Missy and I traveled down to Mississippi to visit mom, dad, and my sis for the holiday. It was great, as usual, to see everyone. In our family we don't ever really do much when visiting except hang out and watch tv/movies/college football but it's what we like to do so it's all good.

I had to convince my mom she needed to get some high speed internet since I couldn't be away from my various projects/responsibilities for 5 days, so it was nice she found a good deal to make that happen.

This month in poker is going really bad, I've tilted some, played sub-optimally, and ran terribly. Broken record on this blog, I know. This month is the first time in a very long time I've had any sort of tilt issues, which is frustrating. Probably down about 4-5k from tilt this month. Unacceptable.

It's hard to believe I'm closing in on one year of being a "professional poker player." There have definitely been some surprises this year, lots of highs and lots of lows. The stress of it all was much greater than I had anticipated, and I felt like I had a pretty realistic view of how things would be. I tend to put a lot of pressure on myself to be very good at whatever I do, so the low points of this year have taken quite a mental toll on me. The high points have been good though. I'll save the yearly recap ranting for sometime in late december.

I've been crazy busy with my various poker and non-poker related projects. It's been hard to find a lot of time to play. Sort of hard for me to believe that back in the spring i was putting in 80k hand months when now I'm barely breaking past 30k hands. I spent a lot more time back then just grinding it out on tons of tables whereas now I've got a lot of responsibilities with coaching, Preemas.com and my other project. The stress is definitely mounting. I was hoping that I'd have a chance to get some R&R over thanksgiving but I think sometimes taking time to spend on things besides all these projects just makes the stress even more unbearable because it's that much longer until everything gets done. That said, I wouldn't trade the time spent with my family for anything.

What an interesting year it's been... I've got basically one month left to make what I can and then it's off to 2008. I'm not sure what my career plans will be for 2008 but I'm sure poker will play a big role. Hopefully these "side" projects will turn into something so all the time/effort/stress involved is worth it.

Sad that college football season is coming to a close but Southern Miss will be in the PapaJohns.com bowl in Birmingham, AL this year on Dec 22nd (ESPN2). I don't think their opponent has been determined yet but it's likely to be UCONN. Related to that, the head coach got fired today at So Miss, so that was somewhat surprising. Jeff Bower has had 14 straight winning seasons and like 10 bowl appearances in his 17 year stint. This year they definitely under achieved but still they're guaranteed a winning season and a bowl. Generally in CFB when the head coach goes down the assistants are also out of a job, but dad is pretty tight with the athletic director so there's a chance he may be asked to stay on. Who knows. College FB is such a cutthroat business... most people who watch Sportscenter and follow their favorite team think they know how it is but they don't have the slightest clue. I think it would be interesting to do a documentary on the lifestyle of a college football coach just so people would have some idea as to what it takes. There's so much public misconception out there it's ridiculous.

Anyway enough on that... I just hope that Bower's firing in someway helps dad springboard into another job that's closer to KC so I can see him and mom more often. Nebraska is opening and after KU's run perhaps that staff will have an opportunity to go to a bigger program. Who knows, I'm just getting to the point in my life where I'm starting to resent how careers/money are basically the driving force of our lives instead of more important things like family. The sad part is I'm probably the worst offender that I know when it comes to that...spending all this time on poker/coaching/side projects... all for what end? I guess because ultimately I have the dream that I can make enough money to support me and my family such that we can have more time together. I just hope to accomplish my goals before it's too late.

Aaron

The end of the year is quickly coming and it'll be time to start figuring finances for 2007. This year, unlike last, I'm going to make an effort to have all my 07 taxes done in January 2008 as to avoid a bankroll hit and just have it done with. So in preparation for that I decided to make a guide detailing the best way to get a tally of each day's wins and losses so you can use it to help file your taxes. I strongly suggest you hire a CPA or knowledgeable tax professional to help you prepare your taxes.

This guide assumes that you're paying taxes on your poker tracker recorded cash game winnings. If you're like me, you use PT to track all of your +'s and -'s. For US players, we have to tally our + and - by session, and for tax purposes we're assuming in this guide that 1 session is 1 day of playing. This guide will help you export your wins and losses to a text file for easy record keeping and tracking and so you can put a hard copy with your taxes in case of an audit.

The first step is to download and install ActivePerl, a free perl interpreter that will allow you to run perl scripts on your machine. You can download active perl here: Download ActivePerl

Create a directory to be used in this guide, such as c:\pokertax

The next step is to download the perl script that does the dirty work. You can get it on my site at this address: http://www.plusevpoker.com/sessioncalc.pl (right-click, save as)

Put the script in the c:\pokertax directory.

Next, you need to export your PT sessions into .csv files. You can do this by opening your database, go to "ring player statistics", click the "Session Notes" tab, then click the little blue "p" button.



This brings up a window that allows you to print your sessions.

After you click the blue "p", click the "Export..." button to see the screen below:



Choose "Comma Separated" as the file type. This will export a .csv file that the perl script will read. Click the "Browse..." button and navigate to the c:\pokertax directory. Give the file a name such as "sessions.csv". Now click the "Export" button. You should get a message saying the export was successful.

Now go to the start button, click run, and type in cmd.exe --This will bring up a command prompt.

type: cd c:\pokertax (and hit enter)

type dir (press enter)

You should see your .csv file that you exported and you should see the sessioncalc.pl file you downloaded from plusevpoker.com. If you don't see those files, retrace your steps above.

now, to run the command you should type: sessioncalc.pl -v sessions.csv > sessions.txt

This command tells the perl script to look at your exported .csv file and tally up the wins and losses for each day and saving the result in the sessions.txt file.

Now when figuring your taxes you can refer to this sessions.txt file for your total wins and losses.

Note, if you have multiple databases for your play this year, you'll need to export the sessions.csv for each database and run this sessioncalc.pl on each .csv file you export. So for example, I keep a different database for each month of the year so when I export the csv file i'll export january's sessions into a file called jan07.csv then when I run the command i'll put the output into the jan07.txt. So the command looks like this: sessioncalc.pl -v jan07.csv > jan07.txt. Then to see what I made for the year, I'll have to add up the net from each of the months. If you have just 1 database for the entire year then you'll only have to do this process once.

Hope this helps,
Aaron

You should help someone out today. I helped someone out today and it made me feel really good. I probably got more out of it than they did, in some ways, so go help someone today even if it's something small. If more people threw each other a bone, it would be less of a dog eat dog world. So there's my not-so-compelling argument to try to get people to help each other out more. The people who go on mission trips to far away lands are doing good things, no doubt, but there are people in your own towns, maybe down the street, maybe next door, that are in serious need of help. Just do something simple to help out. You don't have to be mother theresa. Go run an errand, or let someone cut in line who is in a hurry, or give a homeless guy some food. Do something for someone else, especially if you're a self centered poker player like me.

Aaron

What a lazy blogger I am.

Things have been so busy and as my priority list grows blogging keeps getting pushed farther and farther down, unfortunately. I really do like making blog entries but it just is more time consuming than you might think and sometimes I just don't have much of value to say (insert whitty "you NEVER have anything good to say joke here"). ya ya ya.

The coaching biz is keeping me real busy. Everyone's having a good time, learning a lot, and crushing. I'm somewhat surprised how many continents I've reached. North America, South America, Europe, and Australia so far. I'm also noticing my hand reading skills becoming better as a result. I would recommend that anyone who thinks they are good at poker, try teaching your friend how to play. Try watching him and explaining why you'd do everything you do. I have a feeling that you'll run into some spots where you'll say "do this" and your friend will say "why?" and you'll have no idea. Take that as a signal that you could have a leak in that spot, or simply that there may be an alternative play that has some merit.

Since I feel like my hand reading has made some nice improvements in the last month or so, I'm going to try to seriously play more HU this month. It's been on my list of goals forever to become better at HU and proficient at PLO, but I think this month I'm actually going to try to make some progress in the HU arena. It's high variance but I think it could be very rewarding to become a good HU player. Plus it makes those HU grudge matches even more tempting to call someone out. *cough hater what? cough*

What else? Well Preemas.com has been coming along nicely. My uncle and I go through ebbs and flows where we'll be 100% on board to making it as good as we can then we work so much on it we're burnt out and have to take a week off. We've got a base skeleton of the site up and running with a solid piece of search functionality, user login, and tabs of the last 7 days worth of dynamic featured products. I'm pretty happy with the current look and feel of the site but there's a lot more functionality we want to implement before we consider the site anywhere close to "done".

My uncle has been playing around with google adwords to help drive traffic to the site. It's amazing to me how much it costs for a click. If you want any sort of popular key word, you're looking at $4-5 per click. If you're depending on those clicks to convert into sales, it's pretty tough to break even off that paying $4 for every click... so the goal is to make the site useful and user friendly enough that people will have a good experience and come back more, so hopefully 1 click doesn't lead to just 1 (or zero) sales.

As far as my actual playing poker this month, I've barely played but of course I've ran terribly so far. I had flush under flush a few times for 150bb+ which has cost a lot. I had a straight flush under straight flush the other day at HU, almost 200bb deep. That was fun. Anyway I've really made an effort to get away from constantly bitching about poker results so I'm going to end the rant there. I've been trying to make a strong effort to be constantly grateful about the things I have in my life. More so than just every once in a while reflecting... I've been really trying to actively be thankful such that when a bump comes in the road, be it poker or whatever, I can attempt to shrug it off. The goal is that a few bad poker hands or someone cutting me off in traffic doesn't phase me at all. So far I think it's helping but I have a ways to go yet still.

Ok, so coaching poker, playing poker, preemas.com, what else have I been doing? Oh ya, super top secret project that I can't blog about. That's taken up a crazy amount of time lately. I'll be able to open that can of worms sometime around the new year. it'll be exciting to talk about and explain and I think it'll help a lot of my blog readers. Enough of a tease yet? Sorry gotta wait a couple months...

One last thing I don't believe I've blogged much about. Every wednesday I've been volunteering at Missy's school being a youth friend to these two second graders. Both these young guys, call them hayden and mack, have a pretty rough home life and need some good male influence. (from a professional gambler? what??? ya i know, right). Anyway it's one of the highlights of my week to go eat lunch and chill with them at school for a while and just talk about life and listen to the crazy stuff they have to say. The best thing about these kids is that you never know what the next thing is that'll come out of their mouth. They're so innocent, curious, and excited about anything and everything. It's great.

From outside sources I've learned that hayden's mom just got laid off, his dad is out of the picture. mack's dad ran off with an 18 year old stripper. It's crazy... and these two kids have every reason in the world to be completely unruly, cause all sorts of trouble and act like the world is against them... yet somehow they always seem to have a smile on their face. They're always excited about the next word game in the classroom, or getting a "panther point" (classroom good behavior reward program), or having a "hot chocolate" party which is nothing more than warm chocolate milk. It's so inspiring to see these kids who are in very hard life situations be so positive. If only we could all hold onto that aspect of our youth. So many of us, especially in the poker world, are so Blessed or "lucky" or whatever you want to call it and we have the audacity to go on huge tirades about being 2 outed or coolered for thousands of bucks that we (and i'm as guilty as anyone) totally lose sight at the big picture life we live.

Anyway, I guess that rounds out where my life has been in the last couple blog-less weeks.

Hopefully more updates more regularly this month.

Aaron