Retrospective 2010

2010 was a massive year for me.

Life:
I started the year in Malta where I was living in a massive penthouse with 3 other pokerplayers in Malta.
Malta definitely was a big experience for me. I got to know a shitload of awesome people and had a very very good time. But after living 14 months on the rock I felt somehow that it was time for me to move on. Yes, Malta is awesome in summer and has a very good legislation in case of taxes and poker, but as awesome as it is in summer as boring it is in winter and I pretty much said to myself that I'm not willing to spent another winter there. Another main reason for my goodbye was, that I purchased a Corvette

in february which arrived about 3 months later. Ok, now you ask why is that a reason to leave. Well, in Malta they have pretty crazy car registration laws. So you can bring in a car which is registered in another country to Malta but you have to register it after 6 months. Ok, no biggie... But unfortunately they tax that registration process and it is afaik dependend on the value of the car up to 40%. That means basically if I really wanted to stay I had to get the Vette registered to Malta for something between 12.000 and 15.000 Euro. Even though I made some serious money last year that was just too much and definitely a point in my decision of leaving the island.
So the plan was to leave Malta with destination London/UK with another german pro I got to know in Malta. End of summer we went to London in order to take a look at some properties in West Central/Central London. Renting prices were even more insane than I imagined and we didn't really manage to find something cool for us. Our price limit was about tree fiddy hundred pounds a month (around 1.75k GBP p.P) but even for that price (in Malta this is a 270sqm penthouse with hot-tub, 4 bedrooms and direct seaview) we did not find any properties in the center. Main problem always were the bedrooms which were to small to fit in our desks. So on our last day in London we managed to find a property in East London (which is still pretty central for London) Canary Wharf. Since october I live here, again with seaview (not as good as in Malta unfortunately). We even managed to find a very large property for a decent price (at least for London standards) which is fairly modern and has over 200sqm. That much space gave us the opportunity to have a spare room for one of my former roomies from Malta who is living with us atm.
I would really like to write some stories about London but since I'm here basically the only think I did was grinding with 3 or 4 nights out which were all pretty massive but 4 nights in 2.5months isn't too much for my standards...

Poker:
Pokerwise 2010 was my best year so far since I play for a living. I made about two fiddy and I'm pretty satisfied with that result.
I decided pretty early in the year to repeat my run for Supernova Elite (if you don't know about this it is explained in detail at www.FPPPro.com). I was grinding a bunch in the beginning of the year. Not so much in summer and a shitload from october ongoing in order to finish SNE as soon as possible and take the rest of the year off which worked fairly well (finished 15.12.2010). So the attached picture pretty much describes my life from early october until mid december (even though London have few sunny days obv) but I do this for a living and so I have to be ambitious and play a ton even if I don't always feel like playing.
In the end I can say that the games were alot better beginning 2010 compared to the end of it. This has many reasons. Biggest reason is probably that Stars changed their Buy-In structure for Ringgames mid April where they created 20-50BB tables in order to cater shortstacks. Because you pay more effective rake at these tables they cost almost all fullstacking regs and even many shortstacks money. So from mid April many Winrates (my own included) were decreasing. Another reason is obv that in the end of the year more and more regs start putting in massive volume to get SNE or a big milestone done and therefore games get pretty horrible.
So my conclusion given the current state of games at Stars is that I'm not going to do the hattrick and do SNE the 3rd time in a row but instead I'm going to get started at Full Tilt, mixing it with Stars and trying to focus more on getting better at this card game again.

peaze