Not including 20kish hands of marginally winning poker I played before getting HEM, this is my lifetime graph to date:




Seems like a technicality, and I probably should have gotten over it months ago, but somewhere in the back of my mind, I always thought of myself as a losing player. Until this month that is. Actually, things turned around for me in the beginning of September which was about 71k hands ago. I was putting in a lot more volume than I had been putting in per month than ever before, and frankly, I was ready to give up poker if I couldn't make it happen financially because I couldn't justify spending so much time on it and away from my family if it wasn't making a monetary difference in our lives and affording us dance lessons and soccer for my kids.

I can't say that I worked particularly hard away from the tables in this stretch, but I am ready to do a lot more of that now that I am rolled for 100nl and can make okay money with less volume and more studying. Anyway, I feel like I was working hard away from the tables for a good two years or so before.

I had a couple of sweats with some other leggo members the last few days, and they went pretty well. I thought I played the best when Klamsauce was sweating me, and I really like how he thinks about poker. I have to say, pretty much everyone in the leggo community is very open and friendly, and that is nice to find. Please accept my personal thank you (though I know this is a very general way to do it...) everyone who has helped me out along the way--particularly Probability who is a close friend as well as my poker mentor, and has always managed to be very upbeat even when things were not going well for either one of us.

All the same, I am not one to let this go to my head. Actually, I am exactly the type of person who lets success go to his head, but I am fighting it. It isn't lost on me that I have a relatively small sample size lifetime, and the true measure of my playing will likely be over the course of several hundreds of thousands of hands. It will depend on how much work I put into my game, both mental and emotional, over years to come. Poker is working out great, and I think I can make it a decent supplementary income and maybe even a regular job to support my family (which would be dreamy). But at 37 years old (that's right, you heard me kids...) it seems like pushing my career future squarely in the middle of the poker economy could be a marginal shove at best. With that in mind, I am pursuing certification as a Sommelier through the Court of Master Sommeliers. I am almost 100% sure I will do this, though I have to wait until I talk to a couple of Sommeliers next week to make the final commitment. Even so, I am signed up for the Introductory and Certified course in late March. I have done really well performance wise in the restaurant industry, and this seems like it could be a way I could put my people skills to work for more money. Almost as important, the Sommelier community also seems to be very open and welcoming to newcomers, and I have found that I have developed a good deal of contacts over the years that will help me go much farther than I could alone.

I haven't given up on acting, and I am absolutely dying to do something creative in terms of live performance, but there just isn't enough money in acting except for a very elite few, who have arguably just run better than their competitors, and I came to the realization that I would have to find a career that could sustain my theater habit long ago. I am the most impassioned about acting, then maybe poker and wine are tied for second. Poker, wine, and theater seems like some crazy bacchanal troika, and maybe people wouldn't expect it of me if they knew me in real life, but I just gotta be me.

I always mean to post some hands in my blog, and I guess I should commit to more of that in the future, but this blog entry wasn't about how I played certain hands in the first place, and it seems a shame to tack on a few at the end of it now. Next week, I (sorta) promise....

Play well. Do good work. Keep in touch.

PFJ