I am such a ding-a-ling. Been wondering for a couple days now why I can't seem to play at least an half-decent numbers of hands every day of every week... Well, I think I got it; it all comes down to priorities, hehe. Thing is, there are a couple things I love doing in my free time, the least of which is procrastination :P. Amongst the other stuff, in no particular order, there's tv and cinema, friends, books, fiction (we'll get back to this), and there's the oldest hobbie of them all, sports watching, mainly hockey, but October also means MLB playoffs, and with my beloved Red Sox just shy of another run at the World Series and now out of it, I did spend some evenings watching the best ball games of the year. Love it, but it is time consuming. A case could be made that it's easy to multi-task while watching baseball, which I totally agree with, but I decided some time ago that I would not spread my attention when playing cards. Thus, music is all that's allowed while grinding :).

So basically, what happened after my month off in August is the famous infamous switcheroo in my priorities. All in all, I'm now focusing a lot of energy on fiction again... Yeah, fiction, as in watching, reading, writing and thinking fiction. Which of course tends to clog my stupid brains with storyline permutations, characters development, themes, ideas, twists, turns, dialogs... the works. And while I really love getting back into it, I must also admit it kinda pisses me off not being able to do everything I'd like to do the way I'd like to do it any given week. Damn those measly 168 hours!!! Seems like it's definitely time for some serious reassessment and a good, hard look at myself in the proverbial mirror...

Being asked "what the fsck you doing with those????" by a buddy, colleague or co-drinker when thumb-flipping some poker chips in a bar always makes me ponder the reasons for me to play poker... Being myself a pretty introspective fellow, I tend to constantly question my life, and having read Schoonmaker kinda helps routinely reassessing my poker shit. But not enough, it seems... So, when answering this WTF?!? from the latest co-drinker with an unexpected "Cause I'm an overly anxious guy who used to chew his fingernails, and flipping poker chips is ZE thing I found to stop this bad habit", I can't help but ask myself if I'm not just bullshitting my friend, being a full-of-shit wannabe hustler yapping stupid answers to what I consider relatively irrelevant questions... And correlate to this is, why do I (still) play cards?

When I was reading Schoonmaker, I think I broke it down into something like that:

1) Measuring myself: 35%
2) Money: 25%
3) Accomplishment: 15%
4) Excitement: 15%
5) Socialize: 5%
6) Pass time: 5%

And now, after this elongated happy hour where I found myself in the bathroom, writing a reminder on my hand to try and answer that epitome of a question of "why do you play poker", reminder which was later seen by a very good friend of mine, whom got curious to know what this was all about, and obviously went "So, why do you play???" with a wink in the eye, I spontaneously answered the archetypal machismo answer "to make money"... Which I used to try and avoid, because of the whole machismo thing, as a matter of fact. But as of now, I think there might be something here... Reassessment really is a necessity in one's life, and poker really is a micro-life of sort for sure! Maybe it's time to change the ratios above ;-)...

...

Just skimmed through my old "monthly analysis" posts and saw the Epic Fail one for last June. Funny how things are all relative. Like position, lol. Just saying cause, this time around, I'm choosing leniency towards myself, since I "only played" 5,233 hands in the month. Thing is I just came back from a month of almost no play that clearly questioned my commitment to the game, so let's be realistic here :). And I'm pretty happy to go pheww! and reiterate: I.Love.This.Game. :D

And glad to be back. With a very decent month of September money-wise but quite flimsy on the volume side. Which is now my new old objective: 12k hands a month for the rest of the year. With the fall and the cold and the rain/snow just around the corner (I hate you!), I feel pretty confident about achieve this. Not sure it'll be enough to win me a volume bet with Nic, but hey, let's hope it snowballs! Especially since I kinda found myself another hobby, grinding at my grinding time like a sour blister. I am speaking of comics, of course. Combined with work, cards, cinema, sports (hockey's about to be back - damn I hope this is the year :P! Oh... but Go Sox Go... Red Sox, that is - lousy Black Sox snuck in, lol), books, although comics have pretty much took their spot, except for poker books (I'm a bit behind, currently finishing PNL1... For reviews, skim through 2+2 :)), and a somewhat existing social life, I feel I need more than 168 hours a week... Ok. This whiny bid was brought to you by AlLaf Inc., AlLaf Inc., the dream is here!! ROFL

In any case, I'm off to a good start in October... We shall see, won't we... Here are the graphs for September.

September 2008 - Money Won
September 2008 - Big Blinds Won
September 2008 - Showdown

♠♥♦♣