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Brian Hastings : Poker Blog

 Hey guys.  I've never been great at following through on New Year's Resolutions in the past, so in this blog I'm going to grade myself on how I'm doing with all of them so far.  I think doing this will help reinforce them and maybe lead me to actually follow them.  So, without further ado:

1.  Make more productive use of my time.

This one is tough to judge.  On one hand, I'm writing this at 11AM, lying in my bed on my laptop, haven't eaten anything yet today, and I think this happens too many days where I just wake up and do absolutely nothing for an hour or 2.  I've probably browsed 2+2 way too much in general too.  On the other hand, I think I've gotten a good handle on routines, which is pretty important when I'm trying to balance so many things.  Basically from whenever I wake up til about 7PM I go to classes if I have any, do schoolwork, and in the meantime keep an eye out for good poker games.  When a bunch of games are running I take a work break and play for an hour or 2, then resume after.  Also, I take an hour out of this time to work out, usually around 4 or 5.  This schedule has gone pretty well, as I've done a pretty good job getting work done, played a decent volume of hands for being in school, and done a pretty good job with workouts (more on that later).  Around 7 I eat dinner, if I eat at my frat (surprisingly excellent food from our chef) I drive to the house for 7, otherwise just order food because I'm too lazy to cook.  Hopefully I stop being too lazy to cook someday.  My roommate cooks occasionally and we just got a George Foreman grill though.  Campusfood in Ithaca is awesome and has a wide variety of good stuff though, so I can't really bring myself to cook instead of that.  After dinner I finish my schoolwork if any, occasionally play a session (generally if I didn't have time or there weren't any games in the afternoon), and then just hang out with my roommates or go out.  I can't stress enough how awesome having a pool table is.  Late night pool is awesome.

Grade: B-

2.  Get in better shape.

I'm very pleased with how this one is going.  In order to get some structure that would hopefully lead to more discipline, I signed up for a workout program on menshealth.com.  They have a personal trainer feature where you choose between 12 different workout plans and also 4 different diet plans if you want, although I've chosen to ignore the strict diet part but just make a conscious effort to eat pretty healthy.  I chose the At-Home Workout, which is perfect for me because it uses all dumbbells and I have dumbbells and all the necessary equipment to do the workouts in the confines of my own house.  From last summer to December I had lost about 15 lbs, mostly by eating well, but in the fall I probably worked out about 2x/week, which was better than before that, sadly.  So far this spring I've been working out probably about 4-5x a week.  I'm pretty great at never missing a workout during the week, but it's much harder on a Saturday when I wake up after drinking copious amounts at a party the night before.  I need to change this.  Otherwise, I think it's going great though.  My mom's cookies that she recently sent aren't helping because they're so delicious, but for the most part I'm great at avoiding junk food altogether and eating pretty healthy overall.  If anyone is interested I can post my workouts to see how effective they'd expect it to be, but I sure think it's doing the job since I almost feel nauseous toward the end of my weight workouts.  I have weights 3 days a week and cardio on almost every off day, usually somewhere from 30-45 minutes, which I've been doing on a stationary bike that I have.  The weight workout is a pretty comprehensive circuit workout featuring on big muscles (lots of legs and back) that has so far evolved from 1 set per exercise to do.  Again, if anyone is interested I can post more details.

Grade: A-

3.  Perform well in school.

This one is tough to quantify yet because I haven't had any tests.  However, I'm doing a great job to date on my main goal, which is to do better in my major classes.  I got a C+ last semester in my Microecon class, which was pretty disappointing although the instructor and book were both hard to learn from, and I felt that I could have worked harder and performed better.  So far in my Econometrics class this semester I've kept up with the material by reading all the chapters we've covered so far in the book, which is pretty unprecedented for me, and I did a very good job on the first 2 problem sets we've had.  In my other classes, I haven't worked quite as hard but there hasn't really been much due yet.  I'm not prioritizing them as much though.  I think I'm doing fine.

Grade: B+

4.  Improve my social life a bit.

This hasn't quite gone quite according to plan because I can't really go to the bars here, so often there is nothing to do.  My social life has mostly been just going to frat events, which isn't to say they're not fun.  However, a few of my other friends turned 21 and I went to dinner/parties with them, which was fun.  I've seen my freshman floor friends more than I did all last semester already I think, and that's a good thing.  Overall, I'm probably staying in a bit more than I'd like, but that might even be a good thing for now while I'm trying to balance so much.

Grade: B-

5.  Become a bit more of a bankroll nit.

Couldn't ask for more here.  I've played over 40k hands of 25/50 and 10/20 since I've gotten back to school on Jan 12.  I've played a very small number of 50/100 hands, which is acceptable since I've built my online roll back up some, and I've only played higher than 50/100 when I've had exactly 50/100 worth of my action.  This has most notably happened against Gus Hansen, whom I've played twice at 500/1k.  Unfortunately I didn't win either of those, but I plan on playing him again soon, with just a fraction of my action of course.  The 25/50 grinding has gone pretty well, I've been running a bit badly in 6max PLO in February but I'm about about 50k in a few small number of NL hands and crushing HU PLO.  I've also started to play the CAP PLO games more because there are often some big fish and it's rare to have 9 25/50 tables running otherwise so it's nice to be able to add those tables during a session to increase volume.  As an example last night I played 5 CAP tables while playing 2 HU tables, and although the CAP was frustrating and I took some nasty beats and lost 10k, I won 5k for the session.  Basically I feel like if I put volume in at 25/50 and play focused sessions, results will come, so I'm going to keep doing just that.  I've been very content just playing a lot of 25/50 and even 10/20 though and I expect this to continue for months, although once I build my online roll up some more I'll take some more shots at juicy big games.  But overall I intend to make 25/50 my main game for the foreseeable future.  Cole is a great role model for this, he obviously has the skills and bankroll to play nosebleeds semi-comfortably but rather than exposing himself to huge swings and tons of variance he chooses to just grind lower and make lots of money.  I intend to do the same.

Grade: A

That got pretty long, so I guess I'll hold up on other updates.  If you made it this far, thanks for reading!  It was definitely a good personal checkup to think about and write all that.

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• Brian Hastings : Poker Blog
  

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