137 Days

This is the first (and what now seems rather lengthy) of many posts which I hope to use in effort of motivating myself through the daily grind, and to keep a record of, well, my roller coaster ride I call life. Primarily aimed at my life in poker and my pursuit to become one of the top 45 man grinders on Pokerstars, I have 137 days to reach my goal, and I'm going to need every one of them.

I am currently 22 and living in Dallas, TX. Even though I've lived in Wisconsin for most of my life, I have chosen to volunteer 12 months of my life to the AmeriCorps VISTA program, and to take a year off of my studies at the University of Wisconsin. I am currently 7 months into my 12 month journey which is scheduled to end at the beginning of 2011.

When I return to UW-Madison, I will happily return to my life of studying Physics and Computer Science, and finally fulfill my daily regimen of nerdiness and numbers again-- And of course to see many of my great friends again as it has been way too long. I guess you could consider me of above average intelligence; I have a MENSA qualifying IQ, but other than being a resume builder, I could care less about MENSA. I study one of the hardest majors at one of the hardest universities in the world but I could still care less. I thrive on absolutely difficult problems, they are just fun to me, and what better of a way to provide myself with exceptionally difficult problems than to provide myself with continuous puzzles and problems with Poker.

I play primarily on Pokerstars under the screen name BakaGaijin34 and for the most part play 45 man turbos. Up until recently I mostly played $6.50 and under 45s, but with the help of Bigbluffzinc (Coacher/Backer) I have been playing many $12 games as well as some $27s as well. I honestly haven't put in enough volume yet to see if I am profitable yet at these levels, but I'm sure BigBluff wouldn't put me there unless he knew I was going to crush the games. It's actually funny to think of crushing games with people like frenzuh, msusyr24, AAralyn, and many other super solid regs, but that is exactly what I hope to do. I know exactly what I'm capable of, and to be honest I feel like the only thing holding me back at this point is my lack of time. I get to play maybe 20% of the volume I need to/should get in on a weekly/monthly basis. Most regs get more games in during a month than I have played cumulatively.

Even with my lack of time, I study my HHs, my numbers, my ranges, my opponent's ranges, variance, and how the game is continuously evolving, because let's face it, if you don't put in the work, you won't get anything back.

I hope to post my stats every few posts so that everyone can see my progress, which will be a motivator to hopefully not lose money, as this will be the baseline for everybody to see :)