So I have taken the last week and a half off from poker/internet/phone/earth and it felt really really good. I went on a live aboard dive trip for a week to the great barrier reef off the NE coast of Australia, and I had the best time of my life, getting as close as you can to being on a different planet. The aquatic life is spectacular, and I've seen (and sometimes touched) things that I've only seen on TV before and some things I've never even heard of, as well as the general sensation of being weightless and being able to travel in 3 dimension at the flick of a fin is still pretty surreal to me.

I haven't played a single hand in that time or since I got back to terra firma, but I feel very confident about my game and I'm really looking forward to the ANZPT Perth Series which kicks off today with a $100 freeze-out which I think will be a really good way to gauge the local game (as well as my own). From what I gathered in Adelaide and Melbourne, the tournaments shouldn't be too tough, many people are still new to the game and the ones that aren't are pretty easy to spot by the way they handle their cards & chips.

I really agree with the old time advice of taking time off from poker and completely immersing yourself in something else. Although I haven't played any poker in the last 12 days I have been analyzing my play and results via tracker/db and there is definitely a positive correlation between breaks and improvements in my game. Since I've started playing I've taken six 2-week+ breaks from poker and every time after coming back my ROI improved as well as my bottom line. The reason that I think that breaks are so beneficial is because as you remove yourself from the poker environment you also become more objective in your thinking because you get a relief from all the emotions that do wind up piling on one after another after several months of grinding. I know that even the best of us get frustrated and happy, regardless of our effort to contain the emotions that we experience, and after several months we get system overload and its pretty important to cool off, come up and refill your air tank before you go petting sharks again..