Snow Blind

Gonna just give some updates on things going on over the last month and a half. I did finish my 30k hand goal for April, but unfortunately, I ended the month pretty horribly. Over the last 6k hands, I lost 10 buyins which is about $1000.

I would be lying if I said that in my bad slide I was playing perfectly. I was tilting a bit and some of my play definitely reflected that. After going through the hands, I am convinced it was mostly due to a bad run. There were 2 hands in there that I lost to river 2 outers that were a combined $600 pots (hand 1, hand 2). There was also a handful of hands where I flopped either a set, a straight or a flush only to get 50% of my stack in before the river only to lose to straights, flushes or full houses on the river. And yes, I paid off. Sometimes when you are in cooler situation after cooler situation, it gets hard to get away from those. See Daniel Negreanu on, well, any season of High Stakes Poker.

Here’s what the month ended up looking like.

It really wasn’t that bad overall, though. After rake back and some small tournament cashes, I only lost about $100. While the bad run really tilted me, when I reflect on it as a whole, it could have been a lot worse. I had 3 months last year with worse results. 2 of them where I lost more than $1000 overall and still ended the year up like $10k*.

Last year, my stake started around May so hopefully I can duplicate those results again over the next 7 months. I’m not starting out awesome. I decided to take a break from NLHE since I was running so bad and I do think it was affecting me mentally. So what did I do? I played some PLO. I’ve now started out the gate of this month with a steep dowslide. PLO is the Murphy’s Law of poker games. If there is a bad card that can come on the turn, rest assured it will come. Actually, I’m up slightly on the only game I’ve played any significant hands, but down overall. I don’t want to make it 2 losing months in a row, so gonna work on that over the next week.

For personal stuff, it’s been a typical end of the school year for the most part. Been just super busy with a lot of stuff going on. We have basically birthday season coming up with 4 of the kids having their birthdays between now and the end of August. We had Zoe’s party yesterday and today is spent recovering from that which consists of cleaning, dealing with tired/crabby kids and then more cleaning.

There are a couple of unique situations this year, though. For one, almost all of the kids have been sick over the last week (plus a couple of days). The only one who has avoided it has been Clayton. The second one is I have a new job that I will be starting next month. I won’t go into too much detail on it until I start it, but I am looking forward to it and am coming into it being very optimistic.

* Disclaimer of that was under the stake so I didn’t get to keep all that.

I’m gonna try and stuff this full of some of the things I’ve been neglecting to post lately. Summer has been busy and I just haven’t been taking the time to update this like I wanted to. Well, shutup and take what I give you.

The kids have been super busy.

Avery and Zoe are doing swimming lessons right now. I think they are enjoying that but it’s hard to tell when you ask Amy about how Zoe refuses to get in the water every day but also refuses to leave cause she wants to swim.

Clayton just finished up his baseball season which I was helping out with cause, well, they really need as much help as they can get. I am also still gonna post the video of Clayton get his black belt, but I’m gonna throw the excuse that Amy’s laptop has been acting up lately. That, and well, between her and TJ, it’s hard to get access to it.

TJ hasn’t done a whole lot extra this summer but he’s been more helpful lately. Even offering to mow the lawn, which I’m totally cool with. We also moved him to the basement this summer which he’s been stoked about. Hopefully it won’t be a temporary solution but we’ll have to address winter as it gets like 40 degrees down there in the summer. I’m ok with that, but Amy seems to think Child Services might not be so keen on it.

Sadie keeps getting bigger and has been teasing us with her walking now for weeks. She just hasn’t built up the confidence to try it without holding some one’s fingers. Personally, I think she’s just being a baby about the whole situation.

I’ll be frank and just tell you that poker has been absorbing much of my free time. Last month, I was all kicking ass and taking names. I had my first $3k month ever and, even though I’m being staked and only getting half of that, I was pretty pumped about the success none the less. This month has been a huge kick to the crotch as far as poker goes, so hopefully I can turn it around and at least have a break even month at the end. For the first time ever, I’ve been putting in more hands than I ever have, have been really motivated to play and could even seriously consider doing this full time if I ever get to the point of playing high enough to sustain a comfortable living from it.

That’s a pretty big pipe to stuff a dream into but that brings me to the next part. There have been changes at work that have pretty much brought it back to the soul sucking source of income most people cope with and pretend to be happy. I’m not gonna lie and say that hasn’t been a big driving force for my poker playing, but I am gonna lie and say that if I ever do get to that point in my poker career that I don’t need a “day job”, that I’ll miss it terribly.

Word press is telling me I’ve eclipsed 500 words and I hate wordy blog posts when other people post them, so I’ll try and wrap this up here. I really do miss posting here and while I have been pretty active on my twitter account, I really want to get back to making more posts here. I don’t always come through with my intentions, but I’ll make an honest attempt. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. I don’t really know what that means, but I’m sure it really says something important about my blog.