Long Time No Blog

Hrm....well, the title pretty much says it all. It's been a long time since I wrote, and quite a few things have changed. I left my job and San Diego back in June to pursue my business full-time. I'm into my 4th month of operations in my laser tag business, and the growth is going far better than expected. I still make more monthly from poker, but I expect the business profit to exceed poker profit by late 2009. It's exciting to be working in a unique and exciting industry with such growth potential, and the future looks very bright as more and more of my business assumptions become proven.

On the poker front, I stopped short-stacking NL 200. Not only was it becoming more and more mind-numbing, but I realized that I very rarely got to force people to make stupid decisions, which for me is almost as satisfying as winning money. So I dropped down to full stacking NL 100 and I've done very well, despite having only dedicated about 20 hours a week to playing. I'm playing terribly nitty, but it seems to be working out just fine. EV-wise, I'm sitting at an hourly winrate of about $30 an hour over the last 2 months and 75 hours of play. This exceeds my expectations for poker and gives me a lot more flexibility to aggressively pursue growing my business (not to mention it's very emotionally satisfying!). At the moment, I've been getting sucked out on far less than I should expect, and I 'owe' about $1,500 in EV from TPTK/sets/etc not getting sucked out on. That's what I love about keeping track of my EV; when I ineveitably begin having losing sessions where nothing is going right and I'm getting sucked out on left and right, it's far easier to handle when I know it's simply a matter of probability evening itself out. Of course, it's also easier when I owe EV as opposed to being owed EV, but it all amounts to the same thing in the end. PokerEV is single-handedly the most un-tilting tool I have, and I'm very glad I started using it and tracking my daily stats so meticuously.

Going forward, I'm mainly looking to continue playing my style and maintaining my winrate. I'm sure I could up my winrate were I to loosen up a little or focus more on improving my play, but to be honest, I just don't care about cash games enough. One of my weaknesses is being too aggressive, and in the past when I have tried to loosen up, it has usually led to me overshooting the proper level of aggression and making -EV decisions. With enough time and effort, I might be able to improve, and indeed, I have become slightly less nitty over the past few months. I'll continue to play and adapt very slowly instead of making changes to my game though. I enjoy being better than most at poker, but I have little desire to be a master or to even work my way up in stakes. I'm mainly treating poker as a lucrative part-time job with flexible hours. Moving up in stakes and loosening up might improve my hourly winrate, but I'm unwilling to put forth the effort and take the chance as long as I can maintain a decent winrate at lower stakes. It's not a major part of my future, as I believe my business will provide a secure future for me. Who knows? Perhaps someday that will change and I'll feel the desire to pursue poker as a passion, but until then, I'm content to make good part-time money.

Another pain in my ass: Full Tilt is running out of convenient options to withdraw money. Seems like I finally have to get off my lazy ass and get cleared for check withdrawals. The sooner the better; I've decided to play it super conservative and keep 30 BIs in my account, plus the amount of EV I 'owe' so I never feel strapped. Even with this and my relatively few hours of playing over the last 4 months, I still need to withdraw about $3k. While it's fun to have a ton of money in the account and be close to 5 digits, it's pretty pointless from a financial standpoint, when I could be using that money to grow my business.

So that's about it. I'm not sure how often I'll keep posting here, especially given my changed goals with poker. I'll try to post periodically and at least post monthly summaries to keep myself honest and for review (plus I would hate to dissapoint all 3 readers of this blog!). Till then!