I know it’s been almost half a year (!) since my last post, but it’s all for good reason.
Since April it feels like I have transformed as a poker player and as a person…I’ve been spending less time with poker and more time with friends and my girlfriend, which has been a very good thing. Over the last few months, while still on my stake, tournaments have become to feel increasingly like high-stress mental slave labor and I often noticed myself wishing I would just bust out of any particular day’s MTT session so I could walk outside and get lunch and not worry about blinds eating my stack, but probably more importantly so I wouldn’t have to feel the pain of getting any place besides first. Whenever I cashed for the minimum it felt like a waste of time, and whenever I got 11th or 3rd or 6th (come on, 1sts are difficult 
), it felt like defeat despite the handsome prize attached to such a “strong” finish. Anything but first place in a poker tournament will and should make a serious tournament player bitter and disappointed, and I was sick of experiencing this sentiment on the daily. In the past I rationalized grinding tournaments because of all the time and effort I put into improving my game, plus the decent results I had over thousands of events, but when you step back and really think about it, playing tournaments for a living is a crazy idea. The amount of money you must invest in entries (and in travel/hotels, if you’re a live player), the time necessary to give yourself a chance to ride out variance, and the almost guaranteed emotional agony associated with the very nature of tournaments…I commend anyone who can actually do it and still lead a happy life.
So, I have switched to cash games almost exclusively. I will still play the occasional Sunday Million (buy in with FPPs), but for the rest of any particular week I will devote intense mental focus to playing and studying cash games. When I left my stake for the second time in 19 months last Sunday, I told my boss that tournaments cause too much anxiety to be worth the rare big score (which in itself will only happen if you put in tons of volume, making the mental burden worse and the inflexible time commitment even greater), and that cash games will provide the more consistent income I need in my life. I am not the first person to have felt this way; at least one coach from the MTT training video website Poker Pwnage has said that cash games brought to his life a type of relatively stress-free financial consistency that tournaments never could. Although playing in a major tournament every now and then can be fun and even extremely lucrative, if you are bankrolled for a particular limit and you constantly put effort into improving as a player and staying ahead of the curve, cash games are the way to go.
A Deuces Cracked subscription and one million hand histories from Poker Table Ratings for the $0.25/$0.50 6-max cash games -and- full ring cash games (depending on which I settle on playing) on Poker Stars should accelerate me on my path to crushing my current limit for a decent hourly rate as well as eventually moving up in stakes. I’m still not sure if I want to move to Full Tilt for weekly 27% rakeback or stay with Poker Stars for ~30% rakeback ($4,000 bonus every 1.087 million hands), but my overall goals are to drastically improve as a solid, tricky, and disciplined cash game player so I can spend less time on the internet felt and more time enjoying real life.
Thanks for reading, and more to come! 
