So yea, I'm back in Toronto, where it's incredibly cold. I knew it was gonna be like this for a few months, and I honestly don't mind the cold UNLESS it's windy/rainy/crazy and/or it fucks up travel arrangements. So far there was just the one day when it started snowing sideways out of nowhere, before that I think we were having a pretty mild winter. I don't care really, I went to some fine dining last week but I honestly plan on spending the rest of this month trekking to the gym 5.5 days a week and nothing else. It sounds a little silly but it'll help me grind, hopefully.
I should be playing more poker, but I've spent my first two weeks up here sick and tired and lazy. I've played some Sunday tournaments but really hadn't played much cash. I have put in a few 1k hand sessions and am determined for them to come more frequently over the course of the next month. I am pretty confident I can get 50k hands in before I leave at the beginning of March. It doesn't see like much to most of you but it'll definitely take some extra work for me. The good news is that I played today so we're trending upwards! Didn't play anything too interesting, luckily I won at 5-10 and 10-20 and got punished at 2-4. I had some grand plan of playing more 2-4 again this time around, but I just don't think that's gonna work out...
We're finally live with LeggopokerVIP, so make sure to hit up Matthew Young for full details. Time consuming projects are always the most rewarding when they are finally completed, but you can't fake effort or it'll show in the results.
Chewy has been wearing his tinfoil hat lately so we've been watching documentaries about pretty much everything. Knowing how absurd our FDA is, we watched Super Size Me today for some good lols. I know I'm almost a decade late to the party, but a really entertaining movie with a good pace, worth the watch if you haven't seen it yet.
Working on a Leggocast this week to have out for February 1. This month I'll interview Chewy about his back to back televised final tables, so if you have any questions feel free to post them in the comments section of the blog as I'll probably do at least part of the interview tomorrow. I'm looking forward to asking about some general differences in production and gameplay of both tournaments (WPT 5 Diamond and Epic Event 3, in case you've been under a rock). Next month I'll have an interview with the King about winning the 100k tournament in Australia and playing a 250k tournament (lol). I should be able to Leggocast monthly from here on out! Apologize to our several hundred (dozen?) listeners that we were slacking.
I figure that is more interesting than what I've been up to. I decided not to do PCA or Australia this year (really want to get around to doing it, but I am just renting too many places to justify flying all over the place and paying infinite for hotel rooms... I'm usually not that nitty but w/e). So, I'm spending another week watching basketball (at all levels), playing video games, and working out. I messed my back up last week deadlfting when I was tired-- but that is all I'll bore you with, listening to 175 weakling talk about weightlifting is not exciting imo.
I can't remember if I ever wrote any PCA stories in my blog, so I thought I'd share a few (I'm sure I did at some point) briefly.
My first PCA was when I was 19 I think my freshman year of college (unbelievable that it was 6 years ago). My buddy won a seat by sucking out with AK to AA preflop (I think) against legend Jason Strasser in a double shootout and invited me to come. I played cash all week-- I mean ALL week. I bet I played 100 hours of 2-4 (yes, the stakes were 2-4, not 2-5, don't ask me why). I brought ~$2k, probably a quarter of what I had to my name at the time. I won some, and then lost almost all of it, and was down to my last buy in (oh yea, account balance on the table). Our games were located next to the 50-100 games featuring a bunch of legends (the lineup was hilarious, now that I think about it, and included that one South American dude who plays super nitty, he might still be around), including Mike Matusow. Mike asked (loudly) if anyone wanted to make a quick hundred bucks, and since I wasn't doing so hot at the time (and I'm not shy), I accepted. I ran and got him a burger or a chicken sandwich or something, and then later the table wanted another round-- all told I made ~$225 in tips I think. I ran my money up to like ~$3500 the remainder of the week. BOOM.
I went back a few years later to Atlantis for a non-PCA thing that was for Paradise poker. I got staked to play in a $5k by a good friend of mine (who I actually met at PCA) but didn't win anything. I played in a $1k side event on my own dollar and bubbled (I think ~12 paid and I got 13th or something) with QQ vs AT. First was a bunch of money, probably would have tripled my net worth at the time. After the tournament, I went out by the Atlantis pools in the evening when no one was out there. I remember laying on a chair thinking that I'd never do anything in poker, I just ran too bad. To this day I think that is the most numb I've felt from poker, despite the stakes I've played for.
Can't think of a good third story, but I have had countless good times there, would have been sweet to have won it once!
Man, wtf? I can't believe it's almost 2012 already.
My holidays have been spent around the family and watching basketball. I've seen a bunch of NBA basketball [sidebar, our first PPP podcast is up, check it out if you're interested in the NBA! (link)], some local high school basketball (some future Big Ten players, there's quite a bit of talent in Indy year in and year out), and of course Butler/UNC (Butler got a quality win last night-- they're a bit tougher to come by this year, but they should be very strong next year).
I live a bit of a double or triple life, and I'm excited about things poker related in 2012. It *seems* like there are positive things on the horizon for online poker in the US (though we might be a police state by then!), I'll be spending a few more months in Toronto and the last half of the year should make it easy for me to move up to 5-10 and 10-20 soon/now.
Speaking of this year and poker, it went... interestingly. I'll try to write one sentence about how my poker year went. Started off 2011 rededicating myself after a sloppy swingy end of 2010 and won some small six figure amount playing almost exclusively 10-20 on FTP and probably continued to breakeven or lose on Stars hence having like 25k in my account when it came time to cash out and having a little dough stuck on FTP but whatever BF happened so I jumped ship to Vegas and decided I'd win the Main Event got a bit closer than I expected but didn't work out broke even for the summer after bricking the 25k HU and some other stuff despite cashing in my two biggest tournaments and needed a backup plan decided poker was still too awesome to go back to school so I spent some time in Toronto don't regret it still there then went to Europe do regret it just stupid to go there sleep in crappy beds for some tournaments even though they were soft got fourth in one that I had half the chips in play 6 handed pretty disappointed but made some mistakes and learned from them and again broke even on the trip back to Toronto ran hot in cash back to Vegas and watched luckychewy get 4th and 2nd in some big tournaments en route to probably my biggest month of the year side bar thnx brah so overall I probably won a hundred dimes fake money on FTP a hundred dimes real money in live poker and post BF stars and almost another hundred dimes from luckychewy pieces and that was that all in all an okay-ish year for a lazy poker player like myself. I did that all without commas. Talent.
And now I have a 5-10 three part series coming out which I think turned out fantastic. I've made over 100 training videos and I hate to say there isn't anyone better but there isn't anyone better and honestly I don't even hate to say it. Think about that for a while.
I played WPT Five Diamond at the B last week. It didn't go well. I had been having good results in tournaments (or at least passable) and was very loose and confident for this WPT, so I was disappointed that I couldn't get anything reasonable going. I haven't posted hands in a while, so I'll post a few annoying hands that wound up costing me the tournament while they're still relatively fresh in my mind.
In the first level UTG opens to 300, CO calls, I squeeze black aces in the sb to 1625. Honestly, I don't usually squeeze here, but... sometimes I do. We're 40k deep, but before the hand I think I honestly thought we were 30k deep-- I guess I just haven't played in a WPT since they went from 30k starting chips to 40k starting chips.
Both call, so there's ~5k in there and the flop is J64r. I bet 2300 in honor of Michael Jordan, UTG is the only caller. Turn is Ks bringing a FD. I bet 4600 in honor of Michael Jordan x2, UTG calls again. River is basically the worst card in the deck, Qs, I check fold to 9k.
Shrug, nothing else I can do except flat pre.
Second level is 1-2, UTG is a tightish player and opens to 600, UTG1 calls (he's wideish here, some suited and connected stuff), CO calls, Donk calls on button, I squeeze sb to 3300 with ~30k effective now. Folds to CO, who calls. 632dd, I bet 3500, CO calls. Turn 9d, I bet 7200 I think... He makes it like 17k, I fold.
I'm not going to say what I had, but thinking about the spot on the whole I am looking at his range and trying to figure out what he has-- I guess he could have three nines or a flush. I think the turn is a bad card to barrel unless I have Ax with the A of diamonds. I was overestimating how often villian would raise the flop with AXdd I think-- before I decided to barrel the turn (it's not relevant what I had, just not a flush or a set or a straight, which are the only hands I can continue with in the second level of a 10k against what I think is a random tournament player [sidenote: he wound up 3-bet, 5-betting T3o and getting it in against AK]) I just thought he would have a lot of one pair hands that would fold turn. I think I was wrong. If I'm going to bet a diamond I think it should be a K or Q of diamonds to kill some combos of those hands that he has and to make sure he folds black tens.
I ran it down to like 4k and then ran it back up to like 30k by winning two all ins and some other stuff. At 150-300/25, UTG minraised (active player with ~18k), donk calls in the CO, and I make it 2100 with black aces again on the button (this is smallish, but is directly related to the stack size of UTG, I want him to have room to 4b fold, which is a thing that does happen), UTG begrudgingly folds, donk calls. Flop is 983ss, donk check calls 2300 (I should have bet more, honestly in the moment I forgot that PFR even minraised in the first place, I should have bet 2800ish). Turn is a red jack, he check calls 5400 (I made up for the small flop bet with a big-ish turn bet, but very necessary against a bad player who is blinded by equity like crazy). River is an offsuit 8, he check calls 12500 and 78 is good. I told him I was fine with him winning the hand, I just ask that in the future he hits a ten or a seven instead of an 8, one of the safest cards in the deck that actually limits his combos of slowplays. Shrug.
I later busted when I shoved like 20-25 bigs over ZeeJustin's 2.66bb UTG open with AQo and ran into AK, pretty standard stuff.
The good news, however, is that Chewy made the TV Final Table and scooped up 220k for fourth, so I ended up winning money on the tournament!
He's headed to day 2 of Epic, so I'll be sweating that as well.
I am a little disappointed my last video didn't get more attention, I thought this two part series (second part out tomorrow) was my best effort in a while.
There was a guy in HSNL talking about how people with a lot of money spend their time watching TV shows and they aren't creating anything blah blah blah. Fuck that guy. I do a little bit of everything, and one of those things is watch superb TV. Which I THOUGHT Mad Men was, until..
[stop reading if you haven't seen the show]
Fucking Don just goes off the deep end in the very last episode of season four and marries his fucking secretary (while he's dating someone else) even though they don't show any special connection between the two, just that Don sees that she's good with his kids. Don says all this bullshit about how often he's been thinking about her and how much he loves her and blah blah blah. Are you fucking serious? Don almost makes sense every once in a while and then he just goes off the deep end. Logic evades this show pretty frequently. Characters seem to be inconsistent. Also the entire last episode is like a season or a half a season packed into one thing where he's going to Cali and bringing the kids and obviously psycho cunt ex wife is doing crazy shit like firing the nanny and wishing she had Don back then he's in Cali with his secretary (lol? that was the best idea you could come up with Don?) then he's getting wedding ring then he's fucking magically back in his apartment and she's there and he's watching her sleep for a few hours (no big deal Don you're not a creep) and professing his love and OBV she's all about it as if we didn't know that already and then they're just in love and getting married and that's it. That's the episode. Seems like 6 episodes, but they do it in 30 minutes. Magic. Took the show from probably about a B+ for me to a C or something. Not even a little excited for S5, even though I'll watch it, show could've been so much better if it would've been more Don bossing it up and less Don in a bunch of random relationships where he just wants to tell anything he's near that he loves it so he can fuck it. I don't get it this chick with the tilting as fuck teeth was DTF without a relationship and so he loves her? WTF.
[begin reading again]
Things have been going well for me. I'm in Vegas, I really like it here. Good food, good gym, good basketball, good weather (compared to the midwest anyways). I have SICK blackout curtains the length of these very high windows so I can sleep forever. It's nearly pitch in my room during the day with a southern wall.
I'm still getting fat. I'm up to 180 or something, probably half of the 10-15 pounds I've gained is fat, but I'm crushing lifts and beasting along in general. Excited to feel stronger in the gym everyday. Finally squatting well-- I bought some weightlifting shoes and they've done wonders for my confidence (I still have a bum ankle and I couldn't get good depth-- the heel in the shoe and the grip was exactly what I needed). I'm still making some linear gains on all exercises except shoulder, press, though it'll usually take me two workouts to go up for bench.
The Bears are terrible without Cutler. Holy shit they're bad. I tried to watch a little today, it was a waste, I couldn't sit through it. Hanie has been bad, but the playcalling for him seems even worse. I am going to make the playoffs in a few of my fantasy leagues but honestly the NBA can't come soon enough.
I wish I had more exciting updates, but my life has been consumed with lifting/reading/madmen/eating the sweets that people got me for my birthday. Maybe I'll have something interesting to report after I play WPT 5 Diamond this week.
I don't even know why I'd post results. I played well at times in November, but still probably not up to what I should be "capable" of. I had a hard time getting in volume. If I'm actually serious about playing 10-20+ again when I come back in 2012, I just don't see a reason that I can't find a way to play 5k hands a day... but I still don't. I barely care. It's still fun sometimes.
I mostly played 2-4 this month. I finally ran my account up enough to play 5-10, but I didn't really make the most of it. I played a couple lackadaisical HU sessions where I played somewhere between slightly above average and downright bad. Nothing else remarkable happened. I won some money in some tournaments. I played some midstakes. I'm probably up not quite 50 since I started back on Stars, everything considered. I'm glad that I won money this money, but honestly I feel downright bad for running as good as I did. I doubt I could ever buy anything with the Sklansky bucks I was owed from '08 and '09, but maybe I'm getting it all back slowly... at less than one-tenth the stakes. Interesting way the universe works.
6M
HU
I don't really know why I always sound so cynical, I managed to give myself a shot to get back playing higher stakes when I come back to Toronto in January. I guess I am just disappointed that I manage to only grind a high volume of hands when I'm losing or trying to get unstuck. That kind of makes me wonder, had I been running worse, would I have been playing worse also? I don't really care about losing flips or other random all-ins, stuff that usually tilts me is when someone plays their hand stupid and runs in just the right part of my range. Something to contemplate; I'm a bit of a masochist-- I'm sure I'll get back running bad next year.
I did manage to be relatively productive towards the end of the month and I made a few good videos. I'm back to reading pretty often and found a cool site to exercise my brain on. That site might be my secret weapon in poker, so I'm not gonna share it with you guys, sorry!
Headed home for the holidays and then Vegas for a while and then back home. Bye kids.
Everytime I open up a blog to write something I forget what I wanted to say. I think of a lot of things randomly walking down the street that I could put in my blog, but I never remember them in crunch time. I default to the same old crap that is going on in my life...
I'm experiencing my last weekend in Canada in 2011 (and likewise, my last weekend of online poker). I'll be in a combination of Indiana and Vegas from here on out doing the holiday thing and hopefully catching a bit of basketball while I'm back home. It sucks quite a bit to not be able to watch ESPN3 in Canada... I am incredibly spoiled with everything being so accessible in the States.
At the end of last week I floated in a sensory deprivation tank for the first time. An Isolation tank is basically a salt water bath in the dark. You can't hear anything or see anything and the salt in the water makes you buoyant enough to float. Joe Rogan swears by it (the woman working at the place actually asked me if I he was the reason I decided to try it). It's supposed to be great for energy, I've got a friend who thinks he can gain four times as much energy from a tank than he can from sleeping. Anyways, it was a pretty cool experience-- I pride myself on having a good internal clock and I've never had so much trouble estimating time.
Shrug, that's it, I guess I'll post some results from this month in a few days.
I've always had a special affinity for a bunch of ones in a row. I'm a weird guy, a little OCD but not really. Also, my address growing up was 1111. True story. Sometimes when I look at the clock, it's 11:11. I think of all the times that I've looked at the clock (assuming there are what, 1440 minutes in a day? don't quote me on that), it is 11:11 more than other times, even adjusting for waking hours (the fact that I'm awake at 11:11 much more often than at 5:55). I also like to think that I get KK against AA more than I get AA against KK.
I can't believe how long it's been since I wrote a blog. For some reason it took staying awake until 9AM to write something... I guess there are a few reasons for it. First, I don't like being in the public eye as much as I used to. When I first began blogging and making videos, I enjoyed it very much. The attention was great and I thought I had super interesting things going on in my life and poker career. I still do, sorta, but not really. I realize it's a little late to become anonymous again, but I really don't think the attention is necessary. Also, I frequently think of things throughout the day that I'd write in my blog-- but I don't have a computer by me, and I also have twitter. That means that some things get posted on twitter and some things don't even make it there, they just die in the depths of my imagination.. things I was going to write for the world to see, now gone forever.
At the moment I prefer to be a nobody. I'm spending my days keeping my mind active by reading, playing poker, and watching MMA. I'm keeping my body active by lifting, although I'm starting to gain some weight, I feel like it's majority fat with a little muscle thrown in. My goal is to be at 225/225/305 of 3x5 for bench/squats/deadlifts, and I'm somewhere around 205/205/245. I hope to achieve this goal by early spring (maybe end of March?) so that I can start to cut in time for my friend's wedding at the end of April. I'll probably cut and lift at a deficit into the summer. As long as we're on physical goals, I really need to start playing more basketball, I haven't played any since I got up to Toronto, it'll be awful to be terrible at basketball and out of shape.
If you're wondering about my feelings, although I can't imagine you are, I don't feel much. I read things, I hear things, I see things, I get a little angry, but ultimately feel like I can't do much. I have trouble caring what people think about me. It always feels nice to win and run good, but it feels much worse to lose and run bad. I don't care about the money, I just don't like the helplessness of not being able to win, of feeling like no bluff is going to work and every board runs out AIDS.
I don't want any of this blog to come off poorly, I am in a pretty good mood as a matter of fact... I think I'm just feeling like a blog is a little too masturbatory for me at the moment.
My hair is also very long, but I didn't trust Europeans to cut it and Canadians are almost Europeans so I'll probably just grow it out until I look like Fabio.
I'm in Europe still, I got talked into coming to San Remo because it's supposed to be one of the softest big field tournaments of the year. I busted it today after uneventfulness. I played well and I think I only made a few small betsizing errors. I wanted to get more suited stuff to 3-bet some of the weak players I had position on, but it's (generally) not good practice to 3-bet guys with 82o, regardless of how bad my opponents' are.
I am slightly discouraged by a very small sample size of tournaments, but mostly since I've only gotten >10% above starting stack in like 2 of maybe 9 tournaments that I've played over here. I guess if I was getting deepish and bubbling I'd find something to complain about too. Poker is such an annoying thing!
Otherwise I am having trouble reaching for feelings about my trip in general. I feel pretty apathetic about it. I feel somewhat advanced by the traveling... but I'm traveling within a bubble, so to speak. Nothing really else to say, hopefully I'll go deep in something and save the ship from sinking this trip.
I am sorry for going a few weeks without a video, I'll have one up in a week or two when I get back to Toronto and am actually playing. I'm probably going to hit the online grind in November playing a mixture of everything and buy a desktop and improve my setup in Toronto.
