Finishing strong

I'm going to start off with a fairly obvious statement, 'there is nothing you can do to change the past'. This little nugget of information is particularly important for poker players. There is nothing i can do to change the decisions i've already made. All i can do is keep on learning from my mistakes and look forward to what really counts, the future.

This year has been a fairly disappointing one for me professionally. I'm going to look into facts, figures and reasons in my end of year blog but in the meantime let's just say that i'm looking forward to putting this year behind me and moving forward to 2010. That isn't to say that i haven't had a fun-filled, awesome year, i have, but from a poker perspective things could have obviously gone better.

The good news is that i'm finishing the year strong. I had my best ever month online in November winning $19K. I ran super hot obviously but i honestly think it was the best i've ever played online. I didn't tilt for more than 10 minutes the entire month and only played 2 sessions where i thought i wasn't playing close to my 'A' game. Ironically they were both sessions where i won over $1K. One of the most important lessons i've learnt this year is that just because you have a winning session it doesn't automatically mean you played well.

I also played my final live event of the year, the £3K GUKPT final at the Vic. For some reason i decided to play day 1A which only got 58 runners. I had a really strong table draw but ran really well in the first 3 levels, moving my 20K starting stack up to 80K. I basically just won all the big hands i played which is always nice; flopped a set of 9's v AK on a A9x and won a huge pot and then made a straight v's a set for the chiplead. Unfortunately i only ended the day with 46K thanks to losing QQ v 77 aip for 35K pot, KJ v J8 aip for 25K pot and 55 v AQ aip for 15K pot, fml!

Anyway i again got off to a great start on Day 2 winning KK v AK aip for 100K on like the 8th hand of the day. At that point i really though it could finally be the time for a big score. Then a couple of hands later i lose that 50K back again when i run AJ into JJ on a J10x with two diamonds. The guy was clearly on tilt from playing a hand terribly an orbit before but unfortunately for me he was tilting with top set!!

I then lose 1010 v A6 aip for 70K pot at 1K/2K and finally bust shipping A9 in and running into AK. On the whole i would say that on my 4 appearances on the tour this year i played decent once, really well twice and great in Manchester. I'm quite a bit down on live events this year but with so few hands played all i can do is keep sticking in the money and hope the fact that i play much better than 90% of all live fields, (apart from WSOPE and $25K wpt champ), can result in a nice payday soon.

Plan for December is just to grind as hard as i can and maintain my level of play from last month. If i can do that long term then i know this whole poker thing might just work out.