Year Ender

I'll remember 2008 as the year in which I decided to tackle heads-up no limit, achieving OK results.

I dropped some money as I tried to learn the game, but I learned a lot about poker in general. Most importantly, the challenge of taking on a new form of the game forced me to study my game, delve into watching more poker videos and hire a poker coach. I'll always be able to play HUNL now when the other games look dead. I'm probably still a small lifetime loser in heads-up play, but I believe I'm getting close to even.

The rest of the year was pretty damn standard: I took a couple of unsuccessful shots at 10/20 NL while still grinding out solid profits at 5/10. My profits for 2008 are closely in line with what I achieved in both 2006 and 2007, which is acceptable.

Let's look back at my goals for last year:

1) Improve my bluffing frequency. I would call this a small success. I found a few more opportunities to bluff by hand reading better and trusting my reads. On the other hand, one of my weaknesses is that I still feel like my style is too conservative.

2) Blog regularly. There were spurts of frequent activity, and on the whole I'd say I kept the blog up to date. It was never my intent to post every day; instead, I wanted to publish at least a couple of times a week without taking too much time off.

3) Work on my heads-up game. Done.

4) Stop bloody spewing so much. I'm always improving at this. Discipline is an upward climb, and I steadily try to tilt less, make better decisions, make fewer curiosity calls and quit when I'm no longer at my best.

5) Find ways to play my best game. See above. Often, it's simply impossible to play my best game because I'm tired or not thinking as quickly as I'd like. In those cases, it's better not to play at all.

Now let's look ahead to 2009.

I only have one goal for the coming year: Learn pot limit Omaha.

I strongly believe the investment in diversifying my game is more valuable than the profits lost by sticking to my regular full ring or 6-max 5/10 NL games. Some pros say PLO already has surpassed NLHE in terms of game selection and quality. I feel like I'm already late to the PLO bandwagon, but that's alright.

I'll start by reading "Pot-limit Omaha Poker," by Jeff Hwang and watching plenty of PLO videos on DeucesCracked. I plan to start at 2/4 and see how I progress from there.

Good luck to you all in 2009, and Happy New Year!