Coming down the homestretch

So I'm at 905k VPPs now and should hit the 1 million mark sometime next week, becoming the first Supernova Elite on PokerStars this year. I'm not exactly sure of the reason, but it really motivates me to try to be the first/best at things, even when it's goofy stuff like this. There's no reward for being first (other than watching people say "omg that Jorj95 is sick, he must play 48 tables for 35 hours a day") but still I feel the need to do it. I started playing seriously on PokerStars in April of 2007, and in May of that year I played pretty much every day and got over 500k VPPs in that month alone, just because I wanted to see how many I could get in a month. The next year I decided I wanted to be the first to hit Elite, and I accomplished it on March 18 (becoming the quickest ever to do it), and ended the year with 3 million VPPs (the highest 1-year total ever).

But my obsession with being the first/best goes way beyond poker. I remember back in about 1997 there was a trivia game on a local BBS where everyone would sit in a chat room and trivia questions would come up every 15 seconds or so and the first person to answer it correctly would get a point. It would tally your score for the month and people were put onto an all-time leaderboard for the best scores in a month. So some retired lady had the record score which was like 3 times as high as anyone else's score, something like 15,000 questions answered in a month. And everyone would say how amazing it is that someone scored that much higher than everyone else. So I decided one month that I wanted to break the record score, so I played this stupid trivia game all month except when I was working or doing other stuff, and ended up crushing her score by getting like 20,000 points, then I never played the stupid game again.

When I worked at the movie theater during the summer before my senior year in high school, someone worked 32 days in a row and everyone thought he was crazy for doing it. So obviously I had to work 37 days in a row (at a minimum wage job) just to do it.

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Since I became a "pro" last week, I've been getting absolutely crushed in the games. I doubt it's related in any way, but it's definitely frustrating. I'm 0/10 in step 6s since then (at $2100 a pop). I'm pretty sure I have an edge in these, but when my average game is around $100 buyin, obviously losing 10 $2100 buyins in a row is going to affect my results a lot. In a way it makes me not want to play them because of how much it affects my results and I doubt my edge is all that big, but part of me enjoys the silliness of playing a 10 minute tournament with a $2100 buyin. I might reconsider if I lose another 10 in a row though.

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Thanks to everyone for the congratulations on signing with PokerStars, whether it be through chat during the games, private messages on 2p2, in my Well thread, or here on this blog. There's no way I can respond to everyone but just know that I do appreciate and am thankful for every comment. I would never have gotten where I am without you guys taking an interest in what I do.