After Maui, the vacation was over and it was off to the Bahamas for the PCA and some serious poker business. Alright, it was basically just another vacation. The "business," if you can call it that, included one full day for the annual Team Online meeting and another hour on a later day for the HU4ROLLZ promo that the team was running (you could play TO members on an ipad and win cash). Both the meeting and promo went pretty well with the meeting being full of great presentations and me not losing more than 2 HU matches in a row during the promo.
Meeting
HU4ROLLZ alongside DaWarsaw
The rest of the trip was filled with socializing and hanging out with the team. I'm sure most of you have seen all of the pics that I've been posting on social media so I won't bother reposting it all but I think you get the gist pretty quickly that it was a good time!
Shifting gears now, what I wanted to do with the rest of the blog post was talk briefly about how 2014 went and then get into my plans for 2015.
So last year was fine at the tables...I ended up playing a bit more than a quarter of SNE volume and took home roughly a bit less than 65K in profit. At the start of the year, my original plan was to try and reach SNE but it didn't take long for me to see that it wasn't going to happen at my normal stakes. I tried moving up stakes and was actually successful doing so...the only problem was that my vpp/hour rate wasn't much better than it was playing 100nl, if at all (due to not being able to play as many tables). I spent one month trying my hand at PLO but let's just say the year probably would have been a lot more profitable if I hadn't ;) After that, I decided to shift my focus away from primarily being on volume and more towards winrate. Last year was the first year that I really made an effort to think deeper about poker and improve my game. I'm proud of all the work that I put into my game last year and think that I saw decent immediate results. I ended up falling well short of my impromptu profit goal of $100,000 but that was more of function of the goal being too unrealistic to start with due to a severe overestimation of what my volume would be :|
Looking ahead to 2015, I'm feeling very excited and motivated to get to work! It's a bit unfortunate that by the time I'm back home and recovered from my early-year vacations the month's already half over but hey, last year it was much more difficult to get started on the right foot (literally, I broke my ankle and took 5 months to recover). The initial theme for this year will be to concentrate on quality over quantity, something that isn't usually apart of my year long plans. After last year, however, I really think the route with the highest profit ceiling is to try to keep improving and play higher stakes. Here are my goals for 2015, with a bit more detail about each:
1. Earn $100,000. I really want to get back over that 6-figure mark this year! Calling this a "goal" is probably inaccurate though...more like expectations and what I would be satisfied with by years end. I've said it before and I think that setting profit goals in general is pretty dumb because you can only control your results to a certain extent. Furthermore, for this year in particular, my end results could be all over the map depending on what stakes I end up playing the majority of my volume at. I think that goals that focus on elements that are within your control (ie. x amount of hours per day, x hands/day, x hours studying etc.) are really where you want to direct your focus and energy. That said, of course I will be implementing those micro-goals into my plan and this $100k number is mostly just to keep motivation up and have something for everyone to follow on the blog homepage!
2. Buy an income property. So I've mentioned before that I want to use poker as a way to build wealth for myself and although I'm no real estate expert by any means, the principle of investing in property is simple enough. I have to work out the details but I'm hoping that by the end of the first quarter I should have enough for a down payment on a property that would be self-sufficient with a renter.
3. Buy a new car! I've taken a lot of heat over the years from friends and family for still driving the same old car since my early days of university. I have no problem driving around in a, let's say "humble" old car as long as it works...the problem is that Old Betsy's becoming a bit unreliable these days. This is probably something that I'll look into in the latter part of the year, unless I'm forced into speeding up the agenda due to more mechanical problems :/ I'm really liking the new Jeep Wrangler though so it may be time for an upgrade.
That's pretty much it for the monetary side of things. I didn't list any social media goals but I do plan on continuing to be heavily involved in that aspect of things as well. I'll also be continuing to coach once a month for PSO. I have an interest in getting involved with twitch too and still want to make YouTube content throughout the year. It's a lot to try and balance so we'll see how things develop over the next few months and see where I want to prioritize my time. I also have some fitness goals that I won't bore you with that involve putting on some weight and strength.
So with all that said, the plan will be to get to work and see if I can move up stakes aggressively and feel things out. I might reach the same conclusion as before, where I could find it to be more profitable just mass-multitabling my normal stakes. I'm confident that I could reach my monetary goals at those levels anyways though, so let's see what happens! Let me know your plans and goals for 2015 :)
gl at the tables!
