The Eye of the Storm

So far April seems to have been the calm after the storm. I think I burned myself out more than I realised after putting so much volume in during March. The $4000 pot of gold at the end of the Gladiator rainbow was such a good incentive that I tricked myself into believing I had overcome the motivational issues that have plagued me this year. As it turns out... I haven't, and with the promotion over they are back with a vengeance. The good news is that another promotion is starting next Monday and I plan to get back to some major grinding. So maybe April is really the eye of the storm?

Interestingly, the new promotion is VIP only (Palladium+), and to get max value from it a truly epic grind will be required. Pushing myself hard last month worked really well, so I'm going to give it my best. I'll need to rake $15,000 in 21 days (about 1500 party points per day). I was raking 1200 points per day in March so it should be easy, right? The problem is that I have a friend's wedding and other commitments that will mean I can't play at all on probably 4 of the 21 days, meaning I'll have to rake closer to 1800 points per day, which will be really tough. As I'm typing this I read an interesting quote on the Party Poker thread on 2p2:

I was thinking about grinding those 60 cards but then i realized i don't hate myself that much.

 -OMGKaraScott

A fair point. I'm going to hit it hard for the first week and see how things go. On the plus side if I succeed I think all the bonuses will tally up to over $10,000 (depending how lucky I am with the random prizes). Not bad for 3 week's work!

Although I haven't been playing a lot of poker this month I've been using my time fairly productively getting on with wedding plans, home improvement and spending time with friends and family. I've also upgraded my setup with a new PC tower. I went for a fairly basic model and with the help of a friend installed a better graphics card and an SSD to run my OS and all my poker software. So far I'm loving the SSD: Windows 7 Ultimate loads completely in under 10 seconds and it should handle mass multi-tabling a lot better than my poor laptop. I'll post a few pictures of my setup in a future post.

So wish me luck for grinding my ass off for the next 3 weeks! Today I just feel like doing this...