Give me a FUCKING break.

Knew the morron was drawing when that heart fell on river. idiot.

waut you were pling 100/200 no limit holdem or werethose tournyhands...al;so i am drunk ajd i love you nd u are sexy and i like how u are small....ps i liove hsamdonk trooooooooo

I snap-called.



I wonder when I'll win at poker again?

I wonder when I'll win at poker again?


2008 man..20008 All things will come together!

2007 Year in Review:

To summarize in one word. Disappointment.

To summarize in two words. Collosal disappointment.

My goal to start the year was $250,000. Here are the results:



All told, I won about $62,500. My peak for the year was about $102,000. Let's get in to why.

The absolute number one culprit was myself. To be more specific, my laziness. I'm on the plane flying home from the Bahamas right now, so I can't look up exact numbers. I'd bet I put in maybe 300,000 hands of cash, which for a full-time 9-tabler who doesn't go to school is simply not enough. Ok I'm now home. My guess was pretty close.





My winrates for 6 max cash games continued to be (without tooting my own horn) nothing short of stellar in the face of toughening game conditions. I just simply didn't play them enough.

The number 2 culprit is me running bad in tournaments. In 2007 I got somewhere between bubble and final table in the following tournaments.

Final tabled the Stars $100k. I managed 7th iirc. A couple coinflips away from winning ~$22,000 more than I did.

Made day 2 and the money of a $1000 tournament at Turning Stone. I ended up getting 11th place for like $2200. First place was over $50,000.

Final tabled the Sunday Million. I got 6th place. While this is good, it was my only reasonable cash in that tournament all year. The final table was very poor and if I wasn't so card dead I could have EASILY won it (and another $200,000 minus Roy's share).

I entered the Mega Stack Challenge at Foxwoods 3 times. It's a $3000 2-day event. I made day 2 twice and cashed both of those times. My total cashes were about $11,000. If my AK could have beat Spiro's AQ or I could have won a coinflip (etc. etc. etc.) I was merely a hop and a skip away from a $50,000+ cash (with first taking home over $150k). The third time I got down to the final like 36 players with 18 being paid, and ran AKs into AA to cripple myself.

In the WCOOP I cashed in the HU tournament for a negligible amount, as well as in a PLO event. Both tournaments obviously with gigantic pays for top spots. In one of the late 6 max NLHE tournaments I was absolutely crushing and then ran AK into AA against a guy who I had been pushing around a ton, to cripple myself. Another small cash. I also made it exceptionally deep in the ME (biggest online poker tournament in history). I ended up getting 56th or so place. I cashed for $17,000. First place was over $1,000,000 and there was a whole spectrum of significantly larger cashes that I could have made if I got a couple more breaks.

I narrowly missed the FTOPS 6 max PLO final table. Another missed opportunity where I was within striking distance of $40,000+ or so.

I think I was about even for the year in tournaments. Maybe up a little, my live tournament results held me back from having a below average, yet still profitable year in tournaments. But like I tried to express just now, I put myself in the position to make several big - huge scores and was only able to muster up one really noteworthy score. And Roy got 25% of it, lol. I just checked my pokercharts, I finished up $22k for the year in online MTTs and down who knows how much in live tournaments (I sometimes input them as "Casino" and sometimes as "Tournaments MT" so it's hard to say. Both of them are very negative though, lol.

My number 3 cuplrit is playing for fun. Oftentimes I'd be bored and want to do something, but not exactly in the mood to play a real session. This usually resulted in me playing a $500 HU SnG or $100/$200 LHE, neither of which are my strengths. My results in these were pretty poor. This is similar to the laptop phenomenom that I touched upon in my post the other day.

Ny number 4 culprit I would say is not moving up fast enough. I played overrolled at $2/$4 and sometimes $3/$6 a lot. My shots at $5/$10 went poorly, however they were very short and I ran quite bad. I became gunshy and with, imo, the skill and bankroll to be taking shots at it, I played under 5000 hands total at $5/$10 until October when I had my first successful shot at it.

This resulted in my year long graph looking like this:



As you can see, I made some decent relatively steady money, nothing great, nothing terrible. Then I got in a losing skid and pulled myself out of it with the Sunday Million. After that I got right back to my losing ways. I turned over a new leaf in my game after a "coaching" session with Derek and took a shot at $5/$10 and absolutely smashed it. This lasted for about 25,000 or so hands until shortly before I went to Foxwoods for the WPT. There I managed to lose insane amounts of money, and haven't recovered since. That is basically where I'm at now, hopefully at the bottom of my biggest losing streak ever. I'm not really too worried, probably every 5 months or so I have a new biggest losing streak ever. But this spot is kind of bad.

I just moved into a very nice apartment and have had a sudden influx of bills and expenses that make me a lot less comfortable with my shrunken roll.


Looking forward:

Well first let me highlight some positives and some negatives, then I will outline my plans and goals.

Pros:

I made more in 2007 than I did in 2005 or 2006.
The games got a lot tougher and I moved up, and I still beat the games solidly.

Cons:

I'm always talking about how I need to start grinding more, and I've yet to really ever put my nose to the grindstone.

Now I shall put forth what I plan on doing to accomplish my goals (which will be the next section).

Obviously most importantly will be putting in more hours of cash games. I usually play a cash session maybe 2 out of every 3 days. And the session is virtually never over 2 hours. I think I probably had under 5 online cash sessions of over 3 hours in all of 2007. I need to stop quitting when I'm up 3-6 buyins to go watch re-runs of King of Queens and Seinfeld.

I'm restricting my online tournaments to the Sunday Warm-Up, Sunday Million, FTP $750k and $1M, WCOOP, FTOPS, and that's it. Other than that, my time would be better spent grinding cash games or enjoying myself away from the virtual felt.

I'm restricting my live tournaments to WSOP and $10k events. Smaller tournament series aren't worth it. They come with a lot of expenses and don't have a great upside. They can be quite frustrating too. My time would be better spent at home grinding cash games or enjoying life. These obviously won't be available to me until later if I achieve the success I believe I am capable of, in cash games.

No playing high stakes LHE or HU SnG's (especially since I always play them out of boredom).

Now let's get to my goals (poker and otherwise:

1) Win $360,000. When I wrote out this goal initially, my bankroll was a respectable chunk bigger than it is now, allowing me to start a limit or two higher than I now plan on. I think I'm going to revise it and aim for $300,000.

2) I'd like to have a 6-figure tournament score and a 6-figure month. This is pretty irrelevant if I reach my bottom line goal, but it would still be cool.

3) I'd like to read 24 books. I'm just not well read.

4) Over the course of 2007 I turned into a bit of a foodie. I'd like to expand my knowledge and experience in this regard. Two restaraunts that I have my eye on are Le Bernardin and Masa. I'd like to go to both at some point in the coming year.

5) Exercise 3x per week. I used to be quite fit, I'm now no longer in very good shape. I'm not fat or TERRIBLY skinny (but I am skinny), I just can't run/lift/whatever like I used to be able to. And despite me wanting to confront reality, I am now in my 20s and the shape I get myself in now will really be the foundation of the rest of my life. I think my genes are pretty good and I know my own laziness so I'm not gonna try or pretend to go 5-7x a week (and 7 is a bad idea anyway).

6) Bang hot chicks. I had Kara (my personal assistant) write out the rough draft of my resolutions and after the first 5 I drew a momentary blank and asked her for one. This was her suggestion.

7) Don't get tased, bro.

8) Related to #4, I not only enjoy eating high quality food, I enjoy cooking it too. I would like to greatly improve on my culinary skills. I'm not sure if I'll ever go to classes (I might) or if I plan on just cooking a lot more, but I'm sure I'll find a way.

9) Invest $7,500 per month. Gotta start building that nest egg. I work hard for my money, it's time for me to have my money work hard for me. Did I just steal that last sentence from a Vanguard commercial or something? Anyways, this one like #1, I think I may have to adjust due to recent continued suckiness. Invest $6,000 per month sounds good. I will probably put this off till March or so (if all goes according to plan) to get my bankroll to healthy levels first. Then hopefully if I'm doing well enough I can make up for lost time by investing $1500/month or so extra for the rest of the year.

Well, that's about it. I hope you all enjoyed reading. Cheers and good luck to all in 2008.

10) No Kayla.

Don't hate