End of the Year Review

First and foremost - Merry Christmas to the 2 readers that actually follow this blog.

On to the other stuff

Took time off from sports betting/poker/whatever due to exams/holidays and what not...I played a $2 MTT on Stars last night while waiting for my online boxing day sales order to go through, ended up making a deep run but busted with 5 tables left. Made one wrong read and put a guy on overs and shoved into an overpair, which essentially crippled me and a few hands later I busted. Still finding my MTT game to be quite...weak. I discovered that I still need to work on chipping up, as I have found that too often, the only way my chip stack increase during the course of a MTT is through a big hand or two, otherwise I end up getting short real fast.

Looking forward to this weekend, mainly this Sunday with the various MTTs I'll be playing. So far the list consist of:
1. FTP Holiday 100K Freeroll
2. Stars Guinness World Record Attempt - $10+$1 $500K Guarantted
3. Stars Million Dollar Takedown
Going to be trying to satellite into the Sunday Million as well since they're guaranteeing $2.5 million in the prizepool, theres also the $215 HORSE, $215 Mixed Hold'em as well as Sunday 500 on Stars that I'll try to satellite into, so it should be a fun Sunday to end of the year. Not sure how I will be able to put in the hours for these satellites, so I might just end up doing those hyper-turbos before the tournaments on Sunday.

This year has been a mediocre year to be honest. I didn't put in as many hours as I wanted to, and as a result the profits from poker this year definitely didn't reach my goal. With that said, it was still a profitable year, and finally breaking through with a decent cash at a relatively big live tourney (by my standards - $235 - 600+ players at Venetian) as well as taking down a live tournament ($120 - 36 players at Binions). Still many holes in my game that I hope to fill in 2009, and definitely need to get more motivated to put in more hours as well.

I don't really make new years resolution, but I do have a list of goals that I hope to accomplish in 2009 - albeit some is definitely tougher than others.

1. Have my first 5 digit score
2. Final table one of the bigger Sunday tournaments
3. Work on my heads up game (cash)
4. Put in some serious volumn for MTTs (35~ tournaments weekly)
5. Satellite into the WSOP ME
6. Satellite into one other live tourney (EPT/Aussie Millions preferrably)
7. Work on my deepstack cash play

I know this list seems pretty long as well as some of them being relatively hard to quantify and reach, but I figure it needs to be something that will really motivate me to put in the work. With a work term from Jan-Apr, it should allow me to put in a decent amount of volumn on evenings and weekends. Furthermore, my spring term from May-Aug looks like a term where I'll just take the minimum 3 course requirement, so that should allow me to keep putting in solid hours online while hopefully getting away for a week or two at the WSOP.

Other than that, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you and yours, may your 2009 be your best year yet.