1314

1,314. That's how many hands I've played this month. In total.

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As I wound down my "pro" poker career in August and went back to the office on September 1st, I fully intended to keep playing part time, much as I had done before April. However, I think I underestimated how much energy it takes working full time (well, 80%) in combination with having a 5-month old baby to take care of, even when there's two of us. I'm not used to playing in the evenings when I'm tired and I learned during my short term as a professional player not to play when I'm not feeling my best. Thus, I've only played 1314 hands, or almost precisely 5 hours, this month. Don't get me wrong, I'm not intending to shelf poker, not at all. I'm just making weak excuses for why I've played so little in September, and that in turn will hopefully explain why I've not posted anything here for almost a month.

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I've been busy with another poker-related project though, and that is auditioning for being a Stoxpoker coach. They requested their members to send in sample videos and I quickly decided it wasn' t for me. But after being scolded by Taylor for not signing up, I decided to give it a try and went way in over my head with a "sample" video that was more a long and fairly complicated way of explaining what to think of when deciding how to size your 3-bets. I spent probably around 8 hours on trying to find a good (read: pedagogical) way of explaining what I meant before I decided that it wouldn't work. I didn't want to base a sample video on loose assumptions and I didn't have the time necessary to go not only prove my assumptions but also come up with a format for presenting the material that made it useful to people who didn't already know it. So I gave up.

Then I decided that, fuck it, I can't just give up. Surely I can come up with something to base a sample video on. I could've just recorded four tables and done live commentary but I decided against it mostly because I felt that others can fill that niche better than I can and if I make a sample video I should really make something along the lines of the videos that I'd feel comfortable making. So I ended up with a video called "You Can Do Better" which is a 25-minute long classroom-style video trying to talk some sense into people who for one reason or another have decided what their win-rate is and are now playing for volume, not for winnings. There's a lot of them around, and quite a few of the readers of this blog are guilty of it. I submitted the video a week ago and haven't heard back from them yet. If they decide to turn me down (I'd be a little disappointed but not totally surprised if they do) I'll post the link to the uploaded video here on the blog. I'm not super-happy with the way it turned out - I understand that that's a common reaction to making your first video - but I'm OK with it. I'll let you know how that works out.

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Back at work, it took me a couple of weeks to get settled in and up to speed with what's happened while I was gone. There was some major software architecture restructuring going on right around when I left and now that's fully implemented, which makes it a little confusing for someone who wasn't there for the implementation and doesn't know quite how it works. But now I'm back in the game and I'm happy to report that I caused an awesome new bug yesterday that copmletely crashed the system.

It's good to be back.

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Benjamin's taken his first step towards talking. He's now advanced from going "aaaaaaaaaahhhhhh" to making a "maow-maow-maow-maow-maow" noise because he figured out that it sounded different if he opened and closed his mouth while going "aaaaaaaaaahhhhhh".