Wednesday, May 10: What's next?

While it's true that I've been utterly swamped with law school exams lately, the slightly longer time between posts might also be symptomatic of something more worrying: I find I'm simply running out of things to write about. I look back on the early entries in this blog from Fall 2004, and think it's really cool how this thing started out as something of a journal from a guy who wanted to see if he could make a healthy income from poker, and so many of the early posts were just writing about the psychological ups and downs of winning and losing $x in a day...and then gradually it became more of a mouthpiece and psychological outlet for me to discuss things more philosophical in nature, such as where poker might fit into my broader life perspective. There are dozens of blogs out there that talk about nothing except how much the author won or lost, and frankly the last thing I want is for this to turn into one of those trite endeavors, because at the end of the day, who really cares about how much I win or lose at a silly card game?

Anyway, I'm glad that I didn't end the blog last December, which some of you may remember that I was contemplating...I think there have been some really worthwhile posts since the new year. But once again I find myself wondering just how much I have left to say about this poker thing. One of the "revelations", if you can call it that, that the past couple years of poker has given me is that this game, while profitable and usually enjoyable, isn't an answer to any of the *big* life questions...it may be something of a 'facilitator' to allow me to enjoy some of the more fun things in life, but its importance is still dwarfed by the questions of how you can best live a fulfilling life and who you want to spend it with. It's funny: I hardly even talk about poker with my friends at all anymore...to the point where many of them even ask me whether I still play at all (I am indeed playing more than ever...I've just come to appreciate that in the grand scheme of things, it's a pretty boring topic, and at the risk of sounding a tad arrogant, there really aren't many people around with whom I can converse about it on my level.)

Anyway, while I don't expect this blog to be ending any time soon, just wanted to explain that the lagtime in posts reflects only the fact that I don't want to let this thing sink to the level of any of the more generic miscellaneous poker blogs out there.

What's next for me

As of this afternoon, I officially found out that I have accumulated enough law school credits to do my last semester in Australia this Fall, and am incredibly excited about it -- I've always wanted to go, and can't wait to be hitting the Aussie beaches as an alternative to slaving away for Big Law, which is the fate that awaits most of my graduating peers. I'm also going to be occupying my time this summer working on an idea I had about a website that I am planning on creating in the next couple months. In one sense it will be an extension of my affiliate business, but I also envision it becoming a humorous, helpful, and very-highly visited website in its own right. To say that I have high hopes for this venture would be one of the biggest understatements I could make...if you've followed this blog for a while, I'm sure you've picked up the theme that I lean a tad more toward entrepreneurial ventures than more traditional and stable employment, and every last one of my entrepreneurial Spidey-fibers is tingling with this idea...I don't mean to be too coy, but I'm not going to talk about it much more until it's launched, hopefully by the end of the month...but I will definitely be floating it here in the coming weeks, and even soliciting feedback on how I can improve it, maybe dangling some incentives for people who shoot some good ideas my way (I've got a few unopened iPods lying around (don't ask me why), and some other rather valuable stuff. Anyway, stay tuned...

On top of the poker world...

Yesterday I had what you might call not a bad day at the office. I also call it a pretty ridiculous day of online poker. PT stats here:



And it struck me that while my ascension up the poker ranks from multi-tabling 2/4 and 3/6 as late as January 2005 has been a series of smallish victories, I really felt like yesterday was a coronation of sorts -- I thought to myself that it was quite possible that very, very few people on the entire planet won more online than did I yesterday. (There are, of course, a subset of poker professionals who play $4,000 / $8,000 or $250 / $500 NL games for which I'm sure this amount changes hands in single hands, but I decided to discount that group of individuals for the purposes of my self-aggrandization.) The above was no doubt a product of running exceptionally well but it's still a nice little anecdote for my poker records, I suppose.

And lastly, a little update on how my NL progress is going overall since I decided to try and learn how to actually play without using a short-stack bitch strategy -- I'm really, really happy with how it's going, and have actually begun looking for good NL tables before scouting out juicy LHE tables (perhaps because it's so much easier to take advantage of fish mistakes...which also makes it somewhat harder to find exceptionally juicy high-stakes NL tables: the fish simply bust out too fast.) Anyway, while 15,000 hands certainly do not a NL shark make, take the following for whatever you think it's worth. It's still quite a ways from the winrates of people whom I'm consider to be the best NL players, but I won't belittle my results too much...it's clearly going well.