An honest look at how 08 is coming along. Shoot me now please.

Oh, where do I begin? 2007 was a really shitty year for a lot of different reasons. Sure there were good things that happened throughout the course of the year but it seems that the bad greatly outweighed the good. Who knows, maybe I am just a really negative person.

I get really spiritual about the New Year when it comes around and this year was no different. I get more excited about January 1st then I do my birthday or Christmas combined. Even though its all just numbers and figures, it feels so nice to start from scratch. At least that's how I perceive it.

I was at a party for New Years and was with a buddy and some other people that we know and about 8 seconds into the New Year I was popped right between the eyes with a flying cork that had ricocheted off a wall somewhere. I immediately felt sick to my stomach as I felt that was a really bad omen of things to come. I try not to think like that but I couldn't help it. I told my buddy who was standing right next to me what had just happened and he just laughed and kind of shrugged it off. To be honest, I couldn't get it out of my mind the rest of the night.

Granted it was entirely my fault, but only 36 hours later I was pinched for reckless driving. Go me for being really stupid.

I would say that out of this entire year, only one good thing has happened to me. Dom finally came through because on February 22 2008 I got into my own place. It's like the 12th time I have moved in the last 3-4 years and like only the 4th-5th time in the last few months. To say that my life is in full blown chaos mode would be a complete understatement.

Poker of course couldn't be worse. I took a look at my graphs before the year started and although its quite far-fetched considering the limits that I play I wanted to be at $100,000 profit at the end of the new year. I wasn't sure how I was going to be able to do it but I was confident in my abilities that it could be done.

As of right now, I am down for the year in poker. I don't know the exact numbers and at this point I don't really care to know.

Actually scratch that.

I am up for the year in the cash games but the tournaments have made me a loser overall.

2008 couldn't be shittier. I have registered 15 wins against 26 losses. Wow, I just realized that for the first time. That is truly awful. I am winning at a 36.5% clip for the new Year. I have definitely set a new standard for losing at poker. I guess the same can almost be said for other aspects of my life however I am not going to get into that any more then I already have.

My recent high-point was when I won 3 sessions in a row for wins of over $300. That is really pathetic. Even worse then that, it was the first time that I had achieved such a feet since late November of 07.

Of course, the world has to balance itself out and I went on to lose 6 of my next 7. Pretty standard for the way things have been going as of late. About 7-8 sessions ago, I completely changed my game up. I started playing really tight. I figured I would experience less variance if I saw less flops and went to show down less frequently.

Instead, it really didn't matter that I played tight. During the last 6 losses I was never dealt anything to play with. The only good thing was that when I folded my favorite drawing hands that I like to play they never hit. I more or less prolonged the inevitable since I would have had losing sessions had I ended up playing those hands.

Here are some oddball stats. This is just a little evidence of how poorly I am running right now. I have logged in 48.7 hours of poker for the month of February and only once I have been dealt pocket Aces and twice I have been dealt pocket kings. I got Aces cracked all in preflop by pocket deuces. I had kings against aces and had kings against A 7. The guy flopped bottom pair and we got all-in on the flop and of course he spiked his Ace on the river.

As of right now, I am completely cashed out. I could not be more demoralized right now. I am at the exact point I was in July of 2007. In July, I had no money, debt was piling up, and I was unemployed. I ended up building a bankroll up to $8000+ for the 3rd time in 3 years. And for the 3rd time, I no longer have that money. That really blows.

I am not going to give up poker though. I am at the point where I have dedicated way too much time and have been through too much to ever give up this evil game. Plus, I have such thick skin now because of this game. Why let that go to waste. I have however developed a completely different strategy.

It is something that I have never tried. It's called: run hot, move up... wash rinse repeat. I really don't care about bankroll management anymore. Not to say that the principles of bankroll management aren't a good tool because they are. But I think you have to move up when running hot to really make money in this game. I have read about too many players making more money then they should have because they moved up and ran hot.

I have also come up with an extremely radical idea on how I am going to go about playing poker in the future however I would prefer to not write about it. I'm not going to lie, it is highly risky and a little extreme. I don't even know if I am going to go through with it so there is no sense in writing about it. If I do go through with it and it works then I will write about it after its been done successfully.

I currently play the $200 NL at Commerce. That is no longer my plan. My poker sessions are going to start going as such.

Walk in with $400-$1000 depending on my bankroll and how I'm feeling.

Buy in to the $200.

I have several ways I can go about this and its all about feel.

Double my money and move up to the $400.

or

Play it out, have a nice a come up and then move on to the $400.

Once I get into the $400 anything can happen.

If I come up a good amount, I can then table change to another $400 table and pocket my profit. If I am having a really good day/feeling really confident/feel good about my bankroll then I will move on to the $600. Once I get there I have no plan because I have never made it that far and I don't know what I am capable of playing in the high limit room at Commerce. I'm not going to constantly grind the $200 anymore because that obviously isn't working anymore.

Never will I just buy into the bigger games. I will only play the bigger games if I am free-rolling. Knowing my luck, it will probably take me like 6 sessions to just get to the $400. It would be nice if the first time I tried this I came up $2K-$3K. Probably not going to happen but I guess I can hope.

Right now, it's all about finding a job. Once I find a job I will probably put my radical plan for playing poker into full motion. Like I said, I don't know if I am going to go through with it yet. I may just end up doing it the old fashioned way and start by saving money from work and then slowly getting back into poker. Probably not going to happen.

February isn't over yet, but I think I am done playing for the month. Here is my graph to end the month.



Here is my new all-time graph. This is 581.8 hours of live cash poker. God I love variance. You can see the different times where I was playing a lot of poker. The two halves of the graph look almost identical. It's truly scary.