Last couple of days I have pretty much finished building all my furniture. Only had 1 drama, where I was struggling to put a really weird bit of the bed together. They sent out a guy and it was fixed in 20 minutes. Turned out I just wasnt banging the cams in hard enough, oops. All in all im very pleased with the work I have done, and im 90% finished buying furniture etc for the house in the short term at least. Im feeling very happy and settled in my new place now.

Telstra and TPG have been difficult and uncooperative in my attempting to get ADSL2+ hooked up. Telstra took 5 days to activate the phone line, and now TPG are saying it will be another 5 days before the internet is hooked up. Urgh. Im currently writing this on beagle dial up. Go beagle! As a result of my lack of broadband internet Andy has delayed his trip to canberra until Jan.

I didnt have the bright idea of using my dial up account until yesterday, So I had gone a grand total of 7 days without playing 1 hand of poker! I played my first session for a week yesterday, just playing 6 tables instead of the usual 14-16 because dial up cant handle that much. I felt really good and my mind was alert. I think it was a combination of the break, doing some recent hand analysis, and playing less tables - resulting in me actually thinking through my hands rather than just mindlessly grinding. I liked it, and I hardly made a mistake.

I played 2 sessions yesterday and 2 today, and I have hardly lost a hand (well, any big hands). I have played well and have avoided coolers. Today I decided to use up my 55k player points which I have accumulated over the last few months. I had enough for 16 $33 tournament entry tickets and 1 $22 tournament entry ticket. I decided to take the route of least variance and play nothing but the double or nothing single table tourneys (10 people enter, 5 losers get nothing, 5 winners double their money). I ran insanely good - I won 14 and only lost 3, shipping $820 in about 2 hours. All this just from player points! As much as people (and myself at times) trash-talk ongame/tower, they do have a pretty great bonus system.

I have decided for the new year I will stick with ongame for the nighttime games, and play full tilt in the afternoons when there are no ongame tables running. I am pretty confident this will work out and I should be able to get in at least 50k hands per month doing this, while still having time for fitness stuff and uni.

Reflecting on the year, I have by far exceeded all my poker related goals for the 12 months. Ive made over double what I had hoped to, mainly due to improving at a reasonable rate thanks to living and breathing poker every day for almost a month earlier this year in vegas. I have made far more from poker this year than I have from my real job, despite only playing it for roughly a quarter of the hours. When looking at the numbers it makes me feel like im wasting my time at work, as im effectively losing money by turning up. Its somewhat frustrating, but I guess its beneficial for my social life. I hope in 09 I can be as dedicated as I am now to poker and I am semi-confident I will be able to crack 6 figures next year.

The next couple of days I have to buy christmas presents, and do some more little things around the house, and then head to melbourne for lots of poker with andy + boxing day test cricket. Cant wait!

My home loan finally got approved and I was able to exchange on my house last week. The last 4 days of my life have consisted of nothing except moving furniture and organising stuff for the new place. Its been a long week. Im about 90% done with the major things, I only have little things left to buy that arnt absolutely necessary right now.

Putting together my fantastic furniture packages was brutal, im pretty useless at everything practical, and its been a huge learning experience. Have managed to put together all my stuff without too many disasters though which im happy with.

Havnt played much poker at all this month, as I have just been busy moving and havnt had the internet at my new place. Am looking forward to the end of this week, I will have most of the furniture set up and internet connected, and Andy is coming up for 3 days. We are planning to play poker most of the day, and do some poker hand/position analysis, and then hit the gym a few times. Should be good.

I went to Big splash the other day with Morgan and his girlfriend Naomi, and it was awesome. Big Splash is an outdoor water centre with 2 big slides and some short, “speed” slides. We had awesome weather, and it was great fun. It was the first time I had been on a water slide in 5+ years, and I had forgotten how fun it was. Thanks for the invite Morgs.

I have been pretty lazy with setting goals lately, so determined to finish off the year well. I will be moving into my new house around the middle of the month, so im juggling doing the admin for that, keeping up with uni work, and getting in some hands. It looks like Andy will be coming up later in the month so looking forward to having a gym partner and to analyse hands with.

Poker
Play 70,000+ hands
Play 10,000+ hands at 400nl
clear at least $4000 in bonuses
Actively review sessions and hands
Open an Ipoker account
Life
Move into new house/get roommates sorted
Write letter to financial services and banking ombudsman
Finish Eric Clapton autobiography
Finish my tax return
Fix up blog links/categories, get more sites on my blogroll.
Correct my sleeping pattern (dont stay up later than 4am, get up earlier than 1pm)
Fitness
Run 3x week
gym 4x week
eat regularly and properly
stop sleeping through breakfast
get 8 reps of 40kg dumbells on flat bench. (been struggling with this for months!)