I feel like I am playing better and better. My number of hands this week suffered as I had a lot of stuff come up, especially today which was really going to be my day to grind, but oh well. In the past I would have found a way to play, felt pressured to get a lot of hands in, and dropped a few buy ins. One thing putting this much volume in has taught me is that there will always be some good games out, and it is best to get your real life shit in order so you can play optimally when you are at the tables. I am at around 27k hands for the month, which means I will have to make a pretty big push next week if I want to get to 40k by the end of the month.

I shipped myself all of my rakeback for the past two weeks because I wanted to see my br officially double for the month to 2k. I was gonna wait for the end of the month, but I thought it would give me some inspiration to round out the month with my A game.

It reminded me of a day early in the month where I got really impatient with a big fish who was playing top pair any kicker really aggressively. I ended up dropping like five buy ins in 40 minutes, and I was wondering if this whole poker thing would work out. I took a break, focused myself, and then was back at break even in like 90 minutes. Zongs, what swongs! It kind of made me feel like all the drama surrounded by losing a big chunk of money was a waste of energy, when really I should have been focusing on the quality of my play (the only thing within my control to improve, tbh).

I plan on cashing out 700 at the end of the month and continuing at 50nl for November. I feel a little guilty about not doing much work away from the table, and I will definitely have to make an uptick in my effort on that next month. Still, playing so many hands has given me a real sense of perspective that I think all my previous months of studying and posting in the forums a lot and playing only maybe 7-10k hands per month just could not provide. I will balance my studying/playing ranges in December when I plan on taking shots at 100nl.

I am up like 10 BI for the month. All in EV wise, I appear to be running really well, and there is a certain amount of guilt associated with that, tbh. All the same, I have ran horribly in a lot of other ways and I think it just evens out in the long run and I make an effort to think of better ways of playing my hands instead of thinking about how lucky I got when all the chips went in the middle.

At work, we have been fairly busy, and there were naturally bigger crowds for the Giants games the past few nights. Tonight the bar was full for the last inning, and everyone was cheering or moaning at every pitch. Ship the extra income on that. I hope the Giants go on to win the Series, obv, but I also hope they do it in seven games and at least three of them go into extra innings. I have been thinking a lot about getting certified as a Sommelier through the Court of Master Sommeliers. The introductory and certified levels seem to be fairly easy, and I have been told I could pass the tests right now with the knowledge I have. However, it seems to me that you need to get to the Advanced Sommelier level if you really want to have an impact on your career in the wine industry, and that involves changing some things around in my life. I would probably need to get some exposure to wines from all over the world, which means I either bust out a lot of money or work somewhere part time where I can taste a lot of different wines. I have the opportunity right now where I work to taste some very good wines, but they are mostly Cabs from Napa and there is a lot more out there than that. I am 80% sure that I will pursue it. I am intrigued by the whole blind tasting aspect of it and using a deductive process to narrow down the possibilites of what wine you are drinking. Seems an awful lot like putting people on hands in poker.

Play well. Do good work. Keep in touch.

PFJ