I realize I’ve been a really sucky blogger over the past few weeks. I wish I had better excuses - or at least more interesting ones - than just “I’ve been busy at work.” Sadly, this is the core of the problem. I don’t mean to make it sound like I’m complaining about that fact though, because I’m not. I wouldn’t want to work anywhere else, and I really enjoy working with the people I do, but with the current situation of balancing “we have too much work to handle” and “we don’t know that we’ll stay in this beneficial situation forever so we don’t want to hire too many people” it just gets a bit much for the ones who are trying to organize the work. And I’m one of those.

As I mentioned a week and a half ago, I need to send one of my guys to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia next week and I decided to go with him. I’ve been needing to make that trip for quite awhile but there’s always been other more pressing things to tend to, it seems. But now it’s way overdue, and I get to go there right before christmas. Good thinking there, Freddy. I’ll be flying out Monday morning, land on Tuesday afternoon local time and be there until Wednesday the week after that. If everything goes as planned - and flights rarely do - I’ll be home a few days before christmas. Come home, get some sleep, go to work and fill out the report, and then off to my parents for three very packed days of meeting the relatives. Ah, and then drive up to Stockholm to catch a flight to Lori’s parents in Minnesota; yeah, I’ll be spending the holidays mostly on the way from one place to another.

Now I’m making it sound like I’m complaining again, aren’t I? Sorry about that.

I’ve been reading a lot of other blogs to get an idea of what works and what doesn’t, in a poker blog setting. I’ve basically come to the conclusion that being yourself seems to work, and trying to blog what you think others expect or want doesn’t. That’s both a relief and a problem for me. It’s a relief because it means I don’t have to try to be something I’m not in order to write something people will find interesting, but it makes it a hell of a lot harder to come up with stuff to write.

I mean, let’s compare me to some of the big names in poker blogs:

- I’m not a poker professional.
- I’m not a dealer and/or play live a whole lot. I can’t share tales from casinos.
- I’m not famous.
- I’m not a successful author who people flock to for strategy tips.
- I’m not an official blogger for a poker site.
- I don’t copy/paste interesting stuff into impressive uber posts.

Don’t get me wrong on copy/pasting into uber posts, I think Iggy’s pretty cool and I read his blog often. It’s just not me, and even if it would feel like something I would be comfortable doing, I’d be a copy-cat (pun intended) who just performed a weaker version of what someone else does better. I don’t know how that works, but somehow my mind tells me that it’s better for me to be a piss-poor original than a decent copy-cat.

As you can see, my advances at $5/$10 so far have been less than stellar. This is only over 5,000 hands so I’m not ready to give up on poker yet but it’s still unfortunate. Some of it comes from lack of adjusting to the opposition, some of it from just being a donkey and tilting, some of it from unfortunate beats and some of it from just plain old sucking. All in all, I’ve got to get better. I’d love to lean back and think “hey, it’s just a downswing” but I don’t like that mindset; not when I know I’m making mistakes. I’ll happily attribute any losses to variance as long as I think I’ve played well, and quite frankly, I haven’t been lately. I take some kind of weird consolation in the fact that I can think I’m actually beating the other players, but not the rake. Yeah, that feels better.

…

CRAP. I almost lost the entire post when I made the mind-numbingly stupid move of surfing away from the input window. I was going to look for some fun reference to add to the end of this post. Fortunately, clicking “back” salvaged the situation when I panicked and wondered where the post went, so now I’m going to just post it before I accidently lose it all.

Have a great weekend!

Fredrik