Hello everyone,

Thought I would create this journal as a place to log my progress, vent, and celebrate (hopefully) with a great poker community. I'll start with a background on myself and will try to post nearly daily.

About me:

I started playing poker in college at Cornell, inspired by Brian Hastings, although I never really got to know the man. I worked my way up to about 1/2 by the time I graduated and moved abroad to play poker professionally for two years. I moved up to midstakes and played 2/4 - 10/20, mostly on Absolute Poker (I know, lol). Was doing quite well until Black Friday hit and I had a little over $100K stuck on the site. This was about 80-90% of my money at the time so it was back to square one. At the time I was a bit jaded by poker and was not particularly happy in life or dedicated to improving my game further.

I decided to work in the "real world" and moved to NYC to try and get some sort of finance job. Since my resume looked a little funny, I didn't have success with a finance job. I ended up becoming a real state broker in Manhattan and have had a couple successful years at that. Again, I'm starting to get jaded by this and have been playing a lot of poker on the NJ sites, as well as a soft online home game. I'm currently building a bankroll from microstakes and would like to move up to the midstakes games in a few months but understand it could take longer.

My goals for poker in 2015 and beyond are as follows:

• Get back to midstakes
• Learn PLO past the basics. I am not BAD, but I am certainly not good. Probably a breakeven to slightly winning player, and I think the games are still probably crushable, especially on these NJ sites.
• Spend time each day IMPROVING and STUDYING my game as well as playing
• no specific monetary goals, but something above $20,000 would be nice so I have some sort of return on my time

My .25/.50 results are obviously frustrating so far. I've run worse at this stake so far than any other bad run I can think of in years past. EV is only part of the story - lots of cracked AA in 3bet pots, set of set, people hitting lots of 3-5 outers, etc. etc. I'm proud of myself that I have not tilted much, if at all, during this run, and I'm constantly focused on just playing my A game.