One step closer

I'm ready to move up to 100NL. That puts me one step closer. In fact, I think that it probably only puts me one step away, but I'm not sure. I'm trying to reach a place that my wife starts to care about poker. And she'll care about it when it starts paying for stuff.

So far, I haven't really cashed anything out of my roll. Back in my Limit days, my plan was to plow money back into my roll until I was playing 10/20, and I shared my online roll with my B&M roll. After the U.S. legislation, I cashed about everything out online, leaving me with a dedicated B&M roll of several thousand. I still hit the card rooms once or twice a month, so it's good to know that it's there. I make small withdrawals from there for things like golf or taking the family into San Francisco for a day, but by and large it stays in its high interest savings account.

I left a couple hundred online, and have just been plowing profit back into my roll to move up the stakes aggressively. It's at $1900 now, and I'll start 100NL as soon as I've got a free evening (maybe tonight, not sure yet). But I still don't want to cash out. 100NL seems like a significant jump in terms of difficulty, and I want to grind through it until 200NL. I think at 200NL, even with a modest winrate, my hourly will be enough so that I can take my time getting up to 400NL and be able to use some profit to do some extra family fun or buy something nice for the house for which we wouldn't otherwise have the budget. I'm not sure whether that will happen at 200NL or some future level -- I guess a lot depends how successful I am.

Until that time, though, me playing poker is way far down on my wife's priority. She doesn't care in theory that I play, she's not against gambling or anything like that. And she's all for me having whatever outlet I want, within reason. She thinks it's pretty silly that I've got a couple poker books on the nightstand and that I spend time doing stuff like posting on forums, blogs, and whatnot. But whatever floats my boat. However, it's all within its place, and I understand where she's coming from.

Wow, I just deleted a freaking novella detailing how awesome my children are and where all my time goes after realizing that I can't do it justice to myself, and there isn't a single person who would read this who would give a shit anyway. The bottom line is that when work is done, our kids come first to me and my wife, and after they go to bed, we've got 1-2 hours to ourselves before she is going to crash.

I've got a standing tennis match one night a week. I can count on having to do something work-related at least once a week as well, for various chunks of the evening. So, we just plain run out of time to be with each other. The nights that she's finishing some household task, getting something ready for school the next day, or just going through her own email, I can opportunistically log some hands for an hour or two. But I usually stop when she stops, and I'm OK with it. There's also a night or two a week that I stay up later than she does, and most of the time I'll play some then. But going to bed separately all the time is not what marriage is about ;). And unfortunately, you can't just (at least too often) play poker right up until you go to bed together. So, a lot of evenings, the computer just sits datamining and that's the extent of poker. A lot of other nights, I get in an hour or so. And a few nights, I'll play for several hours. It all adds up to less poker than I'd like, but what I feel is an appropriate amount (maybe even pushing it), given only one of us in the household holds a passion for poker. But as the stakes go up and the money gets more meaningful, my hope is that even if she never develops a passion for it, she at least encourages me to play more.

As an aside, I think that if I were really serious about poker before we met, it would be fair to expect that I could continue. I play golf with a couple guys whom I'm amazed play as much golf as they do...we're talking 150+ rounds a year -- just about every Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. I ask them how they pull that one off, and they say that their wives knew what they were getting into when they got married. Fair enough. Also, their kids are grown (although they still played a lot when their kids were young, and one guy has two boys whose combined indexes are less than 1.0, so they played as a family.) Also, my index is lower than both of these guys. That's not really relevant to my point, but whatever....it's still cool.

To reiterate, I'm pretty happy with the balance and priorities in my life. My family is awesome. I wish there were more time for poker without sacrificing anything else. We'll see when that will come, but all in all, it's pretty minor. And even from a poker standpoint, it's not all bad. My work/life balance forces me to do more study relative to play. I have a chance to really learn and think about the game, and I think that has paid off, making me a stronger player compared to number of hands actually played, than a lot of people. It doesn't mean I'm a top notch player by any means, but it does mean that my progression will not stagnate due to all play and no study, as I believe happens to many good players.

Well, this has been another post that has kind of come in fits and starts throughout the day. I feel like I've got some more to say here, but for now will end and get home to the family!

For the time being, I'll double post on Blogger and CR. Good luck out there.