So far this month/year, I've played about 11k hands of 2/4 NL and 3/6 NL. The month was going pretty poorly for a while. I was down about 1.5k about halfway through, but this weekend I made bank. Today, I played 1.5k hands of 2/4 and 3/6 and I found the biggest fish I've seen in a LOOOONG time. He was playing 61/3/.2 or something like that. Best part was that it was at 3/6 and he had about $1800 on the table. He kept reloading too. All said and done, I took 2k from him and won about 4.2k for the day. That is by far the most I've won in one day. It felt great especially since I had a decently big day yesterday as well. Between the 2/4 and 3/6, I'm running at 5.79 ptbb/100 so that is good.

Anyway, I have been keeping up with my poker goals of reviewing my sessions. Either immediately after a session or right before a session, I'll take a look at hands from the previous session. Usually I'll look at the top 5 winners and top 5 losers and see if there is anything I could do better. I also started posting more here on CR which I hadn't done in quite a while. So 2008 is starting off good, hopefully I can keep it up....

In my last post, I talked about some of my goals in poker for '08. While poker is a very good source of extra income right now for a lot of us, one needs to diversify their methods for making money. Over time, being able to earn superior returns in the stock market will be a very worthwhile goal. Earning just a few percent more than the overall market can make you hundreds of thousands, or millions of dollars wealthier. With that, I am really applying myself to learn as much as I possibly can about the stock market.

My goal is to be able to comfortably value most companies with a reasonable amount of confidence. I've already read quite a few books on value investing and I feel that is the best way to beat the market. As a poker player, looking for value situations makes the most sense to me. There are still a few more books on the subject that I plan on reading in the coming months. As I learn some of the methods, I will be practicing valuing companies and analyzing their fundamentals. Another way to help me learn is to get a subscription to one of the Motley Fool services. I have done a one month trial subscription to both Hidden Gems and Stock Advisor, and really found value in both. I'm still not sure which one I'll go with for the full year (probably Stock Advisor).

I don't know when I'll actually make my first stock purchase. I'm in no rush. I really want to learn as much as I can before I take the plunge into the markets. This is rather similar to how I approached poker in the beginning. I read a bunch of books before I started playing seriously with real money.

We'll see how it goes.

I've never had a blog before. It's something I've wanted to do for a while now. As an introduction, my name is Wally and I've been playing poker seriuosly for about 3 or 4 years now. Currently, I play mid stakes NL 2/4 and 3/6. I have a full time job doing web usability so thankfully I don't rely on poker for my income. My blog is going to consist of a multitude of different topics including poker, business and investing, psychology, web usability, and of course my everyday life.

For the new year, I do have some goals in many different areas. For poker, I don't have any specific monetary goals for the year. If I can a few grand a month, I'll be happy. The fact that I don't NEED to win in order to survive makes playing much more enjoyable. As most of us here at Card Runners, I want to improve my game. I definitely improved my game throughout 2007. I started at 1/2 and occasionally took shots at 2/4. I got some coaching sessions and worked on my game a lot. Now, I am beating 2/4 pretty soundly. I've been playing 3/6 semi regularly (not that many hands yet), but am still in the red there. So my goal for '08 is to simply improve my game. That can be measured by the amount of money I win, stakes I am playing, or winrate. But how do I go about improving my game? I'm going to do a few things differently this year. After every session, I am actually going to review some of the hands from the session. I'll try to see where I could have played a hand better. And for a select few hands, I'm going to regularly try to calculate hand ranges and plug into pokerstove. Over time, this practice will help me accurately assess people's hand ranges and hence play more profitably. I also want to start posting and replying to more threads. The other way that I hope to improve my winrate is improve my table selection. I currently practice decent table selection. I color code the good and bad players and look for tables with more bad players. I'm looking into getting Smart Buddy to help find fish at different sites.

I'll post my goals investing in a later post.