The Journey Is Complete!

Well, it's over.  Around 11am EST yesterday I earned my last VPP needed to make Supernova Elite.  I actually timed it perfectly and finished my normal 24 tabling session with < 1 VPP to go, and then got a few friends together for a $50 flip to earn the final point.  Unfortunately, I lost the flip, but I can't complain as I effectively made about $30,000 by playing the hand!

It feels amazing to be done, knowing how much work I've put in achieving this goal.  I certainly made things difficult on myself by taking so much time off during the summer, and if I decide to do SNE again, I'll be infinitely better prepared.  As of right now, I'm about 50/50 on whether or not I'll do it again.  The 50,000 free VPP's I'll have for playing the World Series of Poker Main Event is nice, but still only accounts for 5% of the year's play that I'll be able to skip.

In terms of how poker went during the final month, it was really a complete mess.  I managed to play less when my head wasn't in it, which definitely helped and I avoided multiple $10,000+ downswings as had been occurring in the previous couple of months.  I actually had one of my best sessions ever on the last day, making close to $5,000 in about 2 hours, which got me almost exactly even on the month.  Combined with the fact that I ran worse this month then I ever have (over $10k under expectation), I'm going to consider it a pretty successful month.  I think I'm down around $200 on the month, so I'll likely put in another session to keep the winning streak alive.  Hopefully, it doesn't turn into a marathon "grind till even session", as I feel I've deserved a nice break.

Besides that, I'm done with poker for about 2 weeks, which will be the longest break I've taken in close to 2 years now.  I don't plan on playing online the first week of next year, and then I headed down to the Bahamas for PCA.  It should be a blast, and I'm taking some friends down with me as well so hopefully I'll have some people cheering me on if I make a deep run.

I have a couple more blogs planned for the upcoming days, with advice for future SNE grinders, as well as my goals and plans for 2011, but I wanted to finish off this blog by saying thanks to a ton of people for being there for me this year when I've been going through some tough times.  SNE truly is a grind, and what most who go for it don't understand is the mental toll it will take on you over the course of the year.  So with that, thanks a million to:   Dad, Mom, Louise, Michael, Mark, Pat, Amy, Marissa, Nate, Becca, Alex, Horstman, Greg, Tom, Speedle, Joop, Mike, Bailey, Rob, Amrit, Joe, Chris.  Ya'll mean a ton to me, and i'm infinitely thankful that most of you stuck with me this year!

And I can't forget the online crew, most of whom I only met briefly this summer, but talked to nearly everyday at the tables.  Zep, Biggie, natisfinest, vini, nolan, Swtwtr, joeingram, that fortress guy, brtn, lydia, tcarr, bigd, and even good ol' Sandhop who let me beat him up in backgammon every now and then.

Well I think that's it for now.  Sorry if I forgot to mention you, my brain still isn't working at 100% yet :)

- Daniel

Boardin', Grindin', Donatin'

Last weekend I headed up to Cataloochee ski area with Nate and Evelyn to get some snowboarding in.  It was a cold weekend up in North Carolina and they had been making snow all week, so there actually were some decent conditions.  It felt pretty nice to take a day off from poker and hit the slopes.  Unfortunately, my car didn't do to well on the ice on the trip up there.  I pulled a full 360 on an exit ramp and then we got stuck for a while on another hill, before we found the right route to the ski area.  So, it's looking now that I won't drive to Tahoe and I'll just fly out instead and maybe rent a car for a few months.

The SNE grind is coming along really well.  As I write this I'm just shy of 935k VPP's so only about 65k more to go before I'm done for the year.  With 19 days left it's under 4k per day and I've been averaging closer to 5k for the past 2 months.  Hopefully I'll be done a couple days early and get to take a few days off before the new year.  Then it's down to the Bahamas for the PCA.  Last year's winner got a bit over $2,000,000 which would be a nice start to the year.

After a really good start to the month I hit another big downer, mostly due to life stuff getting in the way of poker.  This seems to be the theme throughout the last couple of months, but once I'm out to Tahoe hopefully things will all be better.  After a good weekend I'm only down a bit on the month now, and historically the games are very soft around Christmas time, so with any luck I'll end the year on a high note.

A bunch of mid-high stakes player on Stars/FTP got together and donated a ton of money to Toys for Kids.  It's always nice when a bunch of guys who make more money then they know what to do with, and have a habit of blowing it on dumb things, get together and do something to make a difference.  Overall we raised about $6,000 for the charity in the US, Canada, and the UK.

One of the guys from UK made it out to the toy store and got to go on a huge toy shopping spree and managed to get some pictures of the whole ordeal.  Lets just say a lot of kids will be getting a lot of toys this x-mas.

Not sure if I'll get another post in before X-mas, so happy holidays everyone.

- Daniel

November Wrap-Up

I can say that November was certainly the swingy-est month of the year, and probably my life.  A ton of bad shit is going on in my life outside of poker, and it's definitely affecting my play pretty negatively.  Unfortunately I have to play a ton to keep on my SNE pace, and it led to some horrible days last month.  In fact I think I had my worst day ever, 3 separate times.  Here's some pretty looking graphs that sum up the month...

Hands from my desktop:

And hands from my laptop:

I had 3 separate $10k+ downswings, and another $8k downer.  All of them except for the last one (which was just a pretty terrible week-long run of cards) was just due to playing when my mind was elsewhere.  I was literally just handing away money at times to whoever wanted it the most.  I'm hoping to get my head together for December and finish off Supernova Elite with a nice winning month.

The good news about November is that I collected about 135k VPP's and finished off the month with almost exactly 880,000 VPP's for the year.  I need 1,000,000 to make SNE meaning I only need to get 120k in December, which I proved wasn't much of a problem at all last month.

Ok, but enough about poker.  There are people who read this blog that just don't give a crap that I'm making/losing mad money they are just interested in my awesome life.  Or at least I hope this is the case.

I got a big shipment from PUMA in today, totaling 6 new pairs of shoes and 1 tracksuit.  Unfortunately the other tracksuit I ordered along with a pair of shoes were on back ordered, so hopefully I'll get them before I go away in January.  Yeah, I took a picture because I like pictures and I thought all of you interested readers should see what's gonna be on my feet for the next few months.

Our place is Tahoe is officially booked from Jan 20 - April 20, so when I get back from the Pokerstars Caribbean Adventure poker tournament in the Bahamas on Jan 16th, I'll likely be packing up all my important stuff and driving out west.  I'm headed up to a mountain close to Atlanta this weekend to get some boarding in, so hopefully there's some snow.  I'll snap some pictures and include them in the next update of the notorious N.I.T.'s life.