2009- Year of The Fucking Finally

Awesome year comes to a close. . . I've been cobbling together income from small stakes poker games for years, always felt like I could succeed, yet I never was able to establish a real money making groove until this year.

My biggest accomplishment by far is finishing the year #1 on a Sharkscope leaderboard. . . now mind you there's a lot of categories to fight over. My category is

Most money won in 2009 in tournaments that started with between 4 and 6 tables, with a buy in between 16-$35. Any site.

To achieve this I played 2,285 $24+2 45 player sit and go's at a pretty spectacular %57 ROI for a total win of $33,772 in this category, which happened to be the most this year. There's a day left so perhaps I shouldn't be documenting this yet. . .

Add to that some nice wins in some other brackets, a recent slew of mtt successes (or near successes depending upon outlook) and 2009 completely outstripped my expectations and was an unequivocal success. For the first time since working in the casino's I earned a proffessionals living wage and I did it working my hours on my terms.

Pretty awesome.

What's on the horizon? I'm not sure. Cash games keep calling to me siren like just for the shear flexibility of the game. Being able to play as long as I like, whenever I like, for as little or as long as seems good. . . sounds awesome. I'm definitely going to work on improving my skills in that area, it's just a matter of figuring out which form I want to specialize in.

That's how I work. I specialize. If I'm going to play a game I study the hell out of it. I think this stems from my chess background and how much work needs to go into preparing your Openings. But it's true. Every poker format has it's own strategies and conditions. A friend of mine recently asked me for a book recommendation- specifically for NLHE cash games. Another friend present suggested Harringtons Tournament Series because it was an excellent book. . . and it is . . . but totally inappropriate for cash games! So many of the concepts just don't properly carry over.

Here's an example.

In a 45 man sng it can be appropriate to reraise, get all in with AK on the first hand.

In a traditional 9 man sng it pretty much never is.

In a cash game AK can be folded or played for less than all in preflop in many, many situations. Stack size and previous action play a large consideration and can lead to a variety of plays.

So about a year ago was when I finally decided to specialize in poker. I had seen some regular success in the 45 man sngs and wanted to see if I could get more, more often.

One of the problems was that I was only playing 2-6 tables a year ago, and I was often doing that in compromising situations, like while watching t.v..

Some of the biggest strides I've made in the last year have been in the realm of multi tabling. I now play 12 tables quite comfortably, and am now itching to get my second monitor working so that I can move to 16 without overlap.

Not only did multi tabling help me put in more volume, but it also helped me plug some leaks. In particular I'm a chronic sufferer of Fancy Play Syndrome, but in order to play 9, and later 12, games comfortably, I finally said good bye to a lot of the moves that I knew were marginal at best yet were difficult to play in even the best spots to account for the limited attention I could give particular hands playing 12 games at once. Basically, playing a bunch of tables at once forced me to finally play more or less correctly- which is pretty damn tight- at least in this format of poker.

There's a whole train of thought to come after this I'm sure, but it's a little late for that.

Happy New Year, Reader, Apologies for the rambling, it's been a sloppy, and happy holidays.

Good luck in 2010!