One year anniversary

Yesterday was the one year anniversary of this blog. In that span of 365 days, I played online poker on 219 of them, which turns out to be exactly 60% of the time. 60% is a good poker number, I've discovered; it's a good goal to see the flop 60% of the time.

I surprised myself by achieving my goal of a million play dollars much sooner than I'd expected. When it became clear to me that I'd be reaching the goal sometime in the summer, I knew I wanted to try my hand at other poker flavors besides Hold'em, and decided I'd switch to Omaha as soon as I made my first play million. The idea of Omaha really captivated me.

As I've chronicled earlier, I didn't give Omaha the chance it deserved. The next flavor I tried was 7 card stud. I liked a lot of the features of 7 card stud, but came to realize it requires a lot more concentration and memory than either Hold'em or Omaha. 7 card stud felt a lot more like work than fun, in the end.

Ironically, it was when I decided to switch back to my best game, Hold'em, that my stack fell back down below a million; it's remained there ever since. Achieving my goal the first time in so relatively effortless a fashion spoiled me; it gave me an inflated sense of my poker skill, and I abandoned (without meaning to) some of the poker best practices I'd built up. I realized I needed to retool, to strip my game back down to the basics before trying to build it up again.

I've been in an extended holding pattern for a while now; every time it looks like I'm about to go on a roll, my stack gets spanked back down again. I'm not discouraged, however; in fact, as I've indicated, I plan on giving Omaha another try when I hit a million again. You notice, I said when, not if :-)

On Wednesday night, I won the first two hands of the session, and decided to end my night when it became clear I wouldn't be able to win the third.

I'm looking forward to my next year of poker and blogging!

delta: $22,400
balance: $881,338