New Beginnings

Warning: long post, lots to cover. First the customary monthly summary:

Profit: +$1488
Rakeback: +175
Games: 2056
Hours: 107

Hourly: 15.54/ hr
Per Game: 0.81 / game

Was about breakeven for the first half at the $12 & $27 45-mans before reverting back to my comfort zone. The last few months, I've been plugging volume without progressing skill-wise. Definitely working on addressing that. I'm making an effort to run at least a few games through SNGWiz after every session. I'm about 90% with their actions, although we do have philosophical differences. My main thing has been always to avoid confrontations, whereas they advocate taking every conceivable edge.

Santa was also nice enough to get me this Bing Blang Blaow shirt, which includes a fitty on the titty design.


Biggest news of the month was that I became a coached and staked player with Nick Rainey. You can listen to his interview here. I've been learning/transitioning to the 180-mans. Took me about 100-200 games to get the feel for where the pivot points are, etc. The variance is insane as expected, since you only get a handful or so deep runs in a given session. But I honestly feel the bubble and FT are where my biggest edge as a player are. $2 games are full of droolers and the $12 are a decent challenge. I was able to take down my 1st $12 win tonight, so that was nice.

Watched the Leatherass interview at MediocrePoker. Definitely inspiring so I instantly bought his book and read it in two days. Highly recommended.


The man is truly inspiring. Incredible work ethic and discipline. He 20-tables 6-max $5/10 cash games for a living, which requires incredible amounts of focus and thought. Prob banked $1M+ last year, without the glory of winning $500K pots. The book is 1/4 strat, and 3/4 poker optimization. Things such as diet, managing tilt,
and adjusting relationships to deal with a poker professional lifestyle. Has motivated me to at least eat better and exercise more, to get some oxygen to this aging brain.

2010 Goals:
Made 5K in 2008. Made about 20K in 2009. Started out 2008 4-tabling, 2009 12-tabling, now I'm up to 18. Definitely have a much better grasp on stack-size shoving and calling ranges and FT dynamics. Let's see if we can at least double the profit this year.
If $12 180s become my regular game and I can achieve 25% ROI and 15 go off / hour, then I could settle on a $45 hourly. If I can average 100 hours / month like I have been, 4.5K / month X 12 = 54K for the year. I think that's a realistic goal, but we'll see.
I think I can also get SuperNova this year. Was about halfway there last year. At the very least, it's a nice way to get me to push volume. www.fpppro.com has a nice pace calculator.

20K Lifetime Profit Prop Bet Update:
vertek: 17.8K
wbmustang: 16.5K
I was able to eke out a small lead on him when he was out over winter break. If he hits another heater, it's game over.

One last semi-poker related note. Almost finished reading "The Alchemist".

Highly recommended as well. One of the biggest themes in the book is this quote:

"When you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it."