2010 meets 2011
Seems like the fashionable thing to do at the start of the new year is discuss how you intend to kick ass/not suck so much in the coming year and look back in the previous in review. Let's begin in review:
Overall I fell quite good about the degree of productivity, accomplishment, and experiences throughout 2010. For a few months at the beginning of the year I was pretty close to having everything I could ever ask for. After January I spent a few months in an intensive work period where I was playing five or six days a week, working out twice a day six days a week, dieting to cut weight, and maintaining a very active social life plus a relationship I was really excited about. Around February or March I went off to New Zealand to work on the book, and while it has yet to be released I'm told it's highly probable we see it this year. In April I found out my ability to live in Australia had ended and would have to make travel plans to return to the United States. I moved away in late April to a house in Las Vegas owned by Luckychewy and filled with phenomenal online poker playing friends. I felt somewhat exasperated watching the life I'd spent five years building down under get ripped away, but I did what I could to hit the ground running in Vegas, keep up my work ethic, and attempt to create a new social circle. The results were mixed; I reconnected with a lot of people in the industry I knew from my years spent at the WSOP and made some new friends around town, but Vegas has a sort of disconnected and transient vibe to it. I had a couple parties this summer that were a great time and I'm sure we'll do more in the future, but I've discovered I don't really care for the full blown "party scene" of Las Vegas. When I tell people I've moved there they always react with something like "What?! You live in Vegas? You can't live there, there's too much crazy going on!" or "Oh man, you must have the sickest party life style living there!" Nope, not really. From what I can tell the people who move to Vegas and become enamored with the never ending party that is the strip wind up wasting a great deal of their time being consumed by it. Most locals seem to despise the place, and in a surprising amount of cases, most other people around them. Everyone has a certain suspicion about each other, a concern that their motives are more than just friendly or sociable. Instead, Vegas has turned into the one place where I truly get work done. My office is upstairs, my gym/grocery store are across the street, my tennis courts are a five minute walk away, and every here and there I leave my Bermuda triangle of productivity to have dinner or meet a few friends for whatever on the strip. I believe that I have been out drinking and partying in Vegas just three or four times since the end of the WSOP.
Career opportunities seemingly came out of nowhere. I was scouted by Matt Palmer's agency in June after they'd asked around about sociable, presentable up and coming pros and kept coming up with my name. I'd long assumed that the business side of the poker world had no interest in me and whatever opportunities there had been I'd personally imploded, but Matt saw a different kind of potential in my outside the box thinking and blunt blogging. The assumption was it would take a while to build up towards anything and the onus was really on me to take my shit to the next level and get him the kind of results he could market. Things took an unexpected acceleration at the WSOP, where I cashed six times and ran deep in the main event. A few weeks later I was in my first job interview in nearly eight years and wound up walking with a position that put me on TV once a week in the 9th season of the WPT. A few weeks after that the WSOP episodes aired. It's a strange thing to spend so long in the industry then get a lot of exposure all at once, in the minds of people that don't spend their life in the industry they see it as far more establishing and credibility-lending than it is. All of a sudden those previous eight years you spent throwing your life away on a game weren't a throw away at all, why, we saw you on TV! Things must be great! Not that I'm complaining at all, the whole experience was a thrill and Norman Chad was most complimentary of my demeanor and antics.
On an every day level, nothing has changed. But every now and then, I get one of those surreal little experiences that wouldn't be possible without the exposure. Perhaps my favorite two happened within just a few days of each other and are on the opposite side of the people-reacting-to-your-image spectrum. When I arrived home from a trip to Asia and Los Angeles I was waiting for my luggage at the Las Vegas airport baggage claim wearing a suit and listening to my Ipod loud enough that I was serenely oblivious to the world around me. On the other side of the claim I noticed that a well dressed middle aged man was making eye contact with me and apparently trying to say something. I removed my headphones, excused myself, and asked him what he'd said.
"I was just saying that I wanted to tell you that I thought you brought a lot of class to the world series this year."
"Oh thanks man, I appreciate that…" I took a closer look at the man, noticed his familiarity, and continued with "Hey wait a minute, aren't you Bruce Buffer?"
"Yes, yes I am."
We chatted about poker, the upcoming Five Diamond WPT event, and his hosting a MMA awards show that weekend that would prevent him from playing the tournament at the Bellagio. He was quite flattering and charming, and once we'd grabbed our bags we wished each other luck with your respective responsibilities and went about our separate ways.
A few days later I was at the Bellagio for the Five Diamond series. We were on break from a tournament and I needed the bathroom, but never bother with the one right outside the Fontana room because it's always packed and there's one down by the shops that there's never any wait for, plus I enjoy a few minutes of getting away from the constant poker banter. While strolling through the hallway I was about to walk past an unknown short man of perhaps 35 when he made direct eye contact at me, stopped, pointed as I walked by and stated "You're a toolbag" then kept moving. I stood there for a few seconds soaking the moment in, then deliberated whether I should double back and politely explain to the man that Bruce Buffer had assured me of quite the opposite, but then decided to continue on to the bathroom and take a well needed crap.
I like to think I am well prepared for being hated on. I've hung out on internet forums for six years posting on all matters of my thought process both in poker plus many other topics and have been all varying degrees of criticized, insulted, and trolled. It seems especially inevitable in our industry of choice as well as quite prevalent in a number of others, particularly hip-hop if I'm to believe what all these rappers are telling me. Seems to me if you're going to make a name of yourself for being an out-spoken eccentric, you'd better be prepared to know that not everyone is going to see shit your way and some are going to express it less politely than others. I think a lot of people are just generally much too reactive to this kind of thing and often exacerbate their problems by making some immediately tempered remark or forum post and wind up looking a bit foolish in the end. I know because I've been there. I think if people want to take the piss out of you best to just sit back and let them and not bother to get involved in all of it unless someone is spreading flat out lies that could really damage your reputation. If people are just shooting off their opinion your chances of convincing them of otherwise with anything you retort is pretty low, so just chill and go about your business. Don't worry, they'll get bored and go back to hating Doug Lee soon.
From a strictly poker perspective, 2010 was pretty excellent. It was the second most profitable year of my career behind 2008. It was especially relieving knowing that 2009 had been the first losing year of my career, which I predominately attribute to a lack of focus on the game. I closed out the year running hot on a Sunday and winning the Tilt 100r turbo for about $50,000 after having spent the months of September and October studying and working hard but steadily losing. I'm starting to feel like the work is paying off in my game but I can tell I still have a long way to go. Although the WSOP was good and I final tabled an Aussie Millions event, I didn't do much else in the way of live poker but I suppose that I also didn't play a ton of it. I think my live poker volume over the course of the year was about 40-50 tournaments but I'm certainly too lazy to actually figure out what it is until I have to do taxes or something.
Naturally, I'm looking forward to 2011. My travel schedule is pretty made up for the first six months: I'm currently in Australia and staying here until the 17th of February, then going to the LAPC from the 17th through early March, then I'm back in Vegas from all of March through July. I'll be at the WPT Shooting Star in San Jose in mid March, then the WPT Hollywood Poker Open in Indiana in early April, with it all finishing at the WPT Championship in late May. Not long after the WSOP begins and lasts for six weeks. After that things are a bit unknown, but that's half a year pretty much sorted.
I've decided between the time I get back from LA in early March and the beginning of the WSOP I'm putting myself through another multi-month period of massive poker grinding/study plus an attempt at getting down to 6-8% body fat area. I feel like both my poker game and my fitness need a few more months of intense work to really get them to that next level and I don't think I'll have an opportunity to pull something like that off for a while after. I've only got two mandatory travel destinations in that period but they aren't long trips that would ruin my routine. Although I never had troubles getting myself to put in the work during these periods I've hired a trainer at the gym and set him in charge of making sure I execute every last detail of diet and exercise in order to realize the end goal. I apologize if I decline your social invitations during that period or accept only to join you out "for drinks" then sit there and slowly sip a water while I droll on about how much I fucking hate you for being able to eat carbohydrates. I'll be normal again in June.
I don't have any formal poker goals for 2011. I have arbitrary ones that are generally outside my control like winning a Sunday major or a large live tournament but I know that much of whether those things happen is decided by variance. Principally I set my goals on the things I can control: I want to make increasingly excellent and thoughtful decisions, I want to continue putting an emphasis at sitting and watching live poker when I play in major tournaments, I want to keep working from home on staying current on poker logic and theory, I want to be responsible the night before a tournament and not show up recovering from a big night of drinking and carousing, I want to put in high volume during the periods I have designated to poker. If being ambitious and thorough about the things I can control winds up turning up roses then awesome, if not then I guess I'll just have to go back and keep working at it.
Of course, my final and clearly most important goal is to repeat as champions with Leo Murphy at the Doyle Brunson Beer Pong Classic. It is my only genuine and validating accomplishment within the industry, and if it is taken away from me they will find me in a dungy hotel room the next morning with the gun that painted my brains all over the wall still smoking in my hand.