End of the year

So 2008 is pretty much in the books. I probably won't get out for any more poker this year. I played the poker almost as a part-time job this year, almost 1k hours, the most I've ever put in one year. Mostly because my wife spent quite a bit of time away from home with the kids, giving me like a solid two months of being a bachelor, allowing me to put in lots of hours.

From my charts, you can see that I have some very wild swings. I've come to realize that I have a very high variance style, I really like to push small edges whenever I can. I think that if I can plug some small leaks, and ratchet up my value betting, along with making some good river folds, and possibly not always making the high variance play, I think I can kick my game into the next gear. When I am running good, I seem to run like a god, but when I run bad, it's not pretty. Plus there were some stretches of like 5 or 6 sessions, where I know that I played bad and played too late into the night. Keeping focused on the goal at hand, and playing your best poker game is tough 100% of the time. I have a lot of respect for professional grinders who somehow grind out a living doing this day after day, knowing that they need to win.

In any case I had another winning year at poker, and for something that I take as just a serious hobby, it's nice that it pays me as opposed to the other way around.

Here are the charts:

Breaking the 100 Big Bet Barrier

I won $4001 last night playing 20/40 at Oceans-11. Previous to last night, my biggest win in terms of big bets was 98.33 big bets in the 30/60 game at Canterbury Park in 12 hours of play. Last night I won 100 big bets in 4 hours! I was smoking hot, and even the hands I was tossing preflop were turning into gold. I shouldn't have mucked anything! It was an awesome game, because the entire table agreed to live straddle, so every pot was a 3 or 4 bet frenzy with 4 or 5 players usually seeing a flop. I made some monster hands, and some just good mediocre hands, but I played them well and got max value on most of them. I got in what must have been at least half a dozen river check-raises as well, most of them with 2 or 3 other players in the pot too. I only wish that I didn't have to travel today on business, otherwise you would have had to drag me away from that table kicking and screaming!

Last month of the quarter, and things are shaping up well. I am up 8879 in the last two months, with a low point of -5930 and a high point of 10770. I had one really, really bad night where I dropped 8 dimes. Take out that 8 dime loss, and I would be having a really awesome quarter as opposed to just a good quarter.

So with only 1 month to go in the quarter and in the year, let's hope that I can make an awesome run to the end, and get my last half of the year up to the $40/hr mark. I need to win about 14000 in 100 hours to do it. That's a 140/hr, so it's going to be pretty tough, but I will try my best. I'll probably fall short, but I'd like to make at least 20k for the year, and I only need 8000 more to reach that goal. That's a lot more realistic and doable. In any case, I really shouldn't be results oriented, just make good solid poker decisions and the money should come in.