Twenty-five cents

Let me give you my two bits on 2011 and the coming 2012. I came out twenty-five cents in the black with my tournament play for 2011. I averaged less than three tournaments a month and most of them were Tavern Tourney events because they have really nice people, mostly.

Tavern Tourneys has a new location in downtown Milwaukee for 2012, starting January 4th. The Irish Rec Room on Old World Third Street near Usinger’s.

That is an improvement over 2010 where I averaged four tournaments a month for eight months, losing less than twenty dollars a month. These figures include any buy-in or purchase for which I received chips and do not include travel expenses. I have greater losses from more than two years back from a few attempts I made at casino play.

I made several monthly, quarterly or six month free tournaments and if I had made a final table at one of them I could easily be in the black overall. I was not able to attend all the free tournaments I had qualified for because they conflicted with my work schedule or other events I deemed more important. As it stands now I am qualified for the Tavern Tourney December monthly. I am also easily on my way to qualify for the next six month after only two months. As they all say, “Only you say you’re a good poker player.”

The last six month? Don’t really want to write anything outside of, sometimes you miss things especially when you’ve been up the entire weekend and your looking to hit a straight one way but there are other ways it could be made and the other guy in the hand thinks he’s got it won outright, …and then afterwards you’re thinking about the hand and comments at the table and banging your head against the wall. A lot of times people just miss things with no ill designs present. Life goes on.

But that is not to let anyone off the hook. It has been all too clear in action and comments that I have a big target on my back and that there are those who don’t want to play with me (too bad for them and I don’t care who their friends are) and though I may joke of alternative reasons everyone knows why. But fortunately we have freedom of religion in this country. Unfortunately, those who want to spew hate and demeaning comments behind my back are sitting in a position to cause a lot of problems for those good people caught in the middle as one of my resolutions for the New Year is no more mister nice guy. The reality is if such defamatory comments of me or my faith were said to my face the fallacy behind the whole construct would fade away and the demeaning hateful nature of such words would become all too clear to all. The truth is the idea that I am just a guy like everyone else who enjoys poker and has the same concerns as any other person in this world is unacceptable to some, a source of fear, a threat. What do you call that?

So I am supposed to just keep letting this crap deny me a career, a good salary that would cover our healthcare, housing and the ability to pursue a family whether through medicine or adoption, not to mention the simple recreational pursuits of my life? Guess what?

For 2012, and to promote the blog and my pursuit of poker as a possible profession (along with my writing) I will be doing Twelve Days of Poker. I was thinking of starting right after The Twelve days of Christmas but that would conflict with our anniversary. I hope to hit all of the four different tournament leagues in the area that I know of, as well as some stand alone tournaments that people keep mentioning at times, and will hit the casino once or twice as we work some evenings and there are no afternoon tournaments on those days.

You can buy the second edition of my latest book for your Kindle here. My writers blog is actually one of my most popular though I haven’t seen any similar numbers in sales. This blog is right up their with my MySpace blog. Yes MySpace still exists.

2012 in the Chinese calendar is the Year of the Dragon and my wife and I are both Dragons. As a friend of mine of oriental decent said to me the other day; The dragon lives on the bottom of the ocean alone for a very long time and then rises from the waters and rules the world.