As things are

I've decided to blog a bit here again. Most poker blogs are about the author's struggles and victories (ultimate failure comes mostly in the form of an interminable lack of updates, I think), and, outside of a few friends, you usually have to be a well-known nosebleeds player for anybody to care. Even then, your blog is probably fairly fucking boring once the novelty/fantasy factor of the retarded sums of money you're shipping around wears off in your reader's mind.

This is supposed to be the part where I state my intention to be different, but since I'm doing this for myself in the way that consists of my enjoying the documentation of my endeavors, as well as having a record, and not so much in the way that consists of gaining social exposure and feeding my ego (though I wouldn't mind having a readership and making new friends, or else this would be a Word document on my hard-drive), I can't really make any promises. A lot of poker stories -- and probably life stories too -- look very similar to each other. You read enough Wells and one sick baller begins to sound more like another than not, every rigtard might as well be the same shrill troll, and most of the dreamers standing at the bottom of the mountain craning their neck upwards say the same things, and go through the same phases, with differing amounts of visibility. Honestly, sometimes I feel we might as well be living out genre fiction.

Me? I'm that last guy. I've been around and tried to climb the monstrous thing a few times, but it's a tough slog up, and I haven't been a very tough guy. Truthfully, I am being very generous when I say that "I tried." I think the thing of it is is that most of us standing here dream of being at the top, or at least high enough (which is simply another definition of "the top"), but few of us are very interested in paying the toll of scarred hands and gallons of sweat that's necessary to transform us into the mean piece of sinew that we must become to simply have a shot at getting there. We want to arrive without traveling. Intellectually, I think most of us understand that hard work is required, but we secretly believe that one day we're just going to Rocky-montage through it all and there we'll be: in Apollo Creed's nightmares. Others seem to know better and are willing to work hard, but most of these are also too impatient, and burn out or injure themselves without progressing very much, like an athlete that over-trains. The best, however, the ones who get to be more Martin Dressler than Leaving Las Vegas, are the ones who crave the journey. It's every bit as hard for them as it is for anybody else, but they can feel themselves changing, becoming more like the creature they need to be, and that's enough, because that's what they get off on. They're not interested in racing, but rather in being just a little bit better than they were, with each passing day.

I want to be more like those people.

Anyway, that was my rant, and I apologize for the extended and cliched metaphor. I'm all fired up for New Year's, but I'm also a pinch drunk and a pound weary, and hackneyed phrases do find their way to my lips quite easily even when I'm writing my A-game. What I'm basically planning on doing with this blog is using it to accompany my efforts for the year, which are hopefully going to involve playing a lot of poker, improving and making it to a level where I could make a decent wage if I so chose. I'm going to try to update on Sundays to wrap-up my week. Today's Saturday, technically, so I'll just leave it till next Sunday, but until then, some basic facts about me and my poker situation:

1. I've played online for at least 3 years, never venturing beyond 50nl hu.
2. I'm currently playing a mix of 25nl and 10nl 6m.
3. My biggest leaks are: Not playing enough (I played 55k hands of cash last year, though there were a handful of HUSNGs, etc as well), cashing out, long losing sessions and booking wins ("Eat like a bird, shit like an elephant."), vengeance mindset, not doing my homework, and passivity.
4. Despite these things, I am a winning player, though for a lot of the last year I haven't felt like one. (But I do now.)
5. I want to play 48k hands for the month of January to complete the 50k Micro Challenge. Winning's quite unlikely, but hopefully this will seem pretty painless to me and I can play more in the upcoming months (not more than 50k hands, just more than I am used to).
6. Other things I am working on: Disassociating myself emotionally from the game, having a process at the table and away from it, making good quits, not quitting without a good reason to, getting in shape, and sleeping on a schedule.