After going near-bust a few months ago, and - stupidly - deciding to cure my deteriorating play by grinding out a bazillion hands in order to reach Pokerstars Supernova, I’m now in the convenient situation of not having to stress and hurry my poker anymore. I’m going to mentally start over, take my time and re-learn the game to figure out where I went wrong. I definitely have some areas that I’m more interested in looking at than others, but part of this involves me taking a lot more time to study in general, and to study the psychological part of the game in specific. I’ve just gotten Alan Schoonmaker’s “Your Worst Poker Enemy” along with Taylor/Hilger’s “The Poker Mindset” and I’m going to start by skimming through those to see if I can get a quick overview of what the current problem is with my poker-state-of-mind, and then dive in more carefully on the chapters that I think will be the most important to me.

The next step is finding a coach and/or partner to discuss more in-depth with. Discussing hands and plays on a message board is good, but I think direct feedback from someone who knows me and my style of play is going to help a lot more. A constructive partnership like this ought to be beneficial for both ends, of course, and I think even critiquing someone else’s play is going to strengthen my own ultimately. Nothing revolutionary about this, of course.

I’m going to start diversifying my play more. I’m not going to “switch” to NL the way many have done, but I’m going to start playing more different styles of poker, including, for instance, Omaha. This might not be the most profitable choice, but I want to keep poker mentally challenging and refreshing.

I’m going to play drastically fewer hands. This means that I can kiss Supernova status goodbye and there will be no more 8-tabling sessions. The focus is on quality, not quantity, for 2008.

I’m going to spend as much time playing poker as analyzing hands that I’ve played and various other forms of studying.

I’m going to make a real plan for 2008.

… and it’s going to entail 2008 being the best poker year so far, for me.

I’ll be faithfully documenting my progress in this here blog as I go along. Input and suggestions are, as always, welcome.

Happy new year - let’s make it a good one.