2012 turned out to be a really good year. It was my most profitable year as a poker professional. I also managed to luckbox the Sunday Supersonic for my biggest tournament cash. It was a momentous year as well, with my wife giving birth to a beautiful baby girl to give us "one of each". I'll go into the year a little more in depth month by month:
January:
I began the year with the lamest SNE attempt in history, whereby I quit after 12 days
("To SNE or not to SNE"). I certainly did chop and change the specific games I was playing throughout the year. Things didn't get off to the best start, I put lot of hours in over the first couple of weeks and got no-where, but after bailing on SNE they picked up. TCOOP fell in the 2nd half of January and I decided to play a few events and was lucky enough to make 2 final tables in events where I had only a basic idea of what I was doing, finishing 5th in the $82 Limit Omaha Hi/Lo and 4th in the $109 HORSE.
February:
My daughter Alaina was born on the 2nd February
("My Second Born"), so much of February was spent on Paternity leave. Learning how to cope with 2 children instead of 1 was a steep learning curve, but I think we've got the hang of it now! I ended up playing a couple of Sunday schedules which I don't usually do, and most of the games I did play were tournaments. With no binks this led to me having my only losing month of the year (I think I did rather well to get a brag in there when you see the graph below!)
March:
Before getting fully back into the swing of things I played a couple of live tournaments in March (
"Lol (live) donkaments"). I managed to get a pretty decent sweat in both, finishing 15/643 in the £500 DTD Deepstack with £85k up top, and then bubbling the final table with £20k up top in the Poker £770 event (which had an insane structure). On the plus side these were my first Hendon Mob flags since December 2009. I then proceeded to grind out a decent couple of weeks back online.
April:
It would be fair to say I ran rather well in April
("The positive side of variance"). Along with many others I applied to PokerStars Team Online in April. With the popularity of this blog I thought I had a real shot, but didn't end up getting anywhere with it. Truthfully Team Online was a large factor in me putting in a lot of effort with my blog several years ago. However, when you realise the last guy they added to the roster was Isaac Haxton, I'm obviously no-where near his league, so perhaps my ambitions weren't realistic. This is part of the reason I've been posting less over the last few months (I'm also ridiculously busy and don't have much spare time).
May:
In May I got incredibly lucky and binked the Sunday Supersonic for $51k (YouTube video of my victory with hole cards:
http://youtu.be/J8DTRqbZibA). It's worth noting that from the beginning of the year until this bink I was backed for $30+ MTTs, so I 'only' got half the winnings, and I was in some make-up at the time too. Nevertheless it was still a huge one-off score for me.
It's very rare that I grind Sunday tournaments like a lot of other grinders, so for me to win a Sunday Major in few attempts is pretty absurd. Not only that, I was down to 435 chips from a 3k starting stack (which represented 1.5 big blinds at the time) and went into the final table with a big stack thanks to binking J8 vs A9, with 11 people left, when the board ran out 9297...T
June:
With May's bink giving me a little bit of breathing room financially, I did a bit of experimenting in June. It seemed like a good time to stop being such a variance-nit, and I stopped being backed for $30+ MTTs as mentioned above. It was something I never really needed, but I found it helped me deal with bigger swings than I was used to. In an attempt to do a flip turn in relation to variance avoidance, I experimented playing $30-$200 hyper turbos in this time, and inevitably had a swingy month.
Fortunately I hit some run good towards the end of the month to send me on my family holiday in a pretty good mood. Me, my wife and our two little ones went to Ibiza for a week. As you can imagine it wasn't the most relaxing week ever, but it was very nice and was good to spend a guilt-free week away from the computer.
July:
I hit a nice little milestone for the blog in July as it passed 500,000 hits
("Half a million hits?!!"). I stepped away from my 6-max hyper experiment, and focused mostly on MTTs and SNGs with sync breaks. This turned out quite well as I churned out a solid month at the tables.
August:
Volume took a hit in August thanks to a Golfer's elbow condition that made it painful to play, and required rest to heal
("Armistice"). It's always a bit worrying when you are incapacitated from playing, as obviously there is no sick pay for poker professionals. Although it took a good 3 weeks to clear up, I was just very pleased that it did. Although there wasn't quite a wound to rub salt in, a $5k downswing didn't really do much to lift my spirits. Not the best month!
September:
A huge volume fail occurred in September, but fortunately I managed to go on a God run. I think it was a consequence of my motivation lying elsewhere. I decided to start running in September
("Couch to 5k"), as a means to get fit which I hoped would ultimately improve my concentration at the poker tables when playing. I started listening to the Couch to 5k podcasts by the NHS, which I highly recommend to anyone interested in running/getting fit who currently do little or no exercise. I stuck with the program, and I really enjoyed doing it. I can now run 7km fairly comfortably, without stopping, and feel much better for it!
Elsewhere, I narrowly missed out on winning a package to the Caribbean
("A bit of a sweat") at the end of the month, but in doing so at least made my first live final table in 3 years (alebit there were only 31 runners, lolz)
October:
This was the most frustrating month of the year as it was the month
("October Review") I put in the most effort in, in terms of hours played and consecutive days played. I was annoyed with myself for slacking so hard in September and vowed to make up for it. Unfortunately I had a long stretch where I just couldn't win. Obviously stretches like this are to be expected, it was just annoying that I was rewarded in September for being lazy, but punished in October for working hard.
Having been a PokerStars-only guy for at least a couple of years, I started to add a few games from other sites to my daily schedule. It worked out well for me as this is where many of my good results game from. Thankfully I managed get out of it by the end of the month.
November:
I essentially spent November experimenting in different games to see if I could realistically take a shot at SNE in 2013. I played some Fifty50s and 6-max hypers. I was pretty lucky that I ran really well in these games, although to be fair I only regained all-in equity I had lost earlier in the year. After much dicking about with various schedules I decided that it would be too difficult to sustain SNE pace, plus I just couldn't see myself wanting to play Fifty50s and/or 6-max hypers all year.
December:
I ran rather well in December and finished playing on the 19th to take Christmas off. I realise it's probably a decent time of year to grind with games potentially being softer, but not really an option with family obligations. Christmas was nice, my wife and mother-in-law went a bit nutso with presents so Clark and Alaina had plenty to open on Christmas Day. It was the first year Clark was really understanding of what was going on (he's 3) so that was pretty cool to watch.
2012 Overall:
So a very successful year. The only thing I was disappointed with was my lack of volume. I don't feel like I put in a sufficient amount of hours over the course of the year. Yes I did have a newborn baby, and I messed up my elbow for a couple of weeks as well, but I think I could have grinded a decent amount harder. This is something I will be looking to rectify in 2013. Something I did do well in 2012 was to get fit, and I'm determined to stick with this in 2013 and hopefully reap the benefits :)
Best of luck to you all in 2013!
Links:
A few pics from the year:
