Sunday, April 6, 2008

All or nothing

Changes

Like I mentioned before, I'll be getting a new apartment some time this summer; we basically have one lined up and are waiting for the current tenant to find a house to buy so she can move out, and of course so we can move in. Put simply, what I'm doing now just won't fly when we have that new place. I'm going to have to make a lot of changes, namely to how I 'work' with poker, how my 'workplace' is set up, and I'll have to make myself a new routine.

Now most people who don't know poker would look at this and laugh at my new 'goals', but fuck 'em, I really don't care what they think. Poker may seem like a joke to some people but I know there is money to be made, I love the game, and I have first-hand experience to know that it's possible to make a legitimate income off of it.

Now I've been on quite a ride since late February and the stress as well as the swings are really getting to me, but I know I'm improving and I'm picking up on a lot of things I never used to. The problem is I'm not taking it seriously enough yet. If I'm going to be playing poker for the majority or all of my income in the coming months, I'll have to approach it like a business and respect it. As it stands now I wake up whenever the hell I want to, don't really have any daily routine, eat irregularly and fairly unhealthily and don't exercise nearly enough. Another thing I do is I check my regular lineup of sites like an addict, refreshing cardschat/stoxpoker/digg/gmail/etc every few minutes to see if something new is up. I guess you could call me an internet addict. Rather pathetic if you ask me, and I've decided I'm going to set myself a maximum number of times I'm going to check those sites daily. Anyways I could go on about all that's fucked up in my life at the moment, but I don't want to bore you nor do I want to get myself in a state of depression, so I'll only be looking forward for now.

Some new goals:
  1. Follow newly written daily routine beside my desk
  2. By way of following the daily routine, play at least 1k hands daily
  3. Start training myself to play more tables
  4. Save like crazy
  5. Post at least one hand daily for analysis at both Cardschat and Stox
  6. Profit
I managed to get nearly 1500 hands of 100nl in yesterday, a new record, but unfortunately I ran into some beats and definitely tilted some money off too, so I lost a good chunk. I did feel that I played well though - I was chunking away at some really terrible players, then I'd finally get their whole stack in on either a setup or a hand where they drew out, rinse lather repeat, and eventually got pissed off and overly aggressive at a shorthanded table which of course bit me in the ass.



Canadian spring

Well 'spring' is here, and as usual the long winter has had me thinking so much about it that I've developed this false image of nonstop beautiful sunny weather and cloudless skies. Aside from today which has been just about the only really nice day (ok, BEAUTIFUL day) so far this year, I couldn't have been more wrong. It's been overcast, pissing rain and around 5C for the past two weeks or so. It's been slowly warming up the last week or so, but the forecast says it's going to basically drop back down to 5-9C and piss more rain all of next week which is just fantastic. I really can't complain though, today I went and walked my dog with shorts on which put an uncontrollably large smile on my face.

It's only been like 5 days, but I'm already getting eager and overly impatient about my FPP order. I can't bloody wait for the new monitor. I think unless my bankroll drops dramatically or something else unexpected happens, I'll be trying to play 12+ tables of 25nl or 50nl like a nit just trying to grind as consistently as I can. I need first and last month's rent on-hand until the landlord rings us up to tell us the apartment's ready. I guess that would more than likely happen at the turn of the month, but I can't risk spending some of that rent and not being able to get that amount back in time when we get called. I will most likely have to start working for my friend's landscaping company to supplement my income for a while, but they're not even in Toronto at the moment so I'm not sure what's happening with that.

I'm ranting again...I guess I'll keep you guys posted with my progress et al. I'll be putting some hands in today (sunday bloody sunday...) so I'll put a graph in when I do.

Anyways one of my favourite spring/summer songs here. This track always reminds me of sitting on a porch with brews or bumping songs in my friends' rides (goddammit I need my license)...


2 comments:

Zach said...

Good luck man, if you can really hold yourself to that there is definitely money to be made in poker. I'm in practically the same boat as you on most of these, except I'm going to be sticking at 50nl. If you can make some reasonable demands of yourself in terms of playing and a routine and of course continue to play like you know how (ie don't tilt hard), you are going to make money. It'll be a grind, but that doesn't mean it can't be fun.

And I don't know much about Toronto weather patterns but I'm absolutely loving the Spring. All of a sudden instead of 2 feet of snow on the ground I can walk around in shorts and a T-shirt.

Anonymous said...

I know you can do it, T.