Hello People,

I am back from a few months absence. Since Jan 1st 2011, I have been grinding like 35 Hours a week online on the 1/2 NL stakes on Ipoker. Been grinding 6-8 tables for about 80K hands a month.

What keeps me motivated to grind this kind of volume every week? First of all I got a great rakeback deal, so I get alot of rakeback every month grinding this volume. But I think my best motivation is setting goals for myself. At the start of 2011 I set a goal in How much rake i want to produce in a year (in other words, how much rakeback i want to get in a year). I broke this goal down is seperate month goals and with this i already calculated in vacations and sickdays and stuff. So now i know how much I need to rake every month to reach my goal. Every 1st of the month I take my calender and pick my grind days. On the days i grind I make sure i rake a minimum of $400. This way i can reach my goals and still keep pretty much all my weekends free :D

Playing like 80.000 hands a month can be pretty ruff. I can get pretty sick swings.. Like in Feb i played break even for 50.000 hands and then had a killer final week. And in March up till now I am break even, but had like 4 sessions were I dropped more then 10 Buy ins.. Last year I used to quit when i was having a terrible session. But now that i have my goals i just grind it out and make sure i reach my $400 rake of the day. In a way I am more in piece with the varience poker bring then last year. I am pretty sure i can handle the dailey swings pretty good. But I think i need to stop focussing on the dailey results. Like when I have a bad week I am really disapointed if i run a few buy ins below ev AGAIN. But actually i shouldn't give a shit. I know in the long run it will even out, but somehow when i run a few sessions below EV I expect to run above EV the next sessions. But ofcourse poker is a cruel game and it doensn't work that way. I read once that Leatherass never looks at his monthresults untill the end of the month. I would like to learn how to do this.. to give me some piece of mind in the process of the month :) It can be prety frustrating to be break even after 50k hands and still have like 1 week left to play in the month to make some money. I hope i can do the same as leatherass in the future..... In the mean while... i just need to find a peacefull place for the dailey swings of poker :D

I wish I knew how to post a picture in here, so I could show a graph :)

Gr. Morten