Monday, November 10, 2008

Back Seat Time for Poker

I'm currently packing up my apartment here in Belgium. I'm finishing work on the 19th and we're out of here on the 26th. Some friends are driving a Transit over from Dublin (all the way in one day..ugh) and we're gonna pack up our stuff from here and drive to Cherbourg for the ferry to Rosslare. There's quite an amount of shit to do when moving countries and I won't be sad when its all done with. I still have to organise all of the stuff on the other side like a house in Dublin, a car, and thats all before the usual Christmas madness.
All of this means that I'll have very little time for poker over the next while. This suits me fine. My bad run of late culminated on Saturday with me playing 3.5k hands like a complete robot just trying to get unstuck after getting off to a slow start. During the course or my extended downswing, all imagination has completely gone from my play. I just load up 6-8 tables, dont pay any attention to hand reading and wait to run good. The longer this goes on, the more you really forget why you're doing anything. At the end of that session I literally didn't know anymore what hands were good to be cold calling from the blinds vs. certain guys etc...just a total mental block. The auto-pilot thing might be ok if you table select, but of course I just played on any old table waiting to run good.
Anyhows the breakeven stretch is something like 45k hands now which is godawful but that's life. Looking at Leatherass' well it seems that this is possible in the normal run of things though I'm in no way putting it all down to variance. I realise that I'm not very good into the bargain. I ran good all Summer so I can't complain about the year overall. I started with $900 playing 20nl and 50nl and I made it up to about $24k (currently $19k). I'm gonna take out a fair bit as I promised myself I could buy a ridiculous car with a big engine if I took the money for the road tax from poker. I also need to withdraw some for a new TV and various other crap. Might as well enjoy some luxuries to make up for the last 2 months of frustration :)
If I do play over the next few weeks , it'll just be 2 tables where I'm really trying to apply the stuff I pick up from training videos and articles etc. Its really a curse playing too many tables before you're a good player, so my plan is to be able to implement stuff which goes beyond the basics on 2 tables and then hopefully it'll sink in to my thought process and I'll be a much better player on 4-6 tables after that.
When I get back into it properly my main goal is to get enough together for a month in Vegas in the Summer and a maybe a shot at a WSOP-ament or two, which is a very reasonable goal. Obviously next on the list is enough for a new model (like 02-03) 7-series!! Hmm I'm rambling now. Gonna miss this Belgian beer!