Random Thoughts

I'll need to earn 1 million VPPS this year on PokerStars. It looks as though I'll be earning somewhere around 1.35 VPPs per hand so I'll need to play about 740,000 hands over the course of the year. This works out to approx. 14,000 hands a week or 2,000 hands a day. In addition, I'll need to play about 150 hands per day on Ultimate Bet.

I'm confident I can average that many hands over the course of the year, I was close to playing that many hands last year. I also realize it will be very challenging at times. I remember feeling burnt out at a lot of points last year and I anticipate it will be the same this year. It is also very difficult to play during those inevitable stretches where seemingly everything goes wrong. I've been through some incredible swings during the approx. 3 million hands I've played including a 500 big bet downswing this past month. I have noticed that I have a lot of trouble putting in hands on days where everything is going wrong. If I get down 100 big bets in a session, my emotions start to take control and I start playing bad. At least I feel like I'm playing bad. At this point I quit and usually for the day. I'm really trying to avoid that this year since I can't afford to be taking partial days off.

About two weeks ago I started taking my dogs for walks through hills near our house. There are some pretty nice views of Oakland, San Francisco, Alcatraz, and the Bay Bridge. It has helped to refresh my mind on those tough poker days and served as pretty good exercise as well. It beats exercising on my elliptical which is what I had been doing. So for the upcoming year I'm planning on taking this walk as much as possible. A typical day should be three hours of poker in the morning and three hours of poker in the afternoon separated by a walk and lunch.

I've been playing pool twice a week and tennis about once a week. I think it's important I keep doing these things to maintain some balance in my life and also to get out of the house :)

I'm off to Vegas this Tuesday for New Years and Jamena's birthday. There's no way I'm going to be able to play 2K hands on New Years day or Friday when we're still there but I should be able to make up the hands within a week or two. I'll try to post some Vegas pics. in my next blog.

Happy New Years everyone!