So I have a couple of friends both of whom are small stakes winners, both decent players and both who get pretty aggravated when players they consider bad get there. It's a common theme in my aim conversations with them that they either expect to run bad or will criticise in chat those players who have tried to donate and have inadvertenty got there.

Most of us have broken mice, punched walls, thrown stuff kicked the cat* or done other stuff causing us damage when we have lost a key pot at a critical time when holding would have placed us really well for a big score. I was a frequent donator in PLO after busting a tournament looking to play bad run good and recapture the $ ev I had just lost in a key mtt hand. A book resovled this pretty much the first time I picked it up. The book Tommy Angelo's Elements of Poker. Now I am not going to write a review as Foucault has already written a pretty good review on 2p2 but suffice to say this book really did change my approach to dealing with tilt and the primary causes of tilt which in many cases are beats and coolers. If someone plays a hand badly against our range or our hand we make money, we don't want to castigate them, sure we can't spend sklansky $ or g bucks but we can continue to make good decisions

If we are semi serious about making money from poker our goal must be to make decisions that maximise our EV if we break stuff hurt ourselves or our bank roll these are -Ev decisions that hurt us. So stop and get the book read it enjoy it and tilt less.

I do not post in bad beat threads I do not expect to be sucked out on I do not break stuff, sure poker is not a primary source of income but still managing to maintain a state of ambivalence to the
out come of a hand when you have played it well is a pretty significant step forward.

Please do not kick the cat, cats are very fkn cool!

So I have been toying with starting a blog for a while now and decided that this is probably the right time to start it being a new year an all. I am hoping that blog will function both as a reminder of how much I have to learn and improve and as a mechanism towards addressing it. I suppose that writing up the hands where I make the most significant mistakes is going to be cathartic and embarrassment will provide the motivation to remove, or at least reduce, such spew from my game.

I want to keep this short so by way of an introduction I have been playing poker recreationally for about 20 years but only really as a semi-thinking player for about the last 2. I have had two profitable years in 2008 and 2009 and intend to set out some goals for ensuring that this year not only maintains that trend but increases my profit for a 3rd year running. Last year was good to the tune of about $12k if we generously include the spot prize for making the nuts with some bag of spanners in a Pokerstars Billionth hand giveaway on some PLO $50 table in May or thereabouts. My primary game is small stakes MTT’s where I play as pkrtiltsme on Stars and frvrfkntiltd on FT, where I am currently playing pretty much exclusively due to a fairly unique backing arrangement I was offered after needing to use my roll for unforeseeable life expenses. I post on 2p2 as well as dereds and am rarely happier than when talking shite about a subject I enjoy but barely grasp.

In setting my goals for the year I am going to try and be both realistic and challenging. My goal is to secure $20k as personal profit not including the profit share I have with my backer. After taking a 4 month hiatus last year this seems pretty reasonable. Other goals include restarting the coaching I was receiving until I was unable to put in the volume or had the online funds to pay for and to post more hands that involve interesting decisions rather than obviously incorrect ones.

GL to all in 2010