picking up were i left off..

well, i haven't been blogging lately and thought I might start it back just to kind of keep ideas visible to myself.

 

poker.

I haven't gotten a good start to my 08 goals yet this year. I've reached approximately two final tables in a larger field tournament. and they weren't spectacular payouts. I have had a few decent runs in the $3 rebuy on stars lately but alas, no spectacular payout. I did win a $4.40 180 in early Jan, but somehow managed to not practice very good bankroll management and squandered it.

 

Speaking of goals, here is my list of them for 2008.

 

1. make at least 50 final tables in mtt with over 100 players in

them. Probably sounds weak to some but up until this year I had only

made 2 final tables over a 2 or 3 year span. Last year wrote down a

goal of 5 final tables in mtt with > 100 players. I made 32 so far.

 

2. Play event #3 of the WSOP. (or whatever that first open event is

with a $1500 buy-in)

 

3. Get a 5 digit score. up until this year only had a couple of 3-

digit scores. This year I've added about 4, 4-digit scores. Time to

nail the >=$10K.

 

4. Play classier poker. No more sarcastic 'Great call', 'perfectly

played', 'got some value out of that', or 'fucking moronic

nitwit' ( just to name a few ) in the chat box.

 

5. Better bankroll mgmt. Had this as one last year and practiced it

very well until I withdrew everything to go to vegas in Oct. That

didn't work out so good.

 

6. Lose weight. Get BP down to normal. More of personal goals but I've

put on pounds since college due to desk job and poker play. I believe

poker is part of the reason for my high blood pressure too. Late

nights and early mornings are bad for my immune system, have to get

into better shape.

 

7. Keep my records more up to date. Seems like I always fall behind

about 3 months before I update my poker tracker records. Like now,

last time I updated it was mid Aug.

 

8. Hold more live sattellites to live events.

 

9. Try to start a regular H,O,E,P,Plc ( more on this to come )

 

Numero Uno is the most important to me, behind number 6 I guess. Last year was the first year that I actually wrote down goals for the year and imagine that it was the first profitable year I've had. I've been playing online since late 2004, and at first I wasn't all that good. I would say I was about average, as I have played poker since I was really young so I knew what beat what and I could read the boards well. I knew nothing about odds and tells and such. But for the most part I was breaking even online since I started playing, until late 2006. I made my first large field final table and a $300 score from a $4 buy-in. I followed that up in 3 days making the final table again in that same tournament for about $400.

 

The new year rolled around and I made a wager with a friend on who could make more final tables in 3 months with a field of 180 or more entrants. I think I made about 8 final tables in that 3 months and the average field size was about 400. Unfortunately my buddy's day job allowed him more daytime play and in turn he got to play more fields in the 200 entry range and wound up getting about 25 final tables. Not to discredit his final tables, as he is probably the best player that I know personally, that made me realize the importance of playing smaller fields though. I had made my goal last year to make 4 final tables and ended up making about 30, so I wanted to set a high goal this year. I just hope I can come close.

 

Anyway, here we are 7 weeks into the year and I've made two final tables. That means I'm about 5 behind schedule and we are about 10 to 13 weeks from the wsop event that I was wanting to play. If I don't get back on track with #1 then #2 won't be met. I figure I need to have won about $3200 by then to affordably and feasibly make the trip. That also means I'm now about $3100 away.

 

I have started having a regular HOEPPlc game. Every-other Thurs night we have a .25/.50 NL cash game and alternate rounds of various flop games. I've done decent at it so far, as we've played about 3 times and I haven't lost any money yet. I'd say I'm up about $80 in it. I did have a slight revelation last time we played too. I believe a tell that I had on a couple of players has backfired on me and now some regulars that I play with are using it against me. No more, lol. I'm going to experiment with it next week and see if I can pick up a BIG pot by reversing it on them.

 

Also, we are getting ready to start the league back. It looks like we'll probably only have 7 or 8 guys again this year but that is a good number. I had a live $20 tournament last night to kind of kick-off the league this year. We had 12 guys show up to play and it turned out to be a group of 6 of the league guys vs 6 other guys that play together fairly often. Our league guys triumphed and took all 4 money spots, with yours truly taking 2nd for $70. It was a really good structure and the other guys just weren't used to deeper stack slow structure play. They were constantly overbetting the flop and raising too much preflop, our guys slowly just waited for big hands to trap them and pick them off.

 

Well, long post for my first blog in a looong time. I'll try to make myself do one every 4 or 5 days at least.

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