It's that time of year again; the holidays are over, people are slowly awakening from their drunken stupor, children are bored with their Christmas presents already and the Leggo latest blog posts fill up with end of year reviews. So, of course, to keep up the tradition I realised I had better reflect on the past year as well.

Overall I feel 2009 saw the culmination of a lot of hard work. I became a Leggo Pro, graduated from college and got a job at one of the best trading firms in the world (to go along with working at the best video training site). All fantastic achievements that I'm very proud of. However, looking forward there's still so much more work to do; graduate as a trader, get more videos out (I'm working on it), get back to midstakes. There are some other ideas I've been playing around with but I keep on foreseeing problems and arguing with myself that I won't have the time or desire to finish them, that the benefits won't outweigh the effort, etc. I guess that type of process is probably a good thing on balance although jumping in head first would result in more being accomplished.

On the poker side I've gotten very, very few hands in this year, only 26k. That was most likely a combination of final year in college, loads of problems trying to produce videos and starting a 60 hour a week job. At least I ran well:




Hope everybody has a great 2010.

I finished third in the freeroll tournament for €1,500. I ran a small bit bad towards the end but made a pretty big mistake in one hand. The tournament had to finish by 11.30 and, if it was still running by then, places would be decided by chip count. The structure threw up a lot of interesting situations towards the end and I'm not hugely familiar with tournament play, never mind this modified structure.

About 10 minutes to go it was 4 handed and I isolated the CO limper with A6o from the BTN. I don't really remember all the exact details but I'll do my best. Payouts were 5000, 2500, 1500 and 1000. Me and the SB had about 27,000 in chips. I had busted a few of the shortstacks and then abused the bubble pretty hard. He had been shortstacked but had been jamming over a few of my opens and had sucked out in a few all-in hands. He seemed pretty competent and better than most of the players in the tournament.

The BB had about 8,000, he had been playing reasonably straight forward and I don't really remember too much about him. The CO limper had about 14,000 and had come into the final table with a pretty big chip lead. He was playing aggressively towards the start of the final table, open min raising a lot and with trashy hands. He was playing terribly postflop, calling down with really weak hands. He would also call 3bets with crap and was definitely one of the weaker players in the tournament. He had tightened up around the bubble and I don't really remember him limping too much. The blinds were 300 - 600 I think. I assumed the limp was weakness and felt I would likely pick the pot up postflop with a cbet most of the time, I was expecting him to call preflop a decent amount. I made it somewhere around 1800-2000 and the BB shoved for 8000 so about 6000 back to me with A6 and 11,000 in the pot.

I felt the BB would probably be pretty light here, I had an aggressive image and would be isolating the CO's weakness pretty frequently. With 10 minutes to go and places decided by chip count it was in the shortstacks interest to be playing extremely aggressively. From a purely cEV perspective it was a snap call but obviously the structure changed things a huge amount. If I called and won it would put me on 36,000 and in a very comfortable position 3 handed. If I folded I had 25,000 left and would have to chip up to catch the SB although I'd be comfortable against the shorter stacks. If I called and lost then I'd be down to 19,000 and still pretty comfortable against the CO but would need to catch up against the SB.

I decided that the upside to calling and winning was a lot higher than the downside to losing. However, I forgot to account for what the BB's stack would be if he won, it would put him on 17,000 and a huge threat to take second place from me on 19,000. If I had noticed this I would have folded but I ended up calling. He showed QTo and a Q and T on the flop locked it up for him.

I hovered around 2nd to 3rd place for the rest of the tournament, in the last hand, the BB and CO got it all-in with the CO taking the pot for 2nd place.

I've just finished my second week of work and it's been going well. I'm an assistant trader on the ETF desk. I have to be in work for 7.15 to run morning updates before the markets open at 8 so I'm getting up pretty early now. The markets close at 5pm and afterwards we do training for an hour from Monday to Thursday. Tuesdays and Thursdays we play poker; either limit holdem, limit stud or limit Omaha 8 or better. I don't have much experience in those games but I've ordered a few books so it shouldn't take too long to get up to speed. Mondays and Wednesdays we do mock trading although that hasn't started yet. Once I've qualified as a trader the days will get shorter.

The work is fine, I'm learning how to do coding in excel, visual basic and access. I hated programming in college but that was probably because I didn't get into it enough to be good at it. I'm reading up on options theory for the mock trading, there's a lot of overlap with the stuff I did in college but it's a bit more practical. Having the theoretical background is pretty helpful though. Besides that I've just been talking to the traders and asking a lot of questions while they show me what they do.

We're settling into the new house, most of the stuff is unpacked but we're still waiting on people to finish off renovating the bathrooms, it's being ridiculously dragged out. My broadband was finally installed last Tuesday, they came to install it the second day we moved in but the signal was too weak so they had to wait for tech guys to come out and fix that first. Sky (satellite TV) should be installed this week. Lauren has made lots of friends and is able to go outside a lot more now, we used to live right next to a road and there were no kids around to play with so it's great that she's not stuck inside as much now.

I'm going to be an options trader with Susquehanna. They were holding a €10k freeroll poker tournament with a maximum of 40 players for anybody studying for, or who had recently gotten, a degree in a quantitative field like maths, physics, engineering, computer science, etc. To enter you had to send in a C.V. and cover letter and pass a phone interview with basic probability questions, pretty cool recruitment drive.

I applied and they offered me a place in the tournament as well as an interview for their assistant trader program. I did well in that and they offered me a job. They use poker in the training program so I ran a little bad when both of my interviewers didn't play poker, but I was still able to explain general concepts and show a lot of the game theory type stuff even if I couldn't really give specific examples. Bill Chen, who co-wrote mathematics of poker, works for Susquehanna as well.

I'm obviously really excited about it, I had applied for internships with them when I was in second and third year but didn't get a place and, with the current financial situation, I hadn't really bothered applying for any jobs as I wasn't expecting too many places to be hiring. Also, I was looking forward to having a break and being able to play poker full time as I've never really had a chance, besides last summer, to get a lot of hands in and take some meaningful money out of the game. There's not much chance of getting in a lot of hands now but at least I won't have to make cash outs all the time either.

I've been very busy the last week looking for a new house and filling out contracts, we're living in Cork at the moment and Susquehanna is in Dublin. We went up and found a place and we're going to be moving on Thursday, I should be able to start work on the Monday afterwards.

I'll be working 8 - 5 Monday to Friday and even longer some days during the training period. I'll still be producing videos for Leggo, they'll just be taking even longer than usual to get done. I'm still going to be coaching as well but only on the weekends from now on so it's going to take a while to get to people on the waiting list unfortunately.

I'm also in the middle of writing a series of articles on 3betting for ********FTW.com, I spent my free time during the last week coming up with some really cool game theory stuff for it so I'm looking forward to getting the series out.

My final exam went well. I had to pull an all-nighter again but I got a lot more work done this time. It's great to have that out of the way so I can concentrate on playing poker full-time.

I hadn't checked my balance for a while but a year of barely playing due to computer issues and final year college work, as well as needing to cash out, has left my roll pretty decimated. I'm only rolled for 50nl at the moment but, hopefully, it won't take too long to grind back up. Playing in a low stress game is probably a good way to get back into the swing of things anyway.

Pretty funny turning pro at 50nl though, if somebody else had said they were going to start playing poker full-time at 50nl I'd probably tell them it was a horrible idea. My immediate plan is to get a decent routine going and start going to the gym, it's been a few years since I went regularly, college kinda got in the way of it.

I'm the latest LeggoPoker pro so I decided it was about time I started up a blog. I'm not sure what I'm going to put in here just yet. I'll probably put in a poker story eventually but beyond that I've no real plans for the blog, I'll just write about whatever I feel like writing about I suppose.

I'm obviously really excited about working with Leggo and finally getting my first official video up. I've been having computer problems for months but, a new computer and 3 headsets later, I'm now good to go. Unfortunately, my final exams are starting next Tuesday, I'm in my 4th year of a Financial Maths degree, and they won't be finished until the end of May so everything else has had to be dropped down a peg on the priority scale.

I should have time during study breaks to drop into the forums though. I asked Matt to make me a moderator in the micro stakes forum and I put up a sticky with links to loads of free and cheap resources for players who can't quite afford Leggo yet to get to a stage where they can. There's also a stats thread where you can post a screenshot of your stats and I'll take a look at them and help you find any leaks you might have.

Matt's being very lazy and hasn't put up a welcome thread for me in the announcement forum yet, maybe he just doesn't like me (as Rob is fond of saying, who knows?), so this will have to act as my welcome thread for the time being.