The Unintentional New Year's Resolution Blog Entry

I've been hella busy these few weeks. My sister came back from Japan for the holidays, and together with the other stuff I have to handle it wasn't really a vacation for me. It was more like "Oh you wanna take a break from playing? Good timing, here's a bunch of stuff you have to do". And do stuff I did. Now I'm still in the process of winding down and recuperating. Got a very stiff shoulder from carrying luggage and kids, and it hurts so bad it's messing with my sleep. It feels like my back muscles are crawling under my shoulder blade, and it even makes snapping noises when I move it. I need to treat myself to a massage quick.

Speaking of quick, I played only 5 quick sessions in that whole busy period. And I was up in all of em. Quick sessions really suit me it seems. That or being busy with other stuff suits me - that would be something. Though I did drop 2BI on my first grind of 2011. It was the usual variance + resulting tilt, but it could've been much better. I place the blame on the lack of preparation. I just jumped in there without proper preconditioning and singlemindedness ended up playing without patience and focus. I still have to work on that pre-game ritual. That's goal number one.

Speaking of singlemindedness, I really have to finish the 8 fold path to poker enlightenment - without spacing out or falling asleep. Man I just can't sit through an hour of voice-overs with clipart floating around. Tried to look for PDF transcripts of it but I didn't find any. I guess now's a good time to work on my attention span anyway. I'm making this my second goal for this year, to finish this goddamn series.

Been studying my play lately. It seems I'm breaking out into the LAGgy kinda playing. On one hand it feels nice to know I've come far from my nitty TAGfish days. On the other hand, I'm not used to the swings. I'm finding it hard to look at the EV of the play when it fails. I'm feeling like Mike Matusow sometimes - that it's either a stroke of brilliance or a blowup. I usually pick good spots to apply pressure, but there are times when I make -EV plays against my better judgement. And the problem is once it fails I seem to be more affected than I should, leading to further spewing. I guess that's the ego talking. I had a good chat with Albert about this after I read his blog. He had a similar experience after graduating from the program - something like a gross overestimation of progress or skill level or something. Then he gave me some good advice: Go back to your roots and regain your rhythm. Look for that feeling or level of confidence that you had when you were still grinding (and winning) in the training. Hmm, naming this goal #3 seems wrong. THIS IS MY PRIMARY GOAL, and all the others just support this.

Speaking of training, I'm seriously considering playing short handed. I believe I will learn a lot from short handed holdem that I can apply to FR games. Sadly, it doesn't really work as well the other way around. And since my game is really opening up nowadays, maybe now's a good time to try my hand in short handed games again. From my untrained and uninitiated point of view, I think short handed touches more on  reading and finding profitable spots to apply pressure than in Full Ring. I feel I need that kind of structure. Is there such a thing as an optional goal? Or a goal-to-be? Well, this is it.

Not a big fan of New Year's resolutions, but what do you know, I unintentionally made some anyway. Hmmm, that'd make a good title.