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!