It's been a while...

 So we haven't spoken in a while. How are you doing? That's nice. Anyhooo...
The last time we spoke, I was on my way to Las Vegas and in the midst of some run bad (a.k.a. play bad, downswing, crap burgers). Right before I went to Vegas, my laptop decided to put a stop to my poker playing and overall Internet usage by having an aneurysm. I have been without Internet access (on my laptop) or over a month, 6 weeks to be precise and to be honest I haven't gone through the DTs. I think the time off from poker was good and gave me time to do other things, like reading, exercising, laundry...

  I will hold off from getting everyone caught up to date on my life.

  So a few days ago I received a new laptop and put Cake poker (juicy stakes) on so that I will be up and ready to roll in to the run good. My family and I had a wonderful Thanksgiving with lots of food and alcohol. Today I was given a day off and decided to make a trek out to the local casino for some hot 1-2 live NLHE action. The first 2 hours were quite stale and pretty soon I was down $180. I didn't lose any huge pots, just constantly missing flops and having other players call my c-bets. Finally I was dealt AQ suited in LP and raised 3 limpers to $12. I flopped top 2 pair and had the UTG limper donk in to me for about 1/2 the pot. I min raised and he called only to donk the turn which was a low brick card. the pot had grown and I just raised all in. He thought for a moment and called with his worse 2 pair. The river was kind and I got back to even. That's why you don't limp call a raise preflop with A5o out of position. An orbit later I pick up JJ in MP and raise to open to $10. I get one CCer on the button and the SB, a bad LPP 3 bets to $30. I have the 2 villains covered (SB just by a little) and decide to call and see the flop. The button obliges and WHAMO- Jc 6c 3s. The SB C-bets $50 and I am in no mood to call with a flush draw out there. I raise to $100 and the SB calls with a confused look on his face. I am now putting him on pocket 10s, or Queens through Aces. There's a chance he could have AcKc here because he's a passive player without the present nuts, but that doesn't matter because I flopped a monster.
  The pot now has $290 in the middle and there's no way I am doing anything, but shoving just about any turn if given the chance. The turn is the 5c and SB checks. I go all-in and he is dumbfounded. I can only put him on an overpair and more likely than not, he has a big club in his hand which must be the only reason he's even considering this call. By the way I have played this hand, I have a set or a King high flush at least. How can he consider this call with a non-club overpair? Well, he takes 5 minutes and even asks if I will show after folding. I don't respond and he unhappily folds. I give him a little consolation by saying that I had him beat. He tells me that he had pocket Queens with no club.

Anyways, I end my 4 hour session soon after and leave up $170 which is nice.

Hopefully this will be signs of good poker things to come because October sucked some major donkey balls for my NLHE game. The good news is that I am still learning and have been getting much better at not tilting. Just let the game come to you, don't force it.
Have fun and I will talk to you soon.

Scotch & Cigars

If you've ever read my blog before, you'll probably remember that I like a good scotch to drink and occasionally a nice, light cigar (preferably robusto). Last year when I went with some friends to Las Vegas, I really looked forward to a cigar bar called Casa Fuente. It's right near the bottom of the escalator near the Forums Shops inside of Caesars. The have some nice scotches to match your cigar as well as some specialty drinks that they are known for. The day I went with 4 other friends was memorable not only for the cigars, scotch, and comraderie, but for the fact that Dick Butkus was signing autographs across from the cigar bar in a sports memorabilia shop. My friends and I got the chance to meet him and take some pictures.

  This year, I will be traveling to my spiritual home in the desert once again, but not with a group. Originally I wanted to go with my wife, as she is a big fan of Las Vegas, but with 3 kids all under the age of 6, it's rather difficult to get child care even for a 4 day jaunt. Instead, I will be making the pilgrimmage alone. Yes, my wife trusts me, which she has every reason to. I love you honey!
I am already feeling the excitement of Vegas and am looking up other Scotch bars that I can relax in. I cam across this list, which is reassuring and will go well with my intention of eating some nice steaks. I had never heard of the Freakin Frog before and am looking forward to making it out to the UNLV campus if time permits to taste some of the owners myriad of scotches.

 The last time I was in Vegas with my pseudo bachelor party-like amigos, we did a lot of group activities, such as eating, drinking, gambling, and gambling. No, I didn't go to a strip club! I love you honey! During that trip, I missed out on 3 important things that I wanted to accomplish while in Las Vegas. Playing poker, drinking scotch, and sipping a big gulp sized Pina Colada poolside right after breakfast. This trip will be a redo, if you will, in order to check those things off and enjoy some relaxation time, sans children. I love my 3 kids more than anything else, but one does need some "me time".

  Well, I'm sure you get the drift of this post, so I will bid you adieu, as I need to get back to researching things to do on my Las Vegas trip. Auf Wiedersehen!

Glory Days...

I just got back from a long weekend in Las Vegas on Sunday and was preparing to write a "Trip Report", but decided against it so that I can get my thoughts together and come up with a theme to my weekend. Instead I want to talk about something that has been going through my poker mind lately and that is my waining interest in playing poker. Without going into too much detail, I only played about 3 hours of poker over the course of my Las Vegas Extravaganza weekend for multiple reasons. One of which was the fact that I didn't feel an urgency or overwhelming desire to play. I wanted to hang out with my friends who joined me on the trip and I wanted to let go of having to concentrate. It's a bit disappointing to me that I may be losing the spark of passion for poker, but it makes a lot of sense given the times.
 Black Friday was truly a terrible day for poker players all around the world as well as the U.S., even though the elephant had been in the room since 2006. Serious online pros and hobbyists alike faced the  nearly insurmountable task of trying to get back home. The causal player wouldn't be bothered jumping through hoops to get money online which in turn only made the games that much more difficult. It was as if the ocean had just lost all of its lowered tiered fish and made the food chain much more competitive similar to the late 2006 when UIGEA passed and many online poker sites left the U.S. market.
Online poker in the United States might as well be dead, in my opinion. Hardly anyone is getting money off of the few networks that are running and the amount of games available are laughable. The entire community seems to be in a bit of a daze. I can only compare the sudden robust to busto shift online to Enron's collapse in early 2001. The big wigs at the top of the organisations (who don't go to jail), will be fine. They'll have other avenues to explore whether it be playing live, getting jobs other high priced jobs or retiring. It's the grinders and semi-serious hobbyists like myself who will ultimately be forced out, so to speak, which brings this back to my poker life today.

 Soon after Black Friday, I made the decision to take up NLHE more seriously than before and move from LHE permanently. Things started off well in the beginning and although I have hit some breakeven times, that is to be expected, especially when learning a new game. The overall problem is that being a stay at home dad of 3 kids 4 years old and under makes it rather difficult for me to concentrate on poker given the tougher conditions with respect to playing online. Combine that with the fact that the closest casinos that offer poker are all at least an hour away and it makes things all the more difficult to keep my poker brain running and well oiled. I've never been the type of person who can leave an activity for long stretches of time and then come back to them in good shape.
If online poker were to somehow go back to how it was pre Black Friday or even more so pre UIGEA, it would take me some serious retooling to get my poker game back to where it was and even then, I would still be improving from there.
As I went from casino to casino this past weekend I felt as if I was revisiting an old apartment or dorm room that I had lived in before. I recognised the tables and the layout. I looked up at the screens that show the wait lists and had a small sense of longing for 2008 through 2010 when I was in the thick excitement over playing poker. I loved discussing strategy on 2+2 and looking at stats on PT3. I loved the feeling when I knew that I had improved and was no longer a complete fish. As I mentioned before, I have been a stay at home dad since 2007, so poker was important to me because it gave me the opportunity to use my mind in a way that I didn't use as a parent. It was also something just for me. My man cave of sorts. There was an energy around poker in those 3 years that made it more than just a TV fad of David & Goliath on ESPN. There was a connection of people around the world. I was discussing poker with people in Los Angeles, Oklahoma, New York, Scandinavia, Australia, and more. I had become apart of a community that my everyday life friends didn't really understand. I guess you could say, poker was my 1960's. What was once considered a degenerate lifestyle, was...well still a degenerate lifestyle, but now more legitimate. Some of the stank had been washed off and febreezed which made online poker all that much more acceptable for the many everyday citizens.

 I walked by the Venetian casino where I had a great run in 2006 and where I met up with a great LHE player from 2+2 last year. It just seemed like a mirage to me. Everyone needs to take a break from things at different times. I hope that this is nothing more than a break. I am looking forward to a time when US players are back in the thick of playing online and not having to find creative ways to get funds into and out of their accounts. I hope that I get the chance to be apart of the second coming of online poker and mania that was born out of the Moneymaker effect. Most of all, I hope I still have that spark to play poker seriously regardless of the stakes. I got into poker with the fantasy of winning that big payday Ala Chris Moneymaker, but I'll settle for being a solid winning player at the grinder stakes.



Coming to you live in God's Country.

So I decided to learn how to play Backgammon a few days ago. I saw a Hoyle's rules book in the beach house where I am staying and took a break from kid duty to read the rules. There was a backgammon set, but I didn't have anyone to play with, so I downloaded a droid application and went on to play over 200 games at different skill levels. This may be the next thing I become hooked on, unless I try Baccarat, which I could possibly try out in Vegas next month. I have a pretty basic idea of Backgammon strategy and I am torn between going online and looking up advanced strategies or just taking this game as a chance to learn something without any external help, beyond the basic things I have read.
I haven't had much time for live poker for the past 3 weeks which is a bit dis concerning given that my last 2 sessions were terrible as far as results go. I am itching to have another live session before I go to Vegas next month, partially so I don't get too rusty with respect to live play as well as the fact that I don't plan on playing poker 24/7 for the few days I am there. This trip to Vegas is going to be with 5 other guys and will pretty much be a "bachelor party" of sorts in their minds, while I will be hopefully relaxing a majority of the time whilst always with drink hand. I'd like to play some NLHE as I have only played LHE in Vegas the 5 times I've been there. My friends are looking forward to "Sin City", if you get my meaning, and I have a different mind set at the moment. Being a stay at home dad, I want to time to myself to wake up whenever I like and do whatever it is I want while on vacation. I am not looking to get a happy ending or put $1 bills in G-strings so when the group goes off to those activities, that will be my best chance to go and play poker. I am also looking forward to having a nice cigar and some scotch at Casa Fuente.

The online poker front has been going rather well in August. I have mostly been playing NLHE .02-.04, albeit at the shallow tables, which means a maximum buy-in of 50 BBs. I plan on playing the 100 BB max tables as soon as my online BR gets to $80 which will be 20 buyins. my current online BR is at a little over $71, which $32 of that has been winnings in August, not including rake back. I haven't been posting much strategy in the 2+2 forums, but I have a goal of starting to frequent the micro full ring forums as of September 1st if my BR is at $80. I know, I know. This is all very exciting. Perhaps that is why I have so many followers so far. It is rather interesting to think that I started my online bankroll, post Black Friday, with only .39 that I got on Cake Poker from trading in Gold cards from 2008. I've won a total of $55 since BF and the rake back helped me early on.

It strange to think of how much money I put into online poker, or should I say lost, back in 2005 before I ran good. It's also strange to think how I have built a uber-nano stakes BR with nothing in the past 4 months. When I get back home, my first blog goal is to begin the 2nd part of my poker journey which starts up in 2008. Regardless of what happened before, I look at that year as when I truly began to learn about playing LHE. I like to glorify the pre-UIGEA online poker times of 2004-2006, but I really enjoyed 2008-2010 when it comes to my own development and results. I am no where near being a finished product when it comes to poker and probably never will, but it seemed like the golden years to me. Kind of like Baseball in the 50's and 60's while the pre UIGEA days were like Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb.
Well, I will leave you with that for now and hope to hear from someone soon, especially with any suggestions on any of the subjects in my posts. Have fun, the summer is almost coming to an end.

The Hand of Death part 1

The touch of death can be a desirable power for many. It provides the user with the ultimate tool of revenge, justice, discrimination, pity, care, and closure. In Roman times, crowds would attempt to persuade their leader to allow a wounded gladiator to live or die. It was that leader who passed final judgment, but with a thumb pointed to the Earth or the sky. Throngs of screaming mobs would rage as an executioner would pull the lever on the guillotine which was the final separation of one’s soul from their body. Bill & Ted outwitted Death with a wedgie and a series of board games to get back from the other side.

We all see the face of death, but only in the peripheral view of our consciousness. It’s not that common to stare death in the face, but rarer still are the ones who search for it. I have had the privilege of being witness to two organizations, hell bent on finding death, or so to speak. The first is an all too common story of ego and spiteful ignorance driving a speeding locomotive towards a cliff with no bridge. The story is common due to its unimaginative, predictable, and boring nature. He second is only a little more interesting than the first in large part because of how solid its institution was. Solid in framework, solid in content, and solid in its simple stratification of responsibility.  Yet, last Sunday, it found what it was unintentionally looking for all these many years. Ironically enough, this organization found death, as many do, while looking for a second chance in life.  I think I can offer some insight as to why this happened.

In the late autumn of 2005, I was a newlywed, having been married in June. I had also been promoted to the position of District Manager in the juggernaut movie rental chain that rhymes with Cock Mustard. They had just hit an iceberg in the Atlantic ocean of business acumen and had not completely realized the extent of the damage. The upper level executives in the organization thought that it would be a good idea to ignore technological innovation as it pertains to customer loyalty which then put their employees in the position of playing catch up to the cutting edge competition called, Netflix. The District Managers and Store Managers were under immense pressure to make forecasted sales numbers, which to no one’s surprise were just about impossible. The company didn’t have a great amount of capital to purchase new product for sale. Instead it was pushing the hell out of used DVDs which had a larger gross margin although the top line sales would be lower which would be one of the many reasons why were weren’t making our sales numbers. To make a long story short, the executives at the top level were setting unreasonable expectations in every facet or running a retail business. In hindsight, it looks to me as if they were paving the way for decreasing their managerial employee base without having to worry about severance or wrongful termination lawsuits. I was 7 months into my new position in a District that thrived on new product sales because it was a high income area. The company’s new sales initiatives basically handicapped me before I could even get to the starting line. One of the main reasons for this was what we in the retail world call a labor matrix. A labor matrix tells you how many labor hours you are allotted based on your average sales. When sales go up, your labor hours follow. When sales go down, well, you get the picture. To make matters worse, the company had reduced the amount of labor hours per sales $ which made life very unhappy at the store level. All of this was compounded again and again with high expectations in the image of the store, the day to operation, and the administrative organization. This is one example of how a company may have purposefully or ignorantly steered their business into the face of death. Like the Roman Empire, they spread themselves too thin, and introduced too many initiatives which ended up cannibalizing their own profits. This affected me in that my stores were continuing to underperform. It was a perfect storm of failure and I was the one to blame. 3 of my stores were scheduled to be closed by the spring of 2006 and another 3 were on the docket for later that year. Would it be wise for me to stick it out and see if the new promotion would pan out? Me neither.

 I had just vacationed in Las Vegas for the first time with my wife and some friends and started looking for a new job with my polished multi-unit management resume. I had liked the idea of working in a laid back multi faceted retail environment where I could oversee multiple departments that sold products I was interested in. I found out that Border Books and Music was looking for a General Manager in Chicago. They had been opening more stores and appeared to be expanding their profits. A few years earlier I had a roommate who worked as a Supervisor at Borders in the music section and he was, in my opinion, a total nimrod. Borders was a bit liberal on the side of cooks in the kitchen if you get my drift, but they had started to trim the amount of managers and supervisors in each store so that they had less overhead, which I thought to be a good realization on their part. When I went in for an interview for the position, I knew that some of the questions that would come up would revolve around the reason for my wanting to leave my current position when I had spent so many years to be promoted. In most cases this may be the death nail, but in my case, it was the company that was nailing its own coffin shut.

Random talking points

Not much going on in the way of poker lately. I am a bit stalled in my online challenge. I said that I would not play NLHE until I had a healthy enough bankroll, but I lied. It's hard to learn something if you don't practice it on a consistent basis. I haven't been able to go to the casino as often as I would like, but when you are a stay at home dad with 3 boys ages 4, 2, and 2, it's hard to get to spend quality time with my wife let alone have time to myself. With that being said, I have had to play more online than what I had planned. I started to play some NLHE again so that I could try and practice some of the theory that I am learning in the forums as well as my reading. What I have learned is that the landscape changes where ever you go. How live players act at $1-$2 NLHE is quite different than how online players act at .02-.04. It's frustrating, but good to keep me alert and thinking. I've played more hands online than I have in quite some time, but it's all uber nano-stakes and I am running basically breakeven due to some early losses sustained at NLHE which I am now bring back to zero hopefully this week. I plan on taking a trip out to the casino in the next 10 days and hopefully erase the memory of my last session which was a -$300 day.
 Some new news is that I have booked my trip to Las Vegas in the fall. I was hoping to get a chance to stay at a new hotel on the strip, but will end up at the Mirage which is nice. They have one of my favorite sandwich places, The Carnegie Deli. It's a great location and I can relax with a Pina Colda at the pool. This may be the first trip that I play some live NLHE in Vegas. I have always stuck to LHE and my past few outings have been quite disastrous which was a far cry different from when my first 2 trips. I am traveling with at least 5 other guys to Vegas which I am sure will promise to be a rowdy time. I hope to steer clear of that as I am looking for some relaxation with some tasty drinks in hand.

Before I continue, I wanted to give a shout out to the person in Germany who may be my only repeat viewer so far. Tell your friends! I have a blog on Deuces Cracked which is basically the same blog with a few variations. The difference in viewers is night and day. Deuces cracked has a built in audience of sorts when it comes to blogs and you can easily see a new post at any given moment. I'm not so lucky here as of yet, but it's still early.
I also wanted to mention one of the blogs that I am following which is a very interesting read so far is you are a fan of Poker. It's called Supernova Elite Chase and follows the quest for Supernova elite status on Pokerstars by a successful player named Tony.
Well, that's all of the excitement for now. I am still working on a couple of longer blog posts that have to do with some recent news stories that have nothing to do with the Caylee Anthony trial. Have fun and I hope to hear from you soon.

It’s been a long time, been a long…

So, it’s been a while since last I blogged. That’s mostly because not much is going on in the way of poker and the rest of my life hasn’t been all that exciting as far as writing goes. I haven’t gone to the casino since my $300 losing session at $1-2 NLHE, but I have been playing quite a bit of the uber-nano stakes online at Cake. It’s been a rocky road type of month as far as results go. I had a great June and then when I moved up to some .10-.20 short handed LHE, I was cold decked hand after hand. Losing sets to flushes on the river, over pairs to runner trips, that ol chestnut. With rake back I am close to $20 in my BR, which as a reminder, began at .39 cents. I am dabbling a bit in some NLHE at the lowest stakes just so that I can keep my mind on that strategy in between outings to the Brick & Mortar.

There’s a new casino opening up about 15 minutes from my house, but I just learned that they don’t have any poker tables, which is quite disappointing. The good news is that I have gotten the green light from my wife to go to Las Vegas in a couple of months with some friends. I don’t plan on this being a big poker vacation as I would prefer to relax as much as possible which would be sitting by the pool with a nice libation in hand, preferably a Pina Colada. It looks like I will be going with 5 or 6 other guys that I am friends with which should be a lot of fun, unless they decide to act like they did when they were 24. There’s been a lot of talk of strip clubs and happily ever endings, if you get my meaning. I am a normal heterosexual guy, so of course I enjoy looking at beautiful naked women, but I just don’t feel right about it and I think that it would be personally disrespectful to my wife even if she didn’t know, so I plan on playing poker at those times.

Over the past couple of weeks I have been thinking of different poker and non-poker related subjects that I would like to talk about, but they’re quite in depth, which requires some research, which requires research time, which requires free time, which I don’t have being a stay at home dad of 3 boys under the age of 5. I’ve been disappointed by the lack of enthusiasm in the uLHE forums on 2+2, especially by the old veterans when it comes to strat threads. It basically resembles an abandoned tourist town with the exception of one bar where everyone hangs out. I can see why this is happening, obviously due to Black Friday, but I still want to be on my game when it comes to playing live and the little bit online, so I try to respond to threads that I find interesting and have started a few of my own in the past few weeks. MODs aren’t responding to obvious situations that they would normally take care of in a matter of hours. Old regs are only posting in the NC thread and new players are putting up a few hand posts each week, but they don’t get many responses as the situations have been discussed over and over again during the past 4 years. One thing that really sticks in my craw is a MOD who was all about the uLHE forum when they first started and became a self appointed dictator of sorts upon being MODed green a few years back. About 10-12 months ago he got sick of LHE and took up another variety of poker and basically packed up shop and moved on to what he considered greener pastures, I can only assume looking for a new wife. Most of his posts in the uLHE are either administrative or condescending in tone (IMHO). I think he’s a nice poster and did a lot of good work “Back in the day”, but I feel like he divorced us when he found a new younger model and just packed up one day, leaving with thought that it was our fault. Perhaps I am being petty.

It doesn’t look like I will be getting to the casino in the next few weeks, but whenever I go, hopefully it‘s in the black this time. If anyone has suggestions on great package deals to Vegas, please let me know. Good luck!

My poker history, July-December 2008

Last I left you was basically here (http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/35/micro-stakes-limit/time-pack-my-bags-nc-233348/). My unrealistic expectations and low frustration tolerance were wreaking havoc on my mental stability when it came to poker. Looking back on how I reacted to running B/E for 5,000ish hands is embarrassing, but as I said in my last entry, it was for the best. If you haven’t already figured it out, I am very intense and competitive when it comes to my hobbies. I have a difficult time taking things lightly, which I don’t look at as a negative attribute, but something that can have negative consequences. Obviously I didn’t end up quitting poker, but I took about 5 weeks off and started to think about playing once again one night when my then, 1 year old son, couldn’t sleep. Once he went back down close to midnight, I was fully awake. I went downstairs to my computer and felt like donking around in a NLHE tournament. I had won a $26token on FTP and I saw that there was a Knockout Bounty tournament about to start. Things worked out and I came in 4^th place, which seems to be a running theme for me, which paid out a little over $200. Not bad for a freeroll. These types of surprises are always good for the ego and it was the little boost I needed to slowly work back into playing cash games. I started up with .25-.50 LHE again, mostly on Pokerstars, but added then switched over to .50-1 in October of that year, which was another fairly bumpy ride.

In the fall of 2008, my wife and I had decided to take a short vacation to Las Vegas with some friends of ours. I was excited to go, not only because I love Vegas, but our last trip in the fall of 2006 was quite lucrative as I won over $700 playing 4-8 LHE in the week that we were there. This trip was to be a bit different in tone which began with some bad weather the week before we left. That fall the Midwest was experiencing heavy rain and winds due to some strong Hurricanes in the Southern part of the USA. One Saturday in September, I went to the basement to get some clean laundry and stepped into an inch of water. Apparently the Village’s drainage system couldn’t keep up with the sudden influx of rain water and in began to back up into many of the houses on our block. I didn’t realize how bad it would get so I took my time locating a sump pump and moving out clothes. Within an hour it was 5 inches and I was in shock. Luckily I saw our cat perched on a mattress that was about to start floating around and got her out of there. My wife, 1 year old son, and still dry cat went to her parents as I began to hopelessly grab things that I could save. In the end I borrowed 3 sump pumps that ran for 24 hours straight. I began ripping up carpet and trying to move furniture that was beyond recovery. In the end, we had the entire basement demolished to the foundation. The next weekend we were off to Vegas for 4 days. My wife and I went out there with another couple whom we had known for 6 years. We’ll call them Kevin and Marie. What could go wrong? It started with the 3 Bloody Marys that Kevin had on the flight out. He had another 2 Margaritas at the Venetian pool an hour after landing and then topped it off with 2 more Gin & Tonics at Sushi that night with a desert of 2 more Martinis at Tao nightclub. I think the rest can be summed up in this 2+2 trip report. (http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/35/micro-stakes-limit/trip-report-wont-live-up-marchons-reputation-305708/).

The last half of 2008 was all about how I needed to work on my mental approach to poker which was difficult to change. One thing that wasn’t that difficult to change were the NLHE tournaments that I was playing. As I had stated before, I usually would play $2-$4 buy-in tourneys that had 2,000+ players. The payout was great if you were in the top 5, but not so much if you were on the bubble. When playing poker online, most sites have some sort of reward program, so that the more hands you play, the more points you earn. To be more specific, Pokerstars had a FPP/VPP program where you would earn points based on the amount of money in each pot you played. You would earn more points (fraction of points) when the pot was bigger, whether that was due to there being more players in the pot in a given hand or the simple fact that one was at a higher limit. Another aspect was that if you earned a given amount of points in a calendar month, then you would move up a level which would help you to earn more points in the next month. These points could be used for many different things. You could buy merchandise, tournament tickets, cash back rewards, and so on. I would use my VPPs to enter single table tournaments with up to 10 players, also known as a Sit N Go (SNGsmicrostakes players on the forums suggested that I play 180-man multi table SNGs rather than the 2,000+ entries because I would have a better chance at cashing for more money. In November and December of 2008, I started playing some 180-man SNGs and did well and finished in the Top 10 players 3 times and netted over $80. To me this was free money to help pad my bankroll, especially after moving up in the cash games and not seeing the instant success.

As 2008 drew to a close, I was rather happy how things turned out overall even if there were things that I did or said which I’m not proud of. I felt like I wasn’t the total luckbox in 2008 that I obviously was in 2005 and 2006. I felt that 2009 was going to be my year. I’m not sure exactly what that means, but all I can do is quote John Lennon when I say, “Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans…”