2009: Year in Review

What a busy year. Lots of poker. Lots of life.

I nearly completed my poker goals for the year. I wanted to be a 200nl reg at this point but I'm not quite there yet. Despite that I'm pretty happy with how things have turned out. I ended up with a lot less time online than I anticipated and still managed to learn a ton of strategy and work on my game a lot offline.

I started off the year still playing mostly 25nl with some pretty big confidence issues. After finally figuring out how to consistently beat 50nl in the first few months of the year, I decided I wanted to take a more pro-active approach to learning and decided to cut down on tables for more sessions. I decided to start taking mini shots at 200nl which worked out well for the most part and played a good mix of 50nl and 100nl throughout most of the year.

Confidence is such a tricky thing. Without it, you get run over. With the wrong kind, you get into all sorts of FPS and put small stakes regs that litter the 100nl+ games on this pedestal of genius. But with the right kind of confidence you feel like you can hold your own and that your normal poker thought process is enough to beat this game without going to the 7th level.

I did go through a pretty soul crushing last 2 months of poker for 2009, December being one of my toughest months ever. I came very close to having my first losing month but managed to pull it back together the last few days to put in a decent result.

I also joined some great coaches over on BestFreePokerCoaching.com and started doing a bit of coaching myself. I really enjoyed putting out some videos - and it's tough to do when you're getting crushed by variance in your regular game - and they helped me think through exactly what I was doing and pointed out a few mistakes to myself.

In life, my daughter turned 1 year old and we found out that we are expecting another one this year! So life will be super busy again but it's so much fun and I wouldn't trade it. We're about 96% finished the house we built a few years ago and should be completely done in the next couple months - those last final details always seem to get put off.

2010 is going to be interesting. I'm probably going to get a decent amount of time off and that should help with some family time and VPP accumulation. I finished up 2009 with 150k VPPs. I was hoping for 200k but it just wasn't going to work out. So this year I'm hoping for 200k-300k or more and that's going to require some moving up. Hopefully those goals will work together.

I hope everyone out there had a great Christmas and Happy New Year!