2014 Year in Review

In poker, it’s important to pay attention to the way you’re playing and less how your results roll in. That’s easier said than done, especially at the end of the year when you’re evaluating how your year went. It’s natural to look back at easily definable metrics like how much money you made and what your hourly is in your usual games. More important than those things is how well you think you played and how you dealt with the usual swings of a year playing poker.

I feel that, most of the time this year, I brought my A-game. Unfortunately, I’m in the middle of a pretty decent downswing. I’m coming through it well enough and I feel like I played well during the bad times, although my mental game was a bit lacking and that’s something I’ll address in my next column, which will be a look ahead at next year. One of the more disappointing things from this year is how poorly my shots at bigger games went. With the exception of one session of stakes larger than I usually play, they all went terribly. I played around 60 hours in games this year that I was close to properly rolled for, but not quite all the way there without selling action. One three-hour session and one six-hour session amongst those were winning sessions. That’s unfortunate. I only played those bigger games when they were quite good and, truthfully, ran really poorly over that small sample. That put a pretty decent dent in my profit for the year, but I did fairly well at my regular games with a greater than 10 big blinds /hour rate at my main stake, even after a dreadful final five months of the year. The first two months went very well, so that definitely helps a ton.

One other thing that really picked up for me this year was my development in other poker related things. I am now the captain of Team Big Slick out of Big Slick Poker Academy in Dallas, TX. We’re recruiting and backing players in the Dallas/Fort Worth area to play in the weekly tournaments at Winstar in Oklahoma. Not only are we backing these players, we are coaching them and doing it well it would seem. We’ve had several weeks where a student either chopped or won the tournament including one week where two students finished first and second out of almost 200 players. It’s been a fun endeavor and one where I’m sure I’ve learned as much as I’ve taught. In addition to teaching in this group format, I’ve taken on several students for private coaching. It’s gone well and is certainly a work in progress, but I feel like all of my students are happy with the improvements they’ve seen in their game. I’m excited to possibly expand on this part of my life next year. Finally, I have some exciting prospects in another area that I’m hoping to be able to share next year sometime. I can’t talk much about them, but I think it will be lots of fun to follow their development over the next few months.

During this column last year, I set forward some goals that I was hoping to hit so let’s take a look at how I did with them.

Goal 1: Average 30 hours a week over 45 weeks of play.

I set what I thought was a not-so-lofty goal of 1,350 hours of play for the year. I forgot to adjust for the fact that we were having a new baby. I fell short of this goal, but not by much if you include both cash and tournament play for the year. I have 990 cash game hours as of the day I’m writing this and roughly 100 tournament hours. I’ll probably play another 75-80 hours of cash over the final three weeks of the year making me short by about 200 hours. Considering I basically didn’t play for about six weeks of the year because of the baby, that’s not too bad. I’ve got a different metric for how I’m going to measure this next year that I’ll include in my goals column next time.

Goal 2: Study 3-5 hours per week.

This goal went terribly. I vastly underestimated how much time my kids would take up this year. Having two kids under the age of two is, at the same time, incredibly rewarding and exhausting. I have them during the days that my wife works and the free time I have when they’re both napping I spend taking care of all of the things I have to do around the house, running errands, and trying to catch a little extra sleep myself. I barely found time for anything else.

On the personal front, I had a great year. Our second son, Alex, was born in May, and he has been a joy to be around. He has an easy smile and a great temperament. Colin, our firstborn, has grown so much over the last year. He turned two in November and is a motormouth. We can’t get him to stop talking and it’s hilarious to hear the things that come out of his mouth. I spent a good bit of time on my bike between January and July, but I broke my collarbone while out riding on July 3 (Two days before I left California to go play the main event) and haven’t been back out since. My first ride since breaking my collarbone should be pretty soon and I’m sure I’ll be slacking pretty hard.

I’m looking forward to a fun and productive 2015, and I hope you all have had a great holiday season. ♠

Gavin Griffin was the first poker player to capture a World Series of Poker, European Poker Tour and World Poker Tour title and has amassed nearly $5 million in lifetime tournament winnings. Griffin is sponsored by HeroPoker.com. You can follow him on Twitter @NHGG