I had a pretty bad night tonight. I played about 40-50 MTT's and got busted from everything quite early. I pretty much only had two deep runs: the Microgaming 25€ rebuy where I ended up mincashing after losing an enormous pot with the nut straight against a rivered flush. It was like a 160k pot when the average was 40k. I dropped to 10k after that which was exactly 10BB, and then I just push/folded for two hours without getting above 20BB once. Oh well, at least I cashed. My other deep run was at the Ongame $33 6max, where I was second in chips with 31 players left (top 30 got paid), and then lost a chiplead pot with AK against some ridiculous donkey's J6s. I can't remember the exact stacks, but it was on the bubble and he had roughly 25bb. I opened 2,5x UTG, he made a hilarious 3bet to like 11xBB, I shoved and he probably realised he was committed and called. After the hand I was left with 10BB and got knocked out soon after the bubble. The most hilarious part of my night was a $5 rebuy satellite to the $200 Championchip, which is the sunday major at the Ongame network. I'm not really interested in satties and definitely not in anything that small, but since I got knocked out from everything I didn't have enough tables up and thought I'd just play. I ended up getting sucked out right, left and center and finishing 2nd. The winner got the $200 tourney ticket and I got... wait for it... $5! Which after all the rebuys was like 10% of my investment. I also got 2-3 outered in pretty much every tournament I played, but that happens every now and then so I'm not complaining. Much.

 

Anyway, since I haven't had to think of much tonight as I've rarely got past level 200/400, I've had time to think of my plans for the near future and stuff like that. I just came to realise that I haven't had two days off poker since the beginning of December. It's kind of impossible to find out for sure, but I'm like 99,9% certain I haven't had two days off for four months. No kidding. On top of that, I've been playing 80-hour weeks, usually playing 6-7 days a week and on average maybe 12 hours a session. While I genuinely love what I'm doing, that's still just fucking ridiculous. A major factor in this has been that I was underrolled for pretty much all winter due to going broke after the incident with my sponsor. I had to rebuild and I had to do it pretty fast, so I didn't have much choice but to play. However as I'm up something like 23k from the last 4 months, I could and should probably cut down my volume a little bit. Maybe playing only 5 days a week wouldn't be that bad for starters?

 

Planning my new, slightly more social life led to the obvious question: what the heck am I going to do with my newly extended spare time? I don't really need to do more sports, as I already go to the gym 4 times a week and do other sports quite a bit. I see my friends enough, as they all live close and we do a lot of stuff together. I also see my best poker friends pretty often as we do grinding sessions together, go partying and so on. Of course there are some past friendships that aren't so active anymore partially due to me becoming a full-time world-traveling poker geek, and I should probably try to call some people I haven't seen for a long time and go for a cup of coffee or something. But still, this won't take that much time either. I already have a girlfriend so I don't need to get into the dating circle.

 

What do I need that extra time for? Basically everyone I know tells me I need to start playing less, or I'll end up burning myself out. It's just that I don't feel at all out-burned, quite the opposite. I'm happy every day, I stay quite positive even during downswings, and I don't really feel like anything's wrong with my mental stability even that I've been playing more poker than possibly anyone in my country in 2010.

 

Then I looked at my book shelf. There are over 10 books I've been dying to read but haven't had time to. I've got a pile of dvd boxes sitting right there that I bought over a year ago but haven't had time to watch. I haven't even seen Entourage season 5 yet. I heard it's good. I really want to study meditation more. I want to learn more about sports psychology. I'm interested in a lot of stuff that's kind of connected to the mental aspects of poker, but which is also useful in many other areas in life. I want to add swimming to my training regime. I want to buy a dog. I want to get more serious with sports betting. I want to get into investing, stocks and all that stuff. I want to learn a new language, possibly japanese. I want to learn how to make sushi. I want to move into a new apartment. I want to travel somewhere with no casino. I spent over 200 hours in aeroplanes last year, travelling to Bahamas, NYC, Mexico, Vegas, Bangkok, Hong Kong and about 20 different european countries because of poker, but only one or two of these trips weren't poker related. And lastly, I really want to hang out more with my girlfriend. I've been playing so much poker that I haven't had a chance to be with her anywhere near as much as I'd like to. I am a commitment-phobe to some extent and would go crazy if I had to be with any girl for a week straight, but the amount of time we've spent together recently hasn't even been enough for me. Not to mention her, to whom the past couple of months must have been frustrating beyond belief. Lately I've been in a relationship with online poker and she's just been the lover, and that's not fair to her. I really need to clean up my act and see her more.

 

So, my new goal will be to play poker at least a little bit less. Maybe 60 hours a week will do for starters. I'm also trying to become a little bit more conscious about what I play, as I usually just register to every MTT on 2-5 different sites for a few hours without looking at the structures. Some of the stuff I play regularly are a huge waste of time as they're just 1000+ person crapshoots with 10BB effective stacks after two hours. I've been meaning to take a night off just to look at the structures of every single nightly tournament, check how many runners they usually get, how long they last, how big the M values are in the endgame, etc. This way I could get rid of all the crap I play for no reason and only focus on the tournaments where the real value is. This would definitely lift my ROI quite a bit, and possibly also my hourly rate. One good example is the Midnight Oil tournament at Ongame. It's not just a random $22 freezeout, they also add $108 tournament tickets to the prize pool and it's very popular. I've played it probably 70 times this year and cashed once or twice. Why? Because, despite being one the network's most popular tournaments, it's an absolute crapshoot. I've never checked how fast the blinds are, but I reckon they go up like every 5 minutes as I'm always shortstacked after less than an hour of play.

 

Tomorrow I'm not going to play a single hand of poker. Instead I'm going to watch at least three episodes of Entourage, read some Bukowski and have a long, great night with my girlfriend. I'm pretty confident the fish aren't going anywhere. Maybe there's life outside poker tables, even for me.