Halfway Home

Well, we're right about halfway through 2K8, that is. How's your year? I'm still trying to figure out mine. That said, it seems a good time to take a look back at the goalish looking poker non-goals I set for myself for this year. I say "non-goals", because I pretty much came up zeros last year when it comes to quantitative performance measures. So, let's have a look, shall we?

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

Okay, I guess you can say I've fulfilled that target. Coming into 2008, I'd never written more than a grand total of 24 blog posts in a year. Eeshk. These days, I'm writing nearly 24 a month, and it feels good. Damn good. Target acquired, objective met.

b. Play a few bloggerments. 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.

That's one horse I've gotten back up on, thanks in no small part to my partners over at FlopTurnRiver (thanks!) and also, my otherwise favorite site to play poker online out there.

FlopTurnRiver's partnership essentially gave me the starting roll I needed to get back into FTP bloggerments, and jump in I have. It's been a blast playing the Skillz series nearly every week, and recently, taking part in NYRambler's games. I've even managed to run deep, taking a 2nd and 3rd in the Skillz games.

I never made it to the Mookie or Riverchasers events, but I'm hopeful that will change in the latter half of the year. Nevertheless, I think I can say Target acquired, objective met.

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.

The best part (and yet still so damn frustrating) may have been playing the recently-completed Bodog Blogger Tournament series. Seriously, those were the most fun structures I've ever seen in the bloggerments -- but I failed to take down any of the juicy overlays or make it to the 2-table final tournament. But that's all on my shoulders, no one else's. Once again, Target acquired, objective met.

d. Write more reviews. This is actually a non-poker goal, as it involves writing more for Westword. 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.

Okay, I couldn't have whiffed on this one any more if I had tried. Mostly because I've been too busy blogging, I guess? That could be a cop out, but at any rate, I shot that wad Way Off-target. More so, it doesn't appear as if they'll be needing my services any time soon.

What's almost interesting is that, even though I dumped certain unmet goals from previous years, I ended up meeting them. I finally took down a couple of sizeable MTTs (not Lucko or LJ-sized), but regularly scheduled MTTs drawing between 200-300 players. That felt awesome. Made it out to the summer un-official blogger gathering. That felt a bit less awesome, because everyone sort of fractured into multiple weekends this year, to coincide with specific WSOP events. Best of all was cashing in the Caesars Mega Stack series. That was sweet, because it was a) my largest live field ever, and b) my largest buy-in ever.

Came into this year with probably under $150 online total, and am now sorta-reasonably comfortable with about $1600 to fund my buy-ins. Of course, probably half of that is thanks directly to my advertising partners, but it's nice to not have had to deposit anything this year (yet).

So 2008 is really going pretty well. For the most part, poker has treated me pretty well. There have been lots of ruts, I'm still occasionally having to work on tilt-management, and there's still plenty I'd like to do, all in all, poker's been a faithful, if temperamental, friend this year.