Yep, PS4, which makes heroes like Widowmaker, Hanzo, McCree very tough to use as effectively as on PC. I've decided to basically never play as Widow, and she's the only hero I have less than an hour experience with.

I've been fooling around with different sensitivities for some of the more sharpshooting heroes to help make my aim more precise but I doubt I'll ever be a very good McCree or Soldier 76. On the other hand, a hero like Zarya, where aim is pretty straightforward and secondary to barrier distribution/strategic decision-making, is a nice fit for me. I think she's one of the most effective heroes, especially if you're collaborating with a Pharah, Tracer, Hanzo, Genji, McCree, characters whose ults combined with hers makes for a really deadly combination. She's a lot more deadly if there's another tank in your comp; Roadhog is basically a dream as he'll get you up to max charge faster than anyone. Zarya is the character with whom I've had the biggest win % in both QP and competitive for heroes I have a large sample size with.

Thread confirmed hijacked by Overwatch GTO strat discussion. Btw, I noticed Doug Polk was tweeting about Overwatch GTO the other day lol, as he was surprised all or almost all of the top-level squads employ the same comp (some combo of McCree/Tracer/Reaper/Genji/Zarya paired with Lucio, Zenyatta, and Reinhardt). I'm looking forward to observing how the s2 buffs/nerfs affect the meta.

That's a shame. Would love to play with you on pc. Think the metas are a bit different on pc than on console due to the aiming. Heard they nerfed torb as he was too strong which was pretty lol from a pc perspective. The biggest changes coming to season 2 so far for meta seems to be hanzo and mercy getting big buffs. Pretty excited about the hanzo buff for season 2. People would get berated any time someone would pick him in season 1 since his skill ceiling is extremely high whereas soldier/mccree had more room for error.

QUICK UPDATE:

I've played less hours of poker this month (~21 hours, three sessions) than maybe any month since I turned pro over three years ago. Strangely, one of those sessions I lost $2600 (NL), and the other two sessions I won $2600 (both PLO). Admittedly, a lot of the hours I would have normally spent playing poker I've spent playing competitive Overwatch instead. It's been scratching the same itch for me that poker has been scratching for the last decade, and until very recently with its novelty it's been shinier, more exciting, and a more attractive option to my time and attention. However, over the last few days I've been on an Overwatch abyss-type downswing (lol, yes, there's negative variance in Overwatch, too) and looking forward to playing more poker instead.

Fortunately, I've also been quite productive on the programming front and have been putting in a good 10-20 hours/wk of structured study and problem set work since starting the MIT course a few weeks ago. The course has gotten increasingly difficult (it's notorious for being the toughest intro to comp sci. course on EDX), but I've been managing to keep up with it nicely and am thrilled with how much I've already learned. If I can sustain this pace, which I expect to be able to do, I'll be able to finish the course and have made a ton of progress towards becoming a competent programmer. It's encouraging to me that the course has never felt boring and that I often find myself doing programming stuff during a free moment even when I hadn't planned on doing any additional programming work in a day. It definitely has the potential to become the basis for my next career.

All that being said, I plan on budgeting my time to include more poker volume again soon while keeping up at the same pace or an even more intense one with programming. That means a lot less Overwatch.

Now, time for some quick recs:
Some good TV I've watched over the last few weeks: Bojack Horseman, s3; Penny Dreadful, s1 and s2; Stranger Things, s1
Good TV I haven't watched recently but recommend anyways b/c you may never hear about it: The Last Kingdom, Black Mirror

As far as books, I finished a reread of The Misleading Mind recently and it was as pleasant an experience the second time as the first. Next up, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, by Oliver Sacks. I'm excited to read it as I've never read any Sacks before but have heard great things.

The variance is real in overwatch! Just went on a nasty 8 game losing streak from my peak rating. Feels bad. Noticed I've played more poker this week due the negative variance which is bizarre.

Public service announcement

If you have access to Netflix streaming and still haven't checked out Black Mirror, essentially a techno-dystopian twilight zone, you're doing yourself a massive disservice. I can't praise this show strongly enough. It's the most creative show on television and has hit me more viscerally than any other TV show I've watched. Not all of the episodes are knock-outs, but they're all very good. Personally, I like all of the episodes (w/ "The Waldo Moment" being my least favorite pretty easily), but if you give an episode a try and find you don't like it I strongly encourage you to give it another chance and try another one.

I just finished watching "Playtest," the second of six new episodes released today. I'm really excited about having four more new eps to watch.

+1 amazing. I literally just watched season 3 in its entirety within 24 hours of its release. Spot on analysis. Not every story/episode hit me the same, but the ones that do hit, are a homerun!

Carry on

Update

Over the last couple of months, I've been productive on the crushing life front and it feels good. I’m now a few days away from finishing the MIT intro to comp sci course and I couldn’t be happier that I decided to take it.

For a very long time I had felt like I needed to do something, anything, to make progress towards my longterm career plan of transitioning out of poker, but I kept failing to get anywhere beyond constantly ruminating about possibilities, with any action being limited to reading books and browsing the Internet haphazardly hoping for some kind of inspirational spark. Ultimately, taking that first step of actually doing something (in this case downloading an IDE for a programming language and starting to fool around writing code) facilitated a burst of productivity that has seen me progress over 2.5 months from not knowing what an IDE even is to being able to design a hangman game and some simple encryption programs, all while greatly improving my general understanding of what computer science entails and what the programming universe looks like.

Now that the course is finishing up, the challenge is to figure out how to maintain this progress. Truthfully, working within the structure of the course was massively helpful and has helped me realize that I’m probably someone who benefits a lot from structure, just so long as I can rest assured I have flexibility within that structure. I’ll probably start up another course or two starting next week or the following week, go back and review stuff I’ve studied in this course, and get to work doing daily katas and coding challenges commensurate with my level of competence. I also plan on going to some local programming meetups, after having a really good experience at one the other week. So far the programmers I’ve encountered have been especially generous with their time and willingness to impart knowledge; it seems like a really good community of people, probably more my speed than the law ever was.

I still don’t know what my specific aspirations are, and I’m far from certain that I even want to transition into a programming-related career, but for now I’m going to proceed as if that’s the plan. At the very least, I’m picking up valuable skills and enjoying the process of learning something new. Solving some of the tougher problems in the course has resulted in some of the more rewarding experiences I’ve had this year.

In other news, I’ve been putting in more poker volume since my last update, but I don’t have much exciting to report. My PLO game feels very strong right now and my HORSE game is solid, but I feel rusty and unfocused in NL. I’ve been enjoying poker for the most part, but I continue to feel pretty uninspired about poker goals and am regarding my time at the tables more as “work” than I ever have in 3.5 years of doing this professionally. I’m not bothered by that mindset. If anything, I’m comforted by it, as I used to be afraid I’d never want to move on from poker. Anyways, I'm afraid I have to stop writing, gotta head out to play; I'm glad that I was able to post an update.

Thanks for the update. As someone who is also looking organizing his life to diversify his skillset and maybe shift away from poker in the near future, it's very stimulating to read about your adventures in coding!

+1

I've actually been fooling around with the coding stuff as well on freecodecamp, definitely interesting but not sure I could see working in that field.

I finished s3 last night (you outpaced me by a lot!). "San Junipero" is in the running for the best episode that I've ever seen of a television show. An absolute tour de force.

FWIW, here are my personal power rankings of Black Mirror episodes (far from objective truth, I'd expect lots of variation of tastes even among readers itt):
1. San Junipero
2. Be Right Back
3. White Bear
4. White Christmas
5. The National Anthem
6. 15 Million Merits
7. Playtest
8. Shut Up and Dance
9. Entire History of You
10. Nosedive
11. Men Against Fire
12. The Waldo Moment
13. Hated by the Nation

GL on the grind, Rossi!

Thanks, palinca and Tyman. FWIW, "Deep Work" is part of what led me to get interested in programming, with its stance regarding what skills are likely to be especially important in the future. I think some knowledge of programming or at least what it entails will almost always be +EV in terms of time investment. A couple of friends of mine have already taken the journey from zero knowledge of programming to great jobs over a couple years, so I'm hopeful I can facilitate the same path for myself should I choose.



Good to hear from all of you guys!

Pro tip:

Include "lunch w/Ajeff, DocO, B0ke, LA Steve & Nick" as part of your diversification :-)

I just got one outed after the $ got in on the flop in the biggest pot that I've ever played (just shy of $20k). I'm still at the casino, just processing everything and trying not to feel sorry for myself. I am going to try look upon this experience as a gift. Just don't know how yet.

Ew. Assuming 5/10 plo? Not much anyone can say to make you feel better, understand the need to vent though.

Yep, 5/10 PLO. For the historical record, here's the HH: BTN ($17kish) super action player straddles for $20. SB another pro ($3.1k) flats (action starts to the left of the btn straddler). A bunch of other players flat, including me ($7.6k) utg+1 with KdKc7d4h. BTN checks.

Flop KsTh3s ($120). SB bets $105. I raise to $375. BTN raises the pot. SB shoves. I shove. BTN tanks a good while then calls.

Turn 9c.

River 3d.

As I'm in the process of turning over my hand I can hear BTN announce he has quads and it's suddenly as if I'm experiencing life in slow motion as I watch him turn over KT33.

Later that night he told me he convinced himself I didn't have a higher set based on the fact that he had blockers towards both higher sets. Other villain told me later he had the AQJ wrap with nut spades.

So, I realize now what I wrote the other night was misleading. Sorry about that. To summarize everything more accurately, I got one outed for the $9k+ sidepot. I also lost the $9k+ main pot where, despite flopping the nuts, I wasn't an equity favorite. So, all in all, my equity for the pot was ~$12k and I finished the hand with $0.

It was the biggest pot I have ever played and probably the biggest pot my home casino has seen in over a year and a half.

To provide a little more context, the game had been running for over 24 hours by this point. I had played for 7.5 hours in it the previous night as the game was first starting (5-5 PLO at the time) and had left at 5am when it was four handed and the action wasn't that great. I finished +$1k for that session. I was pretty shocked when I woke up at 1pm, checked my phone, and I had gotten a couple of texts asking me if I knew anything about the still-running game. When I arrived back at the casino around 2:30pm, the game was full, there were a ton of chips on the table and the aforementioned BTN (who has legendary stamina as well as legendary gamble) had never left from the previous night and was sitting on a stack of at least $25k, over triple his stack when I had left that morning, w/ everyone else from the morning gone and busted by him.

During this second go'round I was in the game for $3k at the time the big hand occurred. I had gotten my stack up to $7.6k thanks to a hand where I flopped a disguised set of aces and got it in and held against this same player's top two and the nfd. The flop for that hand was A93. A third player in the hand bet the flop and folded after a raise and my reraise behind. Before the remaining cards were dealt he said he had folded a set of threes. The river was a 3 and he was visibly angry that he would have made quads. So, eerily enough, that's twice I could have had top set cracked by quad threes in the same session.

As the big pot was going down, at least half a dozen people were railing the game and by the time the chips were being sent BTN's direction, it felt like half the casino was looking at our table (our table had the most chips of any game that our home casino has seen in a long time, especially given it wasn't long after midnight as opposed to being later in the night). Right after the hand, I left the table to walk around for a bit and try to stabilize myself mentally for the rest of the session. During that walk I stopped at a bathroom a bit far away from the poker room. As I was in the stall I could hear a couple of random people talking. One was telling the other that "some dude" had just lost a $20k pot in the poker room as if it was the craziest thing he had seen in awhile. The other guy was in disbelief. It was rather surreal listening to them while knowing it was me who they were talking about. I thought about the days years ago when I was a rec player living near Detroit and used to keep an eye on the 5-10 NL game at Motor City Casino and thought at the time it seemed like there was an ungodly amount of $ on the table and unfathomable amounts being won and lost.

I'm pleased with my reaction to losing the hand. I didn't say a word, and when I came back to the table BTN and I had a friendly fist bump; he started to apologize and I told him it was all good. This is a guy I've played many hundreds of hours with, gotten dinner with many times, and a guy who I like. Upon returning to the table despite feeling pretty distraught I played without any tilt and made a small amount of $ back before the game broke. I ended up losing ~$2.3k for the session. The next night 5-10 PLO broke out again and I won $3.2k over a ten hour session despite being pretty card dead.

Anyways, I had planned on doing a year-end review for this thread but it still hasn't happened. I might still do a larger write-up, but in case I don't here are the cliffs: Poker went quite well for me after my miserable wsop and results-wise I ended up having a better year than I probably deserved given poor volume relative to other years. Unfortunately, despite having had another good year financially, 2016 wasn't a very good year at all from a crushing life perspective. I failed to meet a lot of my goals and I ended up being pretty disappointed by how I spent a lot of my time during the year (one word: Overwatch). I was also a less happier person in general. I continue to be very unsure about what my short term or long term future hold.

I've toyed around with the idea of writing a lot more frequently in here, but I continue to feel pretty self-conscious about it all given I was a lot more comfortable writing in here when I was more anonymous. I'm very introverted and a relatively private person, so it's been a bit of a struggle for me.

Anyways, my best to everyone who has been following my journey and especially to those who have posted regularly in here. Thanks for reading.

Tough hand, plo is the devil. Tough with live poker when you get so few hands over the year and it comes down to how you run in the big pots. Congrats on the strong mental game though. That pot would sting anyone, but it sounds like you handled it and moved on from it as well as you can.

I feel you man, running cold sucks. Reading people's bad beat stories makes me realize how ridiculously cold I must run though, because that sounds like the kind of beat I take on the regular. I've told poker buddies that I seem to take beats several times a session that a lot of the regs and "pros" (ie people that are running the hottest the last few months / years) would complain if it happened to them once a month.

Glad to hear you took it on the chin and ended up having a profitable couple of days.

hey I've always enjoyed your posts on here. Very well thought out and on interesting topics, hope you keep it up.

Ouch, PLO such a sick game. Don't know how you can handle it live.

Judging by your post your mindset doesn't sound like it's in a good place.

I lost interest once I read that you are disappointed in your time spent on Overwatch lol

Thanks, Tyman. How about an update in your own PGC? That was one of my favorite follows when you were regularly updating it.

Thanks for the kind words, jlevu. I've been feeling the urge to write again but I'm not sure whether I'll be doing it in here given I'm mostly interested in non-poker topics atm.

I've had some wild swings playing it but I am growing to prefer PLO more and more. I've found that it's easier to weather the variance if you go in accepting that it's inherent to the game. I'm rarely stung by losing a PLO pot these days other than those like the one described above.

NL, on the other hand, is losing my interest more and more. It's less the game itself than the fact that I find the dynamics of the NL games locally very boring and, if I'm traveling, I'm way more likely to be playing PLO or mixed games.

Thanks, Kato. I dunno, I tend to feel the same way, and I suspect a lot of pros fall into the same psychological boat. I agree with Mr. Schupick and think it's probably just us falling prey to a host of cognitive biases that make us think that we are unluckier than we actually are.

I now respond to such thoughts by comparing my observed hourly over a meaningful sample to my expected hourly. When doing so I tend to find that I'm running pretty close to what I expect in my results and suddenly I feel a lot less unlucky. For example, despite losing that huge pot, I still had a really great month and for the month overall took in way more $ than I perhaps deserved given poor volume. All in all, I definitely ran substantially over expectation this month (+$200/hr) and in fact ran pretty great. It would be irrational to consider it a bad or unlucky month, yet I've been hearing unsolicitedly from others for a couple weeks now about the huge pot that I lost and how unlucky I was. Any time I find myself indulging this idea of being unlucky I remind myself about this bigger picture and then feel like an idiot.

Haha, whatever, you know I'm currently still obsessed with this game. As are you. My bad.

Who knows how much $ this damn game has cost me in opportunity costs?

My next goal is to hit Masters, but that could well be drawing to a four outer. I'm definitely hoping to scale back my OW volume quite a bit regardless of how high I'm able to get my SR.

January cliffs:
-Played about half the poker volume I wanted. Was fortunate to have a really good month results-wise despite that.
-Played way more Overwatch than is healthy.
-Read several good books: Sapiens, The Oath, Death by Video Game. Sapiens (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00ICN066A...ng=UTF8&btkr=1) is a must read imo.
-Not pleased with the amount I worked out (1x/week), my sleep schedule (waking up way too late), and slacking on some things I'd like to get done (clothes shopping, scheduling physical and vision exam, getting back into dating, etc.). Hoping to do a better job this month.
-Getting increasingly disgusted and terrified by the Trump administration. The last couple of months have made me become more cynical about humanity and its future. I realize these are strong words that some readers of this thread may vehemently disagree with, but please don't engage me in this thread re: politics and leave it to PM if you feel the need to react. I'd really like to keep politics out of this thread, just felt the need to include this as it's been a huge focus of my mental attention lately.

Haha k ill do an update soon. I've thought about it at varying times as I did enjoy it in some ways, but it also feels semi worthless to just drop in quick and update things unless going to continue updating. I'm still toying around the idea of updating again more often but either way ill make sure to throw an update down soon. PGC is still def my fav part of 2p2 and I love seeing updates from the best threads (inc this one).

Really liked that last part of the response to Kato. It definitely is true that we a lot of times on some level feel like we are running poorly or that we run worse than others when in reality it's likely not true. All cash grinders with a reasonable min volume will all take their turns running more poorly than they thought possible. I think the only place it would be valid that certain people run way better/worse are in tournaments because how you run at the end of certain tournaments is so meaningful to your end result. But unfortunately that's just part of grinding +ev lotteries.

WSOP 2017

I’m currently sitting at a Starbucks in Vegas (the one near Sahara and Decatur, if anyone is curious) waiting to leave for home in a few hours after having spent twelve days here. Unfortunately, it was yet another losing WSOP for me.

Before I address the WSOP, I should provide some context as to my mindset heading into the summer. During the first several months of this year, I enjoyed the most consistent and, frankly, pleasant stretch of positive variance that I’ve ever experienced as a pro. Local PLO games were good and I ran even better. Best of all, I enjoyed a lot of monster wins while having very few big losing sessions, resulting in a really low stress few months. So, despite pretty abysmal volume relative to previous years and despite losing the biggest pot I’ve ever played (discussed itt: received $0 from $19k pot of which I had $12k equity), results-wise I had an excellent start to the year and was able to leave for Vegas with the comfort of knowing I could lose a substantial amount and still be satisfied with my YTD results.

My plan heading into the summer was to focus on PLO cash and play tournaments sparingly, having played barely any tournaments since last summer and finding the idea of chasing tournament glory less appealing than ever after last summer’s misery. I’m pleased to say that I was able to follow this plan dutifully and have zero regrets about my cash game/tournament volume and selection. Unfortunately, I ran poorly in both departments.

Tournament-wise, I fired one bullet of the Colossus, two bullets of the $565 PLO, and I played the $1500 Eight Game Mix. All bricks. The Colossus, I busted the final hand before the first break. While I didn’t find a single good value spot in my two hours of play, I don’t think I played very well, either, dealing with not only tournament rust but also NLHE rust. Probably my biggest mistake, I made a questionable c/r allin after defending the BB with AJo after a short stack (2.4k) opened 300 in the CO at 50-100 and it was folded to me. I checked a T32r flop, villain bet 500, and I jammed thinking I could get bigger aces and some pairs to fold while also punishing any bet he had made with air. He had been decently active so I assumed his range was pretty wide. Unfortunately, he had QQ and I didn’t bink, losing half my stack and never finding a spot thereafter to recover the chips.

The $565 PLO, I played well but ran quite bad. The first bullet, I lost getting it in on the flop with a 13 card nut wrap against a set where I was the final aggressor thinking I could get top two (which seemed like the most likely hand) to fold (still totally fine SPR-wise imo although the lower variance approach of flatting the raise of my bet might have been optimal). The second bullet, I had built a pretty big stack when the following hand occurred that gave me a great opportunity to approach the top of the chip counts. Some guy who I recognized as a pro (just by having seen his face on WSOP updates) opened from utg+1, I 3bet full pot on the CO with AhKhKdQs and he defended, leaving his effective stack as 75% the size of the pot. The flop came Jh9h3d, obviously a great flop for me. He jams, I snap call. He has QQJ8, no flush draw possibility. I’m an 88% favorite and if I win I’ll have a 30k stack for over 3x the average stack. Turn Ax. River 8x. The guy has already stood up from the table and is about to leave, not realizing he binked the miracle. The most standard hand of WSOP PLO tourneys ever for me. I ended up busting not long thereafter.

The Eight Game Mix, I played pretty well overall despite some mixed game rust but made at least a couple of costly mistakes in stud hi (my worst game of the mix) that combined with being pretty card dead I ultimately couldn’t overcome. I lasted about five hours before busting. On the bright side, I had a lot of fun and was at a friendly, chill table. This was the only tournament that I was pretty confident heading into the summer I’d be playing. If I ever return to the WSOP it’ll probably be my top priority to play, mostly because I’ve really enjoyed both experiences of playing it.

As far as PLO cash games, there’s no other way to put it: I ran absolutely terribly. In particular, I ran especially poorly in three different forms of negative variance: 1) I had extremely few good value spots come up (and, of the two of only a few that did over ~43 hours PLO cash, I ended up chopping RIT despite being a big favorite), 2) I ran significantly below expectation in allin pots, and, the most overwhelmingly negative of the three, 3) I ran absurdly poorly in terms of the average quality of flops for my hand in bloated pots and/or where I saw the flop with a premium starting hand. #3 was especially glaring. Pretty much always, if I bloated a pot with a solid AA/KK hand or a high rundown like QJT9, the flop came 653 of the wrong color. After experiencing #3 so often, I realized how well I’ve run in this regard in the last few months at home; I’ve been flopping quite well with my big hands.

All that being said, while I made some mistakes and was especially prone to do so after hours of having endured different forms of card torture over several hours, I think I generally played pretty well and my expected hourly was high enough the games were worth playing.

About the middle of the trip, feeling like I needed a change of pace after the PLO cash runbad, I sat down in a 50-100 stud8 game that didn’t look very good. While the game indeed wasn’t very good, I ran scorching hot. After two hours, I was up just shy of +$4k and was so overjoyed with the big win after several days of misery that I decided to just go ahead and book the winner, especially given the game wasn’t great, anyways, and I knew I had just run amazingly well. Admittedly, I’m embarrassed to say I could have won another $200 if I had realized the bets weren’t capped on sixth street in a particular hand; I had just assumed it was a four bet cap and didn’t even ask, where I could have put in a fifth and final bet. Anyways, after the big stud8 session, I returned the next day looking forward to play some more, thinking I might have found my route to salvation for the trip. Cue disaster, this new session I ran as badly as I had run well the previous day and lost almost everything that I had won the previous day, having never seen more nines through queens dealt to me in my life. I ended up booking a very small stud8 profit on the summer.

Re: cash games in general, truth be told, I didn’t find myself in many good games this summer, although I definitely could have put more effort into game selecting in the form of table changing. Continuing a WSOP trend, I came away from the WSOP thinking that people are playing PLO better than they were the previous summer and making fewer obvious mistakes, and wondering whether my money is better saved for making a poker trip elsewhere. I played all of my PLO hours at the Aria or at the Rio. At the Aria, the rock seemed to stifle action, making already fairly tight players play even tighter. I came to really dislike the rock. At the Rio, while there was generally better action, tables were rarely as good as they looked upon first glance. Moreover, the transaction costs were pretty brutal: $8 half hour rake where time collection takes forever, dealers weren’t very good on average (I ended up calculating the pot for half the dealers in hands I wasn’t involved in), no chip runners, overwhelmed staff, inconsistent rules re: straddling, lots of hit n running, etc.

There are some silver linings to this WSOP and I’m very happy with some aspects of my WSOP experience. Most importantly, I didn’t let the negative variance affect me much. While it’s true I strayed from playing optimally a few times in the form of playing a little too loose after a few hours of being card dead or otherwise facing adversity, I rarely dipped below my B game. Best of all, I had a cheerful, good-natured attitude almost the entire time I played and didn’t hesitate to tap the table and/or smile at an opponent any one of the numerous allins that I lost, even the really absurd ones (e.g., top two/nfd chopping one card to come against bare double gutter with nowhere approaching pot odds in PLO; AJ < 56 against lunatic in a short NLHE session on J87r allin on flop, etc.). Handling beats well was a problem for eme in previous years and I handled them awesome this year. While I returned to my hotel room frustrated many nights, by the time I went to bed I felt mentally strong and ready to go the next day every time, and entered every new session hoping for the best and planning to play my best. My final session here, after finding almost nothing going my way again, I could feel myself reaching a new threshold of frustration and worried I wouldn’t be able to shake it off this time. At that point, I decided to concede this battle and head home a few days early for the second year n a row.

Further good news is that despite losing pretty big this summer it didn’t make much of a dent in my roll thanks to great results after last year’s WSOP, which is especially fortunate given I’ve put in pretty lackluster volume. Last summer, I felt some really unpleasant additional stress because those WSOP losses put more of a strain on my roll than I would have liked; this year, that’s not really a factor. One thing I kept repeating to myself this summer mentally as I found myself losing money was “it’s just money.” For the most part, I played well and put myself in a great spot to make $ but the cards didn’t cooperate some way or other. Oh well, it’s just money. I’ve been through the cycle of ups and downs too many times and I realize it’s all just part of the long game, which has overall been great to me. And who cares if I lost some $? I have freedom, a more than adequate roll, and I’m valuing relationships and experiences more than money more and more.
Also, I think it was much easier to handle a few dozen hours of negative variance this year when I’ve experienced a few hundred hours of overall quite positive variance. I’ll gladly take that level of bad every time if it comes with that level of good.

Oh yeah, lesson learned: don’t bother making a hotwire hot rate for a car. I’m probably about to get burned for a week of a rental car I won’t be using when I probably could have paid the same amount if I had put more effort into it without having used hotwire.

One final thing, I don’t know how much longer I’ll be playing poker professionally, but even if I’m still a pro next year I’m not sure if I’ll even bother going to the WSOP. Games are getting worse, transaction costs are getting higher (parking now at some casinos is especially adding to that), and I now have a firmly horrid history overall at the WSOP despite some small accomplishments. It’s funny, it’s not like I crush at home but get crushed elsewhere; I’ve done great in California over a decent sample, great in DC over a decent sample, great at other Midwestern poker rooms over a decent sample, but Vegas has been a special animal. I get crushed almost every time in Vegas and truly believe I’ve ran bottom 1% of outcomes type bad in the aggregate here; between the unpleasant history and increasing lack of appeal, should I really bother treating it like a priority? If I do go again, I’ll probably book for no longer than ten days.

Anyways, I have to leave for the airport in a few minutes, but I’m glad I was able to provide an update. Obviously, I’ve lost some interest in maintaining the PGC, mainly because I always preferred a more anonymous presence, but I feel like I owe y’all an update every once in awhile. As always, I appreciate anyone who’s followed this PGC and/or offered their support at any point in time. Apologies if this post hasn't been edited well as I no longer have time to review it.

TL;dr cliffs: Ran awesome first few months of this year. Ran horribly over twelve days WSOP. Still doing great for year. Believe WSOP scene is increasingly meh and not worth it. Happy to be going home.

Frist

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