2008 Goals Assessment

Well well well. It's that time of the year again, when the dorky among us go and dig up their goals for 2007 post, and assess how they did against those goals now that 2008 is mercifully coming to an end. Interestingly, in each of the three years I have done this on my blog now, I have found that some of my goals come the end of the year really changed in many ways from what they were at the beginning, and this year is no different, with one of my goals in particular. So, without further adieu, I turn to my "2008 Goals" post and how I think I fared on each of those points, and why:

1. Win the phucking Mookie!!!

Nope, still no Mookie victory this year. And I didn't really even come close. I think I had maybe three or four final tables in playing almost every Mookie of 2008, but none in which I made the top three that I can recall. I specifically remember having the chip lead at some point at the final table at least twice, one time with a monster lead, but I managed to give it all away in typical Hoy fashion whenever that occurred. I know I regretted some of the plays and decisions I made late in those few Mookie runs, but the bottom line is, I had a horrendous year playing this tournament, unlike my fellow prop bettor Mookie himself, who I'm sure had more final tables and I know made it to heads-up at least once if not twice, once with a more than 2-to-1 chip lead over Carmen. The sad thing about this particular goal is that things are not likely to change for me in the near future. I still look forward to playing the Mook every week, but I care far less about attaining this goal than I once did. Sure the prop bet has been fun and all, and I've been in discussions with Mookie about renewing it in some form for 2009, but even with the prop bet in place I barely ever thought about it. I know I've made a big deal about winning a Mookie here over the years, but the more I have focused on cash mtts and the less on the blonkaments during 2008, understandably the less import this particular goal has taken on.

2. Win at least 15 blogger tournaments.

Wow. It is hard to believe that was even me writing that just 12 short months ago, isn't it? I mean, in a lot of ways, 2007 was the year of the blonkament for me. I ended up focusing far more last year on blogger tournaments than I did on actually winning real money in real poker tournaments, and it clearly showed in my results for 2007. In 2008, my stated goal was to focus more on winning cash in larger online mtts, and at some point during the year after the end of BBT3 I recall specifically making the decision not to focus so much at all on the blogger events, at least not like I had been in the past. That decision clearly helped me to focus on the larger mtts I am really more interested in anyways, and again I would say this has obviously helped my profit and results overall in 2008. But it makes a goal like winning 15 blogger tournaments nearly impossible, and really quite moot as I just haven't viewed that as much of a goal throughout the better part of 2008, regardless of how I was feeling back in early January.

And don't get me wrong -- I think I had a perfectly fine year, blonkaments-wise. I won a couple of Dookies, a couple of Skillz events despite barely playing in those tournaments after the BBT3 ended, four Bodonkeys, at least three Riverchasers tournaments and at least two Donkaments, literally all of which other than the Bodonkeys occurred in the first half of the year. I just haven't played blogger events other than the Mookie with any regularity -- again other than the Bodonkey, which I really enjoyed per my previous posts -- during the majority of 2008. I understand from Al that the BBT4 is on its way back, and I imagine that will pique some interest from me in these events again, but for the most part I have turned into mostly a Mookie-only guy these days. Again, it's not anything to do with the blogger events per se, but the initial fun is long gone for me from these things, and the bottom line is that they make it harder to focus on winning real money in larger events on many occasions. So that's another goal that I failed at during 2008, although it doesn't feel like a failure because I was well on my way to surpassing that goal before I kinda gave up trying, and it's just not something I care a whole lot about at this point.

3. Get back to my cash-payout mtt success from 2006.

In retrospect, this was easily my most important goal of the year, and happily it is also the one where I think I performed the best. Without having to review the numbers in detail, I am quite sure that I exceed my overall profitability at poker in 2008 as compared to any other year that I've been playing seriously. I had a number of big cashes in 2008, surely more than in 2007, and for larger dollar amounts as well. I made the full tilt 50-50 tournament my biatch in 2008, playing it probably about 180 times for total buyins of $9000, and I final tabled it I believe 9 times out of those 180 attempts this year. Basically 1 in 20 times I played a $50 buyin tournament with a roughly 1000-person field, I final tabled. If that ain't making a tournament your biatch, then I don't know what is. I'm too lazy to do it again now, but I recently added up all of my cashes just from the 50-50 alone this year, and it was somewhere in the neighborhood of $25,000. That is a nice tidy profit just one from one tournament alone on one poker site. I was also solidly profitable from the 50-50 equivalent on stars, which quickly turned into a 70k guaranteed event. This one I probably only played maybe 40 or 50 times during the year, but I final tabled it twice for a 2nd and a 4th place finish, netting me over 4k in profits overall. This enabled me to turn a clear profit on stars for all my play for the entire year, in addition to playing profitably overall on Bodog and on UltimateBet.

With the advent of $T on full tilt, I was also able to nab some big scores via FTOPS and other regular satellites and just keep the winnings as cash. This equated to two $1000 seat victories for FTOPS events and/or the Monday 1k on full tilt, plus I recall two $2600 wins in two days over the summer I think in advance of the August FTOPS series. Although I surely need to do better at converting my satellite wins into cash wins at the end of the day, I was able to use juicy satellite formats and structures to my advantage and to keep the cash via the $T process for the first time on full tilt in 2008.

Lastly, Ultimate Bet has proven to be a real find for me here as the year comes to a close. Even though I never thought I would even consider putting a dime on that site, here I am and so far the experiment has been hugely positive. I am up over 10 large in pure profit there over just a week and a half of play. What do you say to that, right? My plan is just to try to keep as little money as possible there on a regular basis, and keep playing the tournaments there with the great structures that are most geared towards my skills and playing style, and take it one day at a time.

In all, 2008 will go down as my best year of poker, profit-wise. And it's not like I'm making a couple hundred g's a year or anything at this game. Far from it. Poker has always -- ever since I was a teenager learning to play at the 1-2 Sutd Hi-Lo games at the Taj Mahal in AC -- been about the entertainment value of playing. The money is just a way of keeping score, and if I end up positive over a given period of time, then that's all gravy. So I will end up a few thousand overall this year -- for all the fun I've had, the personal enjoyment and satisfaction that I've felt, and all the great experiences I have had, to think that I will actually get paid to do all that? Effing awesome.

4. Play some more large-buyin tournaments.

I'm not sure how I fared on this one. I did not play any WSOP Circuit Events this year as I had planned to back twelve months ago, but then I really didn't feel like trying as 2008 wore on, so I'm not sure what all that means. I did manage to play the $500 buyin FTOPS Main Event two times this year -- getting suckout-eliminated from both of them, thank you very much -- in addition to playing the Monday 1k twice and the $1000 buyin FTOPS event on one occasion as well, where I donked out with AJ on an A high flop likea guy who has no business whatsoever playing in a $1000 buyin event. I also made it out to play in the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas again in the summer of 2008, making a solid run through about 1100 players before busting in around 250th place in a field that paid only the top 99 finishers. But other than these, I really did not play in too many other large-buyin events, which it turns out I sacrificed in exchange for playing in medium-buyin events like the 50-50 and these $120 UB tournaments to a decent profit on the year.

5. Attend one more WPBT gathering, and play in the WSOP.

Well, 1 for 2 ain't bad. As I mentioned, I did play in the WSOP again, making a solid run with no cards to speak of whatsoever. I lasted nine hours -- the longest I have played in one live tournament in a casino in my very few attempts at the big events -- and I had a great time doing it, and really just capturing the whole Vegas and WSOP experience as I have over the past few years of heading out for my regular summer pilgrimage to poker Mecca. And I did spend a small amount of time with some bloggers while out there -- a memorable nice breakfast with cmitch and Vinnay, both excellent guys, comes immediately to mind -- but the fact was that this was the year when the summer WBPT gathering officially went by the wayside. So there was no summer gathering of the bloggers in Vegas, and I am not the type to try to push for two Vegas trips a year away from my family, and so, since I like to play the WSOP every year I can these days, it is highly likely that you donks will continue to avoid seeing me on a yearly basis going forward.

6. Minimize tilt!!

Man I love seeing this one at the end of every year. Let's put it this way -- I am, and will always be, a tiltmonkey. It's just how I'm wired, and I accept that. I'm always going to blow up in the girly whenever I suffer my lifetime-worst-ever beat (that happens about once a week, just ask my chat friends). I strongly suspect that most of the people who girly chat with me on a regular basis only put up with the rest of my yammerings so that they can be around when I absolutely blow the top off the chatbox after a particularly ferocious screwage by some poker site or some donkey across the table from me. Because I know that shit is funny. I read it the next day, the next week or whatever, and it is really funny to look at some of the stuff that came out of my head, my fingers, whatever you wanna call it. So I'm a tilter, and I don't think that's going to change.

But the fact remains that 2008, much like 2007, saw me improve marginally in the tilt factor as well. Sure, I will blow my ass up in the chat like there's no tomorrow after a bad beat, but every day I get better at dealing with it, at accepting it, and most of all at moving on in whatever other poker I am currently playing without letting it affect the quality of my play. For example, just last week when I won that 30k guaranteed sniper tournament on Ultimate Bet, I took once of the sickest beats of all time in the middle of the third hour. I had some of my girly chat people rolling in the aisles I'm sure reading the shit I was saying about what had just happened to me. But you know what? I perserved. I didn't push allin on the next hand with that J7o just to get myself eliminated so I could steam about it all night. I kept my composure, I played the rest of that blind round, that hour, and that entire tournament like it was important to me, and look what happened three or four hours later. That I am sure would not have happened even a year ago. And I see similar examples all the time these days. I use the girly as my outlet to let off some steam after a bad beat, and although I surely still have my moments where tilt gets the best of me in a big way, where I donk right out of two other tournaments within seconds of an anal rape at a third table, those moments are fewer and further between all the time these days. So I don't know if I would describe me as "minimizing" tilt. But decreasing it maybe, slowly but surely.

7. Tell some stories in my blog.

I'll give myself a B on this goal. I did manage to post a couple of the stories I had going around my head a year ago when I wrote this particular goal down. But in the end, I ended up finding other outlets to write about non-poker topics here, and I did so with some regularity. Sports, the economy, the stock market, you name it and I wrote about it here if I was of such a mind to. And to tell the truth, I am really proud of what I've written here in 2008 outside of the poker context, in particular all of my thoughts about the economy, the bailout and the great crash of 2008. Frankly, on a couple of lazy afternoons I have had a blast going back and reading my real-time thoughts during the collapse of my former employer Lehman Brothers, and seeing what I thought the government ought to be doing to right things and comparing to what has actually been done during the balance of 2008. In fact, if I dare say so, I think a lot of what I predicted and said needed to be done actually makes me look like I know what the F I'm talking about, given what we now know. But it's that realtime-ness that makes blogging as a medium so powerful, and the fact that I took the opportunity to write about the events of the day as they unfolded during this truly unprecedented year outside of the realm of poker is one of my happiest and proudest achievements of 2008. So it wasn't nearly as much fiction as I had expected, but the overall point of this goal was met as I found other topics to write about and clearly expanded the scope of what I do here far beyond all poker, all the time. And I've alluded to this here before, but my readership swelled bigtime during the crash. I picked up literally hundreds of new readers since September, which my traffic stats bear out in a big way. Comparing my average hits per month in the four month period prior to September (May-August) to my average hits per month from September to December of this year, my traffic is up a whopping 37% here at Hammerplayer. And it's not slowing down, with December on track to come in about 12% higher than November's traffic and even a couple percentage points over October's levels. And that is something again that I am extremely happy about, and, frankly, proud of because it means that other people out there feel they are getting something meaningful out of my posts about everything I've written on since then.

So that's it for the goals I set for myself and this blog back on January 4, 2008. In all I think I fared well on the goals that mattered the most in retrospect, and as usual many of the things I had been planning on focusing on earlier ended up not being big priorities for me as 2008 rolled on. Most importantly, playing profitable tournament poker has been a great, fun experience for me all throughout this year, especially in light of what's been going on in the world throughout most of 2008. To be able to win more than 20k in online tournaments in January alone to start the year, and to end it with this 10k+ month just on UB, has been quite an experience, and obviously dwarfs all my other goals from a pure poker perspective. Within the next few days I intend to get up a post detailing some goals I will set for myself for 2009, although to be honest sitting here right now I really have no idea what I am expecting for next year. Not sure if I will post again this week as I am on vacay until next Monday, but if I'm not back before then you can expect me here doing my same thing next week as 2009 rolls in. It's been a great year of expansion in more ways than one here on my blog, and I thank each and every one of you for your interest and for all the great contributions that I get here on an almost daily basis in the form of insightful, well thought-out comments. You guys really are the glue that holds this little corner of the internet together, and I can't wait to see what we do with it next.

New Year, Housekeeping, MATH Pimp and Another Shot at the Big Time

Back in the office on a Monday for the first full week of the new year, so that can only mean one thing:



Mondays at the Hoy is back again on full tilt! 10pm ET every Monday night, password as always is "hammer". Any and all are welcome, whether you've played in 10,000 Hoy tournaments before or if tonight is your night to lose your Hoy virginity. We love n00bs in the MATH tournament, and as I've mentioned here before first-timers have had an uncanny amount of luck or skill in finishing high up the leaderboard in this tournament, so come one and come all to try your skill against the best of the best in the world of poker blogging. The buyin as always is $26 or a tier I token on full tilt, and the game is 6-max no-limit holdem. And since it's a new year, that means we will start up a brand new MATH moneyboard for 2008. 2007's moneyboard was won by Columbo in a stunning performance fueled by several big cashes late in the year including in the large-field BBT events. Columbo eked out cash and tournament player cmitch as well Bayne who crushed the first BBT earlier in 2007, so kudos out to Columbo for a truly impressive performance and the well-deserved of King of the MATH for the past year. Tonight we start a whole new moneyboard for a whole new year, so here is your chance to make a name for yourself early and often in the first blogger tournament of the new week every week.

Btw I am still working with full tilt on a possible reward for the top finishers on the 2007 MATH moneyboard. I will be back within a week or two with the details of that but there may (and I repeat, may) be a little something in the works on that front. It won't be anything huge but I would like to give something back to the guys who performed the best and helped make the MATH the fun tournament that it was during 2007. I'm looking at a small freeroll tournament for the top portion of finishers or something similar, but a few of the details are still to be worked out so we'll see what happens. I will let everyone know right here as soon as I know anything on that front.

So, today I was going to start my new turbo sitngo strategy post, but I'm not quite ready for that yet so that will have to wait another day or two. Hopefully when it comes it will be applicable to most of you and written in such a way that most of you will be able to make use of it if you so choose. But in the end I was up a little too late last night playing these turbo sngs and a few satellite tournaments as well. More on that in a minute.

So our boy jeciimd is off to Australia today for his two-week package that will culminate in his playing in the Aussie Millions nlh tournament starting on Monday the 14th. For those of you who don't know, this is a 7500 AUD buyin tournament, and it is a 5-day affair, plus three Day Ones split into three days. So the whole tournament runs from Monday the 14th to Sunbday the 20th if memory serves. I think I mentioned this earlier, but jec has literally never played a live tournament in a casino in his life, and in fact has never even stepped foot in a casino at all other than one short evening jaunt during college to Atlantic City. That in my view is not good and creates a number of additional issues for jec as far as feeling comfortable at the tournament that I wish did not exist, but we all have to deal with the cards we are dealt and this is jec's situation. I spent some time this weekend and gave jec my last-minute pep talk. My advice essentially amounted to be comfortable, dress comfortable, bring snacks and drinks you like if you can. And play tight. Not that jec of all people needs it, but this is a fucking 5-day event. I told him there is no excuse for him all of people, who rarely to never makes moves early as it is, to get allin on any flop without at least top two pairs. Period. I told him this is true for Day 1 at least, and maybe Day 2 as well. Jec bought part of me for my run in the World Series of Poker last year, and I went ahead to cash, so I have returned the favor and bought a similar-sized piece of him this year for his run at the Aussie Millions. And never fear, the biggest instruction I have jec was to blog blog blog godammit. As I mentioned the tournament doesn't start until next Monday Australia time, but jec says he plans to be online by this coming Wednesday. I will of course post any updates I hear here about him here as well.

So, I am off to a pretty good start with my goals for this year. First and foremost, one primary goal of my blog, something that I did not even list in my 2008 goals post but which has always been pretty much the reason I am here doing what I do every day, is sharing poker information and experiences. While I think I've done a fine job of doing so in my own right on the blog, my blogroll over there on the left is sorely out of date. So later today, I will be correcting that problem by adding a bunch of new links to the roll, in no particular order. A number of these are blogs I read with some frequency but just have never added them to my roll for some reason, a few of which I could have sworn were there in fact but I was surprised to see they were not. Some of them are old bloggers taking a new stab at writing regularly about poker, and some of them have been doing this for some time and have started doing a great job of regularly updating, so I am adding them here. I apologize to those whom I have left off for all this time, as well as to those I of course am forgetting with this new update. I've never been the type to just list every single blog out there, as I really want my readers to be able to click any link on my blogroll and be able to get reasonably current, regularly updated poker stuff, but it is high time to expand things quite a bit and today is the day that finally happens. I will be adding those links throughout the day on Monday, and I will probably even mention them specifically over the next couple days once I get all the new links up over there.

One of my other big goals for 2008 that I did write about the other day is giving myself a shot in some more of the big-buyin tournaments. This is another one I am off to a solid start in so far this year. For starters, I played in this past Sunday's 750k guaranteed tournament, qualifying in on Saturday night via a sweet $75 buyin turbo sitngo where the top 3 finishers won their seats. I would win my way in to this thing every weekend in that very same turbo sng if I could play every Sunday evening. Overall I spent more than I would like getting in to this thing, but less than the $216 buyin so that's all good overall. I won't have much time to play at 6pm ET on Sundays for the most part as that is prime dinner/bath/bed time in the Hammer household, but I was happy to get in on the first 750k of the year, and I had a nice experience playing in it.

Since writing down last week about my unsatisfactory cash-payout mtt performance during the second half of 2006, I have noticed that I am playing more focused in the few mtt's I have played. Hopefully that continues for a little while here at least, and I think it is sad and very telling that I could so easily notice the difference that a little more focus and tightness has meant for my large tournament game, but that is still a good thing for the present and near future overall so I'll take it. I have been lasting longer in my few large mtts this year, and that extended to the 750k as well on Sunday where I got nothing early, but instead of pushing things I waited around with the double starting stacks of 3000 chips until I found some favorable situations. Never dropping below around 60th percentile in the remaining field from the starting size of over 4100 runners, eventually I doubled up when a shorty pushed TT into my QQ around the middle of the second hour, and then I chipped up nicely again around the end of Hour 2 when I won a big pot against top pair with pocket Aces. From there I managed to drop a little, gain a little back, drop a little and gain a little back, mostly holding ground as the number of players remaining continued to drop. Sometime either late in Hour 3 we crossed the 1000 players remaining threshold, with me sitting in around 600th place after having made a large laydown on a resteal. Basically, the button on a big stack open-raised the size of the pot before the flop, and I repopped it 3x more to around a quarter of my existing stack with AQo. The button thought, asked for time and eventually pushed allin. I spent maybe 10 seconds before folding. No way I go out here with AQ. I kept asking myself, what are the chances that this guy is pushing here with something like AJ or AT? He had a nice big healthy stack, and he knows I can basically knock him out if I have AK or something, let alone any pocket pair which I would be ahead if not significantly ahead of him with. Why would he take the chance this early with this big a stack of ruining his entire run? Answer: highly unlikely that he would. So then the question became, with just under a quarter of my stack already in the pot, was it worth me calling his allin in the hopes that he did not have AK, AA, KK or QQ -- all hands easily representative of the strength he was showing here -- just to be a slight dog in a race situation? Answer: not to me, not with still a just around average stack left over even if I folded. I never asked the guy what he had and in the end I don't really care. What I am concerned with is the process to my thinking, and I feel confident that my thinking was sound in that spot. This is a way of thinking about chip stacks and big decisions for most of your stack in tournaments that I see as key for anyone serious about running deep in these things. The primary goal is always to survive, and to survive with enough chips to make it worth your while to continue. I still had it, and the chance of me being up against QQ-AA or AK, and thus having a very poor shot of remaining alive in the tournament, or almost surely being against a lower pocket pair and still being less than 50% to remain alive, it was just not the right spot for me at that time.

Sadly, with just under 1000 players remaining, and my stack at the lowest it had been in a good hour or so, I made a bad play following up on what I think was a solid tournament play in laying down the restolen AQ preflop that I described above. I called from the blinds with QTs into a five-way pot, and the flop came down JT4 with two hearts. The action checked around into what was already a large pot thanks to the big blinds four hours in to the 750k and the 5 players in, and then the guy on the button put in a smallish bet, which to me just reeked of weakness and an attempt to steal a big pot. But I made the mistake of forgetting all the other three players in the pot other than the button and myself, and the fact that there were eight other hidden cards in their four other hands, and I went ahead and raised it allin with my middle pair and Queen kicker. In a 2- or even maybe 3-handed pot I think this is a fine if not strong tournament move, in particular when I don't have a medium-large stack. But with five players in the hand, I should have known that (1) the odds of someone in the hand having made top pair were somewhat high -- gotta be better than 50% though I have no calculations to back that up (any of you pokerstovey or mathy donks want to give that one a try?), and (2) none of these guys were going to lay down top pair to my allin reraise. So I raised it to allin, and one of the guys who had checked the flop to begin with to my left went and called my bet. The original bettor was in fact weak and folded, but I knew I was behind even before he flipped up the KJ for top pair King kicker. I did not hit a miracle and IGH in 900-somethingth place, about 500 spots from the cash in the 4100-some runner tournament. This was yet another example of a bad tournament poker decision and is exactly what I was talking about in my goals post from the other day as far as needing to get my late-stage tournament game in order. Final tables, I feel supremely confident after killing the sitngos these past few months. But getting from the late stages to the cash, normally a strong situation for me, has seen me plagued with bad decisionmaking and that is why I need to play some more of these things to get back that experience that I have been missing so much from only playing these multi-seat satellites which generally offer a very different balance of decisions heading into the bubble time.

So after my nice performance but then bustout in the 750k, among other things I decided to continue to pursue my big-buyin tournament goal and play in the $100 buyin satellite to the Monday 1k on full tilt. This one has 24 runners, awarding 2 seats plus $280 cash for third place. The tournament took more than three hours overall, and there was a lot of shit in the middle there including me getting sucked out on three times including a real beauty on a 3-outer with just one card to come in the first hour to knock me down to under half of my starting stack early on. Nonetheless, I perservered, and here was the result of it all:



BOOOOOooooooom!!! So I will be playing again in the Monday 1k this evening at 9pm ET on full tilt, which I am once again very excited about as it is a $1000 buyin tournament. This will be my 4th attempt in this tournament in the year or so it's been run on Monday evenings, with a couple of poor performances and one hideous suckout just short of the money in my first three runs in this thing. But I said I wanted to play more of the big buyin tournaments, so here I am with a solid start to that in 2008 so far with the 750k this past weekend and now the Monday 1k tonight. And the way this satellite to the 1k ended was pretty sick too -- check this out:

So after leading the entire way from 7 players left down to the bubble with 3 players left, I finally took the inevitable bad beat, moving allin on an Ace-high flop with a slow-played A9 and being called by a slow-played AT, which had me down to just over 5k in chips while the other two players had more than twice my chip stack. Then, after I had chipped up a bit but was still in 3rd place of 3 remaining with about 8k to the other two players' roughly 12k in chips, this flop and turn came up:



Obviously, with the huge raise up there from the big stack for almost all his chips, he's got to have a 2, right? And I'm thinking the guy on the bottom also had to have a 2 to be betting 5100 chips to begin with in this spot. Don't you think? Well, take a look at this setup hand:



Boooom! I would like to feel bad for DIAMONDJIM555 there at the bottom of the screen, but after watching him call allins within the last four or five players with J4o and JTo on two separate occasions from a good-sized stack, he had it coming and I am quite sure that the best two players left won the 1k seats. Of course then this guy at the top right of the screen who won the 1k seat with me kept telling me I had to thank him. He wouldn't even push allin for a while, he just kept folding preflop and demanding thanks from me for busting the other larger stack to get me into the top 2 and winning my seat. Of course I had to be a dick so I just kept typing in "thank you full tilt" instead of thanking him directly, as if it was him somehow who created that wonderful setup hand for me, enabling me to play in my fourth lifetime Monday 1k tournament tonight on full tilt.

And this is where the rubber meets the road with my goals for 2008. In 2007, I won plenty of satellites, but I did a piss poor job for the most part of turning them into actual cash winnings. I have gotten sucked out on recockulously in many key spots for sure, but still. Monday night will be my second big chance already of 2008 in a large-buyin tournament with a huge prize pool, and in a relatively small field. Like I wrote about in my goals post last Friday, this is where I either start turning all these satellite wins I seem to be able to generate with relative ease into some actual cold hard fucking cashish, or I keep wallowing in the mire of lots of satellite wins and little cash wins to show for it. So not only is Monday night my night to get a head start at the top of the 2008 MATH moneyboard just like it is for the rest of you, but it also is my time to shine in a nlh tournament where any cash at all will mean a nice four-digit payout to me. Feel free to come and rail me in that starting at 9pm ET, but otherwise I'll see you tonight at 10pm ET for Mondays at the Hoy on full tilt!

2008 Poker Goals

OK so today I will end my week-long look back at the year that was, with a look ahead to 2008, specifically as it relates to my poker play and to my blog. I took a look at my last two years' worth of goals, and I am happy to say that most of the attainable ones I have done pretty well at. It's nice to not be someone who keeps listing the same goals every single year because I keep either setting them too high, not focusing on meeting them, or am just flat unable to accomplish them despite my best efforts. That said, there are a few goals that I have still left undone from the past year or two and those will make another appearance on this year's list as well. It's hard in a way when I know that the goals I write here today will be the same ones I will be copying and pasting into a post here a year from now and evaluating myself against them. But at the same time, I have always believed in aiming high with my goals, and I guess I just don't see the point if I just come up here and put some easily-attainable things that I know are softballs and will easily make me look good a year from now. I don't do the goals just to be able to beat them, as that misses the entire point of doing them in the first point and all the thought that goes into them. I do them to set high standards for myself, and then to have something to strive hard for during the year.

So that said, here is my list of poker- and blog-related goals for 2008:

1. Win the phucking Mookie!!! This one is a re-tread from last year, as it is the single biggest poker-related goal of mine that I have yet to attain. As I've written about here many times over the past year-plus, I have come close to this one several times. I was one card and six outs away earlier last summer against great poker player and Mookie dominator to the tune of five lifetime wins Surflexus, but alas it was not meant to be that night. I came in 4th place I think twice in the Mookie during the BBTwo, both times having AQ, playing them strong, and both times running into a bigger hand when down to just four players left. All of those were and still are hard for me to take. Overall I had a decent year in the Mookie (somehow), amazingly winning a little over $397 in exactly 39 Mookie tournaments, meaning that I incredibly managed to eke out a tiny profit from this thing in 2007 despite about 31 suckout eliminations in 39 tries. I still think Mookie and Good Wonka might have got the numbers wrong on that thing, but I guess I did have 3 or 4 deep runs in some of the larger fields which is enough to bring in some nice cash. So 2007 was clearly a better year than my non-profitable 2006 in the Mookie, but all I care about with this thing at this point is a win. And the Hoy Haters should probably want me to win about as bad as anyone, because there is a chance that I will just shut down the blog and stop writing about poker forever once I finally attain my last and greatest poker goal. I would cry real tears if I ever got to read my own profile on Mookie's blog, and be listed as a former champion under the "Mookie Winners" tab alongside the names of all-time poker greats like NomeyMyHomey, bonehet, Marxst1 and Xanthius. I'm crying a little here just thinking about it.

2. Win at least 15 blogger tournaments. This one is actually a lot harder to do than to win one measly Mookie, but as I mentioned in a post earlier this week, the blonkaments are what I focused on most during the past year or more, and they are something I plan to continue as a major focus during 2008. Competing against the bloggers is for me the most fun aspect of my poker play, and beating up on you clowns is what I like to do. While the number 15 may seem like a completely arbitrary number, it's actually not. In 2007 I won 5 MATHs, 3 Dookies, 3 Riverchasers (not counting the recockulous runner-up finish to the 12-year-old that one fun evening), 3 Donkaments and 1 Big Game for a total of 15 blonkament victories on the year. I started off intending to pick a larger number than 15 then for 2008, especially with the advent of KOD's Skill Game series which will not only add more total blonkaments but also increase the non-holdem proportion of blonkaments which is all good for a well-rounded guy like me with skills in all the major forms of poker. But then I remembered the BBT, and how things like this have tended to increase the field sizes of these blonkaments somewhat dramatically. Not that I find it impossible to win tournaments with 60-100 people in them, as I won two tournaments during the first BBT and came very close in several other of the large events during the year, but the fact remains that if we do a BBThree with a WSOP ME package on the line, the field sizes are likely to be significant and that does make it much harder to win. Plus, with all the BBT stuff and just another year of blogdom in the books, the audience that is attracted to our ghey weekly tournaments has grown noticeably, even in just the past twelve months. So even without any more BBT stuff the field sizes in the weekly private games are definitely larger than they were a year ago, when I was winnig 18-person Hoys and getting recockusucked out of 38-person Mookies. The days of the small blonkaments seem to be beyond us, which is a great thing as far as I'm concerned don't get me wrong, but that does again simply make it harder to win these things outright on any given night. So if I can come up with 15 more blonkament wins in 2008 -- more than one for every month of the year -- then I will consider my year a success once again in for this goal. This one is going to be harder than it may seem, as anyone who plays in our games regularly I'm sure can attest to. But I did at least get started on the right foot for this one, winning the first Dookie of the year this week so I'm already 6.7% of the way to my goal. And with the way that people with 6.7% chances seem to find a way to beat me on full tilt lately, I should have no problem getting the rest of the way there from this beginning.

3. Get back to my cash-payout mtt success from 2006. This is a very significant goal for me and was not something I thought hardly at all about during 2007. But I need to get back there. My mtt game overall in 2007 was not good. I've mentioned the reasons for this previously here, but generally speaking I spent most of my time during the past year either playing satellites, cash games or sitngos, leaving very little time to play in the actual cash-payout multi-table tournaments that I had so much success with in 2006. As a result, I did not give myself nearly the number of chances one needs to really be able to overcome the luck needed to make some really big cash scores, and that showed in my mtt results which were not good, especially in the second half of the year. Moreover, the lack of playing in these tournaments also clearly affected the quality of my play in them, as I had much more trouble making the deep runs than I have had in the past, and more than that, I made plays that I know were bad ones time and time again when I did get down deep into these things. My game, and in particular my late game, clearly suffered as a result of playing so many satellites where you only play down to a certain number of seats (such as in the nightly token frenzy where both myself and NewinNov won another $75 token apiece last night, thank you very much). I could feel and see myself making bad plays, calling off my stack late in a tournament with just top pair decent kicker, missing a key read against one of the few stacks at my table who could really hurt me, stuff like that that one simply cannot really ever fuck up in late-stage mtt play if you expect to be there at the end for the bigass payouts. That's just the way it is in tournaments, you don't get many second chances after big effups late in the game, and I did not make good decisions overall in these mtts, again especially during the second half of 2007. In 2008 I need to focus much better on playing winning, profitable mtt poker again.

This one is going to be a very tough goal for me to attain, but I simply have to make it a priority and I must succeed on it because I had a significant net loss since the summertime in the few cash-payout mtt's I did play in. It is also going to be a very hard goal to quantify come year-end. I mean, I can look at my overall mtt profitability at the end of the year, but I'm not sure if that is the end-all be-all of my performance. Really, I know when I am playing well just as surely as I know when I am making bad decisions. That is the thing that I really need to improve for 2008. I know that I have it in me to kick some ass in nlh mtts. I've been there before. I just need to get myself back to that place again this year. One thing I think will help with that is to only play mtts when I feel I am honestly ready and able to focus on that particular mtt. Another thing is that I will need to play more of the cash-payout mtts as opposed to focusing on so many satellite tournaments. And don't get me wrong, I expect to still focus on playing mtt satellites. But I need to find a better balance this year -- either playing fewer satellites to give me more opportunity to win some actual cash in cash tournaments, or playing fewer cash-payout mtts so as to minimize my losses in that arena. One way or another, my mtt results have to improve in 2008, and that is a major goal I intend to get done in the coming year.

4. Play some more large-buyin tournaments. This is one of those goals that I did a very good job at in 2007, but I want to do it even better in 2008. That means more attempts at satellites into the big events, and hopefully more live tournaments as well like the WSOP, the WSOP Circuit Events, and perhaps some of the big casino tournament series at Foxwoods and in Atlantic City. To date I have never played a poker tournament at Foxwoods, I've never been to Turning Stone upstate in New York, and I have only ever played the regular daily tournaments in the largest poker rooms in AC, other than the Caesar's WSOP Circuit event I played in March of 2007. My hope is that this year I will get to play at least one major tournament in each of those poker rooms, in addition of course to playing in at least one more World Series of Poker tournament this coming summer. Similarly, I want to make a more concerted effort to try to satellite in to things like the Monday 1k tournament on full tilt, which I played in only three times during 2007, as well as continue to play as many of the FTOPS events and other special big-buyin tournaments whenever I can.

5. Attend one more WPBT gathering, and play in the WSOP. So I mentioned my intention of playing in the WSOP again this summer, and this time around, rather than just playing in the event, I am going to go into that with the goal of cashing once again in my third ever appearance at the Series. I have renewed confidence after my showing in June 2007, where I played in the $1500 shorthanded nlh tournament, and my big sub-goals on this point for 2008 will be (1) win as many Bracelet Races as I can once those start up again in a few months, and (2) play in whichever event I think gives me the best chance to succeed. In 2007 I wavered between a number of different events in the WSOP, but ended up going with the shorthanded nlh event because, basically, at the time I had been killing the 6-max tournaments and satellites on full tilt, and that was what I felt most comfortable at, and frankly the "best" at, at the time I headed out to Vegas, so that was the event I played, and the results were great IMO. So I want to do that same thing this time around -- make a conscious decision to play the event or events that give me the best chance to win given my then-current mindset and the state of my game at the time. And of course, I will do my best to time my WSOP action with the WPBT gathering in the summer in Vegas. The last two summer meetings have both been incredible times for me, and with the friends I have made through all this blogging and playing together, I really can't wait to get back out to LV and meet up with everyone again, as well as hopefully to get to know a number of new faces and people that I have yet to meet in person. I truly cherish the two weekends I have spent live with the bloggers thus far, and I can't wait to add another set of good times and great memories to the list out in the desert in 2008.

6. Minimize tilt!! I know, I know, it seems pretty foolish that I keep putting this up here every year and talking about it all the time, and yet I don't seem to be getting any better about it. The first thing I would say here is that, despite what you may think about me or my blog, I undeniably have gotten better about my poker tilt over the past few years. Keep in mind, this is someone whose chat was completely banned by pokerstars probably 6 times in the first year that I played there, as was my ability to keep notes on other players and various other little things they used to do to punish me for my dirty chatting. I was a real psychopath in the chatbox back in the day. Now, I never really do that anymore. Never. So there have been some strides in this area. My big area of tilt this year was more about people and less about bad beats I took at the online tables (I have never even come close to tilting in a live venue). I don't know if this is a good change or nothing to be excited about, but although I take without a doubt the most bad beats of anyone I've ever known or even heard stories about, and sometimes I do find myself being a little bit of a wiseass about it in the chat (i.e., "Nice call!" or "well played!" sort of things on my way out), I really do not tilt these days so much about individual beats I take, and that is something I have gotten much better at. But all that being said, I would describe myself as still being legendarily tilty when it comes to some people, even people I like, and some of the decisions that I see made or some of the things they say about me or otherwise, and that is an area I intend to improve at in 2008. Now let me make this loud and clear: I will not be stopping analyzing the plays I see in the blonkaments and otherwise during my poker travels here at the blog. If I see something done that I think is worthy of discussion or analysis and/or something that I think can help other people approach their own games in a more skilled or thoughtful way, you will likely see it here. That's just me and that's not going to change and I wouldn't want it to. I reject any notion that this done in an anonymous, respectful way is anything but a positive aspect of my blog and I don't have any plans to stop doing that. But it is my sincere hope that you will read much less this year about me being on work tilt, life tilt, or tilt about something that some particular person did or did not do. And that is that, we will see how I fare on this point twelve months from now.

7. Tell some stories in my blog. This one is a more blog-related goal, just like my final goal for 2007 was as far as writing some more about non-poker topics here. I have a few good stories that I've actually wanted to tell for some time here on the blog, but frankly I think of myself as a shit writer and that has kept me from really posting any of that stuff here to this point. But I do have the itch, and I know these things would be of interest to most of the readers I have amassed over the years I've been posting here. So 2008 should be the year that I take some chances, put myself and my writing out there and share some of the interesting stories I have to share. I look forward to exploring a different form of writing, the kind of thing you see on this blog or this blog or even this blog from time to time, something that I have never done before here or anywhere in my life. I know this is all kinda vague and I'm not trying to be on purpose, but suffice it to say that in 2007 I resolved to write a little more outside of pure poker, and I am very satisfied with the way I did that and you can look forward to more of the same musings from me about great movies, cheating undefeated sports teams, the best tv show of all time, you name it. But this year I also want to finally post some of the other stuff I've started but never finished over the past 18 months or so, some fictional and non-fictional stuff not written in the form or tone of a blog post but more the telling of a story. Believe it or not, this will definitely be the toughtest goal for me to succeed in, because it is the one I am the most uncomfortable with personally, and the one I am least confident in my skill at acocmplishing. But it's definitely in my plans for 2008.

OK so that's it for 2008 goals for me with respect to poker and this blog. It's a good list across a little bit of a spectrum of poker skills and goals, but these are things I take very seriously. I plan to check back on this post many times over the coming year to check on my progress on each of these, and hopefully you guys out there will notice me achieving some of these as they happen over the next several months. The overall goal of course is to keep focusing on analyzing poker hands and poker play in general, keep broadening my own poker skill set as far as different games, different formats like turbo, knockouts, etc. and different types of poker such as cash, mtt and sitngos. I will definitely keep this a place for ever-constant self-analysis of my play and the play of others whom I run into during my nightly poker trials and tribulations. All this starting with next week, when I am planning hopefully to do a 5-part series of posts on turbo sitngo strategy that I hope will be helpful to some of you, interesting to many of you, and hopefully will generate some analysis and discussion from some of the other great poker minds out there who have made my comments section such a thing of beauty during the past couple of years. Ha ha.

Have a great weekend everyone, and see you at the fabulous $1 rebuy donkament tonight at 9pm ET on full tilt (password as always is "donkarama") if you are (wo)man enough to try to take my title.