10/8/2010--A totally disrupted week

The family situation has really been clobbering me lately, taking some of my time 3 of the last 7 days. I haven't played any tournaments of more than 90 players in the last few days, and it's very likely that this will be the first week in a while where I haven't been able to get in 30 hours. Fortunately for all concerned, the situation is starting to resolve, and November should go much better, and affect poker much less.

I took another look at the PokerStars tournament schedule over a 24-hour period. There are 4 daily tournaments of at least 1,000 players which have a decent structure for my playing style, and there is one that stands out. That tournament starts at 0600, and I think that I need to play it as often as possible, partly because of the structure, and partly because I can start my day early, and get in at least one good (for my playing style) MTT before anything happens to take me away from poker. But long-term, it's definitely not the schedule that I want to keep, once I'm playing high enough that I have more tournament options, because:

1. I am naturally a night person. I have worked every kind of shift imaginable--day shifts and night shifts, long shifts and short shifts, and various combinations of those. But for poker, getting up at noon (which is the schedule that poker pro Daniel Negreanu uses) seemed to work well for me.

2. Poker is a nights-and-weekends profession. There are more players online at night (US eastern time), and therefore more tournaments, weaker players and bigger prize pools. Most of the online "majors", such as the PokerStars 1/4 Million (that's the size of the prize pool), in which I played once, start on Sunday afternoon and can last as long as 12 hours.

3. Live poker happens mostly at night. Where I play live poker, the weekday tournaments start at 7 P.M. On weekends there are tournaments with both mid-afternoon and evening starts. The live tournament that I won ended around midnight--not exactly compatible with a day that starts at 6 A.M.

By next week I hope to be playing the $1.10 0600 MTT almost every day, but I hope that I don't have to do it for long.