New Year's Poker Resolutions

I'm not much for new year's resolutions. Apparently the top ten are:

1. Spend more time with family and friends
2. Get fit
3. Lose weight
4. Quit smoking
5. Enjoy life more
6. Quit drinking
7. Get out of debt
8. Learn something new
9. Help others
10. Get organized

How the hell are you going to enjoy life more if you quit drinking and smoking and spend time helping others? Let's go get drunk and pick on some short people! In all seriousness those things all seem important, but I feel like I have at least a good handle on most of them.

On the other hand I'm always looking to improve my profession. This year my resolution is to be more businesslike and professional about my poker playing.

I've gotten out of the habit of keeping tight records. I know how much I've won and lost, but I can only guess about what is the most profitable use of my time. This year I'm going to get back to tracking exactly how many hands I played, in what games, on what sites, and exactly how many dollars I've won and lost in every session.

The second part of my plan is to play more and keep a more consistent schedule. I don't have any trouble getting motivated when I feel like I really need the money. But when all I've been doing is slaughtering it's hard to get up that hour or two earlier, or take a 30 minute lunch instead of a 2 hour one, or play until 7 instead of bailing out at 5. Can you blame me? It feels all but impossible to push through another 500 hands when I'm ahead $1,000 for the day, $5,000 for the week and my two year old son is saying "Daddy, come play with me!"

One of the ways I cope with devastating losses is by coming up with a plan. Once I have a plan I always feel better. But I don't need a huge loss to come up with a plan! I have one right now! A plan that I'm sure I will stick to for at least a full 2% of 2010! My plan is to use 75% more exclamation marks!

Actually my plan is to play 50,000 hands a month. That's significantly less than I did in 2008, and while that's about what I did in 2009 I'm going to do it playing 4 games at a time instead of going to 6 or 7 when I feel like I need to bang out a ton of hands.

If I can make 25 cents a hand that would be $150,000 for the year. I don't think that's unreasonable since I've been making more than that since switching to AP and cake poker.

In the longer term I always thought to my self that it would be great to have career winnings of $1,000,000 before I turned 30. I'll be 30 on February 16th so barring an absurd tournament win, I'm going to come up short. But my new goal is to make $2,000,000 between 30 and 40. As long as we're talking 10 year plans, I'm also going to make a WSOP final table during that time.

Happy New Year!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!(I told you about the exclamation point plan right!?!)