Gentlemen, We Can Rebuild Him...

Who's put in about 20,000 hands over the last 2-3 weeks at the .50/$1 NL full ring tables? Why, umm, that'd be me.

It surprises me too. As far as the explanation for such insanity, well, I'm not sure there's a big honking direct one, but more an accumulation of lots of many smaller indirect ones.

I guess more than anything I just got weary of playing less-than-good poker. Lazy poker. Not bad poker necessarily but just poker in which I took no part of the process all that seriously, as far as the results, the effort I put into it, expectations, etc. Which honestly isn't a bad way to approach the game, if you're content with that, as it makes it a hell of a lot more enjoyable and less time-consuming.

But in the end I couldn't help but be a little disgusted with myself, especially given my competitive and stubborn side. Trips to cover assorted WPT tournaments also helped on the motivation side, as far as occasionally running into not-the-finest-specimens of either intelligence or general humanity who are able to consistently pull large sums of money out of the game of poker. I just felt more and more embarrassed as time went by that I'd not only stalled out poker-wise but laid down, taken a nap, stumbled back a few steps, took another nap, considered waking up, but decided to sleep some more.

So I signed up with Cardrunners a month or two ago and dusted off PokerTracker/PokerAce, and basically just tried to start fresh, seeing how many hands I can comfortably grind out, trying to unbreak myself of past bad habits, learn better new ones, all that happy fun crippety-crap.

Grinding .50/$1 was kind of hard at first as far as getting motivated about the stakes, but that's the old thinking rearing its ugly head, and if anything I should probably have stepped down another level while retooling things a bit and absorbing as much info as my tired old poker brain can handle. I've honestly been a bit surprised by the results even at .50/$1 NL, as I'm averaging $20-$25/hr (including rakeback) running 4-6 tables at a time, which isn't bad for those stakes.

No real goals in mind, as far as plans to crush X limit for Y big bets before moving up to Z limits, etc. Just trying to get back to not playing like a impatient monkey and hopefully making a little bit o' scratch at the tables. So far so good but we'll see if it takes or not.