So I have managed to find my way back to a sustainable bankroll after months of grinding/losing/frustration, and the line continues. I've managed to get my game back (thanks mostly to help from Jennifear) and re-focus on my poker "goals."

I read through Soupie's article a couple nights ago, and it all made sense: I am a "decent" player by standards, looking at the stats, so what happened? Where did I go wrong? I reassessed my game, my life, poker, etc. and found out that I had just flat out lost the concept of keeping up on my game as I moved up limits and gone spewy in situations I shouldn't even have been in the hand pre-flop.

Playing at the lower levels is pretty simple. If you want to succeed playing for $10 buy-ins or less, just play ABC poker. The guys who just want to have fun and spew money, will eventually do it with second pair or some gutshot draw when I'm holding the nuts.

So I grinded my way back to a $2K bankroll from $300 in just over a month with a major double cash, some grinding, and adding some cash tables back into the mix. That and a little addition of $1K from an original poker investment on the side puts my bankroll back to sustainable again at $3K on FTP.

So I decided it was time to put up a set schedule. Here are my goals for November:

1) 1 final table of a Daily Double ($24), $3r or (only up to $15 spend) the $35K Guar. ($26) I am only playing these 4 MTTs twice a week (8 MTTs a week) so I need to make the best of it.

2) $100 ave. profit a week at $.50/$1 NL.

3) If all else fails, achieve bankroll of $3.5K at the end of Nov. Optimally I would like it to be at $5K by the end of the month, but we shall see.

And away we go!!!! Good luck at the tables.

So I haven't posted in a while, mainly because I haven't had much to post about since the FTP Double Best Finish. The BR has made its way up to $1.6K and I just cashed out a mutual fund that I invested in (undisclosed amount) and I'm going to put $900 towards the BR to sit at $2.5K and the rest is going towards my upcoming wedding.

However, I did want to make a response to a couple posts people have made about love and poker / love vs. poker. After I was getting a kick out of some of the blogs, I told Soupie's story to my fiancee (obviously taking Soupie's side). She took it as an opportunity to open the flood gates about how in her words "all you do now is go to work, come home, eat dinner, and play poker. You don't have any time for me." In my opinion, she may be right because I do get in a zone when I multi-table and there's no way for me to pay attention to my tables and have some "deep" conversation with her.

In my defense, she and I got engaged when she thought I would have little to no time for her (I was going into minor league baseball when we got engaged). Now that that is all over and done with, I took up poker more seriously. I think she thought that when my baseball career was over, it was going to be all about "quality time" and I'd be this crazy romantic guy.

So in order to keep her off my back, I had to strike a deal so that I could play two nights a week and the other five nights I would be open. As much as I HATE this idea because I already know it's going to just turn into me being bored out of my skull those five nights, I have to give it a shot to keep her happy.

So that's my two cents on the poker and love/poker vs. love story. Unfortunately, if you want to dedicate time to poker as well as have a job, you would have to be single or in a relationship where the significant other understands that you are a poker player and a lot of time gets soaked up by it.

So haven't been playing much with lots going on with the family and friends that I pretty much haven't had a weekend to myself so I've been constrained to playing a few MTTs a night after work. I double cashed the Daily Doubles on Thursday night last week and picked up just under $100 for min. cashing both (gross after I was a big chip stack in one and my AA lost to KK pre-flop with a K on the turn).

Then last night I ran well and played well in both going for 22nd and 25th, good enough for $120 in prize money and then picking up just under $900 for the double finish. Now the bankroll is manageable again and I can play some more tournies, but I want to stick to my Jennifear teaching: "Prove success for a good sample and THEN jump levels, don't just jump based on how much cash is in the bankroll."

What this means to me is I'll be sticking at the $26 buy-in guarantee tournies and below and see if we can run the bankroll up to 5-digits before the end of the year. I'm going to cheat a little and pull back just over $900 from one of the mutual funds I invested in with winnings so my bankroll will be right about $2.4K on FTP.

My rules of engagement/goal setting:

1) NO CASH TABLES. Unfortunately, the investment of time in cash tables doesn't match the ROI. And cash table players have gotten much better at the $1/$2 & $2/$4 NLHE level than when I used to kill these games 1-2 years ago.

2) Get a good enough sample size to say I'm succeeding then move up. For me, I think if I show a 30% ROI or above over 500 games, I think that's a good enough sample size to move up (open to opinions here).

3) Win some damn tournies. I know the more you play, the more likely you are to pick up a big score, but I just don't have that luxury anymore to play 15-20 MTTs a day with a full time job, an apartment to take care of, and my fiancee and prepping for our wedding in July '10, etc. etc. Unfortunately, this puts me between 3-5 MTTs a night and then the Sundays I DO have off with no family stuff or obligations, I want to try and play 10-15 MTTs.

4) My longterm goal is to build a big enough bankroll to go to the 2011 WSOP and play 2 events and possibly the Main Event. This means I need to somehow roll up a $100K+ bankroll in a 1.75 year timeframe (possible, but it's going to take a lot of work).

Good luck at the tables all, and hopefully your next monster score, whether it be 3-digits or 6-digits, is right around the corner.