Slowly gearing up for the SCOOP

The SCOOP is coming ladies and gentlemen. I'll basically be in a one tracked mind the first two weeks of April. This series is the best series I've seen an online site put together because it has three different target audiences. Every main event for the SCOOP (on Pokerstars) has low, medium, and high buy in. If the low starts at 10, multiply it by 10 to get the medium event, and multiply that by 10 to get the high event. I plan on playing basically every low and medium event. I'm working on playing step sit n gos at the moment to win my way into the bigger events as I'd love to participate in them. Aside from that, I have some aunts and uncles and cousins coming into town which is always good. It's tough being far away from family a lot of the time.

The past few weeks, I've been playing a very small tournament schedule. I've played most Sundays and Wednesdays and a few days in between, but I want to be totally focused and in gear come time to play the SCOOP. The Bellagio has another series coming up, but I only plan on playing one or two smaller events unless I ship a monster tourney in the SCOOP. I'm feeling pretty good despite no notable results.

One thing I've really wanted to address lately is my emotional control. I've been reading a book called The Joy of Living and also following some of the meditation practices in it. The self-awareness of how my own mind works has been quite enlightening to say the least. I plan on continuing the practices in this book. Everyone knows that I've had an ability to get caught up way too emotionally in the game of poker to the point where it's probably not even good for my health as far as the stress goes. For the last 4 days or so after putting a lot of this into practice, I've understood what my mind does in situations and how it often resorts to negativity which then spirals out of control to the point where it almost always ruins my day. As a tournament player, most days end in disappointment, but they don't have to always affect me. I would recommend this book for basically anyone, but especially poker players.