I’ve said before that I tend to have two interests, and if one of those isn’t poker I don’t play at all.  It’s helped my poker laziness that I finally got my first money transfer from Apple for iPhone crap (for March).  It’s not quite at crunch time money-wise where I will need to get a job or start bleeding bankroll money, but it’s getting into the yellow area.

My two interests lately have been hockey playoffs and playing hockey.  I wanted to play ice hockey goalie my whole childhood, but I never bugged my parents enough for them to buy me the pads.  Three years ago I bought a shitty set and played a few times, but never got enough confidence to go to anything other than open practices.  This spring I finally went four or five times and then bought some new leg pads that are actually meant for ice hockey.

Old pads:

New pads:

I’ve been going to three or four pickup games a week, and put my name on the beer league sub goalie list at my local rinks.  Hopefully I can join a team next season.  I’m getting miles better every time and have noticed a huge improvement in my cardio.  It’s also helped me eat a lot better, making sure to lay off the diuretics the day of games, eat tons of carbs a few hours before, and eat/drink some kind of protein after.  I’ve also made a half-joking goal of being able to do the splits in six months.  Stretching twice a day will help my play regardless.

Unless the Capitals pull off another miracle and win two straight, a vacancy will be opening up in my other interest slot.  I think at this point it’s safe to say super turbos will not be filling it.  Hopefully I can start putting in more than the dismal number of hours of heads up I was putting in earlier this spring and maybe start filling up monitor space with some 6max.

As for the iPhone stuff, I spent some time re-evaluating how I was spending coding time (read: being lazy and doing nothing) and decided that the general consensus among the iPhone coders on SA is probably correct.  Unless you get very lucky, a very polished game is not the best way to go, especially as a single developer.  I have a few ideas for quick $1 apps that shouldn’t take more than a few days each.  None of them are big ticket ideas, but neither was Gin Rummy, and I’m just about covering my rent with it alone.  I have one idea for a utility-type app that has one competing app with terrible ratings and sparse features.  The other ideas are mostly silly ideas that are hoping for impulse buys.  We’ll see what works.

JC’s somewhat epic post got me thinking a lot recently.  I suppose it’s not that unusual, but I definitely share the sporadic, dedicated motivation that he talked about.  Poker hasn’t popped back up into the primary role in quite some time, but it is definitely about time for that to happen.  I was getting back into it when I started this blog.  Right after that, all of my iTunes tax info finally went through, and I started making iPhone app sales.  It hasn’t been anything too crazy, but seeing actual positive cash flow threw me right back into being super motivated in programming.  I’ve done a ton of work making my gin rummy game significantly less shitty and also building the backend for a multiplayer version.  I just noticed that this project turned somewhat unexpectedly from “crappy, simple project to learn Objective-C/Cocoa” into very good resume material if I end up going to coding gig route and, even more surprisingly, some actual income.  It’s nothing to write home about, but one or two more projects in the same ballpark could probably cover living expenses.  I certainly have at least two great ideas for my next projects that have a decent chance of taking off.  A gin rummy app can only do so well, but my other ideas are actually fairly unique.  We’ll see.

I rarely have the dedication to concentrate on more than two interests at a time.. it’s usually more like one and a half.  The half has definitely been music lately.  As corny as it sounds, playing Rock Band took me leaps and bounds farther in my drumming ability.  The house I’m living in has a huge garage that’s used as a practice space, so I’ve been trying to take more advantage of that.  I wouldn’t say my technical ability has improved that much, but the way I think about playing is completely different.  Anyone who’s played any kind of improv music knows what it’s like to finally start passing that wall where you’re reproducing memorized patterns/scales and when you feel like you’re actually making the shit in your head come out through the instrument.  I was barely scratching that on trombone at my peak, and at drums it feels like I’m already getting there after playing drums for maybe 20% as long as I did trombone.  It sucks that I don’t have any organized groups to play with right now, but I have been jamming with friends a lot and am going to actually set up some recording equipment this week to start writing stuff.

As for the title of this post and the topic of motivation, it is getting to be hay fever season.  If I were to graph my productivity in school/poker/whatever through any year, there is a sheer drop all through April.  Having itchy eyes, a scratchy throat, and constant sneezing shouldn’t really be that much of an excuse, but it’s hardly coincidence.  In past years, I’ve made false promises about staying productive even while feeling like shit.  This year I have no structured measure of productivity since I finished school.  Maybe my dwindling savings and current complete lack of poker income will be the subject of the promises this year.  Maybe I should make a Leo-style prediction of sitting on my ass, going completely broke, and being disowned by my parents.  At least I don’t have to worry about doing anything silly like trying to go to law school.

Token poker content:  I played a tiny bit of heads up a couple of weeks ago.  I am still pretty confident in my heads up game, but I have always had trouble really grinding more than a couple days a week.  It still boggles my mind how some people just explode heads up.  After playing a very tight dude for an hour or so, almost folding this hand, I made what I thought was a possibly-spewy crying call. WHAT.  Maybe this poker thing is actually worth the time occasionally.

After 300 or so super turbos, a few things made themselves clear.  Most importantly, my idea of being able to jump into them with basic ICM knowledge that hadn’t been tapped in over two years and making free money was pretty misguided.  A few aspects of my game were atrociously bad.  I learned to tighten up a lot, especially calling shoves.  My stats say I’m still way too loose early on, especially around levels two and three.  Specifically, I think I’m shoving the button way too much.  These problems are really frustrating for me to isolate, because they don’t show up by just glancing over SNGWiz and writing down the few iffy spots.  I’m pretty sure most of my problems are just giving bad ranges

I’ve always preferred not to post hands and post in hand critiques, instead doing intense self-reviews.  That method of learning isn’t revealing the glaring holes that are still in my game.  I’ve tried to save tons of specific hands with notes during sessions and reviewing them later, but they’ve mostly seemed OK.  It’s looking more and more like I’d have to either get coaching or do some videos for critique if I really wanted to be a solid ST player.  Whether or not I’ll give in and do that is still up in the air.

Like I said, my main goal with STs was to have an easy way to put in some volume that’s less mentally-intense than playing HU cash or whatever.  I also planned on using STs as a stepping stone into playing MTTs.  I’ll probably spend some time debating the value of getting better at STs.  For a long time I felt like SNGs were pretty much a waste of time as far as development as a poker player goes.  At the same time, I thought once you had spent a pretty small amount of time studying ICM, they were relatively trivial.  I now know I was wrong on one count, and I wonder a little about the other. I’m positive now that some of these ST mistakes would translate directly to MTT spew.

I suppose the good news is that, thanks to running over expectation, my ST experiment has been slightly profitable.  This whole experience would have been a lot more stressful if I was spewing money.

In other news, I finally set up a blog for my iPhone shit. Apple rejected my gin rummy game for a second time for the same reason. Apparently when I updated the preview image that they rejected, it didn’t save, so I resubmitted the exact same thing. Hopefully it works this time so I can make dozens of dollars.

Along with the ST mind-fuckery, I spent the better part of the past week spinning my wheels on an issue with a very basic collision detection algorithm for my next game.  It turns out after spending hours drawing lots of coordinates and messing around with convoluted trig functions, all I needed was a dot product. Maybe I can attribute my shitty ST play and this both to my sleep schedule and overall mental state being all over the place this week.

I am somewhat alive again.  After goon house in Vegas, I moved to a new place and did pretty much nothing for four months.  I got a smallish inheritance that I’ve been eating through pretty steadily.  I began realizing that an income may be helpful before the money is gone and I have to start dissolving my roll.

After reconnecting with some nerd friends, I bought an old MacBook and started doing some iPhone coding.  I ended up spending three months or so learning Objective-C and Cocoa off-and-on the way I always learn new things (spending twice as long barreling into projects head first and then fixing dumb mistakes I could have avoided by being patient to begin with.  I know what autorelease does now!)  I just submitted the first version of my gin rummy game to Apple for review a couple of days ago.  It should be on iTunes for $4 made by Neurotic Nerd Software in 1-3 weeks.  It’s not too special.. just a straightforward gin rummy game with a nice touch-and-drag interface to get my feet wet in Cocoa with a game no one has done well yet.  I have tons of ideas for following projects.  I’m going to stop rambling about this for two reasons: 1) I am going to set up a dev blog for this nerd crap once I get around to putting something on neuroticnerd.com  2) My next idea is actually very unique, and I want to have time to flesh it out by myself before some team of more than one person jumps on it.

I’ve been pretty stressed out about jobs/income recently.  Somehow I went from thinking I’d be happy doing almost anything to spinning my tires obsessing about the perfect thing on which to focus my time.  Being thrust into the world of poker and seeing the success and freedom of several of my friends is probably to blame.  I’ve given serious consideration to getting a shitty web dev or government contractor coding job (the only coding jobs in my area); trying to get my foot into the game industry, hopefully working up to the fun AI stuff; doing iPhone development; getting serious about poker again; getting a retarded part time job like pizza delivery; and splitting time between two or more of those.  I’ve spent a lot of time polling friends and have been honestly really disappointed with all the feedback.  I was hoping to spend some time talking to JC about the poker possibilities when I visited his house, but we ended up just playing Rock Band.  Screw that game.

Anyway, now that my crunch to finish the first iPhone project is over, I’ve had some time to study the game a bit and play some poker.  I mostly jumped back into some 100 HU which is probably more of a slap in the face reintroduction to poker than the easing in some may suggest.  I had one bad hand where I made a somewhat thin river value bet, then got shoved on.  I don’t have the history for this one off hand, but it was an inexcusable call.  It wasn’t tilt – I thought it through for awhile – but I really should have looked ahead to the odds I’d be getting on the shove before I made the dumb bet.  Even with the great odds, it was retarded to think my opponent was value-shoving worse, which is the only way I win.

Other than the one early bad hand, I was very happy with my play.  I quit a couple decent guys after losing half a buyin, which is a great personal sign for me.  My biggest leak by far in the past was dropping two or three buyins to an obviously decent player before sitting out.  There is no reason to play anyone with half a brain at $100, so when I’m on my A game, I’m quitting them early.

I had a couple folds I am very happy I could make in a session where I was already down four buyins.  Vs. a dude who seemed somewhat retarded (flatted 55, donked on 844, then fired tiny two more times after a flush and high cards arrived) I had Q s 8 h otb, opened, chk/bet/c on Q c J s 7 s , chk/bet/c 8 c , then chk/bet and was shoved on 7 h .  Pretty damn standard fold vs. an opponent who had revealed his hand strength with bet size, but like I said, I’m happy to see the gears are still turning in there.

After hearing the super turbos are somehow still beatable for a decent rate ( Derk ), I played a few $30s to see if the ICM gears from two years ago would still turn.  I made a few more mistakes than I expected, but at least one of the sketchy calls busted Derk.  I am definitely going to put in a few more sessions at these to gauge how soft they really are.  It would be so nice to be able to grind SNGs as a change of pace.  I still get a bit more emotionally involved playing heads up cash than I’d like, but it is physically impossible to care about SNGs until you’re in the 25+ buyin downswing range if you’ve ever put in any volume.  (When I say I get emotionally involved, I don’t mean so much that I tilt or that my play changes, but that after I finish the session my mood reflects my results for a good hour or two.  It’s not too healthy.)

I’ve also been watching some PokerVT stuff.  Right now the plan is to get back into HU cash and spend some time messing with STs and/or MTTs.  It should be very doable to make enough income off of poker and iPhone app sales to be better off that I would with a crappy web dev job.  Time to make it happen.