Close to Robusto > Busto

Despite being a walking zombie of late (the cumulative effect of a month or two of putting in ~100 hr. work weeks between all my sundry jobs and projects), I've actually been playing a decent amount of poker, and turning in pretty positive results.

I've been playing a ton of $5/$10 and $8/$16 LHE, mostly short-handed, and have managed to grind my last $300 deposit in Full Tilt up to about $3K. Part of that is due to old-fashioned running goot, part of that is from some decent tournament scores, but a lot of it is the simple fact that I'm not a bad limit player when I sit down and focus and grind. I'll probably shift gears and do something dumb-ass such as start playing $200 SnGs but for now I'm still enjoying the return to my LHE roots, and trying to not play too far over my bankroll.

I've also qualified for 3 of the FTOPS events, including the kickoff one tonight. My total investment in getting into those was about $75, so a cash or two would be pretty nice. I also won a $26 SnG into the Sunday Mulligan last week, and was top ten in chips with about 90 left (and 65 or so paying, I think). Was obviously feeling pretty good about things, especially when I got the second biggest stack at the table all-in pre-flop with my AA versus 1010, but a 10 on the flop took a big chunk out of my stack. Chopping with AQs versus A8o a few hands later didn't help, then the same guy with the 10s bounced me a few hands after that with QJs versus QQ (although I guess I could have possibly gotten away from it on the flop of 8 9 10, as that's when all of the chips went in).

I've got a couple of more weeks before the current house renovation project is done, and then it's time for some serious decompression, as I've managed to run myself pretty ragged since last March, when I went on my house buying spree. I've been taking on more and more freelance work to fund all of that, especially with the sale of the first investment house dragging on and on and on, and the snowball keeps getting larger and larger and larger.

I just agreed to cover the WPT Championship in April and the 2008 WSOP for PokerRoom, but at this point even the hectic, crazy nature of working those events would be a relative vacation from the current state of hectic-ness, so I'm basically looking at those as vacations.

The WSOP may be problematic, though, as far as the day job goes. I had a ton of vacation time in the bank last year so I was able to just use vacation time to do the poker events, but I blew through the excess last year, so now I'm faced with basically burning it all for poker events (and risk incurring the wrath of my wife, as none would be left for personal vacations) or, you know, simply not showing up at the day job anymore. Until I sell the investment properties it's not even a possibility, so there's plenty of other moving parts, but I'm basically at the point where income from freelance work and my other Web schemery is > income from the day job. Thus the eternal debate of stability, enjoyment of life, love of extra money, yada yada yada, broken record broken record broken record.