Life Update

So haven't been able to play much poker this week, definitely not getting near that 500 mark by the end of day tomorrow, but hopefully will be putting in a solid session tomorrow morning if not tonight.

I'm blogging from Tucson right now where I'm visiting some friends (I live in Phoenix, about 120 miles northwest of Tucson).  Had to get away for a night as I got the wonderful joy of having to deal with some identity theft issues yesterday.  Getting that email from Bank of America that states that there is "irregular activity" on my card is always a pleasant thing.

That aside, I've been plotting out my strategy for the challenge my brother and I will be undergoing starting on 1/1/11.  It's definitely going to be a challenge beginning with a $10 roll and trying to run it up to $50,000 (which is what each of us will be doing for a combined $100,000).  What will make it a bit easier will be the fact that we're going to be sharing/splitting our bank rolls so it should help even out some of the variance that will greatly impact the microest of stakes.

My current thought process with regards to BR management is going to be something as follows:

As you can see, the strategy I'm thinking about using is going to be fairly aggressive in the early stages.  I'm defining early as <$100 more or less.  I feel like getting over the $100 is going to be one of the milestone goals of this challenge and once past there the rest of the puzzle will hopefully begin to fall into place.  I haven't detailed out what my strategy is going to be beyond around the $150 mark as I'd like to put in a fair amount of review of my game play and review of results prior to that to get a feel on where I want to be focusing my time (whether it be the 9 mans, 18 mans, or 45+).  I think that for this type of challenge the larger field games (45-180s) are going to be mandatory, though seeing someone grind out $100 - $50K playing nothing but 9 mans in a year would be kind of exciting I suppose.

As always, I'm very open to suggestions from any readers of this blog.

My next objective prior to beginning this challenge is going to be to figure out the best way to go about reviewing my play and improving on a regular basis.  When I first started playing poker back in March of this year I was grinding the cash games for a couple months.  The review there seemed to make a bit more sense: I would review largest hands won/lost for whatever period of time my review was covering.  Additionally I would review positional stats along with some random hands just to make sure I didn't find any potential leaks in various other forms (raise sizes, developing reads on players, etc).

With SNGs it's a bit different as I need to dedicate more time learning ICM, putting regs on ranges in different spots, and generally beefing up my pre-flop play by quite a bit.  There is little to no serious post flop play when reg'ing 40+ tables and that is going to be my goal during this challenge.

OK, I think that this post is quite long enough.  I look forward to the coming weeks and look forward to any feedback you provide :).  Cheers!