Setting Aside Time to Play/Study

Finally, I got promoted at my work! I'm still a temp right now, but they will soon hire me on giving me a raise and a cash bonus. I will be able to pay off my doctor bills with my bonus (it will be a pretty hefty sum by my standards). With my finances improving, this will set aside the need for a second job. Along with my promotion, they adjusted my hours so I am no longer working 7-3:30. Instead, I am working 8-4:30. Even though it's just an hour difference, it makes all the difference! On days where I have to go to the chiropractor (3 days per week), I don't get home until about 5:15 to 5:30PM. Then, I have to figure out what I'm going to do for dinner...whether I'm going to cook something or just find a fast meal. If I cook, I usually have to go to the market first and buy stuff. By the time I'm done cooking and sitting down and eating, it's about 8:00PM. By then it's too late to even sit down and start a session of poker online.

My days are pretty much limited to the times I don't go to the chiropractor, which are tuesday and thursday. I'd like to make room for Wednesday, because that's when the games get really juicy because of all the WPT fans logging on and pissing their money away on hands they saw win on TV. I also have the weekends free as well so I guess I have plenty of time to play each week. I figure I can play 20+ hours a week if I'm just consistant in disciplining myself to sit down and play on those days.

Running bad sucks. It just sucks! Maybe FullTilt is not the best site to play at to make money. Most of the time the tables are so tight, you're basically paying the house to sit down and fold. Currently I'm observing the action over at Doyle's Room. It looks like the tables are a lot looser than at FullTilt.

I do have good news, though. No, I didn't save a bunch of money on my car insurance by switching to Geiko! Actually I won a tournament I run with a bunch of my friends. This wasn't just any tournament, though. This was the tournament! What we do is play a series of ten tournaments in which we recieve points. Basically the higher you finish, the more points you get. If you finish in the money, you get extra points. Once we play our series of ten tournaments, we hold a final event in the series. How the point system plays out in our final event is this...the more points you have, the more chips you have added to your initial stack. I ended up third in overall points which was very nice for me! Even nicer was winning the final event! The final event is where the big money is at because in every event in the series, a points fee is added to the buy-in. These fees are saved to add to the pot for the final event. Each event is a $10 buy-in plus a $1 points fee. After all 10 events there is around $100 saved up from the points fees. The final event is a $15 buy-in. That will put the final event pot around $300. I took down 1st place and $149. I was very pleased with my play that night. I like the system we set up because it evens out the luck factor in our final events.

Anyway, I'll try my abilities over at Doyle's Room for the time being and see if I can make a better profit than at FullTilt. Also, another thing I'd like to mention is that looking at my records, I don't think I've played enough hours to worry too much about my play. One thing I would like to see more of is consistent winning sessions. Right now my winning/losing sessions look like they are based on me flipping a coin. I have a total of 178 hours of play logged which is great, but unfortunately that is from 4 months of play. That should be about 2 months of play. Clearly I need to be putting in more hours per week. So out of a month's worth of full time work, I'm down $122.23. That sucks! It's discouraging to say the least, but I'm not going to give up. I'll try out Doyle's Room and see what happens. Wish me success!