Dear Blog,

Hi! It's been a while, and I feel like posting an update. Plus uni is done for the year, and I have been playing a ton of poker.

The middle half of the year was really stressful - balancing uni, poker, girlfriend, etc.

I had a sharp downswing playing live in August or so, losing 200k in the space of three sessions - we play 25/50/100 usually, sometimes 100/100/100 or 25/50/100/200.

It really stung since before that I had sorta been doing the play live once a week and every third Monday donkament session 'poker is free money when you feel like showing up' thing.

Think I forgot what it was like to lose, and it really bruised my ego.

So for a while I went a bit insane and wound up playing way more of the WCOOP than I would have otherwise (trying to get unstuck), and not putting as much effort into uni as previously.

I also took a couple of months time-out from the live game, to lick my wounds and work on PLO.

For the first time in a long time I started feeling like I was under a ton of pressure, and I was finding it hard to balance everything.

Fortunately I managed to prioritise and after WCOOP was over I realised how ridiculous I was being, and to just let go of the money and stop degrading myself chasing tournament scores, and make sure I took care of uni/gf.

Then with poker forgotten about that all came together nicely (funny how easy succeeding at life is when you aren't playing poker at all), before I was done for the semester in October.

Since then I have been playing a bunch of PLO cash, bumhunting 6-max on pretty much every site.

Have been running pretty well higher and terribly lower, which is fine with me.

Here's a graph since I am going back to WA for Xmas and thus, free from karmic punishment as I won't be playing again in 2010:



Overall, it's been a really good year.

I might start updating more since I'll be playing a lot of poker until uni starts again next March.

Hopefully I can keep running above expectation...

Happy holidays!