"Young poker players should take a page out of his playbook. Just shut the fuck up, leave the sunglasses at the pool, and just play cards."

- Dr Pauly

Amen to that. If only I were able to do that all the time I'd be a better player and better person. Can't manage to be perfect all the time though so for now I'll just have to try and keep upping my percentages. You've probably noticed, especially if you were kind enough to read this blog last year, that my poker playing and thinking has recently hit a limbo. I haven't played for any long stretches since November last year, and I keep wavering between "this is easy" - "I want to win every pot" - "I want to play brilliantly" - "I can't be bothered" - "I'm bored". For the last week I have been of the "I want to play brilliantly" mindset. That doesn't mean I have played brilliantly, but I've done ok. I doubled my bankroll on Stars playing .25/.50 which had taken a knock from many tourney entries and no cash games to keep it ticking along. I love playing tournaments because of the scope for creativity, and promise of a pot of gold, but cash games are bread-and-butter in the real world even though they can be boring.

Ok so where's this post going ? We've heard about how my motivation dropped off in the last 6 months, well one of the traps I feel into was thinking "it's the bloggerment on Sunday, I'll just blog after that". That's lazy. I know some of you aren't as lazy as I've been and blog mostly whenever you play, you know who you are, good stuff ! The rest of ya, we're interested in what you do day to day between Sundays, especially if it involves poker, but mostly just for voyuerism or escapism. So please blog during the week, so I have something interesting to fill my days with past Tuesday lunchtime !

And finally, our more experienced cousins in America are getting together for yet another WPBT event. I'm jealous. I'd love to join them. So I hereby laydown the guantlet. Your challenge, should you choose to accept it is to get a respectable bankroll together by 01 May 2008, so that together we can fan the flames of international bad beat stories. Beg, steal, borrow, throw bankroll management out of the window. Do whatever it takes. It's high-time we planned to put faces to names and make our mark on Vegas, after all why should they have all the liver damage and not us !! If we really soar beyond expectations maybe we'll even get 'rolled for the WPBT Winter Classic in early December !

Who's Coming With Me ?!!