[ ] Contained

The last 30 days have been some of the best I've had yet as a professional poker player.  I've learned a ton about "GTO" or "Nash Equilibrium" play, I've developed some theories about game selection and quitting, I've advanced relationships with a few poker friends, and I've pushed myself a few times to see if I could play well enough to stay in an amazing game well past the point where I'd usually have tapped out and called it a night.  Heck, there's even the whole "we might get our full tilt money" thing going on, which would be the best thing to happen to the poker ecosystem since...ok, probably ever.  I mean really, think about it.  $300M that tens of thousands of people had completely written off as gone forever just getting disbursed back into the gambling world.  In short, things are grand.

The official statistics for my April are pretty fantastic, at least to me.  I played 196 hours, almost certainly my most ever, which actually has me on pace to clock over 2000 for the year.  It doesn't even feel like I've been playing that much, and given that I was saddled by my prop job through March 3rd it would seem like my hours per week could actually INCREASE from here on out, despite the 14 weddings I will be attending this summer (and by 14 I mean 3).  Where did I find the time to do all this?  Well, I can think of 3 or 4 things that have contributed.

1.  I kind of dropped off the face of two plus two entirely.  Like, I haven't made a post in mid-stakes in over a month, and really have just done a few pop ins in the small stakes low content thread.  That wasn't really intentional, it just kind of...happened.

2.  Danielle and I pretty much stopped watching TV.  We caught up on Breaking Bad, finished The West Wing, and now just occasionally watch a movie.

3.  This should be obvious, but blog output has slowed dramatically.

4.  I was so used to the propping lifestyle and the insane hours of casino time it took just to book 35 hour weeks that now 45 or 50 hours doesn't seem that hard.

So I guess that sort of sums it up.  None of those things individually seem like a big deal, but they definitely used to consume over 10 hours a week of my time and now they just don't.  Am I happier?  Sort of.  Should I be doing even more to take care of myself (sleeping more, eating better, making it to the gym every day)?  Sure.  But for now I'll take what I can get and just be happy about it for a bit.

And then there has been the winning.  The constant, day in and day out, mind boggling, winning.  It really is stunning just how good you can run in this game.  I know my online graphs show periods of utter insanity, with me seemingly unable to lose a pot for thousands and thousands of hands.  But when you do it live it can just take...so...long.  It's just been fantastic, and thanks to the high hour count and the run good I booked my most profitable month ever (I didn't officially keep this statistic before Jan 2011, but I'm positive I've never won $1K/day for an entire month before).  So yeah, things are just swell.  They can not stop me, and so far they really can't even hope to contain me.