I've been away for a bit, but I've been wanting to put in a decent blog for a while.  A lot has been going on.  Huge uspwing, which I finally managed to put in decent volume to, decent downswing, plenty of learning.  The funny thing is if I started a blog post a year ago, I would have felt like making a "this is how things should be done" type of post right now, yet today I'm going to preface the following by saying this is where I'm at, not necessarily the best way of doing things.  You honestly need to keep evolving all the talents behind what makes a great poker player, and there is a lot of work involved to making better decisions at the tables.

Sorry, nothing poker related, but the better half has created a survey and needs some more results to help out.  If you have a girlfriend, wife, mother (it's kind of aimed at females) or anyone you feel has a couple of minutes to commit to filling in a survey, please pass on the following link:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=RZ6dvguY_2b2zmZnEcfb0nbQ_3d_3d

The better this gets circulated, the more brownie points I get, the happier I am in general.  This makes me think clearer in poker, which helps motivate me to write about poker, which will make this blog a whole lot better.  Thats about the best incentive I can give at this time, and I guess whoever enters goes into a draw for a free movie ticket in Australia, though flights, accommodation and spending money are not included :) 

I've become a bit fascinated by the WSOP.  This is the 2nd year of WSOP since I've been playing poker, and there are still several layers unwinding that really get me more and more interested in it. After the 2008 WSOP, my feelings were basically, that live pros are morons, and that spending 6 weeks buying in one MTT after another was basically  burning money.  I mean you just hear story after story of pros losing $100K+ in 6 weeks, just for the glory of a bracelet that 40+ people get each year.

Now even if they aren't long term winning players, losing $100K is still variance as their EV must at least be close to +ve if they know a thing or two about poker.  So I start wondering about MTT variance.  After some forums browsing, it's safe to say it's huge, and some figures floating around about online MTT's suggest you'd need 2000+ MTTs to estimate a players ROI, 100BI+ downswings are standard (ie your bankroll is 100BI lighter at some point, not ran bad for 100 straight MTT's, so this could be over 100's of MTT's), and of course the much shorter upswing, winning some big tournament.

About 2 weeks ago, I spent half my poker time not playing, and instead analysing different poker situations, and more specifically HU situations, which really did help a lot.  The results will come if you have clearly put in more effort learning than everyone else and can apply that consistantly.  The problem of course is the promise of hard work paying off rarely surpasses the desire to play and get what results you can scrap together now, and alas I'm back to playing 90% of my poker time.  The stupid thing is, this is like a cycle I go through, and when I'm mid way through my next big downswing, and my bankroll is being decimated, I'll probably start putting in the effort again.  It's such a crippling way to try to move forward properly.

Even if this is going to a very long painful rise from mediocrity, I'm up for it.  Leave egos at the door, leave your money at the door, it's time to simply get better at this game.  I'm basically starting from the most basic insignificant parts of my game and working my way up, although as this post probably shows, nothing is insignificant in poker.  I'm going to try to use all that stuff I've read, heard and been told over time to do things right, but in all honesty, it's pretty damn hard for me to remember what happened Sunday night let alone some great advice from an article I read 2 years ago, so feel free to correct any mistakes I make.