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.