Baby Steps

So far, my Awesome Pro Poker Career (or NAMBLA) has been tentatively successful, and I'm not measuring that in cash won, but in managing to play the requisite volume of hands and feeling good about myself which bodes well for the coming five months. Here's what's happened so far:

I've played four sessions for a total of 3.5k hands, and am up about one buy-in. Nothing spectacular there; I believe this to be below my expectation but I can live with it.

I've had an "aha!" moment in regards to rakeback/bonuses where it dawned on me that with the large increase in volume I'll play, this money will now be more than just icing on the cake. I can probably stand to make close to $2,000 off of Party promotions alone per month.

I sat down and talked things over with Alan (who coached me earlier) yesterday and he basically just gave me a thumbs up on everything Lori and I had talked about, and reinforced the idea that there's a lot of money in clearing bonuses (and that I should consider that a major source of income at these levels). After talking about that for maybe 30 minutes, we ended up looking through a series of hands that he's been struggling with and wanted my input on. It was a great discussion and we both enjoyed it so much that we agreed to make it a bi-weekly recurring event. 90 minutes or so every two weeks; I bring a set of hands that I'm struggling with and he'll do the same and we'll just talk through them and see what we think.

Alan's adamant about this being "a discussion between peers" but I still consider free coaching, heh. Still, if it's worthwhile for him, and definitely worthwhile for me, then it's a win/win I suppose.

I'm doing a brief tour on Stars (a site I play very little at nowadays) because I had $400 worth of old reload bonuses just lying around that felt silly not to clear. In doing so, I also managed to clear silverstar (that happens real fast when you're 10-tabling 200NL) which means that I have two months to spend my FPPs on tournament tickets. Once I've cleared the last bonus, I'll be back at Party, tearing up the regs and wrecking havoc on the fish. The goal of playing 75k hands/month seems doable, even with lots of time spent doing other things, and I'm basically just really excited.

Well, well. Either way, before the baby's born, everything's up in the air a little bit and no real routines can be settled. Then again, I've always liked living day-to-day and not be caught in too rigid plans, so perhaps that suits me just fine. The worry that I won't be able to make the required cashouts still lingers, but it got majorly soothed with the revalation about the value of the Party promotions that I'll actually be able to clear.

Also, the sun is shining, spring is coming and I'm sooooo ready to take time off of work. There's no place like home.