1-2 or bust

Something that has always helped me stay focused and determined has been setting goals for myself. At the beginning of this year I decided that I wanted to be at 1-2 by the end of the year and along the way I have set and achieved, as well as failed miserably, a lot of small goals.

Well I am now setting my last goal. 150k hands, and if I am not at 1-2 I'm "giving up". I wont be quitting poker, but I am going to stop spending 9 hours a day thinking, playing, studying, and shitting poker.

As some of you may know I have been playing "professionally" since February. I did not do this out of choice but necessity. I was laid off from a job and had no notice that it was going to happen. We were actually planning on moving to another city to continue work, but over night it seemed those plans were canceled and 95% of the work crew was let go. It sucked but I knew I could find another job, and my unemployment would be able to take care of my bills until I found another decent job.

Well the decent job never came around and unemployment runs out pretty quickly. I did not end up finding a job, mostly because I did not look very hard, but our local economy doesn't really offer a plethora of opportunity either. Work at a local call center or Wal-mart. I'm not doing that...

I found that I could pay my rent with the micro stakes. at first everything went amazing. I had no problems winning and grinding out a solid hourly rate, one that was a lot more then I was making at my job before, and then something happened.

Honestly I dont really know what happened. It was after my first 1k downswing and I am guessing that it may have been due to the amount of money but it shook me a little and put my confidence at an all time low. It was when I first joined the study group and was still playing on UB. Well, I decided that I could move down in limits for a while and work on my game and since then I haven't been able to put things back together. looking at my graph since I was laid off, the past few months are pretty disheartening.

Luckily I have kept my overhead very low and have few bills. I can actually make enough in RB every month to pay my bills and get away with playing breakeven poker. But honestly I am not satisfied with this. So I am about at my end. So I have a few rules/goals that I am going to start adhering to.

1 150k hands.
2 at least 1k hands a day
3. at the most 6 tables during peak hour and four during off peak hours.
4. I will be recording almost every session I play with camtasia and will go back to talking through my hands. it helped last time.
5. I will do what I can to make no more withdrawals. I am moving my BR back over to FTP and will be sitting on a 2.3k roll.
I am going to move up to the next level with 35 buyins and take a five buy-in shot.
6.2 buy-in a session stop loss. No matter what. I will take at least a two hour break if I lose 2 buy-ins.
7. 6max only. No HU, No FR, no 2-7nl triple draw with jokers being wild. I can still play the low buy-in tournies and sunday 20$ tournies, but thats it.
8. Reviewing hands. I dont review my HH enough. I ordered something like 7 or 8 poker DVD's and books from PokerStars so I will have a lot of reading to catch up on.
9. I am going to start posting hands on CR more often, and commenting on more hands.

Here is my graph from 5/21/08. This was when I started taking poker very seriously and putting in tons of hours. I bought HEM that day


I guess the most frustrating thing about all of this is that with the amount of money that I have won from poker since then, I am still grinding the penny games.


+7.3k in cash games
+2.1k in tournament winnings
+~4.5k in bonuses/rb
+75 in 7-2 games (thanks bitches!)
= a 2k bankroll and still grinding fucking 50nl.