Where was I?

A fortnight’s holiday is too much for me. That’s the main conclusion I have come to. A week isn’t long enough to really get a good feel for the place and to see everything I want to but two weeks is too much. I start to crave a return to normality and find myself sat around almost twiddling my thumbs a few times if I am away for too long. And as lovely as Crete was that was the case this time. With a few days to go had someone offered me a flight home there and then I may have taken it. But I survived the full fortnight and am now trying to get back into the swing of things – which is not as easy as I thought it would be.

What was I doing before I went on holiday? What was my routine? What was I working on? What did  I have in the pipeline? What projects did I want to make progress on? All these questions and more have come up in the last few days and I am struggling to answer them to my own satisfaction.

Shortly before I went away there was the Great PC Disaster so I was rebuilding my computer and frantically trying to rescue all my data. That’s obviously something I wouldn’t be doing normally – I certainly don’t plan on making a habit of wiping my data – so that doesn’t count as part of my routine. I need to think back further and try to recall how I structured my days. But I also need to decide whether I wish to just drop back into my old routine or whether I should make a few changes. The holiday gave me a chance to evaluate things as they stand and perhaps identify a few weak spots that I need to address. OK, I didn’t take full advantage of this opportunity as I tried to forget about gambling as much as possible and I didn’t have my laptop and associated spreadsheets with me but I still mulled a few things over and made a few tentative decisions.

I think one of the major points to come out of what I was mulling over was that I need to increase my profits. There are several ways to go about this and I need to look at them all in more detail but the bottom line is I need to make more money from gambling. At the very least I need to convince myself that the path I am going down will ultimately lead to greater profits. It sounds like an obvious point to make as surely all gamblers want to make more money but it’s perhaps not as daft as it sounds. If this is to continue to be a full-time enterprise then it needs to prove it can pull in a respectable full-time wage. If not, I need to look at ways I can reduce the effort involved to a part-time level and go back into full-time employment. That’s not a route I want to go down, for various reasons, but it has to remain an option unfortunately. The spectre of a nine-to-five lifestyle will act as a driver to ensure I look at all the ways to get the most from my gambling, that’s for sure.

Another thing I realised recently is that the football betting system research and development I have been working on has dragged on way too long without anything concrete coming out of it. That has to change. I need to make real, meaningful progress or change tack. This is nothing new as I noted this before I went away but while I was on holiday I started to think about the best way to wrap up the current development phase and approximated an order for the remaining tasks. This is in support of the primary goal stated above – to make more profit. I must have some profitable football systems ready to go for the new season in August, and they must be fully tested etc so that I can be pretty sure that profits will ensue. August sounds a long way off but there is a lot to do.

Poker – I have had a change of heart recently. I get this now and again, a nagging thought in my brain that just won’t go away until I entertain it properly. This time it concerns limit hold’em cash games. My brain keeps telling me that if I can keep my discipline and concentration at the tables then I ought to be able to churn a steady profit from limit poker. I have done it before – it’s more or less how I got started in the game. But it involves a different mindset to no-limit games and I need to be confident that I can slip back into the right frame of mind. I have had a few abortive attempts to get back into limit cash games before and found that no-limit play had ruined my limit game. I need to forget about stealing blinds and how powerful position can be in no-limit. Position is still important in limit games, don’t get me wrong, but it’s much harder to bluff-bet your way out of trouble in limit games due to pot odds so solid starting hands etc are required. And that means discipline to only play the right hands in the right position and not calling raises just because it’s only one more bet when you know you’re probably beaten. I still haven’t decided whether to go down the turbo SnG route or have a go again at limit cash games but I plan to examine the pros and cons of each soon and get back to the tables in the near future. My brain keeps telling me there are profits to be made on the poker tables and if I want to make more money then I need to take advantage of opportunities such as online poker.

I have a number of other projects I want to work on – some old, some new – but unless I can see a financial return from them in the short-term I am currently putting them on the back burner. It’s primarily about ensuring I have a solid base going forward. I was happy with my portfolio before my holiday and I have no reason to be unhappy with it on my return but that doesn’t mean I should sit back and rest on my laurels. There are profitable opportunities everywhere so I need to make sure I am exploiting the right ones.