Plans for 2011

I've been thinking for quite a lot of the last month about my poker goals for 2011.  Heres what comes to mind right now:

• Play 360k+ hands - Chose 360k because it makes it easy to aim for 30k hands per month.  I played about 300k hands this year but believe I could have been a bit less lazy at times (especially during spells when I am doing well) and grinded more instead of booking wins.  This is also in spite of my intention to play more live poker next year.
• Go on a poker trip once every two months - This goal is much more flexible and not exactly set in stone.  This is because my ability to go on such trips will be dependent on things like how well poker goes throughout the year and whether I manage to qualify for events through satellites.  A lot of the bigger events like the EPT main events and such are beyond my bankroll (unless I sell, which I'm not really keen on).  Also, I can imagine not wanting to go on an expensive trip if I'm in the midst of a significant downswing or I just don't feel like playing live poker.  

These trips will hopefully be mixed with several UK based events like UKIPTs and GUKPTs.  Unfortunately it seems there will be less poker on my doorstep now as there seems to be no GUKPT Brighton on the latest schedule.  This isn't massively suprising as the numbers weren't great this year.  Also, all the UKIPT main events have gone from 1k sterling or euro events to 500s.  This sucks because it really doesn't make much financial sense to travel around the UK with the associated transport and hotel expenses and expect to make much profit with such a small buyin.  Especially with the missed opportunity cost (is that the correct term?) from not being able to grind online.

• Record results of everything - Up till now I have only recorded my online cash game results on HEM and basically kept a rough estimate of everything else in my head.  Not exactly the picture of professionalism.  From now on I will record all tournament results in HEM as well and create a spreadsheet for live tournaments and cash games, as well as any percentages I have brought or sold of others in cash games and tournaments.  I will also record any money won or lost in any other staking arrangements which I'll talk about more now....
• Pursue staking further - Mark (MrNiceness) found a really good candidate to stake for 50c/1+ hu cash games so we're using him as something of a test subject to see how staking works and whether it is a worthwhile thing to pursue in the future.  This stakee seems like a smart chap who doesn't really need the money we are putting up to back him, but rather would like to improve his game with Mark and I's supposed expertise (we have about a million hands combined at hu so we should hopefully help his game).  The ideal goal would be to build up a number of horses so it could become a really profitable enterprise but we'll see.  I have a couple of ideas on how to find some possible candidates in the future too.

Thats all I can think of at the moment.  I just finished a session where I ran rubbish and played worse.  I played a couple of hands poorly with big hands where I lost a lot of value by taking the incorrect line and also folded AA pre flop while looking at the lobby for other games.  This is something you have to put up with when using PKR but it's my fault for looking at the lobby for too long when I knew I would be timing out of hands.  Just a lack of concentration thing.  Then a player named after a character from Pulp Fiction completely butchered a hand and won a 300bb pot vs me.  This villain doing dumb plays isn't an uncommon occurance.

I quit soon after this as I was playing my D game and it seemed like one of those sessions that can only get worse. Depending on how I feel tomorrow this could well have been my last session of this year.  Not been a great year, but also not a terrible one.  I think I would sum it up as disappointing...5/10.

In other news Japete, a common foe on the PKR cash games came 2nd (with some sort of deal involved somewhere) in the Sunday Million for $165k.  This was a big relief to me as he's been running terrible all year and was definately due a score like this.  It was brutal when he got bad beated with JJ vs AK heads up at PKR Live and had to settle for some lousy 2nd place prize money.  He had also been getting very unlucky in cash games and only winning 95% of sessions he plays.

Yeah sarcasm is low on the wit scale but it's all I got.  Congratulations Jaume.