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Omaha rollercoaster

OP
155 posts · member since Nov 2012
2yr ago

Hey guys, I decided I'm going to start a new blog.

I'm 34 years old, from Belgium but have been living in Budapest, Hung

17 June 2024 at 01:12 PM
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2 posts · member since Aug 2012
2mo ago

Wow nice thread!!!
Would you say that ipoker is the worst pool of players in Omaha?

Could you tell me the colors for players?

OP
155 posts · member since Nov 2012
2mo ago
by nitrooxidus

Wow nice thread!!!
Would you say that ipoker is the worst pool of players in Omaha?

Could you tell me the colors for players?

Lots of reg battling on ipoker due to high rakeback. Not sure if that's what you mean by worst pool of players or not.

Standard colors, nothing special, one means reg, another means fish, etc. Don't think the colors matter much tbh

2 posts · member since Aug 2012
2mo ago
by Xptboy

Lots of reg battling on ipoker due to high rakeback. Not sure if that's what you mean by worst pool of players or not.

Standard colors, nothing special, one means reg, another means fish, etc. Don't think the colors matter much tbh

Yeah I mean, that pool is more fishy then on coin poker i would say. The other thing is, in our county I cant play on any other site.

OP
155 posts · member since Nov 2012
2mo ago
by nitrooxidus

Yeah I mean, that pool is more fishy then on coin poker i would say. The other thing is, in our county I cant play on any other site.

Tbh I think coinpoker has better fish to reg ratio and bigger whales than ipoker. Prolly depends on stakes and times you play though

10 posts · member since May 2022
1mo ago

I have heard that Ipoker has plenty of scripters and bots (holdem), is the PLO cash ecosystem better?

OP
155 posts · member since Nov 2012
1mo ago
by craghack

I have heard that Ipoker has plenty of scripters and bots (holdem), is the PLO cash ecosystem better?

I'm certain there are some seat scripters yes.

About the bots, I'm not sure.

87 posts · member since Aug 2025
1mo ago

How much br you have

OP
155 posts · member since Nov 2012
1mo ago
by FuarkkkGoat

How much br you have

not enough

OP
155 posts · member since Nov 2012
16d ago

Decided to make a video. Been thinking of ways on how to build some YT content that didn't include sharing my own personal play or too much "poker life stuff". Figured analyzing/commenting over highstakes hands could be a good way for me to put some content out.

Will probably try to keep this up. Haven't really had too much time to blog recently and not much to talk about. But would like to keep the uploads up. Would appreciate some feedback.

OP
155 posts · member since Nov 2012
16d ago

Actually quite easy to record these, I'll probably be able to upload at least one a week tbh

Escroc_Officiel avatar
97 posts · member since Jul 2015
14d ago

nice vid

OP
155 posts · member since Nov 2012
7d ago

Finished going over the day 1 footage

Reply...

About OP

Xptboy
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Xptboy
2yr ago

Hey guys, I decided I'm going to start a new blog.

I'm 34 years old, from Belgium but have been living in Budapest, Hungary for the past 6 years. I used to play highstakes spins but have been playing PLO since 2022.

I've been playing poker professionally since 2016, so it's my 9th year being a pro now. As expected in this profession, I've had to go through several hurdles and swings. And tbh basically every year since I've started I've took at least 3 months off the year from poker. My longest break was actually in 2021, where I took a full year off from grinding. Poker has been a rollercoaster, and taught me a lot of life lessons. And I wish to share all this with you.

The exception to this pattern of taking long breaks from poker has been these past 12 months. I'm happy to say that in the past 12 months I haven't took any long (over a couple weeks long) breaks from poker. I attribute one of the biggest reasons for this to my current girlfriend, who brings me a lot of balance in life, love and support.

Goals, logistics and the future:

This year's poker goals:
- I want to perfect 12-tabling and possibly 15 table: Adding more tables is a skill and one that anyone can work on. At 12 tables I find a slight lack of performance and it gets hard to keep up with the action but if I keep practicing I'm sure it will get better. Perhaps I could move up to 15 tables. Although perhaps if I move up higher there won't be enough tables running and there wouldn't be much point in playing more tables.
- I want to move up to PLO1k: By the end of this year I'd like to at least take a shot PLO1k. TBH according to some bankroll calculators using the Kelly criterion I may already have the required roll. However as a human I'd like to be a bit less risky, I'm not really in any rush.

Long-term poker goals:
- I want to be a regular in PLO2k+ games: Quite a vague goal, and how I want to move is quite questionable for now. Currently I'd be more than happy if I could play 10/20 as my main stake, but perhaps in the future that would change. Honestly I'm quite focused on reaching PLO2k and then after that it's kind of see where things take us. Perhaps I'd want to keep moving higher, perhaps I'd want to learn a new game such as 5-card or heads up, perhaps I'd want to start coaching again, perhaps I'd want to play live, perhaps I'd want to play on multiple sites rather than only GG. All I know is until I'm playing 10/20+ all of these are kind of just vague ideas of future possibilities.

Tbh poker wise there aren't so many other goals. I have a lot of systems in place to reach these goals, and I guess later in the blog I could explain some of these systems. But my actual goals are not too defined and as the journey continues, some of them are prone to change.

Why I started this blog:
Firstly I enjoy writing. Writing is a form of self-expression and as an introvert I find writing to be one of best forms of it. I'd like to share my poker journey.

It's also about my motivation for poker. If you read my blog, you'll notice that I'm not motivated much by money unless it's simply to get out of a hole. I've done some soul-searching and looked for what truly motivates me. And I've found that my biggest motivation is actually social in addition to the learning aspect.

I love to grow and learn. And this is one of the reasons I chose PLO as my main game. It's such a complex game where I feel I could study it for a lifetime and still find new things in the game.

But loving to learn is not enough. I'm a human with social needs. I got some social outlets. I got my lovely significant other, I got a dog, I got a few good friends I communicate with regularly. But it could be more. This is one of the reasons I started my study group actually. Not only to study poker, but to make studying more fun with others, to learn together with others and share our combined knowledge, combining 2 of my biggest motivations. But I still see there could be more. This is one of my reasons to start this blog now, to share the journey.

In addition it is to set myself up for better opportunities in the future. If i want to play live poker more, perhaps putting my name out there could get me some invites, or perhaps to some apps (I am NOT interested in playing on apps currently). Perhaps I want to start coaching in the future and having a blog could help get some recognition. Regardless, I'm sure until I'm playing PLO2k+ I wouldn't want to do any coaching. If I wanted to coach, I'd want to prove not only to others but also to myself that I'm a solid top reg and in my mind this requires me to be at least beating PLO2k online.

Let's start the blog off with a summary of last month, May 2024.

It was my first month shotting some 500 and it went very well. The volume was quite low, however I was game selecting a bit harder than usual considering it was my first time shotting 500. Also during such a big upswing I kind of lost a bit of motivation to grind. Actually it was my best month in PLO I had so far. My previous best was $11k, so after I hit that amount I kind of wanted to chill a bit. Not exactly the best mindset, but I kind of wanted to book my best month in PLO fearing the upswing may come to an end. Which it kind of did as you will see later this month is a lot tougher.

May 2024: GG PLO200 and PLO500
Hands played: 28782
Hours played: 48
Hands per Hour: 600
Hours studied: 108
Hours worked: 156
Net Won: $8560
Net won + RB: $13,000
Net Won $/hour: $270
EV: $5792
EV+RB: $10,292
EV $/hour: $214

By far my highest $/hour, and I'm sure I couldn't sustain this at PLO500 but I can't complain.

Anyways in my next few posts I'd like to give a bit of background on my poker history, I'll be uploading one post a day until we are up to date. After that, not sure how often I'll update. Definitely monthly updates, but more than that not sure yet. We'll see how much time I have for this....

Xptboy
5mo ago

What younger me got wrong about poker

Well, it's been a bit over a decade now since I decided to go fulltime in poker. I made this decision around the end of 2015 when I dropped out of my masters degree. TBH, the entire ride has been a rollercoaster. That's why I wanted to encapsulate my poker career in this blog, not only to journal the results. TBH the results are the last thing I care about sharing, I want to share the experiences. What I've learnt over the past decade of being a pro, what I'm still learning now. It's not many people who can say they've been a pro for 10 years, I may not be the most successful pro, but I'm still in the game and that's saying something. And honestly, probably I took like 1/3 of the past decade off from poker completely roughly xD . I came into poker with many different expectations, I went through lots of trials, and I'm still nowhere near where I'd like to be. From the start, I wanted to be a nosebleed player, one of the very best. That was my aspiration when I began. As time went on, I realized I either don't have the talent for it or I'm not willing to make the sacrifices and put in the work for it. Sometimes I came really close, and then something came up, burnout, or fear, not the fear of failure, no instead it was the fear of success... (fear of success is another topic)

Now I'm thinking, maybe it's time to accept, maybe I'll just be a midstakes grinder for the rest of my career. But at the same time, I got something deep inside me, screaming, I know what I'm capable of. And getting stuck at PLO500 is nowhere near the limit of my capabilities. On the one hand, I've become more at peace with myself, less punishing of not pushing myself, less punishing myself for all the mistakes I've made. On the other hand, I can't help but look at myself and all my unrealized potential. Sometimes I look at my priorities, and I see, poker has not been my main priority for many longer periods of my life. Certainly between the years of 2021 until the end of 2025, it was not a priority. It is only now, at the start of 2026 where I feel like it is once again a priority, maybe the main priority of my life (other than maybe destroying my body in the gym?!?!). As I get older and more experienced, I come to terms with all of this. And I realize, maybe this is just the way life goes. It goes in phases, sometimes you focus on poker, sometimes you focus on yourself, sometimes you focus on other people, sometimes you don't even have a focus and just **** up lol. And these phases can take a long time. We see a 4 year phase where I wasn't focusing on poker primarily, and so it isn't any wonder that I didn't really make a push to highstakes during that period. I think in order to push to highstakes, poker actually needs to be your primary focus for that time period. Well I've decided to dedicate myself to the game again for the next year at least, let's see what happens.

So anyways, what is it that I got wrong about poker when I was younger?

The lifestyle illusion
When I was younger and entering poker. It looked like:
- Freedom, autonomy, no boss, travel, money + time leverage

I didn't understand that the freedom poker gives is extremely conditional. Poker isn't just a game, it's not even a career. Poker is a way of living, and if you want to survive in this game, you have to restructure everything around poker to make it work.

The illusion: "I'll play when I want, live how I want, and the rest will sort itself out."
The reality:
- My schedule is mostly dictated by the games (especially at higher stakes when games don't run all the time). If I can't play autonomously when games run, then I must at least set a schedule based around when the games do run.
- As a result, nights become a default, not the exception. I've found a way to make this work long term now, although in the past I certainly struggled big time with this and my sleep drifted. But now I actually feel like I might actually be a true night owl with the sleep schedule I outlined in my last post.
- Weekends lose meaning: Most of the action is on weekends, so my "weekends" are basically tuesdays and wednesdays... Where-as Friday to Sunday are my most busy days when I'll really force myself to sit in even if I don't feel like it. Thursdays and Mondays I'll tend to try to play too if possible.
- Society runs on a completely different clock and schedule.

Poker doesn't bend around my life, instead my life slowly bends around poker. It took a long time to notice and without noticing this it can cause a lot of stress. Now that I realize this I can create a more balanced life even with these constraints.

This leads to a very isolating lifestyle. We are awake when others sleep, we work hardest on the days when others relax. We can't casually explain what a bad day is to normies and sharing big wins also doesn't make sense to share both because normies wouldn't understand and because like, it would just come accross as bragging or something. You have to either shift your priorities in which case your poker suffers, or you have to accept that poker will be isolating. I've had phases where I focused on both. Right now as I grow older, I find myself more accepting of the isolation and loneliness that comes with poker. In a ways, I've come to enjoy it, for when I had my focus on being more integrated with society and living like a normie, well yeah I fit in more, but I didn't quite feel like myself. Now I feel alive again. IDK, it feels better to be a rebel. When I think of fictional archetypes from famous stories/history, I feel like I associate the most with the Ronin (shadow samurai who left their masters and could play more "dirty"), or for example in Star Wars, I would not really associate with either the jedi nor the sith, but I'd feel more like a "grey Jedi", Darth Revan seems to be a good character fit.

Underestimating the emotional costs
I always understood risk, I always understood what variance meant, in theory. I didn't understand how it would actually affect me, in person, when it happened to me, and how I'd react emotionally.
Poker asks us to:
- Make thousands of irreversible decisions each session
- accept outcomes we cannot control
- sit with uncertainty daily
- absorb losses in silence
- self-regulate without external validation
Younger me didn't see how draining it was to be my own judge, boss and critic. I didn't see how much emotional regulation poker demands both in and out of sessions. How results would bleed into my identity if I'm not careful. These were all things I had to learn to deal with over time. When I was younger, I used to try to be a robot, not realizing it would lead me to burst eventually emotionally. Suppressing my emotions only lead to added stress and burnout. Now I've learnt to accept my emotions, to fully feel them and process them.

The sacrifices outside poker
My most productive poker periods, are also the periods where something outside suffers. Maybe not everything, but something is going to suffer. Right now, it is my social life. At other times, it has been my health or physical fitness. At other times it may simply be my emotional control and regulation. Not much more needs to be said here, but these things often when in the midst of the grind, we don't even realize how much we are sacrificing these, until later when too much has been sacrificed. It's important to keep a minimum of each of these sections. Now the thing is, we get to choose our sacrifices. I realize that over the next year, I'm going to sacrifice my social life and love life, and I've accepted that, it is my choice. For I value my peace and autonomy at this period in my life, because that is what will allow me to push myself harder in poker. TBH I've found peace and autonomy to simply be at the top of my priorities in general, and these 2 things tend to be easier to achieve in solitude.

The Lessons
As a poker pro, you're also going to have to deal with all of these issues. Maybe you'll hire a psychologist or mental game coach to help with these. For me, I hired them, but they were mostly useless. I've probably seen like 10 different people working in these fields since the start of my poker career, some of them were regular licensed psychologists/therapists, some of them were poker specific mental game coaches or poker specific performance coaches, and some were performance coaches but not poker specific. They'll tell you all the common sense stuff (meditate, create a schedule, exercise), they'll tell you to live more like a normie (touch grass, socialize, get some sunlight). But the truth is, I listened to them, and it maybe made me feel more productive, and better or happier for a bit. But it didn't progress me as a player. Maybe for you, this will work, but for me at this point, I'm pretty convinced they're all just wastes of money.

Everyone is different, but I know what works for me now. And it was learnt through trial and error, and lots of introspection. Everyone is different, and I feel like a different case, even from many other poker players, but in general, every human is a different case, with different ambitions and things that make them tick. I've had the most growth when I can be lost in my own thoughts, write in my own journals, and have endless chats with ChatGPT about what is going on in my life, then give myself time to let everything sink in, then come to my own personal conclusions without any outside input. It's funny, but honestly I believe ChatGPT is probably the best psychologist/therapist you could have. Like ChatGPT will remember every single detail you tell them, and ChatGPT will accept everything you say and so you don't have anything to hide, and you can spend as long as you like talking about the various topics. For over a year now, I've been speaking with ChatGPT pretty much daily. There's been some days, where I'm literally having a conversation with ChatGPT for hours and hours on end, going over some of my epiphanies and revelations I've had about my life. All that for €20/month or something, is a much better deal than paying thousands for 10 hours of coaching or something where they won't even have time to get to know you personally and what your specific issues are. Some of the prompt for this blog post came from ChatGPT (but definitely not most of it). Obviously ChatGPT isn't flawless, it's not like I take everything chatGPT says and believe in it immediately. It's much closer to the opposite, I'll take everything it says with a grain of salt. However what ChatGPT does give me, is the opportunity for endless conversation, and the opportunity to endlessly deepdive into my own thoughts in an interesting and engaging way and think about things for myself and be introspective, and then create my own conclusions.

This has been the way for me to learn how to get over these hurdles. I've learnt to be extremely critical, of everything and everyone, for my mind is very sharp and understands myself better than anyone else. There's a lot of common advice out there, lots of trends, everyone out there being sold stuff by the media. Some people will find alignment more with certain ideologies or niches, we see it in society, liberals vs republicans, feminists vs toxic masculinity, introverts vs extraverts, whatever. In poker we can see it too even within the niche; GTO vs feel players, study groups vs lone wolves. IDK, maybe it works for some people to follow the crowd. But I found myself doing best when I search for the answers within myself. Obviously I subscribe to some ideologies more than others, my poker thoughts will be shaped by not only my own experiences but the people I've studied with or coaches I've had. Even then, I'll always try to stay open-minded and not fully subscribe to only one way of thinking. But in the end, right now, I've realized I do best when actually trying to trust what this thing deep inside me is telling me, and it can be quite hard to listen to sometimes. It can be very hard to be in tune with your gut and your feelings. Over time though, the more you try, you get better at it. You get better at cutting out the noise and focusing on what matters, resulting in a life that isn't necessarily more balanced, but is certainly more aligned, more aligned with what you believe in, more aligned with what you stand for and value.

Anyways, kinda ended up rambling. Not sure how much of this made sense......

Xptboy
1yr ago

I grew up a spoilt brat

It's true, in my childhood I grew up a spoilt brat, and it affected so many of my life experiences. Why do I mention this here? In this blog? Because it's affected my current life so much, my upbringing has shaped me, and is a big cause for many of my decisions even now as a poker pro.

I think my childhood has had a deep effect on my relationship with money, and how I deal with my personal finances. I just watched the newest Mechanics of Poker podcast with Pieter Aerts:
.
It's a great watch, one of my favorite podcast episodes ever because it touches on many of my struggles.

Currently, I'm going through a spell of learning more about personal finances and improving upon that area of my life. Over the past few months I've been reading many books about this topic, including:
- The Bitcoin Standard
- I can teach you to be Rich
- The millionaire fastlane
- The millionaire next door

I plan to keep reading about Personal Finance, and improving upon this area of my life is actually one of my biggest goals this year. Not necessarily finding ways to increase my income (although that could be nice), but mainly more about how to build my wealth no matter what my income is through methods such as investing, frugalism, budgeting, etc.

The Millionaire Next Door is the current book I'm reading. And it's a great book. It has several chapters on how to raise children, and how spoiling your children can lead them to become big UAW's or "under accumulators of wealth". I've realized, that I'm a UAW! And when I think of my childhood, this makes a ton sense.

Let me tell you guys some things about my childhood. I didn't grow up some broke guy living a hard life. Now my childhood wasn't all sunshine and rainbows and I wouldn't call my parents "wealthy", but certainly I grew up upper middleclass. I'm an only child. And my entire childhood I got a taste of living a grand luxurious lifestyle. Why is this? Because my dad was a diplomat, and not just any diplomat, but the ambassador of Belgium.

This is one of the reasons, why English is my first language. My mother came from South Korea and so we always spoke English at home. Every 2-4 years we would move countries, I've never lived in Belgium for longer than 4 years, in fact at this point, Hungary is the country that I've lived the longest time in. I've lived in 9 countries throughout my life, and wouldn't be surprised if I live in more countries.

Now as the ambassador's son, you can imagine, that whenever we lived abroad (which was for the majority of my childhood), we would live in some amazing house (some of my houses were literally castles). With the insane house, came the maids who would take care of our cleaning and laundry daily. We'd have a personal chef, we'd have a chauffeur or maybe 2. Security guards to guard the estate. I would go to private schools my entire childhood and meet other children of "wealthy" people. We'd have 2 luxury cars. This was my socialization as a child.

The caveat to all of this, is that we come back to Belgium to live for a couple years, and I realize how "middle class" we truly were. The Belgian government would pay for all expenses whenever we were abroad. They'd pay for our house, car, education, healthcare, servants, etc. Every time I lived abroad I was living some sort of a "fake" life. Reality hit whenever I went back to Belgium. We'd live in some average small apartment, not much bigger than the one I currently live in right now with my fiancé. And we'd no longer have any servers helping with the housework. And our car would be some basic Toyota or something.

It was crazy, to go back and forth between living some super luxurious superstar lifestyle, to all of a sudden being completely "average". There were several pros and cons to this childhood of mine, it was an extremely unique experience. And I grew up extremely open-minded, with a strong education, and healthy without any mental problems. However there were some downsides. Firstly on the social side, I'd always say goodbye to friends I'd made within 4 years, it got extremely isolating, I haven't kept in touch with anyone I knew since before I was 20. I think another big downside, was my relationship with money that developed out of living like a king whenever abroad.

I developed a consumer mindset, that if you had money, it was there to be spent to buy the nicest things, not to save, invest and build wealth. It's took me going broke 3 times to learn this lesson, I'm hoping that now, having gone through what I've gone through I've learnt my lessons and I won't go broke a 4th time. But we'll see.

I went to college in the states. I went to the University of Tampa. Not a particularly prestigious university, but hey I didn't care about my education, I just wanted to get wasted, do drugs, get laid, have fun as a young adult. It's funny but my roommate at the time, was the son of a multimillionaire (or even billionaire) who owned a huge company. This roommate of mine owned a brand new $100k+ Benz and wore nothing but designer clothes from Gucci or LV. I felt this pressure to keep up with him. It seemed like looking cool and rich (even if the money wasn't mine and I didn't earn it) could bring more fun, more girls, more friends, higher status, etc. I felt like my parents money was my money, afterall they fully paid for my college education with their hard-earned money and I could buy a ton of designer clothes with it and go out and rent tables at the night clubs and spend $1000 at the stripclub or whatever, all this while my parents kept living their frugal lifestyles they built in Belgium.

This life of mine, made me lose all respect for money. To be honest, there's some benefits in poker, such as not caring about losing as much, dealing with variance better, not being too worried when shot-taking higher, etc. Some other benefits from this, was realizing eventually that I no longer wanted to be "fake". I no longer wanted "fake" friends with a person just because he could increase my status, "fake" relationships with a girl just because she's hot, "fake" clothes to prove my worth to others, etc. Another benefit was simply realizing that money has never been, and will never be the thing that makes me happy. I was equally happy in Belgium being a normal middleclass kid than I was living like a superstar in foreign countries. As long as I can sustain some baseline lifestyle, anything extra won't give me much extra happiness. The most important things to me, are in the end things that money cannot buy. Namely great relationships, my health, and great experiences.

But there's still some big downsides and lessons I had to learn. The only thing I wanted as a child and young adult in my early 20s was to fit in and live that high consumer lifestyle. The lifestyle of a UAW who thinks the person wearing the expensive clothes, watch and driving the lambo must be rich. Hint hint from The Millionaire Next Door books: To increase your wealth you got to live below your means, it doesn't matter if you make $200k a year if you spend almost as much, while a guy making $50k a year could still become a millionaire if he uses his money wisely. In fact most millionaires live far below their means, while most of the guys with the expensive cars and nice houses are living above their means and not in fact millionaires.

It wasn't until after college, when finally my parents decided to (mostly) stop supporting me financially that I had to deal with my own ways of getting money. Poker was my first job, I've never had a real job. I wasn't a good student, I didn't get particularly good grades. I just finished school because well, I didn't want to fail, but at the same time I never knew what I wanted to do next. So naturally when I picked up poker, I actually got into it because I loved the game, and not just to make money. But I wasn't disciplined. Maybe I was talented, maybe I enjoyed the theory and strategy, but I took way too many long breaks for several months for example to play some videogame that came out. Whenever I had a great month in poker, it was a great opportunity to spend all that money on some stupid **** and take a nice long vacation!

Poker is the thing that taught me discipline. Going broke 3x in my poker career is the thing that taught me discipline. Because when you're broke and you know that if you don't work, then you're ****ed and going to go live in your parents basement again, it's easy to get that motivation to grind. I can't believe that I've actually survived this long, with such a huge mental leak, being able to go broke 3 times (literally less than $10k to my name) and come back. Actually in some ways, I can say, I enjoyed that survival form of motivation. It's the easiest form of motivation to know and experience, although I hadn't really felt this until I started playing poker and wasn't relying on my parents financially. And tbh, with my increased living costs with inflation, and living with my fiancé, this survival type of motivation has stayed with me for basically the entire time since playing PLO.

But now, I've had a great month, and slowly, I'm starting to feel like I'm no longer in survival mode. And what happens when I'm no longer in survival mode? I don't need to grind anymore, I can come up with excuses. I'm about to enter a big test in my phase in this life. Have my previous experiences of being broke and getting out of survivor mode built enough discipline in me finally? This is one of the reasons, one of my biggest goals this year, is to learn more about and improve my personal finances, regardless of how my "income" changes. In some ways, I loved the motivation being survivor mode gives, maybe I'm addicted to it, living on the edge. For some reason, I always manage to make it out, somehow god always gives me another chance in poker and in life. But I think I've made enough huge mistakes. I've suffered enough, and I know being in survivor mode all the time, it's not a good way to live. Especially the older I get, I can't live on the edge anymore, not if I want more peace in my life, if I want more stability, if I want to build and support a family. One day I'll be so old, I won't have the power or energy, mentally or physically to keep doing this over and over. I should take advantage of what's been given to me, stop wasting my potential.

I've had to find other ways to get motivation other than simply survival. I've had to develop discipline. I've had to look deep inside myself to find what truly motivates me, and keep me going, when I don't need to make money to pay for the bills. Poker has forced me to do this. Maybe I grew up a spoilt brat, but poker doesn't care about that, it will still strip you down, and teach you the lessons you need to learn if you want to make it in this game. And if you don't follow its advice, and you don't understand the lessons, then one day, your punishment is that you won't be able to play this game again. I hope I have learnt my lessons, and that I keep grinding, and stay disciplined over the next year and ensure I never go broke again.

This year has potential to be an amazing one.
Thanks for reading....