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