A Quick Update and My September Plans
It’s been about 8 weeks since my last post. I originally hesitated to write it. I built this site to share my off-the-table poker work with a broader community. The large majority of my work relies on solvers and data to explore the nuances of this game. I had not dipped into the mental game or shared much about my personal life. While I know the mental side of poker is important, I have avoided writing about the subject as I’m far less qualified than many others to do so.
I also didn’t want this site to be a personal blog about me. It is and always will be about exploring concepts and creating an implementable strategy using analytical methods. I wrote it, however, to share some of the struggles I have been facing since the start of the pandemic that has led to a significant decrease in production here. I’m going to get back to my work very soon. But I first want to share a brief update since that post.
As I mentioned in July, I’ve had to significantly reduce the amount of time I devote to poker because of work-life balance challenges brought upon by COVID. I posted 2-4 times per month through May but had to scale back considerably to keep any semblance of sanity. Since then, I’ve had plenty of ups and downs. Even though the rough days are still there, I’m happy to say that my head’s in a much better mental place now than it has been in a while.
Thanks to those of you who have reached out and shown your concern, provided helpful resources, or shared your own experiences. It meant a lot to read all your kind messages. For those that have messaged me to discuss poker, you’ve been what has kept me from falling completely out of the game for the past couple of months. I know I’m a bit behind in responding to some of you, but I’ll hopefully be clearing out my backlog shortly.
Much has happened since my post in July. At that time, my family and I had just put our house on the market in Maryland with plans to move to Ann Arbor, MI. Since then, we sold our Maryland house, bought a new one in Michigan, temporarily moved in with my in-laws before we could close on it, and moved into the new home. We officially got the keys a week ago, and we’ve been settling in, unpacking boxes, painting the house, ordering furniture, and planning home improvements ever since.
Part of the reason we chose to move to Michigan was to be closer to family. Since the start of the pandemic, my wife and I have been home with our 2 toddler daughters trying to balance them and our day jobs. I wrote about it at great length in my last post, but that pushed us to our limits and hindered our ability to focus on anything else. We had hoped that extra help with the girls would make things more manageable.
This first week in Michigan has no doubt been chaotic, and I’ve still had some difficult moments. But I have already seen massive improvements, and the framework is there for a far better situation. All of a sudden, I see myself having some extra time again, which is making me optimistic for the first time in a while.
I’ve become used to trading on-call parenting duties back and forth with my wife while the other works or rests. After 6 months, it just feels like the normal grind. This first week, I had 2 days where I worked uninterrupted for hours at a time. That has already done wonders for my mindset.
My wife’s work schedule has lightened up considerably — she goes down from full-time to half-time — and my in-laws are helping by watching the kids for 1 1/2 days. That means that going forward, we have to work and be a parent at the same time only one day per week. After 6 months of doing it all five days per week, it’s a considerable improvement.
With some of that extra time, I’ve already started filling it with poker. I finally got an online session yesterday after not playing for almost a month. I had two good coaching sessions over the last week. My study group and I got back together after a 4-month hiatus. Finally (and perhaps most importantly), I’ve started to map out plans on how I can get back to work on advancing my work on this website.
I’d like to close out this post by sharing some of my upcoming plans. It’s been a few months since I’ve really thought about development on this site, so it will take me some time to get myself entirely back in the mindset I was in when posting 2-4 times per month. So as I ease back in, I’ve come up with some realistic goals that I can drive toward throughout the rest of September:
Revisit my site strategy and develop a longer-term roadmap — One of the most amazing things over the past few months is that my traffic didn’t die off. Quite the opposite actually. The site has continued to grow, and I’ve had more visitors recently than in June when I was last posting consistently. I still plan to follow the same general themes that I wrote about it in my initial launch post and my 2-month checkpoint. However, I’d like to spend time digging through the 8 months of web analytics data on the site to further map out product development, ideas for videos or articles, and overall themes. I hope to plan out the rest of the year by the end of the month.
Finish my 100 BB Flop Analysis Workbook product — I receive at least 1 email per week from people asking when this will be available. After I released the 200 BB live-focused workbook in June, I announced that I was working on one focused on the online 100 BB game. For the past couple of months, I’ve had about 10-20 hours of work left to do to finish everything. All of the formations are solved. I simply have to update the 200 BB spreadsheet to account for the different formations and output data. My goal is to finish development this month and release it at the beginning of October. For those that have emailed me, I’m sorry for the delay and I’ll get it done soon.
Create another GTO+ video — One of the final things I did worked on before taking my summer break was a video series on GTO+. I created 4 videos about how to use the software (Part 1 about the interface and the basics of setting up trees, Part 2 about running a solve and interpreting the output, Part 3 about node locking, and Part 4 about database aggregation). The engagement with these videos has been excellent, particularly on YouTube which has helped continually drive traffic here. Someone had an excellent suggestion for a 5th part to demonstrate the GTO+ integration with Flopzilla Pro. I do use these two tools together regularly and can share some good workflows that will help analyze range interactions really well. I plan to record and release a video later this month that shows how to utilize these two tools together.
I’m not quite ready to start writing again. While I have a huge list of ideas I brainstormed in the first half of the year, I’d like to develop that cohesive plan before jumping back in. However, I do think these goals above are a great way to get back into the swing of things. I plan to keep myself accountable to them. While things are still somewhat hectic and likely will be in the near future, things are far better than they were before. With all of that said, I’m ready to get back to work.
If you have any thoughts or experiences of your own, leave a comment below. You can also contact me here or reach me on social media using the icons above. Thanks for reading.
-Lukich