The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

It's almost that time of year.  A poker player's Christmas-time, otherwise known as the World Series of Poker.

Unfortunately in past versions of this poker-Christmas, I've given away a lot more gifts than I've received.  I've played around 150 WSOP events in my life, and have only 4 small cashes to show for it.  Last year I played 37 events and had zero cashes, which is just ridiculous and immensely frustrating.

And even though I realize that a sample of 150 tournaments doesn't mean much in the grand scheme of my poker life, it's annoying to have that monkey still on my back.  Many of my friends have a bracelet or 2, and they talk like it's the easiest thing to just win a tournament here and there, and it's implied that I must be doing something wrong to have not won one yet.  Meanwhile many of them have won a lot less money than I have overall in poker (excluding the WSOP), but there's still a part of me that really wants to be successful at the WSOP for reasons that go way beyond money.

So is this the year that I finally break the streak?  I sure hope so, but so much of it is out of my hands.  Obviously it takes skill to win a tournament, but it also takes an incredible amount of luck (and I'd say this even if I was up a million dollars at the WSOP).  I feel a calm confidence in myself this year, as if I just expect good results.  Part of it probably has to do with winning the SCOOP Player of the Series last week.  I feel like I can compete with the best in any game (not that I didn't feel like that before, but winning the award definitely didn't hurt my confidence).  In past years I can recall being a little nervous in the days leading up to the WSOP, but I haven't felt that at all this year.  Whether that made any difference in my results is difficult to determine (I tend to think it didn't, but it's so hard to say really).

Anyway, enough rambling, first event is Friday, we'll see how it goes.

I will be updating at the end of most days on here, but if you want to follow me during the day, I will be updating my twitter every 2 hours or so with updates from whatever tourney I'm in.  There's a link to my twitter account on the right, or you can just click here.