Leeeeeeeeds and Some 2012 Goals
Its been a pretty hectic opening week to the 2012 - bringing in the new year with LFmagic, Gavz, Tony J, JoeJoe et al in London with a special guest appearance from Galen Cranston (Gakn29) all the way from Canada to bring in the new year in London. First time I've had new year at a club rather than house party so that was cool but with the move into a new apartment in Leeds on the 2nd I couldn't really get too hammered.
Moving in went without a hitch, absolutely loving the location right in the centre of Leeds, less than a minutes walk from the train station. The apartment is on the top floor of what used to be a hotel which is pretty cool on the soundproofing front. I always have to be listening to music while I'm playing and having a subwoofer on the floor has caused complaints from neighbours below before now but still nothing after 5 days so looking good. After disastrous relations with the neighbours in Barca it'd be nice to get along this time around. At least we speak the same language.
I've decided to take it easy on the live trips in the first half of this year to consolidate before Vegas so the plan is to grind a ton online and in complete contrast to lildaves goal of playing 25 live tournaments this year I'm probably going to play less than 10 after playing a good 50+ in 2011. On both the Summer 2011 and Oct/Nov 2011 trips to Vegas I worked a ton on my live cash tekkers and I never really felt like I wasn't crushing those games playing 5/10 so during any extended stay in Vegas this year I'm definitely going to want to move up and grind some 10/20+. I'm not really a big fan of selling action in cash games so I'm just gunna try and take $100k to Vegas and grind 10/20 with some 25/50 shots. Still, June is a very long way away...
Until then I'm going to be grinding the HUsngs a ton as per on iPoker. Had a really rocky December running ~$7k under EV and never really feeling like I was playing great. January started in much the same vain but I've been doing some hand history reviews, had a couple of hours of coaching with HokieGreg (highly reccomended as a heads up sng coach) and discussed some things with other regs and I think I've got my mindset back in the right place so despite being a small loser (~$2k) over the first 300 games of 2012 I've pulled it back and am well on course to book a good month to kick off the year.
After doing some calculations in December it works out that if I put the hours in its pretty easy for me to make a ton in rakeback and even if I'm only a small winner in the games, $100k profit in the first 5 months of the year is ambitious but very attainable. If I can play 5,000 games at stakes from $100 to $500 this splits as follows:
1,000 $100s
2,000 $200s
1,250 $350s
750 $500s
Thats $30,750 in rakeback before we've even started doing some winning. Average ROI of 4.9% to hit the goal. I could definitely end up playing more volume than that though, got 357 games in alredy on the 7th of Jan!
I've seen a lot of posts on various blogs and forums about how setting monetary goals isn't a good idea and everyone wants to have these wishy washy achievements but at the end of the day no matter how many times you went to the gym a week or whether you managed to keep the pet hamster alive for 52 weeks of the year, if you didn't make money, you had a shit year. So there it is, rather than doing what everyone else is doing and giving a list of bullshit stuff and keeping a number in their head for how much they wanna make I'm just gunna let you know that $200k is the marker for the year. I'm don't plan on doing any high variance stuff like playing tons of live tourneys or going on big road trips this year, although Vegas in November I was adament I wasn't going then lildave managed to convince me in 10 minutes so theres definitely potential for impluse travelling. The only things definitely on the horizon are the Irish Open and WSOP 2012 right now.
Congrats to LFmagic and Marcin Milde for their respective Sunday Million binks in the last few weeks. Congrats also to Sam Grafton (SamSquid on stars) on crushing the start of 2012, been some good rails already so far this year!
