The New Plan for September

I didn't play hand of poker during the stretch from August 5th to the August 19th. This is the longest I've gone without playing poker in the 7 years that I've been playing poker seriously. For those of you who may not have heard the reason why was my wife Jen and I had our first child (Peyton Wesley Huff) on August 9th (you can get all the details and look at pictures on our other blog www.thehuffs.wordpress.com).

I got back to work playing 3/4 days last week and started back with full time this week. So far I've had mixed results. The past few days I've ditched the cash games gone back to playing single table Sit-n-go tournaments (SNG's) which were my bread and butter for years. While I haven't exactly been smoking the competition I've done OK and at least I've felt in control and like I've been making good decisions.

And now, I have a plan! It's critical to have a plan when things haven't been going as well as you'd like. If nothing else having a plan will keep you from thinking "ACK! WHAT THE HELL AM I GOING TO DO!" If the plan doesn't work you come up with a new plan and keep trying until something else works.

My latest plan is to play sixty-five $60 SNG's a day (which should take about 8 hours playing 6 at a time), 20 days next month, which amounts to 1,300 tournaments. I know for a fact that pokerstars will give me 115,050 FPP's for my efforts which will be worth $1,835. If I can make another $2.50 per tournament that will be another $3,250 which along with the FPP money is enough to pay the bills. If I can make $4-$5 per tournament like I think I should realistically be able to do then there will be a few thousand bucks left over for a rainy day.

It sounds so easy when I think about it that way. Of course I am my own biggest enemy sometimes and the only reason why some of my past plans have failed. If I start to do really well early on I have a tendency to lose motivation to play enough volume and if I do really poorly I get frustrated and playing becomes torturous. I'm hoping to have a steady, solid winning month and if I don't I'm going to do my best to hurdle my classic pitfalls.

Another thing that could change the plan is the WCOOP which starts on September 14th and runs through the 30th. I'm still working out how many events I'm going to play (probably 5-8) and if I happen to do really well I'll probably scrap the latest SNG plan since I'll be swimming in dough.