Back to the real world

It's funny to think that exactly a year ago, I was in Las Vegas. With Emily, vk, Wendy and Rahul, for Memorial Day weekend. I was one week away from leaving my job to spend the summer playing poker full time and studying to prepare for entering my PhD program. I had WSOP seat in hand, and roughly a $10k bankroll.

Today, I'm not in Vegas, I have no WSOP seat, and I have about $1k in the "bankroll." Not even much of a roll at all. I did make a good amount through the summer, but I ended up spending way more than expected to cripple the roll, plus took a nasty downswing in December. I remember... at Mike's New Years party, we had a discussion involving how to rebuild from a $500 bankroll. yeah. So at least I've made some progress since then.

I haven't made much of a push for winning a seat this year. School has been taking way too much time. I've played one WSOP satellite so far, actually a satellite into another $500 satellite. I didn't win.

Mostly these days I am playing $10-30 single table tournaments. I ran from $200 up to like $880 in less than a week, but then it came crashing down. In there was a session of PLO where I dropped $160, getting stacked 3 times, once as a dog on the turn and twice as a favorite on the flop or turn. I don't really know how to play that game anyways though, so I probably shouldn't have been playing that while I'm still rebuilding.

My first year exam for my PhD program is on June 12th, so I plan to step up the poker after that. Full Tilt is running a huge WSOP 100 seat guarantee tournament on June 17th. What this means is that at least the top 100 will get a seat in the WSOP Main Event. Of course it's going to be huge, so there might not even be any overlay. The buy-in is $500, and this is the tournament I was trying to satellite into. I fully plan to play in this. The problem is that since it's just 5 days after my exam, that only gives me that much time to make a big push for it. Until then, I can only play satellites here and there... or maybe not even any until after the exam.

Full Tilt also has satellites into the smaller WSOP events. I'm going to try and win one of these too, although last year that didn't go so well; ironically I spent more money on that, with no succcess, than I did on winning a Main Event seat.

We are going to Vegas on June 29th. There is a $1500 NL event on June 30th that I would like to play in. Rahul plans to play in it as well, and it sounded like he was going to buy in directly. baller.

I'm toying with the idea of becoming a regular at Tulalip Casino this summer. They've got a 3/5 NL game with $300 max buy-in. So it's quite shallow, but I think I can beat it. I played in it a few weeks ago and pulled down about $400. Granted I was getting sick cards, but as much as I could objectively evaluate the play of the others while on my rush, it seemed to be beatable. We'll see. The main problem is that I'm nowhere near rolled for it with just $1000. But maybe I'll run hot to start out. That would be pretty sweet.