Yo. Happy new year everyone!

Just spent half an hour or so putting together my results for the year as I don’t have all the hands in 1 database. From my pokerstars audit, looks like from 1st Jan till 4th April (when my current DB starts) I netted $56,175 at the tables (my memory of this time was that i was heaps above ev, which I obviously was in the purest sense, but looking back on my early year updates looks like i wasn’t that far ahead of allinEV).

Then started the biggest downswing in buyins of my career so far- but since then, things have picked up very well:

As my confidence and bankroll recovered, I took another small shot at some good 1k games, which unfortunately didn’t go so well, so I’m still quite a long way from recovering fully in $ and ev$ terms:

If these graphs look exceptionally swingy towards the end it’s because I’ve been playing a fair bit of the new 3 blinds games on stars where one ‘giant blind’ = 2BB.

So yeah – I’m down $4,876 since my high water mark for the year in April (lol) plus I got $3,548 in rakeback from stars (around 10%), plus probably around 1k from other sites. In MTTs, I took some shots at SCOOP with a fair chunk of action sold which went terribly, but I had some extreme luck with a piece of a good friend recently so I’m probably around even on that score. So yeah, overall this year excluding bitb stuff I’m going to call it $55,847. This is actually quite a lot better than I thought it was tbh – I’d forgotten just how good I ran in January and March especially. No year graph/reports I’m afraid, would take too long to get all the hands on 1 database.

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I made it out to Mexico with no problems on the 29th and I’m settled into our new apartment here. The internet looks like it’s a heap of **** so unfortunately I’m going to be tethering from my phone to play with a stable connection – far from ideal as I probably won’t be able to coach or join study calls for a month, but not a great deal I can do about it, it’s just one of those things here.

During the journey out I was reflecting a lot on my poker career and how to take things forward. Even after so long in the game I still love to play, and I try to be thankful every day that I have my freedom and something competitive and rewarding to do with my time. I wrote down a bunch of stuff relating to my process and my goals for the year some of which I’ll share here:

– $100k from playing poker this year
= 40 playing weeks
= $2.5k/week
= 10x 500hand sessions
= $250/session
= average stake 500nl, 5bb/100

– Triple my hourly
= 200 study sessions (1 per playing day)
= 5 sims/session
= Increase bankroll by 3x
= Improve myself every day

I bought myself a new notebook in the airport and I’m going to do my best to keep track of my progress towards these goals. Obviously I’m not a complete robot, and obviously staying healthy just supercedes all these goals, but yeah – these are my goals and I think I have a plan which, if executed properly, will get me there. The hardest thing I think will be the mental game side – playing average stake 500nl means for every hand of 200 I play, I’ll need to play 0.8 hands of 1k, so I’ll need to move up a fair bit over the course of the year to achieve this and handle the swings/additional pressure that that entails. I’m also going to try and learn 40bb, and I’m planning on working properly on my MTT game and playing a weekly MTT session on sundays. I think my updates here will be fairly infrequent and probably quite life-focused, but we’ll see how it goes.

Thanks to everyone who’s read/posted to this blog over the last year, and here’s to crushing it in 2020 

GL out there!