For A Better Tomorrow

Something happened last night which got me thinking a lot lately about my current situation in life. As I have mentioned before in my previous post, 2007 will be a year that I will never forget. Since then, I’ve been pretty clean from a lot of the dramatic events that occurred in my life. I was thinking recently about my life routine lately and I am pretty damn proud of it. I’ve been waking up early on weekdays at around 730-8am for workout to start my day. I get in enough poker hours by the end of the week to make my weekends a bit more comfortable and relaxing. I celebrate my productive days during my nights with friends to relax and forget about poker. Everything is well balanced right now and I feel really good about that. I feel like my future has a lot of potential even though poker has been pretty slow lately. I recently got a poker coach to work on my 6 handed game so I will be very busy with that. I am pretty much living, breathing, drinking, eating, and dreaming about poker right now. I feel like that is the mentality I need in order to succeed in this game. I admire a ton of athletes and that is all they do when it comes to the specific sport they play. So rather than drinking and partying constantly, I must keep my life in check in order to survive in this game. I am a professional after all.

With that said, I feel like there’s not much that can disrupt my current life routine except for myself when I am undisciplined, and one other thing that is pretty hard to control….relationships. I’ve reached an age where I feel like I need to really work on my life. I repeatedly see friends ending their 4-5 year relationships because they started so young and they end up becoming extremely depressed. I’m currently working on a game that requires my mind to be consistently free. I need to have a clear mind. I do not want to stress with girlfriend problems while I am in control of thousands of dollars in front of my screen. I think the next relationship will likely be a serious one. So until I can focus on that relationship and drop certain bad habits, there’s no way I will be in one soon. I want to have a healthy relationship now that I am older and a bit more mature. I feel like in order for me to obtain such a thing, I am going to have to go by the same philosophy that has always worked out for me, and that is being patient.

As of right now, I’m going to enjoy my bachelor life even though you can get pretty lonely sometimes from not having a “female bond”, but I believe that that is a great thing to sacrifice during my time of growth. I have many trips that I plan on taking this year and the next, and the majority of them are for poker. I don’t want to complicate my plans for the next couple of years with a relationship.

I remember reading the law school dropout blog, and he was writing about how he would go nuts if he had like a -5k day. At the time I was playing low stakes so I couldn’t even comprehend what that would be like. Now that I’m chasing for the higher stakes, I now know how he feels. Yesterday was one of the most unpleasant poker days of my life.

It feels like bad beats are occurring much more often. A poker friend of mine said that if the games get tougher, it means it’s getting more aggressive, and if that’s the case, we will be in more coin flip situations. The more coin flip situations we are in, the higher the variance of the game will be. Which, in a nutshell, will increase the chances of us having more bad beats in a given month.On top of all of that, the United States is now in a recession. Which means people do not have money to gamble and play poker. The legislation (U.S. related) has already made an enormous effect on the game already and now with the recession happening, there will be even less fishes than the aftermath of legislation. Which means that the games are at it’s toughest state and will continue to get tougher. This is all just my opinion by the way.

It is probably the most difficult time to move up in limits. Which sucks because I am currently taking shots up in higher stakes. But due to my bad timing, I ran really bad at nl1k and I am now forced to just stay at 400 for the time being. The shitty problem is that I have grind up my losses at 1k at nl400 and maybe nl600. I really do pray that the online poker game will be legal one day. To be honest, I think all of the low to mid stakes professionals are developing their game right now to wait for that moment to happen. I can’t imagine what the game will be like if it was just like the pre-legislation days. At that time, I had a winrate of 4+ playing a standard tag game. It was stressless and carefree. It was like heaven. I guess we just have to do what we’ve been training ourselves to do while chasing this grotesque game, we have to be patient.