Realisation!!!!!

I have just realised something I should have known for a long time.

Poker for me is like football for Liverpool.

Pretty bold statement you might say, but I'll explain. It is very frustrating being a Liverpool fan, but I persevere. It is very frustrating playing poker, but I persevere. False hope is another thing in common. Just when I think things are going to turn around, and this could be my year, I have a disastrous sequence of events. This is a familiar scenario to any Liverpool fan as well. I regularly play against opponents I deem to be inferior to myself in the poker department (call it false conceitedness if you will) but I consistently struggle. Liverpool are the epitomy of struggling against so called inferior opponents. I regularly struggle against opponents I deem to be fairly equal or superior to myself, and that compares similarly to Liverpools record against the Utd's, Arsenals and Chelseas of the world.

Sadly though I don't have a good European record to console myself with.

OK, enough of that. Time for a mini review of 2007.

Tournaments - terrible. In the latter part of the year I played less and less of them but overall I had a dismal record for 2007.

Cash - Mixed. I had some good days and some bad days, and had a relatively small profit in these over the year, but not near as much as I would have liked. Still not good enough.

Online - Not worth mentioning. Terrible effort to start playing regularly online and a dismal failure in terms of hands played and effort expended.

Overall I had a loss than was nearly as big as my profit for 2006 so I was very underwhelmed overall with my year pokerwise.

2008

I am not going to make any brash predictions for 2008. If I happen to qualify for any big events then great, but I am probably not going to put a huge amount of effort into qualifying as they will mostly just cost me money that would be better spent elsewhere. I intend to play very few of the regular weekly tournies around Dublin, but will hopefully play one or 2 events a month on average around the 200-300 mark. This is obviously dependent on how my cash games are running, but I hope that overall I can be less reckless than I have been in the past in certain regards. I am going to try to concentrate on playing smarter, not more often. I have also had an encouraging start to the year online, but since I am currently playing mostly 1/2 PLO underrolled, it could go pear shaped soon and pretty much kill my online interest.

The pipedream as regards online would be to keep plugging away for a few months, get to a point where I am bankrolled for 2/4 and be able to play there and withdraw any winnings above a certain level. However, since I am quite severly underrolled for the game the likelyhood of a few bad sessions, which is extremely possible, mean that it could be squashed fairly quickly. There are early encouraging early signs though. Over the first 1000 hands on my new db (yes, I know, very few) I am running at just over 28ptbb/100 at a combination of 1/2 and .50/1 on UltimateBet. If I could keep that up it would be a doddle, but somehow I can't imagine it will be anything like this over even the first 5k hands, never mind anything serious. I am also only playing about 8 or 9 hours a week at this point an 2/3 tables at a time, far from serious and dedicated as you can see, but it is a start.

If this starts to take off or fails dismally or even just peters out, I will say it here. One thing I can guarantee though is that it will be underwhelming.