Wednesday, January 02, 2008

Looking Backwards, Looking Forwards

Since just about every other blogger in the sphere is doing it, it's gotta be healthy and taste good, right? I am, of course, referring to looking back at last year's goals. With no further ado, here they are, along with a healthy bit of "wha'happen" to them.

1. Play an event at the WSOP - BIG FAT ZERO - For two years, I've thought I would get to this. However, the fact I never even went to Vega$ this year meant, by definition, I did not play at the WSOP. For 2008, I will modify this goal to be "Play a WSOP Circuit Event". I don't care the location or the buy-in, I would like to get this one done.

2. Win a Blackhawk casino tourney - WE HAVE A WINNAH! - I played five tournaments in Blackhawk this past year, with buyins from $50 - $110, bubbling two final tables, but finally chopping three ways in a $60 buyin. As I no longer play $2/5 spread bingo, and while there's a fair number of home tournaments in the $50 or so buyin range, there's at least a decent likelihood I don't even go up the hill this year, so it was good to get that one out of the way.

3. Attend a blogger weekend - BIG FAT ZERO There were two chances, and I missed them both. I still want to watch Waffles drink a sixer of Soco from a plastic baseball hat, but this time, I'd like to add that it would be so much funner if he were insulting this guy at the time.

4. Get a positive win rate at NL ring games - STATUS UNKNOWN - I really did not play a lot of ring games at all this year. I did manage to hold my own at .50/1.00 limit 2-7 Triple Draw for a while, but breaking even is not the same as being profitable. I ended up focusing most of my efforts on microballin' the big field MTTs. In fact, I've gone back to microballin' .05/.10 games, to the limited extent I even play ring games. So, I suppose, to the extent I play ring games, I haven't done too badly, but I made little progress, either.

Of course, the larger the MTT field, the larger the variance, and while I managed to have a few decent cashes (57th in a 17,500 runner $100k guarantee, 2nd in a couple $4/180s, etc), I rarely made it truly deep enough to make the large fields profitable. As such, I barely had a profitable year at all. Essentially, what I made in a few live tourneys, I mostly gave back in online deposits to fund my MTTs.

As for 2008, it's actually gotten off to a good start already. Since I got my handy dandy new laptoppy last month, but haven't installed my image grabbing software, I have no screenies. However, I managed to take 3rd yesterday, in a PokerStars $3.30 HORSE tourney, and picked up about $150 by besting 597 of the 600 runners. Unfortunately, when we got down to the Final Four, we were into the Omaha 8 portion of the event, and the variant nature of Omaha caught up to me bigtime. No complaints, as I'd been about 95% tourney-long in showdowns up to that point. A bit of ninja banzai poker after losing 90% of my chips helped me get to 3rd, but that was that. Anyway, it was a nice way to add to my micro roll to start the year.

I really don't know what to come up with in terms of goals for this year, mostly because of what I learned over 2007. Specifically, I much prefer tournament poker to ring games, however, the Good Doctor Mondo really dislikes the fact that getting deep in online tourneys is typically a 4-6 hour proposition. As such, I suspect making anything tournament-related a real "goal" for this year is probably setting myself up for failure. However, I would like to:

a. Blog more. This is a blog. It is meant to be used. And abused. And used some more. Blog it. Just do it.

b. Play a few blogaments. There was once I time when I was a fairly regular participant in the Mookie. I would really like to do so again. However, this will require a re-up at Full Tilt. Especially if I want to join these guys, too.

c. Play the $mokkee over at Bodog. I downloaded and deposited over there for the explicit purpose of it. I won't exactly plug his tourney yet, when there's others already gettin' paid to do it, but there's a real nice T$ overlay factor, and the fields are both talented and small.

d. Write more reviews. This is actually a non-poker goal, as it involves writing more for these guys. Last year, I freelanced a bit of music writing for them, and enjoy it. I'd like to do more this year than I did last year, especially since I've had fuckall luck actually finding a new band to join myself.

Hmm. Reading the above sure looks like I'm laying out a plan of mediocrity. If so, then so be it. Embrace your inner averager, I say. Have a great '08.

1 comment:

SirFWALGMan said...

Smokee Bodog Tourney is pretty cool. I actually felt it was less donkish than a lot of other tourneys based on the blinds. Sure you had your normal fill of Donkey plays but it was pretty damn tight throughout. Not sure if this is good or bad.