Figuring out my tournament schedule

As it says in one of my poker books, "What you do away from the table is important as what you do at the table."  In this case, the issue is planning my time.

It sounds easy enough.  Open your poker site, look at the list of tournaments, and decide what you want to play.  Alas, for those of us who play on americascardroom.com, it's not that easy.

First, even though the software has filters, the list of tournaments is still hard to work with.  I can't or won't play most of the tournaments on the list for various reasons.  For example, many of them have unlimited rebuys.  That means that whenever you want, you can keep spending more money to buy more chips.

They had a tournament like that a couple years ago at the World Series of Poker.  One of the players took 13 rebuys, and the tournament was nicknamed the "buy-a-bracelet tournament."  After an avalanche of criticism, the WSOP dropped it from their schedule.

So, the list of tournaments is unwieldy, but there is a bigger problem.  Only the tournaments for the next few hours are listed.  Sitting down at 10 A.M. and seeing a schedule that doesn't go past 2 P.M. isn't much help in planning my day (or night).

I decided to make my own schedule.  The schedule doesn't change that much, that is, the list of tournaments on Wednesday is usually the same as it was a week ago.  So I'm writing down all the tournaments that might be worth playing, with all the relevant information (day/time/buy-in/prize pool/starting chips) and I'm putting it all on a spreadsheet.

Soon, I'll have something to work with so that I can plan my day.  And I won't have to look for something, anything, that I can play.  I can concentrate on the ones that give me the best chance to make money, and use other time for whatever else I need to do, from poker study to mowing the lawn.

Not only will that help me, but my wife will know what my schedule is.  It's frustrating for both of us that I can't do any advance plannning.  And of course, having ADD and being unable, due to outside factors, to plan and be organized, is not a good situation.  I'm glad that it will be fixed soon.