iBall

Ladies and gentlemen I present to you the Dell 3007WFP...























I know, the pictures suck, they were taken with a video camera.

Pugno di dollari...

If you play SNGs for $55 or more, go ahead and do yourself a favor. Right now. Open up a table of 200NL and just watch for 5 minutes. Preferably 6-max. I'll wait.




Wow! Did you SEE that shit!??!?!? That part where the guy folded getting better that 15:1 on the flop after calling a preflop raise for 4BB? That hand where the guy 3-bet ALL IN with AQs preflop? That guy who bet 1/4 of the pot on the river with the stone cold nuts? Yeah, pretty bad, huh?



Now think about this--that crazy donkey shit is going down all the time at those tables. They're at least as bad as, if not worse than, tourno players. And they're playing for cash! When you pick up a pot, it's denominated in US dollars. Not some abstract form of 3rd-level currency that represents your share (derived by ICM of course) of a prize pool that you can theoretically convert into money at a rate %5-%15 more reliably than your average opponent. Dollars.



Anyway, think about that for awhile. And if you still think SNGs are the way to go, more power to you. I see the advantages inherent in the game. The mathematical reducibility is unparalleled in SNGs. 80%-90% accurate late-game play can be learned in a matter of days. There are donks I have played over 20 SNGs with, and have less than 200 hands on. So if you decide to stick with that, I understand. But I just thought I'd let you know what else is going on out there...

FALTR not...

So far, so good. I didn't realize just how little you have to play to make the leaderboard, so I'm there! I'll probably just make a hundo or so off it this month, but as I move up in stakes (and volume) I can see having a legitimate shot at an extra k a month from that shizz. I've only played 200 tournos or so in July, but also a little Cash NL & Limit brought in a little extra (I like to play those when I'm watching a sports event).




If I seem a bit overenthused about the leaderboard ish, it's because it's nice to finally see my name in lights, so to speak, like the 2nd Assistant Gaffer who sits through all the credits of a shitty romantic comedy just so he can finally see the validation that yes, indeed, he did help create something. Maybe it's a pile of shit, but by God it's something, and it's his something.




I was going through some old boxes and found some journals I'd written in over the years. One thing that I noticed in reading them as that my life tends to being going better when I keep a journal about it. So I'm going to treat this blog like a new journal, sorta. Of course it may turn out that I have transposed horse and cart, and that I was only keeping those journals because my life was going well. So here is a message to future me: just because you are nostalgic for these days when you kept that blog, don't start a new one. It will just be a waste of time and will not help anything.



On to poker. For now, my goal is going to be to play enough to make $500/day, working up to $1000/day by the end of the year. Note that I said "play enough to..." so I'm not expecting to make that every day, just on average. My results over the past 3 days have been incredible. I'm bracing myself for the inevitable regression to the mean. I'm also rolled for the 77s now, but they go off approximately never... I'll play as many of them as I can, as long as they're not shark tanks.

My latest results graph, par usuel:




For my money, Henin crushes Mauresmo tomorrow. Revenge is sweet.

I get seeer-yus...

Well, completely ignoring my own advice, I decided to quit my job and "go pro". Most of it was due to my success at the 55s, some of it was due to a stupid management decision that ended up with me working for someone who had no idea what I did or was supposed to do. The cost-benefit analysis just got more and more weighted towards quitting as my hourly rate got higher and higher.



Shortly therafter, I just hit a mental brick wall with my schoolwork. There was a bit of homework to do for the seminar I was attending, and it had to be done by June 29. I just couldn't finish in time. I knew the deadline was coming, I had read the material, I knew I could write good shit about it, and.... I stopped about halfway through. I heard a voice in my head say "Why am I doing this?", and I couldn't come up with a good answer. I mean, the best-case scenario for school--a law degree--would involve 6 years and over $100,000 in debt, after which my starting salary would be around $60K. Maybe in 5 years I could get that up to 6 figs.



OR, I thought:

I could quit school and just play poker all the time. If I only put in 4 hours a day at $50/hr, that's, um, $200/day, which is over $52,000 if I only work 5 days a week. This is basically a permanent vacation compared to my old job, for 30% more dough. If I actually worked hard at it, got my hourly up to $60, and did 8 hours 5 days a week, that's $100K+ easy. Working from home. In my underwear. And let's say I move up in stakes, and make $100/hr by the end of the year. I remember talking with a friend from college about what we wanted to do "when we grew up", and one thing we agreed on was that it had to be a career where we could pull a bill an hour by the time we were 40. Well...




So that's what I did. I quit my job, quit school, went on a fishing trip (fucking here, ship it), and now that's what I'm doing. I'm going to take it easy at first, try to play at least 30 tournos/day, and take the opportunity to get out into this beautiful summer and lose some of the "work weight" that I put on scarfing birthday cake and free soda at that hellhole. I'm also going on another vacation at the end of July to see my friends in Colorado.

Poker has been *meh* since I got back, but hey, it happens.



Allez les bleus, batch...