Hey guys, I'm gonna try to give this another go. I've tried this in the past but I've never been able to stick with it for very long. It's always fun updating when things are going your way, but as soon as variance takes you for a ride it just turns into a super demoralizing mess. But I feel I absolutely need a blog of some kind in order to improve, both as a person and as a player.

Long story short, I'm 25 years old, Swedish, and I've been playing poker on and off for a few years. I've played 'full-time' sporadically for a few months here and there, but never over any significant period of time. I've just started playing again after 6 months off.

The idea is to improve very quickly and move up to NL100 asap, and actually try to stay there. Volume-wise I'm thinking ~50-60k hands/mo, and I'll also be playing some MTTs every now and again. I've got a full-time job as well, but making time for poker has never been a problem and it won't be this time around either.

To start this off I'll post my (somewhat depressing) yearly graph:



(+~$600 in MTT profit)

All things considered it's been an acceptable year (since poker's not really been my main source of income), but I was obviously hoping it would be a much bigger year for me at the start of 2015.

I also thought I'd talk a little bit about some of my weaknesses, since the whole point of this is to be brutally honest so I can actually improve as a player and a human being. My biggest weakness is, quite simply, that I'm extremely competitive. The problem with this is that it ruins a ton of relationships for me, because I have a very deep sense of entitlement in a lot of ways. If I genuinely believe I'm better than somebody at something, I feel I deserve to win and any other outcome is almost unacceptable. As a consequence, it can be pretty hard for me to handle any setbacks emotionally.

This is obviously a problem in poker, even though I'd like to think I've gotten a lot better at handling myself. However, there's certainly room for improvement.

So yeah, due to this ridiculously extreme emotional volatility/'me against the world'-mentality, I've got literally no friends in poker. Most of my opponents absolutely despise me, and while the feeling might seem to be mutual, that isn't the case at all. It's just my competitive persona that is very unlikeable, and people typically confuse that with my actual personality (and understandably so). So the idea is to get involved in some study groups too at some point, preferably as soon as possible, and try to make the most of it.

To make it short and sweet, my goals for 2016 are as follows:

• Focus on significantly improving my mental game
• Focus on significantly improving my actual game
• Be more involved in the poker community in some way
• Be a better and more respectful individual; try to be the best version of myself a much larger % of the time
• A minimum of 50k hands/mo
• Win at least $20k
• Spew less IRL/be less of an idiot with money
• Date more

Leggo.

So, time for an update lol.

In terms of results the month has been okish considering how little time I've spent at the tables. This is the graph for January:



+~$300 in MTT winnings.

Unfortunately I haven't been able to play too much, but that's going to change from now on. January was a bit of a special month since I spent a week in Portugal over NYE, and I've had to travel for work quite a bit this month. I spent an entire week in a hotel room, but there were too many mandatory social activities at night for me to grind there.

I've been playing mostly NL25 this month (75% NL25, 25% NL50), but my BR's big enough for me to focus on NL50 now. If things go well I'll throw in some soft NL100 tables too in February.

I also absolutely need to study more. Maybe buying the PokerSnowie application for HM2 could be a good way to go about it? I've reactivated my RiO account too, so the plan is to watch at least 3 videos a week.

As for life/diet/fitness, I've been absolutely terrible. My diet's been horrible and it's basically a massive miracle that my body hasn't given up on me at this point. I seem to go through these cycles where I'm either completely perfect in terms of diet/gym, or I'm just literally the worst of all time. I need to have some sort of consistency in this area of my life, and not just leave it up to chance/my current state of mind.

For this exact reason, a friend and I have decided to start doing BJJ, and we've got our first session tomorrow. I don't really have any experience whatsoever when it comes to martial arts, but maybe this is what I need in order to be more consistent and motivated long-term. I've always just been a strict gym guy, and maybe that's simply more freedom than I can handle. It's a little too easy to just skip it, or choose not to go for whatever bull**** reason. It's easy when I'm going through a phase where I'm super motivated, but those phases usually don't last more than 3-4 months. So yeah, we'll see how this goes, but I'm definitely gonna give BJJ a serious go.

So, goals for February:

• 45k hands
• 75% NL50
• 12 RiO videos
• 10 workout sessions (BJJ/gym)
• Eat healthier/eat out less. Bring my own food to work for lunch
• No more than 3 nights out in total