And So It Begins. Again. Again.

So I managed to find a partial backer/co-investor quickly on parttimepoker.com and have been slowly getting back into the flow of 200nl. Instead of playing on my own vs playing backed, I decided to chop the difference and sell my action @ 60/40 and take about a third of it myself, effectively making my cut 72% while still permitting me the luxury of not having to keep a big roll online. I think having a backer is also going to help keep me accountable as far as volume is concerned; which is definitely something I could use going into my next challenge.

Overall, since I started playing rush approximately 4 months ago, I've averaged about 50K hands/month and so, for my next challenge, I will attempt to double my production and put in 100K hands in June, hopefully all at 200nl. While this may sound like a standard prop bet/challenge that many players make to try to trick themselves into being motivated when other factors are causing the opposite effect, my plan centers around getting back to the tireless grinder I was before the money meant something to me. See, before I had to worry about a wife, a house, or a future child (the one my wife will eventually have, not a child brought back from 2112 to John Connor it up), I used to be able to grind for days on end and pretty much lived in the space between my bed and computer. But, through the help of Jared Tendler's incredible new book The Mental Game of Poker (you can find it here: http://www.mentalgameofpoker.com/), I've come to realize that my irrational fears of failure have been steadily increasing along with my responsibilities. It now makes complete sense that my motivation would wane...why would I want to grind every single day when I was subconsciously going into every session fearing the worst? I've come to learn a ton about this mental stuff over the past week but I'd basically be paraphrasing Jared, so I'll just say that if you have any motivation, fear, tilt, or confidence issues surrounding poker, you will literally never make a better investment than buying his book (and no, I unfortunately do not get a cut of book sales).

So what I will be doing going forward is getting myself back in the grinder's mindset by putting in 5K hands/day, 5 days/week. I plan on generally doing this Mon-Fri so I can finally get my internal clock realigned with the rest of the real world and, if I succeed in keeping to this schedule, I should reach 100K hands on the 28th of June with 2 official playing days to spare.

I am also going to get back to working on my game on a daily basis. Right now I generally only 'study' about once a week; which I don't think is really enough for anyone to stay on top of their game. I mean, professional athletes don't only practice once a week, so why should I?
I think adding a relatively insignificant 15 minute review at the end of each day, in addition to an hour session during one of my off days, will go a long way to ensure I'm playing my A game as often as is possible and that, when I'm not, my D game might instead turn into a B- game. Thanks again Jared for teaching me that equity comes in all shapes and sizes!

I will be celebrating my last day of slackerism tomorrow by watching the Miami Heat beat up on Dirk and then the grind will begin.
I'll try to post lengthier weekly updates here but most of the time I'll just be using twitter so feel free to click that button at the top right and say hello.

For (hopefully) the last time, this is SlackerSentin signing off.