Sunday, December 13, 2009

2009 in review

Have been meaning to update this for the past week or so, but havn't been playing any poker at all so ended up never bothering with it. December started off a total disaster, I only played 6 days and averaged about -$350/day or about -$200/hour. To be fair to me though I ran horribly bad, instead of being down $2.2k I should have been up $450 but I sucked pretty bad at winnings pots when I was a huge favourite to. Last Saturday took the biscuit altogether with me losing 1.8k and after that I had decieded that that was enough for the month and was going to have an early end to my poker month and year. I decieded to play a few tournaments on Sunday which was pretty successful but in the end no major result. I did finish 14th/800 players on Everest for $2.5k but ran QQ into AA for a big pot and that dashed any hopes of a $57k first place finish.

So 2009 wasn't really all I hoped it would be, I went backwards in online cash, started the year taking shots at 5/10 6max and finished it playing 50c/$1 hu cash and 1/2 6max. I did have $8.5k of cash winnings and made about the same in rakeback so wasn't a total failure, I did withdraw a lot of my roll each month for about 8/9 months of the year so never ever really got to progress and move up levels, mostly moved down levels. I also was supposed to play the Irish Open but that never happened due to me basically being robbed of my ticket worth €3.5k. As it turned out I would not have played it anyway due to my uncle Michael passing away that weekend (God Bless his him). Graph of cash games below:



I guess the highlights for the year would have been winning a $13k package and living my poker dream of playing the World Series of Poker Main Event and playing at the same table with some truely amazing players like Elky, Kipster, Marty Smyth, Neil Channing, Scotty Neguyn, Steve Davis and Jamie Gold :). I made my first live final table in the Cork Poker Classic and taking home €5.5k for 8th place. I won the baords Division B heads up league for $2k.

Overall it has been a pretty great learning experience for me, I didn't run great this year and ended the year on a $10k downswing. I never played out of my roll and always moved down levels at some point. Sometimes I should have done it earlier but certainly never once put myself in any danger of busting my bankroll. Overall I made about $25k profit on the year which isn't to bad considering I do have a full time job and poker is getting tougher by the day to make money from.

2010 my aspirations would be to:

Start at 100nl HU cash, 100PLO and 200nl max cash but move up the levels more aggressively/quicker than I have done before. $50k online cash winnings (Fuck the 8k-100k challenge :) )

Play more live touranments including the Irish Open and WSOP ME with a side event.

Win the boards Div A heads up league

No doubt I will get a few hands in between now and 2010 but I would imagine 2k hands and a few tournaments would be the height of it. Havn't played now in a week and am really starting to look forward to 2010 already. Thanks to everyone that read this for the year and Happy Xmas and happy new year to everyone. Until 2010, good luck!!