2005 Year in Review/2006 Looking ahead

Since everybody else is posting theirs and I'm such a frickin' bandwagon-jumper, thought I'd lemming right along.

2005 - I finished out the year by getting broke in Vegas at the WPBT. Yup, folks, there you have it, I was stuck the entire trip. Had a ball, lost my shirt. The only reason I can call it a winning year was a $1400 win in a Stars $5 freezeout in March kept my numbers +$600 for the year. I learned a lot about my play and the game in general, mostly that I still don't know how to play. My live game isn't terrible (so I thought 'til I dumped six bills at donkey poker in LV), but my internet play is for real shite. So after careful analysis, this is the conclusion I've come to.

I suck at poker.

News flash, right? More specifically, I suck at online ring games and am way too aggressive in online tourneys. I actually have something like a 35% ROI for the year on the $5 SNGs, so I suck less there.

So in 2005 I won a 1100-person tourney without having a friggin' clue what I was doing, bought a new monitor and pissed the rest of the money away, then went to Vegas, had the time of my life, and got broke. Let's do things a little differently in 2006.

For starters, I'm actually going to try to manage a bankroll. The Dear and Patient isn't working right now, so the $200 I deposited on FT and Stars is going to have to be the bankroll. I put $100 on each site and $100 in my cash roll to start the year, so now we'll have to play like the money actually means something, without playing like the money means anything. That means play to my strengths - the baby SNGs. So that's where I'll be for a while online (along with limit Razz, which I'm finding addictive) until I get the bankroll built up. So my goal there is to not have to deposit again. Period.

Cash-wise the G-Vegas tourney helped a lot, turning my $100 cash roll into $500 pretty quickly. So my cash goal is to build that roll up to about $4K by summer, then play the $1,000 WSOP event. I know, not the smartest BR management strategy, but that's the plan. I make enough at my job to support myself and the Dear and Patient, and a decent side income on Ebay selling various and sundries to support my travel habits, so poker only needs to support my buy-ins, not necessarily the associated travel costs.

So my goals for 2006 -

1) Play the $1,000 NLHE WSOP event in July.

2) Make the trek to several blogger tourneys that I know are already being planned, including Austin in March, Philly in September, and any of the G-Vegas tourneys that I can get to.

3) At least 2 trips to Vegas.

4) Support the poker travel through Ebay, and the poker play through poker winnings.

5) Suck less.

6) Move up from the baby SNGs to the $30 buy-in range with enough cash behind to feel comfortable playing there.

7) Actually read the poker books/watch the DVDs that I've bought/acquired in the past year.

8) Learn to read first.

9) Host one decent-sized tourney at the Casa de Falstaff this year. Maybe February?

10) Continue to have fun. 'Cause let's face it, I ain't getting no sponsor's exemptions into the TOC anytime soon, so I'd better enjoy this shite while I'm doing it.

Oh yeah, and as The Rooster read to me from his pocket list of tips "work on selective aggression." Patricularly the "selective" part.

Peace,

J