2012 1st Quarter Plan

A few general thoughts first:

• The state of online poker seems to be on a gradually worsening downward slope since BF and throughout 2011. Game quality is rapidly deteriorating.
• 2012 has started off with a vitriolic bang and the community as a whole seems even more venemous than during the Fullstack-Shortstack Wars. Hard to believe.
• I do want to say that there are still some very good people in the community. But 2011 was the year I grew up and realized that poker players are humans. It was kind of the same feeling you get when you're mid-teens and people start to talk to you like an adult and you realize that society isn't this wonderful world of heroes that you thought it was. It's just a bunch of people looking out for number one. I do realize how naiive that sounds when applying it to the poker community, but that was my pre-2011 mindset. And I'm fine with people looking out for number one, that's what the game is about, until people come to the illogical conclusion that it's better to have their cookie taken away if it means someone they hate has two cookies taken away rather than to let everyone keep their cookies.
• I know that this sounds fairly cynical, but I also think cynicism is fairly realistic at this point in time.

Coming to and admitting realizations:

• I'm a winning recreational player. The adage that you can't be a pro until you're a pro -- or however that goes -- is very true. I'm a busy person with a full time job and family with very little time to study and even less time to review. I can't pick when I play, so I play when I'm tired, hungry and life tilted. This is not going to change. This year I have to admit to myself that it's just not going to happen in the foreseeable future and stop being disappointed when it doesn't.
• As a winning player you have to choose between one of two evils. You're either going to be a hated mass-tabler who's killing the games or you're going to be a greedy, talentless bumhunter who's killing the games. I believe the latter is the going term for table selection, once deemed a skillset in itself. I suppose you could be a real ego-driven poker player and just close your eyes while clicking on the lobby and play whatever pops up but that just seems, well, stupid.

2012 -- Quarter 1 Plan

My original plan pre-January 1st was to amp up the volume and hit 300k VPP for the year. But now, based on my outlook outlined above and due to a significantly smaller component for rakeback, I'm going to be taking the bumhunter approach for the first quarter of the year. I'll re-evaluate after a few months to see where this is going. I'm going to do my best to lower tables to the point where I'll just barely be maintaining Supernova status. I believe I can get that done with ~12 tables of 50NL given the number of hours I play.

I'm not quite committed to it yet, but ideally I'd almost like to set a volume ceiling target rather than a minimum volume target. I think that may just push me over the edge into making sure I once and for all play for quality over quantity. Needing to cut tables and increase winrate has been a long time goal of mine but  it inevitably falls by the wayside in the quest to stay in the VIP prison system (metaphorical prison, before the analogy police show up with a relevance related bone to pick). Now that they've blown the walls out of the prison, I'm finally free to do it. Of course I could have done it before, but the appeal of regularly scheduled prison food always outweighed the appeal of the unknown.

I'm going to be playing on Stars while I research the software, rb/vip and cash out efficiency of a few other sites. I'll re-evaluate everything once FTP is up and running again and will likely make a committment to one site after that.

Good luck to everyone in 2012.