Life update + Aruba tomorrow!

The new CR site finally launched, and it looks like I'll be moving this blog over there in the coming weeks (where it probably belonged in the first place). If and when this happens, I'll post here with a link to the new blog so you guys can continue to read about my boring life. I had been beta testing the site for a week or two to help test things out before launch, and I'm excited to see the way in which all of these new tools & features will improve CardRunners as a community. Cool stuff!

Anyway, I'm really pumped about leaving for Aruba tomorrow. I'm staying with Derric and a few of his buddies in a house down there from Friday until Tuesday, and I can already tell that it's gonna be very hard for me to leave the island -- especially since I'm leaving early (the tourney lasts until next Saturday!). Chicago has cooled down a lot recently, and it's getting to be about that time of year where you can't walk outside without a jacket anymore. The ~2 months I've been living up here have been beautiful and sunny for the most part, and I'm really going to miss being able to hit up the beach for a pick-up game of volleyball on the weekends. San Antonio was awesome for stuff like that almost year-round. At least I'll get one final weekend in paradise before it gets freezing in the windy city...

On a personal note, I'm still pretty bored with work. I really hope things will change, but it's been a full month since I finished my five weeks of training, and I've been applying to projects like a madman in an effort to get staffed. Unfortunately, the subgroup I was assigned to within the company does things much differently than every other subgroup: we don't get to directly apply for roles ourselves, we are under relatively strict supervision every day, and we all basically just sit around staring at our desks pumping out any remedial busywork handed down to us by our supervisors. In short, everything that's hilarious about Office Space applies to my work life right now. This is lightyears from what I expected from a career in consulting...I'm a very intelligent + motivated person, and my talents are being utterly wasted on a daily basis.

Like I said above, any project we wish to submit an application to must be approved by our HR rep. She then removes the roles that either she or the subgroup's policies deem "inappropriate" for a person from our subgroup to fill (which typically shortens my list of roles significantly), adds other roles that are "appropriate," and then applies us to the remaining roles on her own instead of letting us do it ourselves. This is apparently the standard policy for all employees in the subgroup to which I was assigned. The problems with this are as follows: this creates an unnecessarily excessive workload for our HR reps, who are already very very busy; I have no way of verifying that my internal resume was actually submitted to all of the roles I wanted; I end up being proposed for roles I don't want; and, most importantly, I don't get to choose my own career path.

This final point was actually the most important concept they drilled into our heads during our final two weeks of training: your career path in this company is entirely in your hands, and you are strongly encouraged to choose projects which will help you develop the skills you wish to acquire to further your career goals. Nearly everyone else from my start group has been encouraged to exercise their freedom of choice -- the only people deprived of this ability are myself and the four others from my start group who were also assigned to this specific internal group. It's extremely disheartening to see all of your other friends taking control of their own careers while we're stuck in the office all day waiting for staffing opportunities on projects we (typically) didn't choose ourselves.

Many of the projects I applied for sound really awesome and would certainly allow me to utilize all the skills I have developed in school and from other experiences, but unfortunately I've found that most of these are not deemed "appropriate", and I get stuck applying for boring roles as a tester for newly implemented IT systems. The words remedial and monotonous can only begin to describe how boring a testing role would be, so hopefully things will work out soon so I can stop ranting about dumb stuff in this blog that noone wants to read about anyway.

Poker-wise, I've been playing a lot of PLO lately. I got burned out after a long day of NLHE about a week ago and decided to give PLO another shot. 2/4 PLO seemed like a good place to start since I've historically done well (and spotted tons of poor players) when dabbling in the .5/1 & 1/2 PLO games for fun. It's rare for me to find many tough players at the games when I sit, but the amount of variance inherent in the game makes it extremely frustrating to play against these bad players when they keep winning. I probably have some leaks in my game still, but I think my game is reasonably solid -- even now I'm certain that my current level of skill is sufficient to show a significant longterm profit at 2/4 PLO (if I could find the time to put in enough hands). I plan on playing 2/4 & 3/6 until I feel very comfortable with the game and have played enough hands to prove to myself that I'm a solid winner at PLO. Besides, it's a nice change of pace for me, and it's always fun to learn a new game.

PLO does have some nasty swings though, and I started off with a 9 buyin downswing my second full session. I'll post some hands later, but I got coolered a few times and this one opponent kept outdrawing me every time I either flopped or turned a strong hand. It was just sick how hot this guy was running -- especially against me! My past couple of sessions have helped me crawl out of this hole, and as it stands right now I'm only down $700 on the month at PLO. Hopefully I can get this out of the red before the month ends, but it's not a big deal if I can't.

NLHE has been a crazy rollercoaster ride since my last blog entry where I took 10 buyins off that guy @ HU in under an hour. For the most part, I've been playing very well but running terribly, but I honestly expected something like this to happen after making >$20k in the first 10 days of September. 5/10NL has been good to me overall, but I'm struggling with a few players at 10/20. I've studied a bunch of hands and had lots of discussions about hands with friends, and I'm feeling confident that I can make the transition to 10/20 full time (with good game selection, of course) in the near future. I still play 3/6NL too when the bigger games aren't good, and I'm pleasantly surprised at how bad the play still is. If all goes well, this month will top August as my biggest month ever. My goal for September was $25k; I barely scraped past this mark as of last night, so as long as I don't post a big losing session before Sunday I should be good. I'm hoping to have a $30k month before the year ends, but I'd honestly be just as happy proving to myself that I can make a consistent ~$20k/month at poker.

Aruba here I come!