Solar Eclipses, Bank Errors in Your Favor and Updates to this Blog

Looking back on the last month of poker playing, I'd like to say I've made a lot of improvement, but tragically, I haven't. In fact, my winrate is down significantly, hanging at around 1 bb/100 before rakeback. Still good enough to pay the bills, but I know it should be a bit higher. If I had to make an educated guess, I'd assume it's because I've gotten in the habit of watching TV while playing at all times. It makes it a lot easier to put in the hours I want, but I don't know if it's worth putting that many hours in if my winrate is that low. In December, I'm going to try and focus more on the tables and see if I can't get my winrate back up around 4-5bb/100, where it was for the first 100k hands or so of my pro-dom.

Another factor which may or may not be conrtibuting is my complete lack of effort to improve my play. When I drew up the plan for playing full-time, I allotted several hours a week to reviewing hands, both my own and other successful players, to see if I could find leaks in my own game and improve my play. In the past two months, I've done approximately none of that. I'm sure I have some leaks I need to address, and there's no doubt I could be more profitable if I loosened up a bit. Unfortunately, taking the time to concentrate on improving won't be easy in the next few months as I get ready to transition the business to a new location and focus on improving the product. The product improvement will take up enough time in itself, as I have to learn a new programming language and how to use a bunch of modules I've never used before. I know how they work in theory, but it's always more difficult piecing everything together. On top of that, I plan on traveling a bit in December, some personal and some business, so I might have to struggle to get in my regular poker hours too. So time spent on improvement is going to have to wait until later. On the plus side, December and January have historically been good months for me as the holidonks come out to play, so I should make a good chunk of change in the coming months. ON top of that, I should be getting a hefty tax refund for this year, so I might take a few weeks off for vacation and hand analysis. (Knowing me, it'll probably be all vacation and little to no hand analysis). Whatever I end up doing, the fact remains that at some point I'll benefit from analyzing my play and eliminating leaks to get my hourly profit up where it belongs.

On the 'Things I don't suck at' front, I ordered a new computer for my brother to replace his 4 year old one. He only needs it for poker, so we didn't go overboard, just got a nice, affordable one from Alienware for about $1,200. he got it last week and says it runs waaaay better than hsi old one. his old one coudlnt hack more than about 8 tables at a time with HUD up, so for him, it won't be too long before he recoups his investmentwith the extra profit from extra tables. Of course, shopping for a new computer only made me want a new one, but my 2 year old machine still handles everything I need it to (if with a little lag sometimes), so no point in spending any more money on a computer I won't see a return on. I am comtemplating ordering another 24" from the Full Tilt store though; one works pretty well, but 2 would be even better....plus my desk seems empty without two hulking CRTs taking up all the space. Not that another monitor would make me any more efficient, but it would be nice.

Speaking of computers, I really need to get my laptop fixed for all the travel im planning on. Nothing takes the boredom out of a long ass drive like playing poker while you're doing it! I can only do a couple tables at a time and still have enough concentration to drive well, but that's enough to make the drive much less boring. I figure in the approximately 50 hours of driving I plan on doing in December, even if I just run at 2 bb/100 with 4 tables open, I'll more than cover my gas expenses.

This past week has gone pretty well; for the first time in over a month, my bb/100 is at or above where it should be. It might be the higher volume of poor players; I've noticed an increase since about mid-November. If i ever get aroud to actually analyzing my hands, I'll know for sure. Till then, I'll just keep grindin. Probably wouldn't kill me to update this blog more than once a month though....