bicyclekick poker

MLB Safety BS

2011-07-09T00:46:00.001-05:00

"Our players are encouraged to be fan-friendly and we will carefully review this incident with our clubs to continue to ensure a safe environment for our fans." -MLB.

What a load of crap! People get hurt all the time by stuff flying into the seats. Baseball games are inherently dangerous if you're sitting anywhere near the field and for MLB to pretend it's safe is obnoxious. The fan accepts the unsafe environment the moment she walks in the door. As long as their is no gross negligence has no case against a team.

I'm very saddened by the tragic death in texas and my reaction to mlb's statement isn't about this case, just their cover their ass bs quote.

getting internet poker money back

2011-04-20T14:06:00.002-05:00

I was going to post a blog a bit ago about my thoughts but everyone else was doing such a good job that I didn't think it was necessary. It was shocking to me, especially considering it fell on the day I had my engagement planned for. I still went forward with it and it went without a hitch. :) We're looking at a wedding next summer.

Today we learned we'll be getting our money back from pokerstars and full tilt, which I was confident was going to happen but it's nice to have the confirmation.

In the meantime it's been awful weather here in minnesota which wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't the worst winter I can remember. I'm so ready to get outside and playing golf/softball/kickball and yardgames etc...draaaaaaaaaaagggggingggg.

I was planning a lighter work load this summer and now that we're for sure getting our money, it's more likely I stick to that as I have a bigger cushion while waiting for online poker to be licensed and regulated in the US. I'll still hit up canterbury a few times a week, but I'm not going to bend over backwards to play hours like I have in the past...the games I can find are generally going to be worse than before...

It's about time the twins pull their heads out of their asses and start hitting the ball. It's been tough watching them fail fail fail...but I know it's a long season...also, I'm one of those rubes who just wants to be in the playoff hunt come september. That means you had a summers enjoyment of baseball. And I'll take that any year.

a few heads up battles and otherwise quiet

2011-04-07T17:23:00.002-05:00

I've had a few legit heads up limit holdem battles lately so my hours have been a little higher than I anticipated. At 35 hours for that first week... These battles are where most decent money comes from so I'm always happy to oblige and suck it up and play...I hadn't played k*bblerd*g in a year or two so when he sat $60/120 with me I was thrilled. He got off to an early lead but his overaggressive check raising every flop isn't too hard to combat in the long run as long as you're not ridiculously card dead...which I wasn't so it went well and I won ~9000.

So my month is off to a decent start...and this year I'd say I'm running a little bit above average...except for heads up no limit where I'm running 50 (yes fifty!) buyins under all in expectation in only 26000 hands. I'm the worst at winning all ins...but I've ran hot at 200/400 so that makes up for it :)

My stupid computer/graphics card is glitching and ruined one of my battles which was really frustrating. I took it outside and blew the dust out of it today in case that's part of the problem. It was dustier than I've ever seen. Either way good to get it out.

I haven't figured my wsop schedule yet but I'm thinking I'll go 2 or 3 times for short trips and play a few small tourneys and the main event obviously. I really don't care for the vegas lifestyle (other than craps!) so it's not too likely I'll be out there much more than that unless out of nowhere the cash games are unreal.

Twins home opener tomorrow and bachelor party for my sister's fiance on saturday. Sounds like fun/no poker for a few days.

march mash, on to april

2011-04-01T16:16:00.003-05:00

Well march finished fine with 3 straight winning days. No big days but winning is always enjoyable. I think I played more hours in march than any other months in recent memory. Pretty dull but it was good to get a lot of poker in as in april I think I'm going to take it easyish. I averaged 53 hours per week playing poker. Crazy right?!

30 hours a week tops is all I'm going to play in april I think. Probably less this first week. I need a break. I gotta get my taxes done and there are some things around the house that could use some working on and I think I'm gonna go on a golden tee binge for a little and obviously the twins games as well as kickball and softball starting back in a week.

winnnnner!

2011-03-30T14:10:00.002-05:00

Well I broke the streak yesterday...I won a few thousand online and broke even at canterbury. It feels good to get back on the right track...

Speaking of canterbury...they have really good eggrolls if you are not asian and dip them in ranch dressing... ;)

Is it friday yet? I'm ready for baseball and a few days off from poker. Maybe a week. I might have to go to san diego soon to do some golfing to get ready for the good weather here...just like jumpstart my spring...it's been so gross lately in minnesota.

4 straight losing days

2011-03-29T15:01:00.002-05:00

I haven't been playing that much in the last few days but anytime I do, I lose. 4 straight losing days at heads up limit holdem is tough to do. I don't think I've ever done it before. I've lost 4 times in a row a million times, but not at my goto 'get out of a downswing' game haha. I'm not sweating it at all I'm just pretty tired of it. The downswing is up to like 400 bets which is the most for heads up limit holdem for me I think. My biggest was 1k bets but that was ring game... I think it helps that I'm still having a mediocre positive month still...

Gonna sit a few hours this afternoon and then head up to canterbury with jay and wilmes for a little live poker...should be real fun.

I also picked up a gamepad which I'm going to try to get working for when I want to 1 table heads up and lean back. If anyone has any recommendations on how to do this (I know there is good software out there I just haven't done my research yet)

quick downer, avoiding burnout

2011-03-26T19:37:00.004-05:00

I've been playing a lot online the last week and it's been going great...until the last 1300 hands which I'm down like 230 bets. Mostly low stakes so not much money but very frustrating nonetheless. I never have anything and they always do.

I have a buddy in town and another one on spring break and we're going to play lots of online poker I'm sure so this afternoon I've just putzed around without tables open. I tried playing civilization 5 but the new graphics card i got (geforce 570) has been having stability issues so that didn't happen as I didn't have the patience to deal with it.

I finally moved my postgresql hand history database to the terabyte drive so now i finally have the space to make a massive database. I'm exited and eagerly awaiting the import.

a little ring game break, etc etc

2011-03-24T15:23:00.003-05:00

I got tilted last week playing ring games so I decided unless there is a world class fish playing at 100/200 or 200/400 I'm going to skip the ring game grinding. No more 30/60 50/100 etc. I just feel like chilling and heads up is good for me like that. So instead to make sure I get hands I'm playing $5/10 and 6/12 lhe hu and 1/2 NL also. It's pretty relaxing and far less irritating. Hopefully the pros don't bust 8sup while i'm gone... ;)

This snow is actually the only snow all year that has bothered me. Usually I like snow and winter weather, but I'm fully in spring mode and it's time to go and not come back.

My bracket is doing ok...top of the middle of the pack...and I am still in the hunt but probably somewhat of a longshot. I have ohio state winning it all..

I started playing civ 5 again and while I've been a lifelong fan of the civilization series (esp civ 2) I just can't get hooked on it. This is like my 3rd run at it and it's the same as every other time. I just can't get engrossed.

heads up 30/60 battle, heads up as a game

2011-03-23T05:11:00.003-05:00

That was pretty tiring. I just got done 'battling' a guy 3 tables of 30/60 lhe heads up for 1500 hands. It was a very peculiar match for me. I usually don't bluff too much (obv other than continuation betting/barreling) and this guy said he usually played 14 tables of no limit..so he was ultra foldy, perhaps more than anyone I've ever seen.

He would constantly check back the flop and fold the turn. He raised my turn bets no more than like 8 times in those 1500 hands. He never adjusted. I just kept bluffing and bluffing and bluffing some more. He won at showdown over 75% of the time. It's just we only went 28% and most of the rest of the hands I won by bluffing. It's not too often you get to play a guy like that so I had to be a little more conscious of what optimal strategy vs this type of player. My friends and I haven't talked many times about how this is the easiest player type to play against...so think of that next time you play heads up and aren't used to it. call call call call etc

I went to canter the other night and had a good time, although I don't find omaha 8/b fun. Luckily I only had to play like an hour of it. A buddy is in town and another has spring break next week so I'll probably go up there next week a handful of times...which is rare for me lately. I had a big stretch where I played a ton, but not lately.

I hadn't even thought of this when I started writing this blog, but there is a thread on 2+2 that is generating a bit of interest. Bryce claimed he thinks sites should get rid of hu tables and instead institute a game where you can like enter a player pool to play a random person who is in the pool for 200 hands.

This is ridiculous.

My response to that I wrote in the thread is as follows:

"There is no shot the sites get rid of heads up tables.

Suggesting it should be removed is pretty lol. Either table selecting your opponents and playing them or not being able to play heads up with somebody if you both want to play heads up for a certain stake is ludicrous.

It doesn't even make that big of a deal with this 'lobby' busyness. I agree it is slightly less inviting but it's definitely not an important enough of a factor in trying to convince somebody it should be removed. It's just so avoidable (by filtering) and maybe the fish are a hair uninvited by it (but truly I bet most don't notice/think about it/care) but it sure doesn't seem to be affecting most of them - there are tons of guys who keep losing tons and tons of money. People want to gamble and they will put up with some bs to do so. This is light bs and is insignificant in the case for removing heads up.

This is coming from somebody who also sits heads up $500/$1000 sit and goes so I definitely feel comfortable playing anyone and am willing to play more than most...It's just not right to take away the heads up game from people who want to play that way."

End of October

2010-11-03T17:01:00.001-05:00

Well the main event didn't quite go as I had hoped or planned. I was the chip leader at the dinner break but then was ridiculously card dead for the next 3-4 hours and got chipped down. It wasn't as if I could have made many moves with how active the other players were. I got a guy to check raise all in on a QJ9 board with 88 vs my KQ and bang an 8. That hurt. As we got close to the bubble I lost a flip and then won a flip before getting KK allin vs AK preflop for top couple places in chips. It came JJTQ3 and I was out on the bubble. I played the best tournament poker I've ever played so while I was dissapointed, it didn't sting as much as if I had done something dumb.

I finished october with a lot of poker. Looking at my HEM It had me playing 175 hours online (43) per week which is even a little strong for me. I played another 50 hours at canterbury so October was a masher month. Up there for most poker probably ever. I ran bad overall at the end but hot at the bigger games and worse at the smaller games so I'm on a nice little upswing at the moment. I'll probably play a good amount the rest of the year too, but not likely as much as october. I'm having a decent enough year. At the beginning of the year if you told me i was going to be wehre I am I would have been satisfied, but I haven't made any progress dollar wise since May (bets wise yes, doing well there, but opposite situation than the end of october..win at small games lose at big ones). I really would like to finish the year strong so I think I'm gonna cut out some of the bigger gambling and focus more on the more consistant games.

I think I found the snow tires for my truck. I'm pretty pumped to not be sliding around ridiculously like my acura tl. It's given me an unnatural fear of driving in the winter. I'm not going to be one of those assholes in a truck driving 70 in the snow BECAUSE I HAVE A TRUCK I'M INVINCIBLE, I'm just not going to be a bitch about not wanting to drive in the winter because of the snow.

canterbury survival

2010-10-23T02:03:00.002-05:00

I went to canterbury on wednesday night with the intention of leaving by 2 for sure because I needed to wake up the next day to play the tournament...This was looking very possible as the 30/60 game was down to me and another guy and he is a regular worker who probably wasn't hanging around too much longer.. when a business man/poker player approached our table looking to play anyone in the building heads up survival. Survival poker is canterbury's way of getting around the max bet of $60 in minnesota. Basically you play for 2 hours and then at you cash in your 'tournament chips' for their equivalent value in dollars. You can also 'rebuy' when you have half a stack or less.

I had played in a couple $200 and $500 survivals and had quite a blast. Just the change of pace of NL and playing with more recreational/social players led to a very fun poker game. The biggest Canterbury had ever had up to this point was $1000 survivals so when we told them we wanted a $2500 survival it created a little buzz in the room. We had actually agreed on 3k but so far their only approved for 2500. One of the other rules for the gaming commission is you need to have escalating blinds, so we agreed on 5/10 for the first hour and 10/20 for the second hour. Long story short I coolered him twice and won a few other pots so had stacked him twice in 35 minutes. I was pumped, I hadn't played heads up nl person to person in a long while and playing it for meaningful stakes got my adrenaline going. Almost all of my NL heads up online is $1/2 with some 2/4-5/10 but I've decided not to play 10/20nl+ because of a couple bad sessions that threw off all my hard work I just don't feel like dealing with.

The first had I had JJ vs 98 on the 994J4 board. I would have gone broke with his hand too. The 2nd one was my 8h6h vs his Kc9c on the 9h6s4h3hKd I probably would have lost the same amount in his spot so again, nothing but luck on my side. He finally went bust when he 3 bet and called my 4bet with J8s vs my TT. I had lost a bit at 30/60 so I didn't end up as much but it ended the night well and early and I got to go home and get some sleep.

The next day I played the tourney I didn't really ever get anything going. I did flop the first set I can remember in a tournament and win a nice pot only to lose an equal one the next hand buffing off some chips. I busted by making 3 7's vs a flush. Nothing I could have done so out I was. I played some 30/60 for awhile during rush hour before going home.

I'm gonna wake up early tomorrow to play the main event...wish me luck!

twins, new york, house, life, etc

2010-10-19T05:17:00.000-05:00

I have a few minutes left on my flight to new York to hopefully sweat the twins hopefully take two from they hated Yankees. It’s been a depressing postseason and while I’m not giving up hope it doesn’t look too good. Michelle, Schneider, hoppman and I thought it’d be fun to make a little weekend trip and check out the new Yankee stadium. We’re staying in Manhattan and if we don’t have a game 4 I’m sure we’ll find something fun to do around town.

I’ve been putting off blogging because I felt like I should give a recap of everything since I last blogged but now I digress and am just going to go forward.

Poker is pretty good this year it’s just been slow the last few months. I’ve been doing well winning bets but have been losing small at the bigger games so it’s been breakeven for a bit. I’m in a really good place mentally though and also with my methods for making money…heads up limit and I’m finally a competent heads up no-limit player. I’ve also this year learned and turned a profit at 30/60 stud hi/low and stud high as well but I’m not really big on the latter. My latest game I’ve been working on is PLO which was kinda fun and I don’t really have any expectations with it. Everyone just gets super excited about it but I really don’t know too many people who have stuck with it for the long haul. I started with cash, but I sucked at it and the rake kills you because of all the flops you see so I changed to sit and goes and I’ve played a little more than 100 $33 hu sng’s. The players are very bad and that has helped with the fun factor for me as I’m so competitive and winning makes it more fun.

My house is finally coming together really well. I remodeled the basement this summer and all that is left is carpet which will be installed in the next couple weeks. I got a pingpong table for down there and was planning on a pool table but I decided I’d rather have the space than something I wouldn’t use very often. I’m working with a vendor on getting a custom golden tee machine with all of the courses and I’ll get a dart board also.

I pick up on the way home from NY now…

What was hopefully going to be a sweet baseball weekend turned into an awful baseball yet unexpected fun tourist trip…for some reason I was just so focused on baseball that I didn’t even really think about new York city, but we actually had a lot of fun checking it out. We decided to wear our twins jerseys on our day trip around the city and it was fun getting razzed. One guy even opened his like 4^th floor apartment window to yell at us. We rode the subway there and back and man is that convenient. I wish I could do something like that for the twins games. I know some people have the light rail, but it doesn’t go into the north metro. And the north star just doesn’t sound all that convenient.

Brilliant me (and partially schneids fault cause he actually bought the tickets, I just clicked on them initially) got tickets for the ALCS instead of the ALDS which we didn’t realize til we were standing in line at the stadium. Omg. We walked around for 45 minutes and literally saw 0 scalpers. It was very weird and frustrating. We decided to see if somebody at customer service could somehow help us and we found out the game was actually not sold out. Idiots. Who would have thought though? We said give us your best seats and he gave us 4 wheel chair row legends club seats and in we went. When we got to our ‘seats’ which I say loosely because there were no chairs there, we talked to the usher about getting us chairs and they wanted to split us up so we didn’t block the view of the season ticket holders who were sitting on the patio behind our row. No shot. We didn’t fly all the way to new York, pay 300 for seats next to each other and then get split up. Long story short we were able to ‘upgrade’ to normal seats for another 50 dollars and that was that.

The flight to/from NY is so short seeming so I had to finish that tonight (10/19). Since getting back I went to the wild home opener (they’re supposed to be kinda brutal this year so I’m just going to enjoy it for what it is). I’ve also gone to Canterbury a few times. I haven’t played any fall poker classic events yet but I’m going to play the 6max no limit on Thursday as it sounded fun and the main event on Saturday. Michelle has been deep into her school work so I’ve also been getting a lot of hands in online.

It's been awhile...

2009-11-18T14:59:00.001-06:00

I typed this about 2 weeks ago otw to san diego and LA...

Well, it sure has been a long while since I've shared my thoughts in a blog...

It's been so long I don't even know where to start, and since I'm on a plane, I don't even know where I left off last.

It's been quite the interesting last number of months. July was the wsop and getting all of the remodelling figured out for the new house while still living at Jon's. I was hoping to be moved in by the beginning of August but it Bill the contractor was taking his time on his terrible work. I was fed up at the end of august and decided to move in and just deal with the contruction pains and noise and maybe that would make him move faster.

I don't really feel like rehashing every last detail, but the gist is he did nothing but terrible work, his tile/stonework had to be scrapped and I had to hire a seperate contractor to redo the bathroom and entry way, and that took time to find and wait for their availability. They finished up a faaantastic job about 2 weeks ago and Bill was finishing up some of the plumbing in the bathroom when he decided to take the shower valve cap off without turning the main water line off. I heard it from my office and knew immediately what happened. I don't remember the last time I ran that fast. Down one flight of stairs...sprint, down another flight of stairs, sprint. Crank, crank crank crank omg hurry up turn off! Got it. As I go back to the main floor water is just pooooouring out of the canned lights. Towels. Every last one I could find. buckets/bins. Check. The new wood floor was not damaged, but the cieling on the main floor and the carpet in the master were. All said and done not some huuuge deal, but the last straw for mr bill. I should have fired him long before, but I guess I just put too much faith in people...and with all the delays just wanted stuff done so I could move on. This was too much. I had to fire him, and he took it just fine it seems. I probably paid for a little more than the services I recieved but I just want to move forward.

So, I've hired a new contractor and he's been finishing up. He'll be done soon and as soon as I pick out replacement carpet for my bedroom, I can actually live in it! Haha. I wouldn't even remotely care except for the woodpeckers that seem to like the front of my house and constantly wake me up. It's good they're on the wall that my bed is one because a good pounding and they're gone for a half hour. Haha.

My furnature has been delayed in addition to my disdain of all the detailed decorating involved in furnishing a house. I have a decorator helping me and she's been good, she's just a little on the over-creative side so I can't just trust her to do her own thing...

I've learned a lot about people and project management as well as being a responsible adult in the last number of months. I've lovvvved having the house to myself at night but 2 days ago was the first time somebody else hasn't been there during the day. It's not particularly annoying having people in your house working on things but it just gets tired after a while. I actually have to get dressed and stuff?!!?! WHAT? Haha. It's nice just being in charge of things and I've learned a lot of 'handiman' things of which were no interest to me b4 having my own house. I also like being able not deal with/address things when I don't want to. There is no mother or other roommates who have to suffer the consequences. I was the only one who got to care when I didn't have trash service for the first 2 weeks of living there. :)

I spent a couple weeks up north with my family and then michelles family in august so it was one of my lowest hour months in a couple years, yet the time I put in I ran well so I made a healthy amount which made relaxing away from life that much easier. September and October Michelle has been very busy with her masters program so in addition to the big twins push I've been playing a lot of poker with great results. EVen still, the long hours with the house stuff I think had me a little more stressed out than I like being. I bet the twins actually didn't help down the stretch. heh.

I just feel like I've really honed in on a place in poker where I can make great money (hu limit online) and I want to take advantage of it while the landscape is the way it is. Put some money in the bank so if something changes, even drastically I have time and resources to reestablish another method without giving up the lifestyle I've become accustom to. So this definitely means playing a little more than would be 'fun' but it's all about the fututure. If I wouldn't have played live/tournaments I'd be havinbg a really good year but unless something changes in the last 2 months, have to settle for a 'decent year' because I've just lost my ass live and haven't done anything in any tourneys. I guess in 2009 decent year is good as almost everyone in normal business is having a crappy year.

A friend and I started a business project a couple weeks ago that has some good possibility of being a good passive income generator. It's not a get rich type of thing but quite possibly a liveable enterprise. I have some ownership in a couple other companies and I'm just trying to touch more things with the hope that eventually all together they can cover living expenses. I don't plan on ever quitting poker, it'd just be nice to have some non poker income (obviously, lol).

I really wish turbulance on planes didn't affect me. I'm so jealous of those who just cruise through it like it's some fun ride. I had a hell of a time on the last flight from DET to CHI and then on to MSP. We had to fly through storms and it was missserable. The entire flight from chi to msp i just sat there with my head in my hands in my lap constantly looking at my watch hoping to be closer. Somehow, I've never thrown up on a commercial flight (but did on a small private plane when i was like 8) yet I feel like garbage a reasonable amount of the time I fly. It's mostly the decent that gets me and more than one in a day is almost always trouble...so I'm gonna start sucking it up and paying for the more expensive direct flights so I don't have to suffer. My thrify side just thinks it's dumb but it's getting the point after all the misery.

I've also decided I need to treat myself to another helicopter skiing day this winter. I just had so much fun 2 years ago and what's the point of all this work if I really don't do what I think is the most fun thing in the whole world every once in awhile. I'm really jonesing for a nice little ski trip and with the little snow we've gotten (that didn't stick) it has me really in the mood. The rainy crap we've had lately I can do without...nice weather or winter sounds better..haha.

remodelling, wsop

2009-07-03T20:39:00.000-05:00

I'm really looking forward to getting back to my 'normal' life...Wake up between 9 and 2, work most of the standard working people day, see michelle or go do fun things like twins/wild games in the evening and more often than not work before going to bed. These days the afternoons are consumed with kitchen/house planning and it's getting a little old. It's really not my style of thing, but it's my house that I could live in for a very long time so I may as well try to do it right the first time and I just gotta suck it up and do it. It's just kind of overwhelming...buying a first house and then before moving in and even knowing really what I want, having 18 people asking me what I want for each and every detail of the remodelling process. The control I have over it is pretty cool but really I don't feel like I'm experienced enough to be making all these intricate decisions. My mom has been helping me and that's been really helpful, but really most of it's on my shoulders.

So the government decided to give me a small business/self employed census, tell me I somehow owe them $100.38 underpayment of 2008 estimated taxes, and decide that poker accounts are foreign bank accounts and have more forms to fill out...so while each of those things are very small to deal with, on top of the house shinnanigans add another layer of stress. I know I'm probably very spoiled and whining about those things is annoying to some people, but hey it's my blog I can whine if i want! Haha.

On an up note I'm on a plane with Michelle to Vegas for the world series of poker main event. I play on day 1c (sunday) and will potentially be here for a week and a half. If I get unlucky and bust out the first day I'll be back on wednesday and if not, whenever I bust out. We're seeing O tonight and I'm lookin forward to that. I'm also gonna teach her how to roll points for 45 minutes at craps and rack up the dollars. Haha.

Jay has been staying with me at Jons' the past week and that's been sweet to have him around...I know mary's with me. And she pwwwwwwned him. She got the valet in on telling him they backed into picketts car (which he's borrowing) so he was totally buggin out. :)

I think him and Dave Schnettler are spending the rest of July at my house after the wsop and I'm sure that'll be fun. I owe them for all the time they've put me up in San Diego. Hopefully the house remodelling wont be too annoying to us while we're there. About as soon as the house gets done it's Du Nord time! Kinda funny, but it'll def be a great break from everything and I hope to be fully settled by the time I come back so I can just be DONE. :)

I'll be posting wsop updates to my twitter (bicyclekick) if you want to follow my deep run you can.

and stuff

2009-06-20T01:44:00.000-05:00

I've been very busy these days and definitely put blogging on the back burner. It also didn't help for blogging that in vegas I won $700 1 short session and otherwise lost every single other session. It was never a big number but bleed bleed bleed. I did manage to have more fun than usual though as I golfed twice, hung out with some great people I dont get to see very often, and found the 2 tournaments I played to actually be fun (vs the standard ughh why did I enter this tourney 6 hours into it). I think that has a lot to do with the structures which I find to be a million times better than any other live tourneys I've ever played and the limit tourney was 6max so a lot of action...very fun.

I close on the house in a week and it's been so busy because I've been working with a contractor and a kitchen remodeler to redo the kitchen and master bath before I move in. We've made some great progress and even though it stresses me out I'm really looking forward to the finished project.

I had a pretty good may for poker but it finished slugishly and june has been no different. I haven't been blowing my brains in overly, just on the negative side of the variance tree. Meh, so much else going on...I don't really have time to think too much about it and it's been lots of short sessions so I don't feel like I've really been tilting too much.

I'll try not to be such a stranger and you can also follow my tweets at http://twitter.com/bicyclekick. I dont put much there - mostly wsop stuff and I'll be updating it for the main event but I throw a bone every once in awhile. Haha.

house

2009-06-03T21:09:00.000-05:00

They accepted my low re-counter offer!!!!! wooooo!

quick vegas update

2009-06-03T19:40:00.004-05:00

I decided to join the twitter fad for updating on wsop stuff here in vegas so if you want to keep up to date with how i'm doing in the different tournaments you can find out at http://twitter.com/bicyclekick

I made the offer and got counter offered and re-counter offered on the house. I should know really soon.

house update!

2009-05-28T22:31:00.002-05:00

I think I've found the house I'm going to buy! I'm suuuuuuuper excited. Not only is it really good it's the first house I haven't been able to find anything wrong that's not cosmetic and it's cheaper and better location than the rest too. I'm going to redo the kitchen and probably a few other cosmetic things but it's a really great house space wise! The yard is reallllly good too.

6am is gonna come too quick so I'm gonna try to unwind and get some sleep!

Camping etc

2009-05-28T17:46:00.003-05:00

I feel like even though I'm doing mostly fun things that I'm constantly running around like a chicken with it's head cut off. I've been waking up to an alarm for the last month or so and I'm sure I'll get zero sympathy for that but isn't one of the perks of being a poker pro supposed to be lack of alarm in the morning?

The camping trip was a blast and could have been disasterous considering the rooftopper we had on top of the car flew off in reletively thick traffic while I was going 75mph. Everyone swerved properly and the state patrol was able to get it off the road and escort us off and tell us to get different and better straps at fleet farm. Only a few dents on my car and a 2 hour delay. Coulda been far worse.

The campsite was pretty cool, nice and wooded and we didn't have anyone overly close to us so sound wasn't an issue. We went hiking in a couple state parks and had some nice picnics and went to a winery and brewary. Also there was a really really sweet restaurant a calm bay on lake michigan that we had dinner one night and it was absolutely perfect. 70, sunny, and no wind. Very nice.

Nights were very very cold. Around 40 degrees...luckily we all brought hats and stuff so we all managed. We pulled the picnic table close to the fire and that helped a lot for playing cards. The first night I slept without a hat on and it was kinda annoying so the last 2 nights I slept with a hat on and it was much better. Now that I'm no longer a whipper snapper sleeping on the ground wasn't particularly thrilling. I got the best compact pad REI had, but next time I'm bringing an air matress lol. I woke up with a sore neck and back every day. Waaaaaaaaaah waaaah. :) I have a lot of respect for the people on survivor.

Since I felt like I was working a little too hard, I basically took a couple days off before my trip and then obviously didn't play on my trip, so that was really pleasant to have basically a week off. I'm back to playing 100/200 on my own action again and have won a little at that. I might chop more of the 6max action and take my own HU action because my edge is way bigger.

I skipped the twins game today cause of that running around with my head cut off feeling and then had my business meeting for 5pm get cancelled which actually kinda pissed me off cause I wanted to play tennis and also had originally planned on having my PA come over and help clean up the disaster I've made in my room and I cancelled her but she was able to come after all. I missed the tennis but I'll manage. I'm seeing a house at 8pm that I'm really hoping is great...as I'm getting a little antsy. My financial planner changed her recommendations about the housing market from do what you want to buy small as she thinks the upper housing market still hasn't been affected by the forclosures and they are going to come in the next couple years and if I bought one and wanted to move it'd be a lottt harder and there will also be good deals then to take advantage of if I do in fact want to 'settle down for sure' in one place for awhile. Seems to make sense to me...so this house is definitely underwhelming compared to some of the others I've looked at but it's location is great, it seems to have a pretty private back yard with woods behind it and deeded access to lake josephene.

Mike's friends who we're going on a golf trip this weekend must think getting up and atem early is the way to go, so they made tee times for like 11am 4 hours away for tomorrow, which means we have to be on the road by 6am. Brilliant imo. At least my sleep schedule is like 2am-10am so while it'll be brutal, it could be worse. I think i'm going to vegas next wednesday. This is contigent to me not feeling overwhelmed and also not having house stuff I have to take care of.

Michelle has been quite the supportive awesome gf these days and I feel like I should give her some extra public credit.

Twins seats

2009-05-22T12:36:00.002-05:00

Here are our new twins seats. It's sweet that they're the same price ($50) as our current seats! blogspot is dumb and cuts the images off but you can click to see the full image.

thoughts

2009-05-22T00:55:00.007-05:00

I had one of those shooting the shit for a few minutes in passing conversations turn into a 3 hour conversation with my roommate Jon tonight. What a conversation it was. It mostly didn't have anything to do with me, but even the parts that didn't made me realize I'm working too hard. It's too easy for me to work at all times of the day so it's always hanging over my head. I could always be making a lot of money for an hour of my time. This isn't fair to me with how I've handled it. I understand why I did for awhile as I was very motivated to make a bunch of money to make the house buying process more stress free as I lost some money when I pushed it, but now that I've gotten back on track, it's time to stop. I like never take full days off. I'm going to try taking sundays off for awhile. I'm sure there will be a rare sunday here and there where I want to play tournies and I'll take monday off, but I'm going to try this at least through June and see how it goes. This seems super "no duh" and easy and ridiculous to most people I'm sure, but I with my drive to put in 40 hours per week (which I've averaged over this year), it really hangs over my head. I guess that sounds like I'm addicted or have some sort of gambling addiction, but it's really not like that or about that. I've pretty much cut most of the gambling limits and what not out of my play, so it's mostly just 'work'. I'm not looking for the winning excitement when I sit down most days. It sure is fun to win and go on rushes, but really in the end I really just want the dollars with the least stressful route.

A friend messaged me and said I should append to this a little bit about how stressful playing online poker for a living really is. Like playing 3-4 tables of lhe for 4 hours is really really mentally taxing. I'd put it on par with taking a test in college as far as how much it takes out of you. I know a lot of people in other jobs feel the pressure and this isn't to take away from them, it's just that most people don't TRULY understand what it takes to do what we do. It's draining.

A number of us bought tennis rackets a couple of days ago and we've played twice and are playing again tomorrow afternoon. I like it just like raquetball except it's maybe better cause you get to be outside and get some sun also. We picked our wild season ticket seats for next year and they are section 115 like row 20 (map here) which is on the wild shoot twice side so we are ridiculously thrilled at how lucky we got. The next best seats were in the corner 2 rows from the top. We pick our twins tickets tomorrow and there are perhaps 10 seats left of what we want (good seats behind home plate that aren't under the overhang) so it's going to be down to the wire. CMONNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN one time.

I'm really looking forward to the camping trip this weekend and had fun stocking up on all the goodies at REI this afternoon. I figured it was time to replace my 20 year old sleeping bag as well as pick up a nice sleeping pad. I'm a little bitch, it's true. :)

A little late

2009-05-15T15:30:00.004-05:00

Sorry about the lack of updates...been busier than normal lately.

The twins game where they won 14-10 in the 13th inning was definitely the game of the year...unreal and super fun to be at. The day game the day after I skipped (i skip most day games...but next year outside they'll be funnnnn) was a pretty cool game too.

Poker...I haven't had this good of a start to a month, let alone this good of a month if it ended today in like 8 months so I'm pretty pumped about that. I'm playin real good and running real good also of course. Positive variance is fun! Hopefully this will propel me into having a sweet world series! I've been playing a lot too...and really noticed a biggg difference between the games from 11pm-5am vs the 11am-5pm so my sleep schedule is an annoying 6am-2pm but it comes with the territory. The games are just that much better lately.

I've been lookin at a couple houses again and there is one I want to see on turtle lake that looks pretty good but the selling agent forgot to tell them I wanted to see it and they were having people over for dinner so I couldn't see it! I couldn't see it on monday either for the same reason but that was a last minute call so it's understandable.

Next weekend a few of us are going camping in Door County Wisconsin...camping is one of those things you always talk about doing then very rarely actually do it...I'm pumped it's happening! The weekend after I'm going with a buddies friends to northern bay which is also in WI for a golf weekend. And 3 weekends from now it's vegas for the WSOP. It seems like everyone is going to be there that weekend so I'm really lookin forward to it.

I'm off to get ready for an Owl City concert now...

Cali, May

2009-05-06T01:27:00.000-05:00

Cali wrapped up nicely. My own poker was pretty snore but I had a piece of jay in a couple games and he won me some good money. Adding his into mine I think I ended up around 30k. A pretty solid week and a half work trip if you ask me! Golfing didn't really happen as much as I had wanted, but I did get out yesterday and also hit balls today.

I've been going to a lot of twins games and running aces the past 2 nights. I've also been tryin to make up for lost time with michelle, who got accepted to grad school at the U today, so we're really excited about that! I'm gonna join up with her beer drinking I mean kickball team tomorrow and I'm looking forward to that too.

Poker in may has been nothing but fantastic and it was capped off tonight by crushing some guy at 1/2. Jay gets half and I'm happy to give some back for his crushing while I was in SD. I'm feelin pretty brainfrizzled now so I'm gonna quit for the night and hop in bed and enjoy some TV or a movie.

MN gambling law proposition

2009-05-06T01:26:00.002-05:00

I'm going to take my last blog post down because I made it before I was fully informed. Here is the deal in my oppinion now that it's been a few days:

Nothing is going to happen. Maybe for a couple days a few ISP's will comply, but it will be fought hard in court and isn't likely to stand. I'm not nervous at all really. It's pretty ridiculous they are trying to censor information on the internet. Another interesting thing is a number of companies on the list of 'banned sites' do not allow US customers so they are trying to block free speach. Is this the american govt or the chinese govt? Seriously.

LA wrap up and on to SD

2009-04-26T14:05:00.004-05:00

Day 4 was a real short day as like I said in my last post we were headed to bob and kirby's for a night off. I ended up picking up about $2000 in 5 hours. It was a bad $100/200 game and a great day to take a break.

On day 5 I spent the afternoon at the pool playing online and put my name on the $100/200 list at 4:45pm. I got in a $10/20 no limit game around 7 and played that for a little bit until finally getting my 1/2 seat at about 845. Frustrating. I was planning on going to SD the next day (saturday) but I ran into a couple friends who happened to be going back to SD themselves later that night so I caught a ride with them...which led to only getting to play 1/2 for about an hour. Thanks to sean and then chris for the rides! I won 800 at 10/20 nl and lost 2100 at 1/2.

Final totals for live poker:
41 hours
+$15,200

Running total for online poker
15 hours
+3,000

It was definitely a weird and pleasant live poker trip as the swings were really low and I didn't ever have one of "those sessions" where you're just stuck your ass (losing a lot) and it's kinda miserable. I did blow that 12k win back to 2k one day but that's standard at $200/400.

I was able to fit a round of golf in yesterday afternoon which was unexpected and awesome. It was my first 18 of the year and we played a kinda tough course. I was hitting the ball well but definitely had some rust and shot a 95 which with the course difficulty seems not so bad.

We're headed to the Padres game now and then gonna work online the rest of the day I think.

LA day 3: jump around

2009-04-23T15:24:00.002-05:00

Usually when I play poker here I'll play longer sessions because the games are great and I'm here to work. This trip, the good white chip($100) games have been really spotty so they really break my sessions up. Like yesterday I was playing $100/200 for about 2 hours when a rich guy walked in and wanted to play $200/400. So a handful of us quit 1/2 and headed over to give him some action. Usually there are no time restraints, but apparently this guy is a real hit and runner so CC and Ly made an agreement with him that everyone who played had to play for 2 hours and couldn't quit unless they were losing. This seems a little forced and odd, but when you have to quit another game and likely wont get back into it any time soon because there are plenty of people waiting to play it along with this guy being notorious for very short sessions, it makes sense.

Just on cue after 2 hours he racked up his couple thousand dollar win and jetted. I played a few more rounds out of courtesy and in case he changed his mind, but without him the game was pretty bad and we had started drinking wine so it was time to go back to 1/2.

I did end up sitting outside by the pool in the afternoon to try to get a little color...but especially with being so white right now I didn't want to push it and end up bright red so I went in after 40 minutes figuring I'd pick up a little color but really I can't tell any difference. So today I was going to spend more time out there but it's cloudy! I didn't know they had such things in cali. :(

There's this mean woman here and a dealer was being unlucky for her and she started calling him "fucking VC" and he flipped out on her and called the floor over. She tried and sorta did play it off and he got over it, but it was still inappropriate and awkward. She also got into a big yelling/swearing thing with a Lebanese guy where she kept calling him asshat or something and he went off saying "don't call me asshat fucking beach. fucking beach. fucking beach dont call me asshat! Don't disrespect me like that!" Back in MN you'd get kicked out for a day for antics like that but here the floor man will just come over and say cmon guys lets just not talk to eachother and play cards. Even the 2nd time it happens. They aren't in the business of throwing people out.

In my 4 2-2.5 hour sessions (8.75h total) I ended up +5100 for the day yesterday.
Running total 32.25 hours + $12,800

Nice to be up like that but it could definitely change drastically real quick so I'm not gonna think about it too much.

I haven't thought about this hand that much since I played it but now I'm going to. I definitely played it differently than I usually would and I haven't decided for sure if there's merit in it yet.

Greg posts a dead blind in the co and it's folded to him and he raises. Everyone folds to me and I call with 98s. I've played greg very strong for years and he used to be a fit or fold kind of guy but he plays lot tougher and better these days and and has been showing down a lot more vs me lately. I've also ran good vs him and that helps.

The flop comes Q86 with 2spades. I have the 9s. I check call.

The turn is a 5d making 2 diamonds. I check raise and he calls.

The river is a 7h and I bet and he folds. Obviously the hand is less interesting when I make a straight, but that's part of the reason I like my turn check-raise. I think I have pretty good made-hand strength already and just in case I have straight outs and more than likely 2 pair outs. I almost never check-call check-raise as I think that's often a terrible line that only fish take, but this board texture and this history made it seem like a line to mix in.

Schneider and I always play hands ridiculously strong vs each other and never make folds so yesterday I decided it was time to lay a hand down. He raised utg 5 or 6 handed and I 3 bet it. The rich guy called 2 in the sb and mike called.

The flop came K75 with 2 clubs.

They both checked, I bet, sb folded, schneids called.

The turn was a 2d putting 2 diamonds out there.

He check raised me and I 3 bet. He called.

The river was an ace of clubs.

He bet out.

I painstakingly threw my cards away. I haven't talked to him about the hand yet but I really hope I didn't get pwned... :)

Time to head down to get a few hours in. A few of us are heading over to bob and kirby's place for a little grillin/beers and modified monopoly.

LA day 3: too tired

2009-04-23T06:11:00.001-05:00

I did win some more today but I'm far too tired to write up about it so I'm just going to wait until tomorrow.

LA poker day 2...$39 at a time

2009-04-22T03:00:00.003-05:00

This will be a short one cause there really weren't any interesting hands or things to talk about. I woke up around 1 and got my name on the list around 230 (what happens when there are no seats avail in the game) and got called for the game at 430. I played a little online in the meantime and it was bad to me as it's been the last few very short sessions.

I started in a must move $100/200 game with mike schneider and CC. It started getting more filled after an hour or two and Frank Mariani (LA Lakers owner) joined our game so we made it $200/400. I played that for a few hours and was up 12k at point but lost like 4 straight hands to Max down to 2k winner so I took a break and went up to my room to screw around on the internet. Any time a player like max wins a bunch of pots straight like that he really gains a nice psychological edge on you and the game. I get this way too people too but Max is a step better for sure...so with him having position on me it seemed like a good time to break and after taking a good hour and a half break I came back down and just didn't feel like gamblin. So I racked up, ordered a beer and found a $40/80 game.

What a bunch of nits they were. I raised like 50% of my hands and won the blinds most of the time. It would be $40 but at the 40/80 game the house takes a dollar no matter what every hand so it was $39 hand after hand. It was really relaxing and I rushed up for a bit but lost a bit back and quit around 12:30am up like $1400.

today: 7.5 hours + $4100
running total: 23.5 hours + $7800

Probably gonna play online for a little while here then finish watching the celebrity apprentice. Tomorrow afternoon I feel like sitting at the pool with my laptop or a book may be in order. Thursday I'm going over to pokerbob and kirby's house for a little grillin and a monopoly variant. While the games have been good enough, they just aren't slave away for countless hours at games so I'm gonna work a little less hard this trip it looks like. It's probably good for me anyhow. I'm just really looking forward to golfing in san diego.

LA day 1 wrapup

2009-04-21T04:43:00.004-05:00

Day 1 ended much stronger than it began with that jackhammer start. I got down to the poker room and couldn't find a limit game and they were starting a new $10/20 blind no limit game so I hopped in and per the recommendation of a couple of people I bought in on the shorter side at $1500. I played for about a half hour when I got called for the $100/200 limit game when I was on the big blind with 54 of diamonds. The flop came Q76 with 2 diamonds. I led and got raised, I re-raised and he went all in and I called and he had a set and I didn't improve. So I move to limit...

The game was kinda crappy for quite a while...pretty much all pros, some of them not particularly good but they are not real fishy or anything. A couple OK guys. After not tooooo long I got moved to the main game which was pretty darn good. There was a guy in it who had been up for 3 days straight. I got to witness something new...a player falling asleep mid hand. He called the flop and then when his opponent bet the turn 10 seconds later he was sleeping and had to be poked awake. Lol. Dude. Go to bed. At around 11pm I was starting to feel a little fatigued myself so I planned on quitting when he did as he had racked up but I kept winning pots and he kept on playin. I try to play longer when I'm winning and shorter when I'm losin and while I was feeling a little tired, I was still with the program. I quit around 2am because I made a lazy play and it just seemed like enough and a good time to quit.

I ended up losing that $1500 in the no limit game but picked up a little over $11,000 in the $100/200 game so I won around $9800 on the day in about 13 hours.

running total:
16 hours
+$3700

A couple of the more 'interesting' hands:

Hand 1:
The fishy sleepy player grabs some chips to limp and then notices a few people behind him have folded so grabs another 4 and raises. I 3 bet with A8s and he calls. The flop is q54 rainbow and he check calls. The turn is the K of spades and he check calls. The river is the J of diamonds and he checks and I bet and I think this is one of those spots that if you don't play much live you will give off the wrong signals and get called here more often than somebody who is comfortable live. He almost surely as a pair by this point and while the board is helping you get a fold, betting in a believable manner is important. He ended up folding with a little 'darnit that board sucks' demeanor and I picked up the pot.

I had a good amount of history leading up to hand 2. The player in question is a long time pro. We haven't played TONS of hours together, but enough for me to know his basic operating procedure. He plays pretty straightforward and waits until the turn with his strongest hands. He's been 3 betting me a reasonable amount because he's 2 seats to my left and I've been missing the shit out of the flops so pretty much been folding until this hand where I had KQo and raised utg+1. He 3 bet 2 spots later and everyone else folded. I called. The flop came Q73 with 2 diamonds. I check raised and he 3 bet. I've seen him wait until the turn so many times with his big hands and he seems like the type who 3 bets that kind of flop with a weaker range than not so I 4 bet and he quickly 5 bet and I said oh ok see you at the showdown buddy in my head. The turn was a jack of spades and I checked and he checked. Heh. Nice 5 bet for a 'free' card. The river was an 8 of clubs and I bet and he called, i showed and he mucked.

That same player (from hand 2) kind of owned me in hand 3. I raised the button with AJs and a tight ok player called in the small blind. He 3 bet out of the bb and I capped it. The flop was AT3 with 2 diamonds. sb checked, he bet, I raised, sb folded, he 3bet, I called.

The turn and river were bricks and he bet it down and I called and he showed AQ. Against a lot of internet players that would be very standard, but this guy's range just felt a lot stronger but he definitely felt I was a little nuts so I just couldn't find a fold. Owell.

Time to watch some more season 2 of the wire...

LA day 1 great start

2009-04-20T13:27:00.002-05:00

Nothing like waking up to a jackhammer in the morning. :( I was all pumped to sleep my little heart out as I haven't really been able to lately but the commerce is doing construction. I'll have to try to get to bed a little earlier tonight maybe and cross my fingers on tomorrow.

Time to shower and head down to 'work'. I'll update later.

LA day .5 trip report

2009-04-20T05:51:00.002-05:00

Well i guess it coulda started worse, but not a whole lot in 3 hours. The $100/200 game was full when we got here so we hopped in the $60/120 game and it was a peach. I started out ok and got called for 1/2 but the 60 game seemed infinitely better so I decided to stay there. I don't think I won a pot after that decision and ended up losing $6100 in the 3 hours I played.

The only interesting hand was one I played was one where I raised 54s on the button and just the bb called. The flop came J92 with 2 spades and he check called.

The turn was a 6 of hearts and he check called.

The river paired the 9 and he bet real quick...too quick to have a 9 and it just felt like he was almost prepaired to bet the river so I snapped out a raise and he called without much pain with ace king and dragged the pot.

Whoops. 'Good' read, get owned. :)

The rest of the hands were just standard losing pots. Enough for one night but I'm not discouraged yet. I'm gonna sleep now and up and at em in the mornin.

Cali here I come

2009-04-19T18:23:00.003-05:00

What do I always do when I'm in the middle of packing and don't feel like finishing? Write a blog obviously. Schneider and I are off to LA tonight for some pokering and when we're done with that gonna pop down to SD to visit the boys. I've been kinda itchin to go somewhere and when spring allergies rolled into full effect last week I just had to figure out where. If I had somebody to take a golf trip with I woulda just done that but I have clubs in SD too so I'll just mash out a bunch of rounds when I'm there.

Speaking of golf I made it out for the first time a couple days ago...just a little par 30 9 hole course by my house. I shot 5 over and was striking the ball well so I was very pleased. Putting has always been the worst part of my game so I decided this year to try something new that I've seen others do...line up the line on the golf ball with the line I want to take so when I am standing over it ready to hit all I have to think about is how hard to hit it as I've already got the line picked out. I'm sure I ran a little good but I 1 putted like 4 or 5 times. I also had my shortest put for eagle - somewhere around 15 feet with a nice break but it wasn't to be but I picked up a nice birdy.

The twins have been really fun to be at. I was at the big comeback game as well as finally a relaxing victory the next night. I wasn't able to go this afternoon as there was a birthday party for michelles grandma but I wasn't disappointed as I've been to plenty and day games are dumb indoors.

I plan on just playing $100/200 while out there and maybe a little $200/400 if the game is good, but I don't think I have the mental bankroll to play anything bigger as I don't wanna leave there again with the same feeling I had last time. It's just not worth it. I'm not sure if people are interested, but maybe I'll give a daily trip report or something if I'm feeling it. I'll try to remember some hands, too.

I know I have a bunch more little topics I could write about but I wanna finish packing so I can actually feel more relaxed.

shaking my head

2009-04-15T14:39:00.003-05:00

All I can do this afternoon is shake my head. Yesterday afternoon I only got to play an hour because i had to meet up with my tax accountant. I could not blow a pot. I won every hand for that hour and it was too bad I had to go. Today is the exact opposite. I just have to watch every pot go the other way and all I can do is shake my head, over and over. I really bet that the reason limit holdem is a good game that will last the test of time is because sessions and runs like these are very common. People can be fooled about their skill level (good or bad) for a very long time and the rushes are so fun and people get hooked on trying to get on another one.

I did get to the driving range/practice green for the first time all year. Pathetic. Like out of this world pathetic. I just hope it was a fluke. I hit my first 6 or 7 balls terribly. I don't think it helps we were hitting off dirt but still, it wasn't good. I was putting better than average and my chipping could use a little practice.

I'm not going to bash my head against the wall with poker, that doesn't sound fun. It feels kinda silly to play racquetball when it's so nice out, but I could use that workout and setting up something like badminton sounds like too much work. haha. May as well let jon's grass get a little healthier too. Hopefully the twins will pulll off another win tonight...I'm slackin at 1-2 at games I've been at this year.

RB time...

taxes, game night

2009-04-13T01:41:00.002-05:00

The thought of doing taxes makes me cringe so it's no surprise I let them go until the last minute. I got some of the prelim stuff done last week and had a meeting with my tax advisor but needed to get her more info (like how I made $.76 in interest on my like 4 shares of ecolab I had when I was a kid. I really should tidy up all my different accounts some day so I don't have to dig so much when tax day comes. I also get tons of statements and crap in the mail. Such a waste (of paper, the company who has to send them, mail system, and my time dealing with all of it.) I have all my main accounts on paperless statements but the ones i don't interact with much are still sending me paper.

I'm going to end up owing less than I remembered my financial planner planning out for me to owe so I'm pretty pleased about that.

We had some people over for an old fashioned board game night last night. Man I love game nights. We played apples to apples, taboo, and a little bit of bananagrams. It's no surprise I play so much poker and enjoy it more than most...I just love playing games!

I played the $109 SCOOP main event on stars today which had 18 thousand people. I lasted quite awhile before getting screwed out 1745th which paid $224! Ship it!!! Haha. They got my ass at the cash games a little today tho. Meh. I haven't decided if it's relax time or work some more. May as well check out the games and have them make my decision.

friday night ganger

2009-04-11T03:31:00.000-05:00

I just quit a sick 4 hour session where at one point I got up to 4 $50/100 6max and 2 $30/60 6max's because the games were so good. I had a guy at heads up too but quickly quit him as it was very hectic and very stressful as I usually feel the most comfortable playing 2-4 tables. After losing a lot of the days to start April I pulled out a nice $16k (and 260 bet) winner today to bring me into the black on the month. The 16k winning days just feel so much better these days without the big games. I used to be kinda numb to those cause I'd be losing that much a lot too, but I don't think I've lost more than 10 in a day since I gave up games bigger than 50/100 almost 2 months ago so it's nice. Poker is so dumb as I didn't play any better/different than any other days this month and I couldn't win and now it comes in a big wave. The games were a little better but they've been good otherwise, too.

The wild game tonight was a really fun time. You could tell they really wanted it and an 8-4 hockey game is always great. It was sad to find out afterwods Annaheim won and we were out, but it's been a fun season and we got to care all the way down the wire and just like I said for the twins, if I'm still going to games in september because they're in it, I see the season as fine. Obviously I want playoffs, but just having something to hope for for awhile is fun.

I was able to talk to our season ticket agent about getting the right behind home plate tickets for a game this past week so 6 of us went and sat 2nd (and then 1st from like the 7th inning on) behind home plate right over the visitors on deck circle. Heckling those guys is really fun. :) Afterwords we went up to running aces for a 10/20 HOE game which after not too long turned into holdem cause those other games are slow and too much thinking haha. I'm thinkin about a quick little Utah ski trip next week and if they have openings another heli-skiing adventure. If not, the other sticks are coming out and it'll be time to start golfin.

I don't feel like blahblahblahing anymore. I'm off to bed.

ape rill

2009-04-07T16:32:00.000-05:00

I've been pretty busy lately and meaning to update this but it always gets put on the back burner. I've got my taxes mostly done (maybe another hour or two of work). Poker has been pretty dumb in april. Twins are starting and I'm excited! Wild are finishing... :( That's the short version of blog. Haha.

A buddy and I started a little project which will probably turn into a business project soon enough. I'm kinda pumped about it and it's computer/software related and it was fun and interesting to plan it. I felt like I was back in college and maybe I will get to directly use my computer science knowledge after all! ;p

As cold and as brutal as it was walking to/from the twins game last night (in short sleeves), I wish the game was played outside...at least then you can dress for the occaision.

Bizot and I have been playing a ton of raquetball lately and if I bust out of this tourney in the next half hour or so aare going to play again today. It's really fun and a great workout, so the best of all worlds.

Well, so much for the tourney I just lost AK to AQ all in pre-flop. Fantasticly played by the AQ. lol owell. At least I get to play RB now...which I'm off to do...

fogodeguy

2009-03-31T04:35:00.001-05:00

Since Jay was in town we decided to do a little 'get spiffed up and have a nice dinner and stay downtown' double date with him and Mary. We decided on Murray's steak house and hotel ivy.

Dinner was cruising along smoothly when towards the end of our entre portion the waitress was trying to clean up the table and projectile spilled my entire glass of red wine all over me. I was wearing a blue shirt and black dress pants...luckily I had taken off my coat. The whole table burst out laughing and I'm not a very angry person so I just had to play it down, as the waitress felt worse than I've like ever seen somebody feel. I also didn't want to be a crabaple on a good night, but deep down it was a little frustrating.

They boss gave me 15 cash and a card to call if dry cleaning cant get it out and they'll buy me a new shirt. I highly doubt they'll be able to. We'll see. I'm not to worried it wasn't like one of my favorite shirts or anything.

Hotel Ivy was fine. Given there are plenty of other options I would probably try a few others before/if i went back. I wouldn't say it was bad by any means, we just weren't that pleased. The small ammount of service we got was pretty good though, and I heard it's known for it's spa which we didn't use.

I ventured back to canterbury for the first time since october with all the boys for a nice fun long session on sunday. It definitely brought back some nostalgia and it was also nice to see a number of people I haven't seen in awhile.

Tonight we had a quadruple date where we (me, michelle, jay, mary, pickett, lindsey, dave p, and reily) went to fogodechau. I enjoy that place...and more as an experience than out of this world food. It's good food, for darn sure, and it's nice to get so many different types of meet, but it doesn't quite compare to a top steak house steak. All the girls were in for going to RA after for a little fun game poker but 3 of 4 of them have to get up b4 7 so we decided a little bowling and games across the street at gameworks would be a better idea. It was for sure.

The place was a ghost town and felt like they've kinda given up on trying. I can't really blame them as the block E area just feels really ghetto and I've been a part of some sketchy bullshit as well as heard of plenty so it's not exactly where most people want to go.

Tomorrow should be another sweet day as we're having a little boys night where 8 of us are going to an early dinner and then the wild game. Like pretty much all of the remaining games it's a must win game so there will be some good energy there and it'll be much fun.

I know I missed talking about something I wanted to talk about but the fact I wrote a blog at all given how tired I am after a great longish session is satisfying enough for now. I'm going to bed.

cider house rules

2009-03-27T02:48:00.003-05:00

Michelle and I walked to a coffee house by her house tonight to get a hot cider because it felt winterish and after buying it the woman there said they were on a break from the concert thingy that some lady was putting on and if we wanted to stay we had to pay the 14 dollar cover. Maybe I'm just out of touch, but some rinky dink lady playin guitar at a rinky dink coffee house charging 14 bucks made me kinda chuckle. It must not have seemed overly weird to the 20-25 people who turned out (and maybe I'm the one out of touch, i'm not fully sure) but I thought most of the time coffee house music was like hey I like playing music I'll have my case open and you can put tips/donations in and I'm sellin my cd if you like my(our) music and want to support us.

We went back and played some gin with the basketball games on in the background and she had no trouble beating me pretty handily. I somehow have missouri going to the final 4 so that upset tonight was very awesome tonight, as was nova beating duke. I'm on top of my pool and leading schneider and hopp in our sidebets so I'm feeling good, but there is so much left and so much can happen.

I'm probably just a little whiner here, but I find having to take my car into the dealership to get the standard oil change/tuneup crap tedious and time wasting. It rarely is done as fast as they say and I find my self in major limbo running around trying to find other things to do.

April is going to the month of appointments. I already have a dermatologist apt, I also have to see the dentist, my financial planner, my tax accountant, and find a personal trainer to whip my butt into shape. I thought poker meant I didn't have to have a lot of crap on your schedule, lol. I think Shneider may have found a new PA to help me keep my life in order. I'm really hoping it works out well.

It's also my birthday on the 9th and the end of the wild/postseason as well as twins starting up. I gotta get out swinging the golfclubs, too, and still try to fit one more ski trip in. We're talking tahoe as we've always talked about wanting to go there and apparently it's like the best spring skiing anywhere and our vail pass works at heavenly, too.

And I was supposed to have a big poker goal of playing another 40-50k hands (I'm at about 45k hands with a few days left in march) And I gotta do my taxes, too. Probably about 8 hours worth of work I won't be able to spend playing poker. Looks like in reality I'll get in like 10 hands all month, haha. But I'll be having a great time. I'm ready for spring and summer. Lemme skip the spring allergies though.

I have a rule

2009-03-24T23:22:00.000-05:00

For some reason I'm not finding this easy to explain as it just feels wordy any way I type it, so I think I just have to roll with it. When I'm playing a guy heads up and decide that he plays good enough and I don't want to play him again, I tell him I don't want to play him anymore and good game and good luck. If he sits with me again, I'll play both my button and give him his button and say please dont sit with me again, I don't want to play with you. If he sits a third time, I play my button and quit. Most people get the hint as they know how advantageous it is to be the guy on the button and they aren't getting the reciprication of being able to play their button. Over the last year on the button I make .08 of a bet per hand wheras in the big blind I lose .02 of a bet.

Yesterday I was playing and decided I didn't want to play a guy. I went through the motions and on the third time I grimmed his ass (the term in the poker world for playing your button and quitting). I left the table and sat at a new one. He joined and I did it again. And again. And again. On the 11th time he said man you're hard to play, always switching tables. lol. Finally after the 12th time he left never to be seen again.

I'm not like all super proud about all of this as it's a little bit douchey but it's one way you can stand up for yourself when somebody else is being an ass and it was making me laugh. I just thought it was funny he came back 12 times. Previously I've never had more than like 2 or 3 times.

I played raquetball today and very dumbly wore ankle socks that are lower than my basketball shoes so mid-first-game I had to go put my brutal street shoes on to play more as my other shoes were rubbing the shit out of my ankle.

I really enjoyed the nicer weather and it looks like the rain and semi-cold is here to stay for a bit. Kinda tough to have a nice little taste of spring/summer and then get it swiped away. Although the rain wasn't cold today and kinda made me feel like it was summer.

I've only put in 2 hours of poker today and I haven't really decided if I'm going to mash out another 3-6 hours after this blog. I'll probably look at the games and if they're good, play and see how I feel. I feel like I might have shorter patience than a lot of times so it might not last. The AP jackpot is up to 733k so I may just open up 10 tables of low no limit and try to win me a piece if I'm not feelin it.

sunday sunday sunday

2009-03-23T03:08:00.002-05:00

The Wild are really under the gun with their season so when edmonton came to town today it was about as close to a must win game as you can get without 100% being so. Finally the crowd seemed to realize and appreciate this as the enviroment finally had a buzzed feel to it. The last bunch of games have felt pretty tame and has been kinda shocking because it was a super cool atmosphere last year downt he stretch.

Schneider and pickett were talking and realized the 4 ticket holders have been to 1 or 2 games together as a complete group. One or more of us has pretty much always been travelling...and lol pickett was gone for 6 weeks...but it's worked out great. One of our cupholders broke on the 2nd or 3rd game of the year and finally 2 games ago we told them about it. It wasn't fixed today. So this is how are seats are...

seat 1 is not a bad seat, it generally has somebody on your left but it's normal spacing. Seat 2 is a middle seat so definitely more desireable but it doesn't have a cup holder so beer drinking/not spilling is always an additional concern. Seat 3 is the best seat...it's in the middle and has all of the proper amenities. Seat 4 is by far the worst. While it has a place to put your beer to get warm (cough bizot) the seat is not parallel with the seat to it's right as we are in the corner. It's especially brutal when there is a full size male sitting in the adjacent seat as there is negative leg room.

Speaking of seats, some season ticket holder since 1961 cancelled their twins season tickets in the first row behind the screen behind home plate so the twins decided to offer 8 game packages to the first 10 current season ticket holders to respond and we were able to snag them. I don't know which games we have them for yet, but I'm pumped either way.

Watchmen last night was fine. It was entertaining I guess. I dont really have any strong oppinions about it, except that the imax had the sound a couple notches too high so a few of the scenes bugged me just because it was piercingly loud for no reason.

I was planning on getting in some work after the movie but a game of risk broke out. I used to play it a reasonable amount as a kid, but in the last 15 years I've played it less than 5 times for sure. The last time I played a couple months ago I rolled super bad early and lost real quickly and there was another guy there (dan) who constantly wins so a little pitty for me last time and a couple people spending their time attacking dan allowed me to build up my armies quietly and eventually run the board. It was obviously fun to win, but really now I think it's not a very good social/fun weekend night game. It should be reserved for cabins and stuff like that. Otherwise a good game of taboo or cranium or something is probably more fun for a group.

I was wide awake when the game finished around 1, so I checked out the games and they were ridiculously good so I played until like 5. They were still decent enough then but I didn't want to stay up toooooooooo late so I called it. I started falling asleep at about 545 while watching tv but when I went to turn it off i somehow woke up major. I tossed and turned for a half hour b4 turning the tv back on and finally falling asleep around 730. Doh. I shoulda just worked longer.

I'm suprised I'm not more tired now. I was only able to get 5 hours of sleep cause of the wild and afterwords got in a good 9.5 hour work session that was broken up by going for a run with jon.

I really hope the games don't change too much from what they are right now. Man, if I could put them in a bottle and hold onto them for the rest of my life I sure would. It's not that easy to get great heads up action anymore but being able to find a couple good 15/30-50/100 6max games is almost always easy. Sometimes are obviously better than others, but only a few times in the past few weeks have I decided not to play cause the games weren't good.

Heh, I just was gonna write out a quick one cause I said I'd blog more and it turned into a novel. I cracked a beer at the end of my session and sipping on that and typing this up has been ridiculously relaxing. Probably find something to watch on tv to additionally unwind my brain and get to sleep before it gets too late again.

Finally an update...and more to come soon.

2009-03-21T18:05:00.001-05:00

Sorry for the lack of updates. Going forward I'm going to try to make a good point to update a lot more often.

The Utah ski trip was probably my favorite ski trip of all time. At least top 2 or 3 for sure. We got tons of snow, got to ski tons of sick runs with tons of snow, and a lot of really awesome guys were there. Most trips have 2-4 people, this one had 7 and enjoying the best skiing with 6 sweet guys is a really fun time. Only thing that coulda really made it better is if bizot and Jay coulda made it, but it wasn't in the cards.

Past that, I've been working a ton and otherwise spending a good amount of time with michelle. So far this year I've averaged 43 hours per week of playing poker. By far the most I've ever played. Since I got myself in that hole in LA, I've just been motivated to grind grind grind...

I'm also looking for a house to buy and have gone to look at like 12 or so and none of them have quite been what I've been looking for. I'm pretty particular so I'm not going to settle cause I just don't think I'll be happy down the road if I do.

For poker I've been playing 10/20 to 50/100 LHE, a mix of 6max and heads up. On feb 19 I decided to give up the high stakes stuff for a bit as it was stressing me out a lot and making me not as fun to be around, at least for me. I didn't like feeling crabby. Since cutting it out, I've been a lot more balanced and have recently added working out back into the routine. It helps that it's been getting nicer out. I've also been destroying the mid-stakes games and that keeps motivation high.

I'm not much of a super hero person, but michelle's friends invited us to go see watchmen at the imax theater, so I'm off to that now. At least the graphical effects could be really cool.

I'm not doing that hot on my bracket so far, but it's still early. I got a little side bet with schneider and maybe hoppman. I forget....whoops. I also have been slacking on work this past week...on at like 24 hours or something. I think I'll put in a couple hours later tonight which will help, but I'm not too worried about it. I've definitely earned the right to enjoy life a little more for a week.

I typed this up quick and have plenty more to talk about but I'll save it for future blogs as we have to run now!

Ta ta!

pre-utah poker blog

2009-02-09T10:54:00.001-06:00

After the wild game on friday I decided to go up to running aces for a little live poker. I was sitting next to a guy and we were having a pleasant conversation about poker and he then called 4 bets out of the big blind with jack six offsuit. He was talking about how he was stuck and he didn't have the money to play bigger. Usually I just say oh and kinda move on. This time I was feeling a little bold and chatty so I said something along the lines of "I dunno man, you could probably do without the j6o for 4 bets." I know I'm tapping the glass which is kinda bad for my co-workers but I don't make a living in that game and I was feeling nice. It was just him and I talking and everyone else was at the other end of the table so it was kind of a private conversation.

He looked up to me and said "Are you kidding? I won the pot. Isn't that what matters?" He was dead serious. In a semi-rude way I guess...I asked him if he was leveling me or if he was really on the level of whatever wins the pot was a good play. He got more adament with me about if I was serious that I thought otherwise. "Of course I'm on that level, I just want to win the pot and get the money and jack 6 did that." I knew it was time to drop the conversation. I tried to help a poor soul and he wasn't having it. Fine by me.

There's just so much of this in poker. Everyone thinks they are experts and it's so easy. I remember when a good friend of mine first played he came back and told me he had the game figured out...just play pretty much every hand and if you dont have much by the turn throw it away, as that's where people started getting serious about what they had. This made perfect logical sense to me. See what the flop brings and if by the time most of the hand is over you dont have much you can fold and wait until the next hand. I was excited that he and now I had it figured out.

Most people suck at poker and especially limit holdem. I used to suck. I still suck at a lot of the games. I can't play omaha for the life of me and it's sorta embarrasing. Same with heads up no limit. I put a reasonable amount of time into trying to learn it, too. There really is tons I don't know and tons I still have left to learn. That goes for limit holdem too...there is plenty left to learn...but it's kinda like weightlifting, the learning can be leaps and bounds for awhile, but you get to a point where getting much better is pretty tough. Part of why lhe is such a great game is the variance is incredible and a person can make terrible plays over and over and still win for quite some time. This leads to dilusion when they start losing. Most of these people are very successful in other facets of life so when they were having that poker success for awhile they got all this positive feadback from all these dumb things they did. Most successful people are at least reasonably logical, so they just assumed that meant the plays were right. Now they are just getting unlucky and might even be the most unlucky person ever.

I kind of went through that phase for about 8 months when the uiega was coming into effect. I was used to playing 4-6 tables and winning consistantly. The games changed and I was slow to adjust and it made for some painful losing. Finally I figured out that I couldn't play as many tables and had to cut out the phone/im/internet distractions and I got back on track. It was a slow process though because it was easy to get wrapped up in previous success. I was guilty too. I'm sure something similar will happen again, but I hope that realizing all of this will help me see things clearer and faster.

I've also come to the conclusion that most people just truly aren't serious about getting better and making money at poker. They may say they are and when you press a conversation they get all motivated, but 99 times out of 100 you talk to them a month later and they haven't really made any progress. They just want to play and 'pick things up' as they play. Practice is great and playing a lot is great, but if you don't spend some time learning and thinking about the game outside of the game itself, you're going to be getting too much feedback that is results oriented. It's truly work and it's often not that fun to sit there and watch a training video, or read a book, or do some math, or pour over you're pokertracker database to see if you can find anything interesting worth noting. That's another thing, almost all of my friends are too lazy to use poker tracker. Sure you can have tons of success without it and a lot of the 'high stakes notable players' don't use it but that doesn't make it not invaluable and it just often (but not always) shows how little true work somebody is willing to put into their game because it's something very easy to do and if they aren't willing to do that, it's not particularly likely they're doing the other small things to get better.

And don't get me started about tilters. I know so many people that look at me like I'm speaking russian when I ask them why they are still playing some guy heads up or still playing in a bad game. I'm stuck 7k, DUH!!! I can understand in the best game ever, but so often I see it in shitty spots...where they probably have an edge when they are on top of their game, but in their mindset are doing nothing but self destructing. They know how to technically play the hands, but they have too many bad habits. I'm not perfect, either. I played a little longer than I should have in a game in LA and it probably cost me.

mmm sleep

2009-02-06T13:02:00.003-06:00

I think my body has finally figured out it's sleep schedule and I've been getting 9-10 hours every night for the past week. Man it's been great. Not feeling tired during the day is amazing.

I've been mashing the hours at poker and it's been very breakeven/small losing. Bout time I came off the heater...

Me, Dave p, Dave schnettler, billy, and Paul are heading to utah sunday for a quick 3 day trip. I'm really pumped up.

It's too bad there are 2 wild home games over that time, but skiing>wild. Wednesdays game was real fun (3-0 wild) and hopefully we'll have another great game tonight.

Kobblerdog came back yesterday and is here today again so wish me luck landing him before he busts his monthly allowance.

Vail and poker since LA

2009-02-01T02:08:00.001-06:00

Poker is really dumb and I know I always go into it and I don't really plan on it too deeply this time. In my last post I talked about having my first daily win over 300 bets in my 5 year career. Well, I beat that record yesterday with a 340 bet win, which I followed up today with a 260 bet win. Since blowing my head in in LA I've won 1350 bets. To put it into some perspective my huge loss in LA was 120 bets...but they were bigger bets $ wise so I'm still down money.

This is ridiculous, I have top pair or a set every other hand and I just don't lose. I'm obviously playing good, but it's infinitely easier to play good when you're winning and have top pair every other hand. That said, I really am pleased with the state of the games these days. It seems liek every table I play has a drooler type of a guy and that just makes the negative variance so much less. The positive variance I'm experiancing is pretty fun.

Vail was a great time but I was just feeling tired the whole time. I'm pretty sure it was because my body was still recovering it's sleep schedule from LA. Every day I'd be starting to fall asleep at like 7pm. And when you're around a bunch of other people taht's brutal, so I came home a couple days early but still was able to get 3 days of skiing in.

I also bought new boot liners while I was there. Fitting was the most painful experience I've had in a few years. They inject this hot foam and it crushes the shit out of your feet to get the proper mold. Taking them out after it was over was an experience as I had lost all feeling so whacking them on the ground felt like i was paralyzed basically. Anyhow, TOTALLY worth it. Man the performance is tons better. And I even had $250 dollar footbeds before. They sucked compared to this. My left one might need to get tweaked a little but I have to ski it a few times to pack it out before I get it modified anymore, but the right one is absolutely perfect.

I also bought heaters for my boots. They are a paper thin heating element that they put in the liner and attatch to a battery pack that sits on the outside strap of your boot and it's controlled by a blue tooth controller that you wear around your neck. The boys gave me a little shit for it, but I'm sick of not being able to take all the runs I want to because of cold feet. I have bad circulation and having warm feet would drastically improve my skiing experience...so screw everyone else. :)

Oh, I looked at my stuff and I put in 180 hours of poker in jan...which makes it the most I've ever played I think. 45 hour weeks ftw. February is going to be similar. I'm just not going to play above 50/100 unless it's against kobblerdog. Haha. I'm looking forward to it.

post LA and off to vail

2009-01-25T12:22:00.001-06:00

I almost never write blogs at home these days but after reading a few good ones from other people (tommy angelo and doyle brunson) I'm a little bit motivated. I also don't want to finish packing as that would make too much sense. My ski stuff is ready and most of my clothes but the finishing touches are always saved for the last minute. I don't have to leave for an hour and fifteen minutes. Plenty of time. I'll shower when I get done with this.

LA was a reletive disaster. It really couldn't have gone much worse (other than being irresponsible and tilting off even more money) but I lost more than any other trip I've taken and was not a great start to 2009. BUT. I always try to look at things with a positive light and maybe it was almost a good thing as it's gonna make me wanna just grind out the low limits and not be stressed out by poker for awhile so the next couple months should be pretty nice. It'll still be hard to avoid some of the good bigger games but aside from a little dabbling here and there I'm really going to try to stick to my best game (hu lhe) and just play bad players and grind a lot of hours and make a healthy number in feb.

Poker really is a fickle bitch. Since returning I've been just crushing and had my biggest winning day ever (bets wise not money wise) of 330 big bets. I've done 200-250 a number of times but 300 has always been elusive. Got there!

My sleeping lately has been completely ridiculous. I've been getting to bed at normal times (11pm-2am) but only sleep for like 4-5 hours before waking up wide awake, only to crash by noon and have to take an hour or 2 nap. I know I should probably skip the nap and just suck it up but it's been really hard.

Vail's getting 2 to 3 feet of snow by tuesday so I'm off with a few of the boys to go get some. We're staying with Brad L again and as always it's greatly appreciated (and pete too but he'll be in vegas while we're there.) I'm sure we'll be mashing lots of poker hands too. Ski trips are so perfect for working.

I was supposed to get a personal trainer when I got back from LA (one of those things I realised was something I should really do while I was losing and reflecting) but this past week was busy (bullshit excuse) and with my dumb sleep schedule (half legit) just didn't get done so I'm writing about it here to keep myself honest with it when I get back. If you see me ask me if I've done it if I havne't tell me how much I suck. Haha. I'm doing it. darn it.

I better go get ready.

san diego, mn, and off to LA

2009-01-17T06:18:00.002-06:00

(I wrote this on jan 11 but forgot to post it)
Michelle had some time off work so we thought a little warm weather was in order so we popped down to San Diego for New years. The Chargers had a home playoff game so we all went to that too. I'm really jealous of the setup they have as we dont have any sort of good tailgating setup here in mn. They have parking lot after parking lot of fans tailgating and it's super fun. It was a really fun trip and it was the first time we've travelled together and she was a really awesome travel partner. I was able to fire up a round of golf too and it took me about 6 holes to remember how to golf...but it all came back and I'm really pumped for when it gets nice again to get back out on a consistant basis.

We had a boys night last night which was long overdue with john in town and it was a really good time. We went to a sweet new steak house in st. paul called the strip club. It's really tiny and has a very 'small town' feel. It was the 2nd time we had gone there and one of the owners had remembered us from when we had gone 2 months previous. Pretty cool. We had a real long dinner and ended up the last table there and our cab took a bit to come so they poored everyone who was still there a shot on the house (us and about 12 employees) and really made us feel welcome. They also gave us free apps cause our table wasn't quite ready at reservation time. I highly recomend anyone looking for a great dinner experience to check it out.

At dinner dave and john convinced me to come to LA for a few days for some poker. I've been itchin for some live play and it's going to be like -1 as a high in MN so it seemed like a great idea...Jay is coming up from San Diego and Ian and travis from seatle are here too so it's looking to be a fantastic time.

I started looking more at houses again this afternoon and was shocked at how much the market has changed in the last 2 years and even 6 months. The value you can get is unreal so I'm gonna take my time and find something I really like and probably in the spring make a purchase. I'm starting to think I may have to wait until my 2nd house to get one on a lake but that's not a huge deal.

Vail

2009-01-01T14:00:00.000-06:00

Dave and I got to denver and it was looking like our flight into eagle (small one runway airport) was going to be trouble as we talked to brad and he said it was storming hard in vail at that time. A lot of times planes can take off but have problems landing and there is often tons of nasty turbulance (brad said everyone but like 3 people threw up on two of his flights...so dave and I were a little apprehensive) but it ended up being reletively smooth.

Brad came to pick us up but didn't make it far before he called and said it was going to take at least an hour and a half to make it because it was whiteout so we took a shuttle. It was the drivers first year and man could you tell. He made it but it was hairy and he was all over the road. We had to get switched into a subburban in vail cause the vans are more prone to get stuck, and that driver drove it into a gaurdrail that if it wouldn't have stopped us we were cyalateralligator over a cliff. We hit it only going perhaps 5 mph but it was still not that cool.

It ended up snowing a foot to a foot and a half depending where you were so sunday was a sick day of skiing so we ripped it hard. Afterwords we went to walmart to get some stuff and came home with hungry hippos among other games. Wow was that more fun than anticipated. We played it for 2.5 hours the first night and a couple a few days later. I highly reccomend it to everyone, it's great entertainment. THe first night we would do 1 ball at a time and the 2nd 4 at a time. We'd rotate seats and hippos to keep things fair as some are better than others and the table wasn't completely flat. The 1 ball at a time method is more skill but slower and not as much fun imo. Probably because i suck at it. I did well at the 4 ball way though.

(first part typed on plane but we were landing so I had to stop and I forgot to finish til now (2 weeks later haha))

The rest of the boys got there the next day. It was quite the group - Dave, Jay, Billy, pfunk, sponger, cts, and pickett. We had a sweet dinner that rivaled a good vegas dinner and skiing worked out far better than anticipated with such a large group as everyone was pretty similar in abilities. It often broke down after a run or two into groups of like 6 which is still a lot and a lot of fun.

I'm not sure of the final tally but it had to have snowed around 35-40" while we were there, so that was super nice and we had a couple good visibility days too.

A few days on the floor was enough for a beeker so I bought a twin matress that I'll have for subsequent trips which will be nice. I can't wait to go back.

Trans-Siberian Orchestra and Vail

2008-12-12T18:56:00.002-06:00

Last sunday was Michelle's bday and there was a Trans-Siberian Orchestra concert so that seemed like a good way to spend it. It was at the Xcel and it was really good. We thought it was maybe a little to 'show-ee' which made it long as opposed to just rocking out. Man they can rock though. I highly recommend people to check it out next year when they come back.

I leave on saturday for Vail with Dave P. The rest of the n00bs get there sunday and it's quite the group. 12 of us in total will be out there. Brad and Pete have a condo for the winter and the rest of the group rented a 10 person condo but it only has 5 beds (2 king and 3 queen) so instead of sharing a bed with dave or somebody else he and I are going to stay with brad and pete and I think I'm gonna buy a cheap mattress cause I'll be out there more I'm sure. They say it's supposed to snow a foot or 2 between sat and sunday evening so I'm getting super pumped...I'm a little nervous though as we fly in a 20 person jet to eagle airport from denver and that might not be happening and if it does a lot of the time people get sick I guess. Great. Owell it's a 3 hour shuttle ride or something if we can't fly. I just hope to get there sometime saturday night.

I'll try to give an update from out there. Wish me luck on the flight and snow!

thanksgiving on the farm

2008-11-28T20:24:00.001-06:00

The yearly tradition for thanksgiving is for my dad's side of the family to goto his parents house on a farm in Worthington (rural sw minnesota). As a kid we would go there a lot and I always had the time of my life and I think it was great for my development. I would ride tractors, make fires, shoot guns, and ride dirt bikes. I think a lot of other city kids miss out on this stuff and I'm grateful to have experienced a little bit of it.

It's always a nice true vacation as except for maybe a few low-stakes hands in the car on my laptop, it's poker free.

We are all ready to go skiing and snowboarding out west but nobody really has any worthwhile snow. I was able to convince jay, dave, billy, and dave p to get vail season passes too as it's just such a good deal so we're hoping they can get some snow soon. It works at Vail, beaver creek, heavenly, Arapaho basin, and Breckenridge. All for $579. Their website says 620 now but if you have a friend refer you you can still get it for 579. Pretty sick.

There has been talks of a pickup pond hockey type hockey game as well as some snow football once we get some snow and I'm looking forward to both. I've only skated now twice in the last billion years but owell it'll be fun to go screw around as most people are about as bad as I am.

I got a sick new laptop a few days ago and so far I really love it. It's the ultraportable toshiba R600 which has a 12" screen and weighs 2.5 pounds. It also has a transreflective (or something) screen that works in direct sunlight so I'm seeing some poker on the beach in my future. It also has a solid state hard drive which makes it faster and more durable. The battery life seems to be about 4 hours which is 4 times better than my last hunk of junk. The one negative thing is there is only 1 speaker and it's brutal as far as sound quality. Not a huge deal but annoying nonetheless.

Everyone laments about vista and this has been my first experience with it and so far I really like it. I haven't had any crashes or issues and I like how everything just seems smoother and thought out. I did HATE the UAC (the thing that pops up whenever you open a program or file and asks you if in fact you wanted to do that) as well as was confused as to where to find how to enable hidden folders to access my poker stars hands (which are stored in the user apps dir instead of program files) but past that it seems pretty sleek.

Rise Against

2008-11-20T14:55:00.001-06:00

For Dave Schnettler and Mike Pickett's birthday they decided to get a vip suite at myth for the Rise against concert and what an idea it was. We didn't get there for the first band, but thrice and alkaline trio played also and they were really good...but Rise just knocked everyone's socks off. They are just so good in concert. I highly recommend the suite to anyone for concerts too. Can easily fit 20-30 people in there comfortably and everything just works out smoothly. We did get a little rowdy and I think one person got kicked out at the end but it was just hard not be to with how good rise against was.

Some seasons out west are snowy in November and I've been following the weather daily and it just hasn't been. I've been ready to pack my bags and go for a couple weeks but nowhere has much open and I'll just have to wait. The long range forecast is warm and dry, too. Hopefully early December will be different.

Michelle and I went ice skating last week and it was my first time on skates in probably 15 years. Since I ski and rollerblade it came back nicely and it was fun to get out there and cruise around with how much hockey we watch these days. Some of the guys are talking about a pickup game, that sounds really fun. Matter of fact I'm gonna go make a few phones calls and see if we can set that up next week.

LA and it's aftermath

2008-11-16T03:13:00.002-06:00

LA was a real good trip and I ended up staying a couple extra days cause it was fun spending time with some really awesome people as well as poker was going well. Most nights I was going to bed between 4am and 8am (which is of course 6am and 10am MN time) and my flight landed at 6am and I didn't sleep on the plane, so I came back with the standard backwards sleep schedule. This isn't particularly a huge deal, it's just pretty annoying especially when you want to hang out with friends and girlfriends who are on regular schedules.

So the last 3 days I've been trying to fix it. 2 nights ago I was able to crash from 230am-630am which I figured wouldn't be that bad because I should still be tired the next night...so when I went to bed at 230am last night I figured I could sleep. But then it was 430am and I still hadn't gotten a wink, so I got up and started playing poker. I lost my ass in like an hour so I had to quit and just kill time. A few friends had spent the night so I drove them home at 11am that probably wasn't a super good idea... I was sober but it was like i was drunk from being so tired. We made it though. I fully intended on sleeping when I got home but then I was talking to a buddy and I'm like "damn, I've made it this far, should just stay up all day and sleep at like 8 or 9pm and wake up and play the heartland poker tour tourney at 9am." So that's what I did. I played poker for 8 hours straight and man was it tough. the 4pm-5pm stretch was by far the hardest but once I got to 6pm it was smooth sailing minus the fact that I started seeing colors on white paper in addition to having the standard sleep deprived vision impairment. I actually did alright in my marathon poker session.

When I got in bed a little after 8, my body was kinda past the whole sleepiness thing. Adrenaline had obviously kicked in and so I had a couple beers and watched the end of the wild game and when it was over, conked out quickly. I woke up at 1230 for no reason and was like screw this but was able to quickly fall back asleep. Then I woke up at 230 and had no such luck. I tossed and turned. No chance. Argh. I gave it a half hour now I'm gonna go give it another shot.

Johnny Chan

2008-11-07T15:07:00.001-06:00

When I was a very new poker player, I would watch rounders over and over. I've probably seen it 30 or 40 times. In the last couple years I watch it perhaps once or twice a year for nostalgias sake. So when Johny Chan came up and sat down next to me at our $500/1000 game I had to admit I was like woah. I've played with many more notable people and better players than him, but there was just something cool about playing a limit holdem pot vs johnny chan- the guy who was so incredibly glorified in that movie. The only hand we got involved together was actually pretty boring and standard but I may as well share it.

Johny raised in MP, I 3 bet right behind with TT, all folded, he called.

Flop Q74 with 2 hearts.

He c/r I call.

Turn offsuit 9

He checked I bet, he called

river offsuit 2

He checked I bet, he folded.

I mean, if you woulda told me 5 years ago when I first saw this movie that I would be playing poker some day for real and not in some contrived situation(like some tournament) with Johnny chan I would have thought you were out of your mind. Now the only person left who I'd like to play with is Doyle brunson and I can't imagine playing with him outside of a tournament really. I also kinda want to play lhe with Phil Ivey cause I hear he's one of the best and I want to see if there's anything subtle I can pick up from him...

So far so good on the trip, but anyone who has played big white chips knows it can change drastically in a hurry...wish me luck!

boys night

2008-11-03T14:08:00.001-06:00

On Thursday we decided a little boys night was in order, so the 4 of us with season tix decided to grab a nice dinner before the game (me, Schneider, Pickett and Dave p). Pickett had heard good things from somebody about this new steakhouse in st Paul called the strip club. Pretty fitting name for boys night. My initial reaction when we walked in was a touch underwhelming but as the night progressed the decor grew on me hugely and I really like it now.

It was one of the better dinner experiences I've had and I eat out a lot(more than i should). Our waiter was one of the best I've ever had - he was really attentive and helpful (and yet not annoying/over the top) and even called us a cab to get to the game. The food was really good. We all got steaks of somesort and everyone was pleased. One of the appetizers stood out as really good - it was like beef tips or something. Basically rib eye marinated in BBQ sauce and then grilled with some peppers or something. It only comes with 2 so it's pretty small but it really hits the spot.

We started with some wine but then got intrigued by the $25 dollar 750ml beers at the bottom of the list so we asked the waiter about them and he said he personally picked them and they are all fantastic. We decided why not try all 3 so he got us all 3 glasses and poured them all and it was quite the sight with 3 beers, a glass of wine, and water all in front of everyone on this little table. 2 of them were Belgian imports while the third was from some small brewery in Colorado. All 9-10% alcohol content. They were super good, as was the wine, so much so that we decided to get another bottle. Schneider said it may be one of his favorites. I hope he wrote it down because it wasn't very expensive.

All that eating and drinking and we were ready for some hockey. Dave P and I had 20 bucks on how long the cab would take to get to the stadium. I had under 7 minutes and Dave had the over. 6:05 later we were there. There was a light we coulda missed that woulda made for a sweat butttttt our cabby decided yellow means go. ship it!

The wild game started off far more intense than many and we were finally like YES! there is going to be a fight finally! (I've been to 5 games so far, 0 fights) Nope. Just some scuffling. The game was tight and down to the wire but we just couldn't capitalize on the most power plays I think I've ever seen. Montreal was sick at killing them and ended up winning which was well deserved in my book.

Going drink for drink with Pickett and Dave P is recipe for disaster so by the third period it was time for a round off for beeker. Those boys don't slow down. Schneider had stopped after round 1 or 2 at the game. By the time the game was done I was feeling like a little extended break. We walked to a local bar and Dave and mike went in for a drink and Schneider and I waited outside cause it was super nice out and just pretty chill and talk a little trash with Montreal fans...most of which had came down from Manitoba. They were all real nice and fun to chat with.

Chal was at the game (but not with us) and somehow had gone home after so we swung by his house and then went downtown to meet up with some of the other boys (Frank, Adam, Johny, Justin). We got apps/drinks at the 508 which really hit the spot for me. We hung out there for awhile then hit up the drink and stinky petes or something where nothing notable really happened. By 1am I was ready to just go home and relax so Dave p, chal and I came back here to chill. Chal was giving me grief about being kinda tired, demanding I stay up so I told him I'd promise him an hour. On the way home Dave P slept most of the way so as we're pulling up I'm like ok everyone have their cell phone and wallet (chal has lost like 4 cell phones in cabs). Chal said yep and dave didn't really respond. We got out of the cab and Dave p is like oman my phone must be in the cab. Wtf i just asked if you had it. Haha. It was there and all is well.

One side note I didn't understand is we called a cab from my house initially and Dave p got caught up in traffic on the way here so when I told the cabby to start the meter, our buddy will be here in 10 minutes he said "god dammit" and was all put out. I don't understand? Is it that crappy of a rate that they get to charge for waiting or what's the deal? I thought cabby's live for big fairs and ours was going to be at least 50 or 60 bucks cause we had to swing by Pickett's, too. Of course on the way we missed a turn because we were too busy talking and he was pissed about that too. Who cares dude? The meter is running and it was our fault. We don't give a shit. Must be just an unhappy person. Pickett lost the paper rock scissors for who had to pay and wasn't there for most of the shenanigans so I'm not sure how much he tipped him, but I wouldn't have given him anything which I'm sure would compound his view of the world but, hey that's not my problem...I was pleasant.

afternoon off

2008-10-29T12:55:00.003-05:00

One thing I've always wanted to get better was just taking a little more time off to just enjoy an afternoon or whatever. For some reason when I wake up and don't have any plans I pretty much automatically go to my computer and start a session. Literally almost every single day is started with a session. They usually last 2-4 hours and then who knows the rest of the day. I guess looking at my PT I did play 45 minutes today but it just wasn't feeling satisfying. A lot of times if I quit short it's cause I started off blowing my brains...but today I was dead even and just not feeling it. A buddy messaged me and said "why you quit that table with such and such still playing?" I guess I just want an afternoon off. I haven't even decided what I'm going to do yet but I have a few business things and errands I have to run so I guess I'll take care of those and then who knows. Maybe just sit on my ass and play the new guitar hero or see if the boys want to play some more racquetball. All I know is, I've earned an afternoon off and I'm taking it...

canterbury tournament

2008-10-25T17:20:00.002-05:00

My friends convinced me I 'had to' play at least the main event of the fall poker classic at Canterbury. Fine. I can handle that.

I hate Canterbury. I don't hate too many things, but they seem determined to stick it in your ass and just make you know that it is in fact your privilege to play there and you are not a customer who is paying them. I hadn't been there in six months previous to this tournament and I really doubt I'll be there in the next year until the next one. That said, there are quite a few people who work there whom I like and it sucks that the only place I see them is there.

On one of the dinner breaks I was 2nd to act (utg+1) and I looked down at 92o so I stood up and started walking towards the buffet. Somebody started hollering my name. I looked back and it's the floor and he's irate that I 'folded out of turn'. Yes, i suppose very technically I did, but it's not like this was even a remotely critical spot of the tournament and surely not worth hollering at me for. I said sorry and kept walking away. Everyone does this. It's not like I'm some out of norm out of line renegade.

The tournament sheet said play was going to be until 27 players or midnight, whichever came first. From the get go that seems OK. They pay 27 ($1270 which is a huge 190 dollar profit from the buyin) and playing longer than 12 hours is kinda long. Ok. But when you have a really stupid structure and it's 9:30 and people are literally getting knocked out every 2-3 minutes it doesn't make sense to make everyone quit and come back the next day. Most people have jobs and other things they need to be doing. It sucks to have to come back and bust out and 'break even' especially if you had to drive a long way. They were going to prolong it but there were a couple 'strongly voiced' players who insisted they stick to it so they did. 80% of the players wanted to keep playing. From a direct business perspective I don't totally blame them, it made a ton of people have to come back the next day who otherwise wouldn't have and they probably spent some money. But from a rational standpoint it's totally brutal. It didn't help that after they decided we were done they collected our ID's and made us sit there idly for 25 minutes. Take our ID's, let us play until you are done with that shenanigans and then send us home. That would make more sense at least.

33 minutes into playing today we had gone from 27 to 18. After about an hour and a half we were down to 9.

I went into the final table 2nd in chips. The only player who covered me was some young kid who 'looks sorta like eminem'. He definitely looked out of his element and was right to my left. A few hands in I raised to T37000 with with AQdd T5000/10000 and T2000 ante. I had been raising smaller but this spot seemed right. I had about 400k chips and he had perhaps 700k and the avg stack was ~220k. He called and everyone else folded.

The flop came AhQsTh and I led for T60,000 and he instantly sat back in his chair like damn. Then he said "raise, one hundred twenty thousand." I immediately hated my hand. I was pretty sure I was folding. Nobody who knows me would ever call me a folder, but jeez, I'm not a bonehead either and this goofball is telling me he flopped a straight or three tens. Or he could have AT, QT, or a flushdraw right???? I went into the tank for like 30 seconds. Some asshole older guy who couldn't stop needling Blake the day before called the clock on me. Ok fine. I hadn't said a word after he raised because I didn't want to give away my hand. Well, now I had to figure out what was going on so I did my standard talking. Asking him what he had, running through different hands etc and he was just staring down at the felt. Good move by him for sure. Then I asked him if he had king jack and he looked up and looked me in the eyes. That was the decided moment in my mind. Most players fitting his description will not all of a sudden look at you if you call their hand out. They'll be like OMGOMGOMG don't make a move, he'll know you have it. Sold. I said all in and he SNAP-called. hmmm. I showed AQ and he showed KJ and byebye beeker. All that good playing and making good reads to blow one and go out to the only guy who can break me. So frustrating. There were a handful of pretty short stacks so I coulda folded and still had an above average stack and easily gotten some decent money. I've lost many 'huge' pots in cash games without blinking at all and for some reason this just hurt really bad. I was in the worst mood I've been in in years. I don't know what my problem was, but I was super crabby.

As I'm walking out of the tournament area I ran into Pickett, troy, frank and another buddy who had just came down to sweat. They didn't even get to see one hand. After cashing in my chips and getting a beer I'm sitting down kinda stewing a little bit at an open table when a dealer walks by and spills my beer everywhere including partially on me. Haha. My initial thought was oman...when it rains it poors, but given how ridiculous the timing was it actually made me in a better mood. It's like the world is testing me. Oh yeah, life is good.

So we get to the wild game and the guys want food and I have to use the restroom so I go find one. I walk down to our seats and take a seat. The boys are sitting in seats 5-7 and I sat in seat 4. There is a ~45 year old couple in seats 2 and 3 and the guy kinda snaps "you have a ticket for that seat?" I'm like what? Yeah? He says ummm actually you don't. Then I realized the boys didn't scoot all the way in. We have 5-8 and I'm in 4. It's the 2nd game of the season. Sorry, I'm off by one seat. Ok. "well if whoever has that seat comes you're going to have to move" "ok fine yeah I will don't sweat it" and I thought it was over there. I got back to the game. Then like 30 seconds later his lady friend turns to me and says really bitchily "no really, if somebody comes you're going to have to move, that's not your seat." I thought for sure she had to be joking cause it was just like mega-bitch tone so I asked her and no, was serious, wrong seat dude. Pickett turns to me and says "wow, wrong day lady." I told her that "I having the worst day ever and to please just stop pushing my buttons and leave me the fuck alone, if somebody wants to sit here I'll move." She mocks "ouhhh what are you going to do, go postal on us???" I don't think I've ever went off on somebody I didn't know or said fuck to a random person but this lady was out of this world. I mean wow. I switched seats with Pickett and ignored them the rest of the time and that was that. I climbed over like 3 rows of seats the other time I came back to avoid them and the wild scored a couple goals and I quickly forgot about all that bologna. Some people though, man.

one of those days

2008-10-20T03:12:00.002-05:00

I sat down after softball this evening just planning on working a little bit with the baseball game on in the background...well then every bad player and their helpless brother thought it would be a good night for a marathon session...so here I am 7 hours later. I wanted to work out. Nope. I wanted to go to bed and fix my sleep schedule. Nope. I wanted to watch the new entourage cause I hear it's good. Not yet.

But...it's all worth it. It's just one of those days where the fish don't leave or go bust and I'm crushing so my image is good. As a good professional - when those two come together I just don't get to quit no matter how 'sick of sitting at this stupid freaking computer' I am. Days like today make the non-poker days just that much sweeter and make me feel better about a splurge here and there.

I think I'm just extra satisfied because after my 1k/2k shot I lost five or six hundred bets and today brings me out of that hole. Money wise I'm still in it but it's not about that. That will come in due time. I have the bets and a good chunk of my confidence back.

For those of you who are playing the fall classic main event...good luck and hopefully see you at the final table...

Wow, just as I was going to post this (which is now 8 hours instead of 7) one of the big dumbdumbs quit and that's gonna be good enough for me to just call it a night. Yay. Good night.

oopps, it's been 6 weeks

2008-10-15T05:29:00.002-05:00

There are quite a few more than interesting enough things that have happened over the past month and a half but I just haven't felt overly motivated to write them down. A big part of the problem is since Barcelona(where I went for 9 days in sept) I've felt like I would have to write about that before writing about anything else. This was combined with the Twins crazyness at the end of September and I just wasn't sitting around feeling like typing.

Soon enough I'll write-up about barcelona because I think it's pretty interesting considering it was my first time to Europe.

The poker side of things has been pretty interesting. August was my biggest month ever and by mid sept I was having a top notch september too...so I pressed while in barcelona. I found a couple good $1000/2000 spots (where I had 400/800 once and 500/1000 the other time) and went with it with my friends having the other half of the action. The first night got out to a bad start but I recovered vs benyamine HU and only lost a little. The 2nd night I played just benyamine and man do I feel like I have a big edge on him. He folds sooo sooo much. We were going back and forth and he was starting to run hot when this hand happened and it was downhill from here:

Full Tilt Poker Game #8043391767: Table Vina (heads up) - $1000/$2000 - Limit Hold'em - 14:41:57 ET - 2008/09/12
Seat 1: uglystyles ($61,474.50)
Seat 2: David Benyamine ($64,463)
David Benyamine posts the small blind of $500
uglystyles posts the big blind of $1,000
The button is in seat #2
*** HOLE CARDS ***
Dealt to uglystyles [8h 8d]
David Benyamine raises to $2,000
uglystyles has 15 seconds left to act
uglystyles raises to $3,000
David Benyamine calls $1,000
*** FLOP *** [9h 8s Ks]
uglystyles bets $1,000
David Benyamine calls $1,000
*** TURN *** [9h 8s Ks] [5s]
uglystyles bets $2,000
David Benyamine raises to $4,000
uglystyles raises to $6,000
David Benyamine calls $2,000
*** RIVER *** [9h 8s Ks 5s] [7s]
uglystyles bets $2,000
David Benyamine calls $2,000
*** SHOW DOWN ***
uglystyles shows [8h 8d] three of a kind, Eights
David Benyamine shows [Jc 9s] a flush, King high
David Benyamine wins the pot ($23,999.50) with a flush, King high
*** SUMMARY ***
Total pot $24,000 | Rake $0.50
Board: [9h 8s Ks 5s 7s]
Seat 1: uglystyles (big blind) showed [8h 8d] and lost with three of a kind, Eights
Seat 2: David Benyamine (small blind) showed [Jc 9s] and won ($23,999.50) with a flush, King high

I played a little bit longer but he kept me down and after a bi it just felt like he had all of the momentum so I quit and haven't played it since. I played some 500/1000 but ran bad there too as well as at the lower games. I started playing lower to get my confidence back and I ran really bad. I lost like 600 bets average of like 30/60 probably. I've since won over half that back since and I'm going to keep playing tons of $15/30 until I get them back before I get back at it too much. I've just really been game selecting for 100/200 and 200/400 and pretty much just grinding. It's been relaxing to say the least. I ended up losing a little in september which was my first losing month in quite awhile I think. I was definitely due. I'm down a touch here in october but it's not stressin me. I know how the game works and I'm in such a good mental state with it these days that I don't even think about getting to the positive as much of a goal. I just want to play well and find good games.

I started really looking at houses but I only want one on a lake and I'm pretty particular about things so that leads to high prices and not much selection and with everything in the economy and the fact I'm gone so much anyhow has made me rethink it. I'll probably just see how the winter goes and there's a reasonable chance go with it in the spring. A couple buddies want to get a condo in Vail and it's tempting me. They would be using it as their primary residence....but I really want to still live in MN so if I did it i'd probably live at both. I love it here...the seasons, the people(friends/family and just people in general are cool), twins, wild (which pickett, schneider, dave P, and I got season tix to for the first time this year). The home opener was quite the fun time.

In the past few years I haven't been at home for a month straight ever. Travelling is very fun and I'm very lucky and blessed, but this past month it's been nice to get into a little rythm here at home. I've been pretty focused on getting a lot of work done (both poker and business related) and workout a lot as the ski season is rapidly approaching. I'm jonesing really bad and can't wait. I suppose I'll take a quick trip out to cali before winter but by the end of november if I haven't really gone anywhere I wont burn myself out as bad by being gone a lot. For now I'm just going to keep enjoying fall in Minnesota.

My story part 3

2008-09-03T11:17:00.002-05:00

For a few years, I'd put 30-40 hours per week with poker pretty much. Obviously there were off weeks but on average I really put a ton into it and it paid off well. The games were great and it was hard to do much wrong by putting more hours in. About a year and a half ago some things changed. It kinda started with the UIEGA closing down some of my favorite sites. The games had changed. I still played really good poker but I didn't change with them. I continued to try to play 4-6 tables and just mash out the hands/hours. I lost for like 3 months straight. I was confused and perplexed. Most people would have chased their losses. The fear of somehow not being able to play poker for a living at the time 'scared' me into dropping down, and then down again, and trying to figure out exactly what was going on. I was running bad, that was for sure, but at this point (-1000 or so bets and somewhere around 150 or 200k over a 4 or 5 month period) I wasn't looking for excuses. It was time to rebuild from the beginning. My bankroll was still in good health, but I really didn't want to have to deposit. I hadn't ever had to dip into my bank account and I was determined not to.

I remember the next part vividly - It was just over a year ago. I was on a plane to Vegas with Schneider for the 2007 wsop. I was miserable poker wise. I was down to 10k online. I recorded a couple sessions the day before to have him watch them. He watched and I started asking the most basic of all questions, like ok so say you flop 2nd or 3rd pair and the big blind check calls, what are your thoughts about betting the turn versus checking and calling a river bet. I had so little confidence. I only had played 2 tables during these sessions so I could 'focus' more and he said he thought I was playing pretty well and that I should try playing 1 or 2 tables for a month or two (instead of 4-6) and cut out the IM/phone/internet distractions as much as possible. It had gotten so bad that it seemed like far to often I was wondering "ok so who raised preflop" and that definitely is bad. We all do it from time to time but the frequency was far too high. I realized he was right.

So that's what I did. I cut down the tables. I cut down the distractions. I started finding the weakest opposition at $8/16 HU lhe (1v1 limit holdem). If I felt like they even had 'half a brain' I wouldn't play them. I would just wait another 10 minutes and some guy on tilt would show up and lose like 200 to me and I'd rinse repeat. It was like taking candy from babies at a rate of something around $100/hour which was a pay cut from what I had been used to before, but still really good money and the destruction was good for the confidence and patience good for the psychy. I did that for a few months and started working the higher games back in, except this time at the 1-2 tables at a time. I then found cake which at the time had a bunch of sports betters and they were just gamblers and I had fixed my bad habits so it all came together nicely. I was quickly back playing $50/100 and $100/200 and finished the year really strong. On December 25th I was having one of my best months ever. I gave back like 75k over the next 3 days and given a few personal things plus going on a cruise jan 2 or something it seemed like a good time to start a break. I didn't start 2008 for poker until like Jan 13th. I'm not really one for big long breaks, but this seemed appropriate.

This year hasn't been all that interesting but it's been really good. It really hasn't been all that swingy. The one thing I'd say about 2008 is quality hours. I've cut back to something like 25 hours per week (and more and more 15-20 hour weeks). Basically i cut out the "ehh I really don't feel like playing but I may as well (and the games aren't that great). That's not to say I don't play when I don't want to, I've definitely had more of those sessions this year than other years. I sat down at my computer at 5pm a couple months ago planning on just playing a few hours. Then a new tourney winner joined and seemed determined to give it all back. After about 5 or 6 hours I knew I was in for the duration. 14 hours later I had won 35k and while I was 'pissed' my sleep schedule was screwed it was obviously worth it. I had a similar session in LA in February. It was a high-stakes locals birthday so all the top local players were out with him and I was left in a 6 handed $400/800 game with $15/30 caliber players. This was a day after playing a tournament until 7am (and getting 2nd!) so my sleep schedule was backwards. I started playing at about 5pm and realized at about 4am I wasn't leaving until I couldn't see straight or the game dynamic changed drastically. After 15 hours I was hurting, but I was crushing and I don't have a strong disdain for money so I plugged along. Around noon a few tougher players joined the game and made it more full (7 or 8 handed) and I couldn't see straight so even though it was still a good game, it was time to quit and book another 35k win. I think I was at the table for 19 hours, by far my longest session ever. There is just something innately satisfying with these sessions to me, perhaps because it truly feels like 'hard work' while the other hard work is at least sort of interesting.

One thing I've been wrestling a lot with this year is what games to play. I've spent quite a bit of time playing no limit as well and while I've had good results and it's pretty consistent, it's just not even close to as fun or motivating to play. I've had tons of success/fun at heads up (1v1) lhe but it's not always easy to find somebody who will play me. If I could play just that I would. Running kinda bad at 6max lhe has lowered the appeal for me with that but I still play it. Live poker that isn't short handed has lost pretty much all appeal. At the series this summer I think I played maybe 10 hours total of live poker other than tournaments. The hourly is better online and it's really turned into a snorefest to me to play 9 handed poker. I still love a good short/hu game but those aren't that easy to come by. The whole playing 5-10 hands per hour bores the shit out of me, really. I guess I'm kind of an action junky that way. I can play if the game is big or if it's a social game, but grinding it out is pure misery. So I've pretty much cut it out.

I think one of the toughest things about heads up lhe is pride and that's one of the main things I've focused on. You have to have supreme control on your emotions and your ego or you're just not going to have all that much success. There's just far too much momentum involved and when the other guy has it, it's so much harder to have an edge. Also, there is constant bullshit happening that if it bothers you, it's easy to just start giving money away. Which is basically what I aim for doing to my opponents. The style I play targets this weakness in players. I play hands in a fashion where I get really lucky sometimes and it frustrates them and they don't know how to adapt and just go off. This is why if I'm not making hands and not
getting lucky' I don't play very long versus people. They are in confident mode because 'I've been spewing to them' and I have to suck up my pride and give them the victory and come back another day when the emotional state is different. I haven't tried to get even in months. Forget it. It's not like I was going to spend that money anyway.

I set a lofty goal and a "I'll be satisfied" goal at the beginning of the year and I've crushed the satisfied goal and if I don't run into some real bad variance I should be able to pull off the lofty one! I'm pretty pumped up but at the same time know that mr variance could come along and crush my soul for a number of months again, so I'm not trying to focus too much on it. I just plan stick to my guns and play more good poker while not getting too caught up in it and forget to work hard.

twins angels

2008-08-27T04:01:00.004-05:00

On Sunday we were at the twins/angels game in Anaheim and doing the standard away fans thing which led to a nice little away team section. The 6 of us who came together was 16 or 17 by the 7th inning. Anaheim fans definitely seemed to be more the casual fans than the over intense ones. Other than 2 drunk alpha males nobody really gave us much grief and billy put them in their place quickly. We decided to give the game back/away so instead of some sweet camaraderie we had to leave quietly but it was still super fun.

As of 9am that morning I still wasn't positive Schneider was gonna make it and then dave got sick (like strep not hungover sick) so I called dave p and him and hoppmann were at the bar after a long night of poker and had been drinking since like 7am. He wasn't hard to convince to join us so he packed his bag quick and we met up at the stadium.

Every time I go to an outdoor game it just makes me want the twins to hurrrrrry up and finish the stadium!

august

2008-08-22T19:08:00.003-05:00

I started working on a big poker reflection post on the flight from MN to SD but I wasn't able to finish before landing. I'm probably half done and when I'm motivated to finish it I'll do it...but I don't feel like it at the moment yet I feel I should update my blog.

August has been a great month. I started it out up north with my family/extended family at a camp that boarders the boundary waters. Lots of hiking/canoeing/card games/beach/reading/relaxing etc. No TV's/computers/gambling/cell phones except a couple small spots where I could get updates on the twins. It was fantastic.

I came back determined to really get my grind on and I did exactly that. After a few months at about half-pace, I've been playing a good amount again, almost all either 100/200 limit or 5/10 and 10/20 no-limit. Most of the 100/200 limit has been heads up and I've really honed in my game at that. I had my biggest day ever (minus the schneids stake which doesn't count IMO) and my biggest week ever as well. It just feels so good when you put in lots of hard work and it pays dividends down the road. Obviously there is a good amount of luck in the short-term, but I've really put tons into my heads up limit holdem game over the past 2 years and it's showing. I'll talk more about this in my reflection post.

Past that, I've been golfing the amount I had hoped...2ish times per week. I've also kept up on my workout plan (no less than 3 times per week) as well as joined a fall softball team. The twins have been a lot of fun lately too. Now they're on the road so along with Jon's schedule it seemed like a great time to head to San Diego again. We're going to drive up to Anaheim Sunday morning for the angels/twins which should be really fun. We tried to get a tee time next week to Torrey pines (where they played the US open) but it was too late. I'll have to remember way in advanced next time.

Minnie

2008-08-02T02:37:00.004-05:00

Jay was in town for a bit and threw a siccck birthday party. We started by a little grillin/outdoor stuff and went from there to britts for a little hiatus before aqua. Some of the guys know people who work there so we got a sweet deal on the top area. It worked out great and major thanks to jay for setting it up/getting like 40 people to come/paying for it.

We've been playing a 30/60 HOE (and one night SOE) game up at running aces a good bit lately(like once a week haha). I think we're going to try to make it like a regular monday game or something. Online I've been really mixing in the NL lately because it's been going so well. Other than that I've been playing a bit more $100/200 cause confidence/online $ is higher again. I've also been mixing in the PLO from time to time to to see if I can really figure that game out. All said and done July was pretty solid especially considering none of my world series fishies cashed and I didn't either.

The twins have been really fun. Went to all of the white sox games and had planned on todays game but when I stepped outside at 2pm I decided it was too nice and bob and I golfed instead. Not a very good round, but it was absolutely gorgeous out so it's all good.

Tomorrow I go up north by ely with my family/extended family for a little annual north woods getaway. It's gonna be fantastic. No poker, no computers, no tv, basically no phone. Nothing but relaxing/games/north woods stuff. I'm really excited!

world series of poker main event and san diego

2008-07-19T17:23:00.004-05:00

I have a few minutes here before heading to the twins game so I suppose I can update this thing.

The main event was pretty dumb again this year. I played great and had my table image honed in and got a guy to stick KQo in preflop when I had aces but for the second year in a row I didn't win (at least last year I got half the pot when the board flushed and neither of us had the suit). I then got AJ in vs a small stack with 88 on a AJT8 board for most of the rest of my chips, and busted out with a very small stack with A7s vs KK.

It really is incredible how soft of a tourney the main event is and given that it's a little disappointing that none of the players I had pieces of did anything notable. I'm not disappointing in them at all of course, but just how dumb big live tourneys are luck/variance wise. Almost everyone had a sick couple of hands they lost.

After Vegas I headed to San Diego again. I've always wanted to golf when I'm out there and we've always kinda talked about it but never followed through. I decided to buy clubs out there so I'll be more motivated to play when I'm there and hopefully we'll golf enough that it'll cover all the fees of renting clubs and playing with rentals kinda sucks anyhow. I've never had nice clubs before and man did I find some I really liked by more or less getting lucky at the store I think. I'm not the hugest fan of the 3wood/fairway wood I got but the iron set (mizuno rx-25's) are awesome. I wasn't planning on it, but now I think I'll have to pick up a set for here in MN, too.

Dave also bought clubs, so we golfed 3 days in a row. I shot my best round ever -an 81 which is kind of bogus cause i had 2 4-putts and a couple others that I really felt should have dropped. I'm gonna play a ton here back in MN and hopefully soon break 80. I think it's time I find a driver I like and work on it. For the past 3 years I've just stuck to a 3 wood cause I can hit it like 230 down the middle most of the time and that's generally good enough cause it keeps me out of trouble. Now it's time to take it to the next level.

Changing topics...I've always loved screwing around in the ocean if there are decent waves. It really makes me feel young again getting just owned by them and it's so fun. Maybe I should try to learn to surf sometime.

I better get moving...

Minnesota

2008-07-05T12:29:00.006-05:00

Every time I'm in vegas or LA a few random people ask me why in the world am I still living in MN. I think it comes down to 1 main thing - Minnesota summers are tough to beat. I really like the people here too but...the summers with all the lakes is the kicker.

Everyone laments about the winters and that is understandable. The cold can really suck and be miserable, but it can be really fun too if you try...go sledding, play snow football, have a snowball fight, go ice skating, go skiing/snowboarding, go snowmobiling. Also, with poker I've been blessed with the ability to travel a lot so I don't spend long enough here to grow weary of it. Falls and springs aren't too shabby, either.

This past week in MN has been incredible and exactly why I love MN.

Saturday: had a bbq...great food, infinity beer, badminton, yard games, bon fire rock band.
Sunday: golf, work in the evening.
Monday: Wake boarding and water skiing with the boys on pickett's boat. Twins game.
Tuesday: Work and errands during the day, twins game then check out the new Running Aces card room
Wednesday: Go fishing and plan on wake boarding but it was too windy, rats. Stop up at running aces for an hour and go home and just sit in lawn chairs on the patio with Dave P and chill for a couple hours enjoying the evening air.
Thursday: Financial planner meeting, work, golf chipping game at the park, taste of MN, bar roof/patio
Friday (4th): had some guys over for badminton and hanging out then go to twins before lighting off a bunch of fireworks followed by the bar.

A pretty kickass week if you ask me.

Now I have an hour to get ready for vegas...gotta go start winning the main event. I've got pieces of a bunch of guys in it too so hopefully I'll make out one way or another! Wish me luck!

twins/padres part 2

2008-06-29T23:51:00.003-05:00

The boys scored us front row seats behind the twins dugout for the day game on Thursday and it was a sick pickup. Not only do you have a great view, you get infinity baseballs (probably 8, but we gave 5 of them to kids) and you get to heckle the other team and cheer on your boys as they come back to the dugout. We were the Pepsi fans of the game on FSN and on there at least another time.

We went to a bar/patio after the game to get apps/beers b4 jackie (dave's 17 y/o bro) drove me to the airport. I was still buzzin when I got on the plane and and the cute girl next to me asked if she could switch seats with me so she could be across from her girfriends. sure. We small talked for a little bit and she said she was from mn but didn't go to the game...seaworld instead which seemed weird, but who was I to argue. Some people really don't like baseball and I'd been drinking so I didn't really think much about it. I started reading a magazine and she was talking to her friends and about 5 minutes later she turns to me and says "actually I lied to you, I was at the game, I'm boof bonser's fiance." HA! I got pwned. The other 2 girls were Justin Morneau's fiance and Brian Buscher's wife! They were really pleasant and holy cow does morneau's fiance have quite the engagement ring.

Some pictures:

Twins/padres

2008-06-25T14:06:00.003-05:00

I definitely am going to be spending quite a bit more of my time out here in the future...probably even start chipping in on rent a little. The boys' new place is sick and a major upgrade from the previous 2. It's huge and spread out and the front deck is awesome for beer pong.

We went to the twins/padres game last night and sat up with the people in the 2nd to the top row in the upper deck behind home plate. At one point this dude started a chant that at least a 3rd of the section was chanting "sit down faggots" when we were cheering. It was a little bit awkward as I'm almost positive 2 dudes in our row were gay, but meh, what are we going to do. I'm sure there were others, but those 2 were the obvious ones. He also got the mascot to come up and steal billy's hat and wiped it on his crotch would be and farted on all of us. Definitely well played.

It was actually kind of a meh game baseball wise because there was no scoring from the bottom of the 1 until the 8th. The beauty of outdoor baseball though is it didn't matter. It was like 70 and calm. Fantastic. After we went back to pacific beach and out to a bar to meet up with billy's gf. I love having a jersey on of the opposing team after a victory.

Today...after the standard beach trip we're having a bbq and then round 2 of the twins. Hopefully another victory so we can bring out the brooms tomorrow when we sit front row behind the twins dugout.

I really think anything Jay touches is lucky. Last time I was out here when I played on his computer I crushed and it's been nothing different this trip. I've probably been playing 90% 50/100 and 10% 100/200. No no-limit and no plo. I'll get back to plo when I start running bad at lhe.

Vegas round 2

2008-06-18T14:22:00.002-05:00

I flew back to vegas on saturday because I had dreams of winning the 10k limit holdem world championship...

My first table was actually pretty soft...I'd compare it to a 100/200 live game. Definitely a sweet table pickup. I ran really bad and after like 6 hours our table broke and I moved with something like 12k chips when we started with 20k. I get to the next table which was the sickest table I've ever been at:

1 Andrew Prock (writer of pokerstove)
2 Tuan Lee
3 Howard Lederer
4 me (bicyclekick)
5 David Oppenheim
6 Chris (death donkey)
7 Marco Johnson (crazy marco)
8 daniel Negrauneu
9 daniel Alahi

I didn't ever flop anything and the two times I actually had hands I got beat. Luckily I busted out 20 minutes before the end of the day so I didn't have to come back the next day with just a few chips. At least I lasted longer than schneider and hoppmann. Haha.

The last night crazy mike decided he wanted to play a $4/8 mixed game at the venetian. The mix would be homo (holdem, omaha high, mikes crazy pineapple 8 or better, and omaha 8 or better. It was actually quite the line-up.

1 A2TRM
2 dr_olson
3 jessie (mn guy)
4 KPR
5 Crazy mike
6 me
7 hoppmann
8 schneids
9 dave p

Most people bought in for 5 racks while crazy mike knew better and bought in for 10...I think everyone but 2 people had to rebuy. Crazy mike played literally 100% of the hands, and before action would get to him he'd put out 20 and if anyone else wanted to could announce 20 and it was auto-20. Every once in awhile people would limp or only want to play for like 3 bets and he'd flip out. It was quite fun and ridiculous...most pots were 3 racks or more. Schneids, hoppmann and kpr decided to go a little over the top on messages. Schneider spent 550, hoppmann like 350 and kpr like 350. Goofballs...go to a spa. It was so much better than doing something similar at canterbury...because everything goes. If you get a card dealt face up...tough deal with it. If you arrive to a hand late you can have 4 cards off the top of the deck, etc. Just no bs rules.

I feel like it's been forever since I've been to a twins game...I guess it's probably been 2-3 weeks but now that I'm home and the twins are home I'll probably go to a couple. I'm really pumped for next week...going to san diego on monday to visit the boys and see the twins/padres!

San diego / Vegas trip report

2008-06-08T13:59:00.002-05:00

I really probably should have updated this mid trip, because now that I'm trying to think about what to write about...there's more than I want to write/you want to read, so I'll try to keep it short.

San Diego highlights: padres game, riding bikes on the beach, our house combined winning 100k in a day (i was the smallest slice of those who played...GO FRIENDS!), watching the season finale of lost with like 10 people.

In vegas I played the $1500 NL tourney and played my best tourney poker in awhile and almost cashed but didn't quite. I also played the $5k mixed holdem event and felt like I played well again, but was ridiculously card dead late and couldn't get anything going.

I played about 4 hours total of cash games. 9 handed live holdem to me is just pure boredom these days. I did get to play some live plo and just because it's so different I enjoyed it.

I played a $10k freezeout with crazymike and won. He beat me the last time we played live, so it was nice to get some redemption.

Everything above is overshadowed by the fact that a buddy of mine Ducci won the $1k rebuy tourney for 650k and a WSOP bracelet. He had a super tough final table and worked it over really well. We had quite the cheering section and it was super fun to just be a part of watching him win. The celebration the next day was quite the blast too, dinner at michael mina's at the bellagio then table service at tryst. Congrats ducci, you earned it buddy!

As we were leaving the poker room the night ducci won the tourney, another friend of mine tony rivera (more commonly known as togni)was getting deep in the $10k mixed event and ended up scooping it for 483k. Since this tourney involved 8 different games it was thought of as one of the toughest tourney's of the wsop. Nice work togni!

When I got home last night another friend of mine told me his friend Rep (and my acquaintance/friend...we've played a lot in the past 3 years but haven't hung out outside of poker minus maybe a dinner) won the $1500 6 handed NL tourney for $383k. The 6 handed part makes it a much more skilled victory in my opinion because it really forces you to get involved in pots instead of waiting for good hands. Congrats rep!

On the plane ride back I got really into the book 4 hour work week. I bet I'll finish it up in the next few days. I'll save my full recommendation until I'm finished, but so far I think pretty much everyone should at least check it out.

Off to San Diego and Vegas

2008-05-27T12:30:00.001-05:00

Obviously I waited until I had stuff I should be doing (packing - cause I'm leaving in 2 hours) to update my blog...

Pickett and I are heading out there to visit the boys for a few days before heading to vegas for the beginning of the world series. I just looked at the sd weather and not that it's going to be bad, but oddly it's going to be about 7 degrees colder than MN every day. Haha. I think we're going to catch a padres game or two and with so many good poker players in one house teach each other a few things.

On saturday we fly to vegas. A number of people will be meeting up with us there...hoppman, dave p, schneids, kirby, and since it's series time I'm sure a number of other people. I have to book the hotel today, but I think we're staying at the Rio as we are all pretty sick of the bellagio. Contrary to other years, I really don't see my self playing that much for cash games at the B, but instead some tournaments and just enjoying vegas...more pool time, maybe some golf, less grinding. Maybe a few combo online sessions (1 person playing with 1-2 people watching/discussing) with all these great minds as those were really awesome last year. As always, I'm sure we'll grab a few shows as well as I usually love em.

As far as poker lately, I took about a 2 week serious LHE break as I was just feeling off and like I was running bad and I didn't want to slip into something bad and be tilted/off for the series. So I took to learning PLO. Hard game. I am making some good progress, but I've played 6k hands and am down 2700. Most of that is from a couple 5/10 sessions, but most of the hands are at 2/4 where i'm up $192!!!! I think with another 6k hands I can make another leap. An old friend of mine told me it would take 20k hands to learn how to not get it in with the 2nd nuts and 100k hands to figure out the flow and when and how to play different draws. Guess I've got a few more years to figure the game out.

A guy who doesn't play cake, but for some reason stalks the games messaged me yesterday about a guy sitting $100/200 who he'd never seen who seemed brutal. I was feeling kinda pumped up from my music and I can handle losing cake money if the guy beat me, so I sat. He ran like god right away and got up like 6k quick, but was playing bad. I think the 2 weeks off improved my mental state, as I was focused and not frustrated. I battled back a little while still running kinda bad when my foot hit the power button on my UPS (the battery backup for my computer) which turned everything off. Ugh. My computer was being dumb so it took at lesast 10 minutes to get back to the seat and the guy was gone. Rats. I still was sitting there and about ready to do other things when that same friend asked me why i wasn't playing him again. I hadn't noticed he had sat. SWEET. i'm in. Bizot was on his way over to play badminton with chal and I, but that would have to wait.

By this time Jay had noticed the guy and since another player sat at one point, hopped in. As friends, unless a 3rd person sits, or the other doesn't want to play the guy heads up, lets the guy who had the fish first play him out of courtesy. I was running kinda bad and was down 10k by the time bizot got here. The fish joined a 2nd table I was sitting at and then I went on the biggest heater in the last year as far as I can remember. I went from down 10 to up 20 in about 20 minutes. I either had it pre, flopped it, or turned/rivered it every single hand. The fish kept reloading and jay was getting pretty sick of my bs and apparently owes me a nice beer over the head when we get there. We played another hour or two where jay got most of the money and eventually sent the fish to busto land. I had got back down to up 12k at one point but finished on a nice note at +21k and brought me back to the black on the month. This was a nice surprise as I had given up on may and just wrote off the fact that I'd lose 20k two weeks ago. I guess I still could in SD, but I bet I wont.

Luckily we made quick time of busting the fish as we still had enough light for badminton! Jon had got some new birdies which made a world of a difference over the stupid ones that came with the set that we tried to use on Saturday. Now we can actually have a reasonable game.

I better finish packing...

I'm not dead

2008-05-14T13:28:00.002-05:00

For whatever reason I just haven't felt like updating this in awhile. It kinda seems like the season to do that as pokerbob and schneids both went a month without updating, too.

As far as what I've been up to...

*a good number of twins games
*softball
*golf - only twice so far this season... I need to learn how to hit out of the sand again, I seem to have forgotten. The weaher hasn't been exactly great yet.
*poker - up and down and up and down. Still going well but pretty swingy.
*hanging out with jon because he finally got a new job that doesn't kill him hours wise

I got new tires for my car (acura tl) cause one of my old ones got a hole and so far they seem so much better. Jon knows tires so he helped me pick them out and I'm pumped for the winter for not having tires that blow (these got way higher winter ratings). So hopefully this winter you wont hear any "yeah but my car sucks in the snow" excuses from me.

I have to finish setting usemywallet up but it appears that it now works great for getting money off cake (previously not possible for 2 months) which relieves some stress as I have a significant chunk on there. So that'll be nice to get to a safe place. I still have a healthy amount on a small site that is having cash flow problems since epassporte went away and held onto some of their money. It really is funny the stuff we as poker players put up with to be able to play online. Having money just floating out there not being able to access it or 100% trust the people who are holding onto it almost seems really stupid. I guess we are gamblers. That said, I no longer will play on absolute or UB because I don't trust them.

sick, cod 4, H&R

2008-04-23T00:02:00.001-05:00

I woke up sunday feeling like I had the plague. I was supposed to goto dinner for my sisters bday but didn't feel up for it. I had bought call of duty 4 for xbox the day before and the wild lost sat night and other than my sisters bday I didn't have plans for a few days so all things considered it was a pretty good time to get sick. I pretty much laid around, played cod4, watched tv and played a few like 20 minute poker sessions where I got back most of what I gave away the other day. I just really didn't have the energy for it.

Kels was in town for work and her dad had to trade cars with her so we went to dinner tonight, which was nice to finally get out of the house. When i was driving home I was feeling a good chunk better and wanted to do stuff so when I got home I went on the eliptical for a half hour. I'm still plugged and what not but I don't feel like death at least. I can handle plugged.

I think i'm gonna goto the golf range tomorrow. Bout time for that season to start.

yuck

2008-04-18T18:00:00.005-05:00

While nothing really out of the ordinary, this session tilted me more than I've been tilted in quite a bit. River after river after never having anything. Almost the whole time I had position on a 45/10 guy too. :(

which led to this:

I've always wanted to goto a micro game and just be dumb and ram and jam. Usually I'm too nitty, but today I didn't care. Buy-in for a dollar, go all-in, the software auto-rebuys for a dollar if you lose, rinse repeat. It really is interesting what it does to the table. I really wanted to get a 20 dollar stack but the highest i could get was 18.

Off to the twins game now.

Denver report

2008-04-17T02:08:00.001-05:00

Denver was a blast. What a game the first game was winning 3-2 in OT. Away hockey games/sports are really fun. I will say I was shocked at how well we were treated by the opposing fans though. We would walk down the street in our Wild jerseys and most people would say "gonna be a great game, good luck" or something of the like. From having watched the vikins/bears in chicago I was anticipating a lot more hostility. During the 2nd game we were down 4-0 and a woman in front of us turns and said "we know how it feels...sorry...it sucks...that's how we felt yesterday." There was very very little "HAHAHAHAH in your face you big douche bag wild fans" or anything really. They put up with our antics the previous night after the win as well...mostly just wild chanting and what not.

Oh there was one funny/hostile happening. The day before the 2nd game when we were walking down the street/mall area to catch the bus thingy when some 25ish year old hippy looking girl just started yelling "fuck you" at us incessantly and loudly. That's all she would say. Maybe it was "fuck you wild fans or something" but anyhow, we keep walking and get on the bus and her and her friend had kinda followed us so she's still yelling at us when we get on the bus and this young dude who is sitting on the bus is like "I know those two girls they're awesome." Billy said something to the guy about how much he thought they sucked and in true denver form the guy responded "Yeah I like her but could see why you guys think she sucks." Billy said a few more things but the guy just sat there like meh I'm just happy to be here who cares what you say.

The 2nd game was definitely the worst hockey game i've ever been to. There was essentially nothing to cheer for other than the occasional power play kill or potential fight brewing. By the time we scored and made it 5-1 it was over and we couldn't even stand up to cheer. We gave it til perhaps 6 minutes left in the 3rd just to make sure not to miss anything epic, but dipped out a little early to avoid leaving with the masses.

I haven't seen it yet, but I've been told by a number of people that we were on TV. I'm curious to see it so I'll have to buy the NHL tv thing again when it gets archived. I bought it today but the game isn't there yet. Rats.

With the twins starting, the ski trip, taxes, exciting end to the wild season, and now the post-season, I've really been working less than ever and it's exactly what I need. Anyone who knows me knows I work a little too much and don't really take enough time off/away from poker. That isn't to say I haven't been playing, I have...but maybe closer to 10-15 hours/week the last few weeks as opposed to 40+. It's been going well, too. I got an elliptical and have been using it too. I really think with that and the nicer weather, it'll be inexcusable to not be in good shape.

Off to colorado for the wild/avalanche

2008-04-14T02:49:00.003-05:00

While at the wild/avalanche game on friday schneids, pickett, and I decided if we won we were going to Colorado to watch the away games and when we won we got a txt from billy and dave in california so we mentioned it to them and they wanted in, too. I told them to buy 6 tickets and we were committing. One of those things that if you don't commit on the spot, it's a lot harder to pull everything and everyone together. They bought tix for all of us for both games it was set.

So we leave tomorrow (monday)afternoon and come back wednesday evening. Just a super quick jaunt out there but it's gonna be great. Thursday is another home game and since Kels couldn't make it down because of the blizzard on friday (3rd one up there in 15 years go figure) will be coming down to watch it. Man playoff hockey is fun. I was talking to a buddy earlier and we were discussing how ridiculous it was that we didn't really pay much attention to hockey until the last few years and how awesome of a sport it is.

I should go try to grab some sleep...

Helicopter skiing in utah

2008-04-09T00:33:00.006-05:00

This winter has been really dissapointing for me which I've complained about in this blog a few times, but today...pretty much the whole season was made up for.

Skip the next 3 paragraphs if you just want the gist and see some pictures of our helicopter skiing adventure.

Dave P and I have been wanting to take a late season trip out, so I've been following the weather for the last 3 weeks or so, and nothing has cought our eye. It looked like there was going to be a storm sunday so we were going to follow it closely. I got back from canterbury saturday night at about 1am and looked at the weather and they weren't overly excited about the storm (the national weather service) so I talked to dave and dissapointingly told him it wasn't looking good, but we'd re-eval in the morning. I woke up and nothing had happened. I felt oddly tilted at limit holdem (it's been going well lately), so I decided to play some tourneys. I played them on my laptop which didn't have my weather bookmars, so with all the comotion of playing tournaments with a couple friends over I forgot to check the weather until 630pm. I looked, it had dumped and was dumping. I called dave and he was at his parents and hour out of the cities and the flight was going to be at 930. Hmmmmm. If we absolutely would have crunch timed it, we could have made it. Even though I'd thought of going, I wasn't remotely ready. I hadn't even showered for the day. We decided that getting in at 4am and trying to get up to ski at 7 would just be too much and we'd get to sleep earliesh and wake up and re-evaluate.

I woke up at about 11 and our dream was coming true. It had snowed like 14 inches so I called dave and said hey buddy, we're going. 745 flight. Quick layover in denver and We'll get in about midnight and it'll be sweet. He was in. I looked a little more in depth into the weather and it had now snowed about 18" but had stopped and was going to be nice and calm until tuesday night. My brain started churning. At the beginning of this season I told myself I was going to go helicopter skiing and it's april and I hadn't so I thought I'd call the outfit out here on the offchance they have an opening. It is april after all. 6 seats left. OMGOMGOMG I called dave and he told me he'd think about it and call me back in a few minutes. He called back and we decided we only live once. Lets do it. I called the powder-bird back and we were booked!

We fell asleep at about 130 or 2 and had our alarms set for 7. It was suprisingly easy to get up even though we were tired...the excitement had pretty much taken over.

We got picked up at 7:50 and had breakfast along with the orientation. They give you an avalanche beacon (used to find you if you're buried). There were 22 other people there, broken up into 4 people per guide, 8 people per group. They fit 4 people + the guide in the helicopter per ride then they go get the other 5 people and then you ski together.

You get dropped off on a tiny ridge, sometimes a rocky tiny ridge, that if you were foolish or not careful you could definitely fall a longggg way and hurt yourself/kill yourself. You pop your skis on and the guide ski cuts the run to make any snow that's going to avalanche, slide and then sets a left most or right most line and you take turns going every minute or so to make it so only one skier is exposed at a time so if something does happen, it's only to 1 person.

The snow on most of the runs was incredible. Somewhere around 20 inches and untouched by anyone. Perfect turns and face shots galore. Almost all of the runs were "the best run i've ever taken" and man was it money well spent (about $1000). All those nights i've stayed up far later than I wanted playing in a game with a guy who's giving it away or just the day to day grind...I finally treated myself to something purely selfish and a little over the top. It is my birthday tomorrow, it's a little birthday present to myself.

Helicopter orientation

Helicopter landing

me

dave

runs from afar

first run from the top

looking up

the tracks from some of our group

another angle

dave ppppp

An oldschool silver mine from the olden days when there was a lot of silver mining in alta.

A look back at snowbird. Our hotel in the middle

From the ridge, alta in the distance.

twins tickets for this weekend

2008-04-02T13:41:00.002-05:00

I might be out of town this weekend and schneids is busy so if anyone wants to buy our season tix for face value ($50) email us at bktwins@gmail.com . We have 4 seats behind home plate section 127 row 21 (which they start at like row 7 so they're even better than they sound). Also, if you just want to be on the email list for when we have them in the future so you get an earlier notice drop a line there and I'll add you.

hockey and baseballs

2008-04-01T01:48:00.002-05:00

We decided it would be fun to get a suite for a wild game semi-for my birthday...so we got 12 people together for the wild/avalanche game on sunday. What a blast it was! I was going to wait to post until I got the pictures from it but now seemed like a good time to blog so it'll have to do without.

Tonight was the home opener for the twins and our season tickets were a good chunk better than i anticipated. They are 'row 21' but the rows start at like 7 or something and there are 32 rows, so half way up is definitely awesome. We are right on the line for the net so if you're not paying attention could definitely catch a ball off the ol face. Paying attention ftw.

I watch most twins games and really get into it, but so far with the snow and what not I'm just not quite in baseball mode. I bet by the end of the week I will be though. Our team is just so much different...it's almost as if I'm cheering on a whole new team. It was cool to see hunter there tonight and while there were a few boos there was some definite respect sent his way with a pretty classy standing O and what not. I did enjoy seeing joe nathon pwn him!

As far as poker...march has been quite the goofy month. I lost a bunch at the beginning but made a sweet bounce back. I'm very content with how things ended up and am looking forward to a great april.

snowboarding and poker

2008-03-21T19:23:00.002-05:00

I snowboarded for the second time a couple days ago and I was pleasantly suprised how much progress I've made since I first started. The first day was very very hard and painful but still a fun challenge, but now that I can make normalish turns (front side to heal side and visa versa) it's becoming a lot more fun. I am still slow/not stylish but feel like I could make it down any run in Minnesota (which isn't saying much). If I get around to it I'll definitely buy a board so I can always have the same get up. I really can't imagine it taking over my love of skiing, but it's been a fun challenge for when I'm not out west with good snow.

As far as poker, I've been mostly playing 30/60 and 5/10 NL but the 100/200 I have played I've actually done ok the last little bit. I played a 14 hour session yesterday which was capped off by a 10/20 nl game I wasn't leaving until 3 of the players lost their money or the game broke. At one point 1 guy had 12k, another with 11, another with 7, me with 9 and a random guy with like 2. None of them had a prayer. It lasted quite a while and I ended up winning maybe 7k in it which could have easily been 20 if I wouldn't ahve gotten 3 outted and 2 outted on the river in huge pots.

I made my third card runners video today...2 tabling 30/60. It was a decentish video imo, I hope you all like it.

Getting together with some folks to watch some college hoops tonight...gotta love march madness. I picked Kansas to win it all. gogoogogogo

wow I'm bad at updating

2008-03-16T15:03:00.003-05:00

I've been playing quite a bit of lhe this month and I've been winning bets but losing money because whenever I play 100/200 or 200/400 I lose my ass but I win when I play 20/40-30/60. I was a little annoyed with it for a few days so I decided to put my energy into qualifying for the WSOP main event. About $500 later in effort I made the top 10 of a 5k FPP 750 person qualifier and won my seat. They also give you 2500 and 8 days at the palms but if you're a supernova they give you a suite. I'm not sure exactly what kind of suite but either way a bunch of value there. I also got 7th in the supernova freeroll with 1400 players. MTT's don't stand a chance vs me these days or something.

I've been going to canterbury a good amount lately(4 times in 2 weeks) and every session has been the same. I get up about a rack and then I end up leaving down a small amount. I did win 175 the day I couldn't get into the 30/60 game and ended up playing 8/16 all night, but the 30/60 sessions have been weird. Usually it's like lose 3 racks one day win 2 the next or something, not this small win/lose cycle. I've been very good at sweet second bests.

2 sessions ago there were 5 times on the river where I bet my hand and if the villain just called me there was no way my hand wasn't good. but each time they called and I lost. They weren't slowrolling me, but it almost felt like it. Then again they saved me 300. I'd have like K8 on the K95K7 board and they'd have KJ and never put a raise in.

I've been feeling really solid about my LHE game these days. I'm back into my old aggressive ways and I feel like it fits the way my brain works so much better. Hands just make so much more sense to me when I do it this way vs the fancier/less reckless ways.

I've been playing a touch of no-limit on the side and except for a disaster 25/50 session where I lost set under set in the first 2 minutes then bluffed off another stack where I had no intentions of playing that game then next thing I know I'm stuck 10 and had to quit so I didn't go off. I haven't been so mad at myself for a bad play in a longggggggg time. It was a very very gross hand. Lesson learned I guess.

I've been wanting to ski really badly but things aren't quite lining up for that. Hopefully can get out in a week or so real quick. We'll see.

I'm off now to Duluth to spend a few days with Kelsey and I think her mom, sister and brother are gonna spend a day or 2 up there too cause it's their spring break. We're all gonna try to snowboard (I've done it once, Kelsey not in 4 years, and her siblings never b4) It's gonna be a blast and a disaster at the same time. Wish us luck.

I have a cardrunners video due friday that I haven't made yet and haven't decided what to make it on. If anyone has any input I'd definitely take it into consideration. Lemme know in the comments or something.

some good luck

2008-03-03T16:25:00.002-06:00

Since the twins started developing their new stadium, I've wanted to get good season tickets for it. We got in on the new stadium priority list a year and a half ago when they made the playoffs and we committed to a small package so we could get decent playoff tickets.

I talked to a representative a few months ago about what it would take to get really good seats at the new stadium. He said that all of the seats behind home plate + diamond view were already taken for this year and we could get some lower level seats down the line somewhere and that would be the best bet. This wasn't overly appealing so I kinda put it on the back burner. I called again a couple days ago and he said the next day was the last day to renew your previous year seats and although he wasn't going to have anything great he'd have better seats in a few days and would get ahold of me with what he'd have. He called me the next day to confirm what I wanted...I told him the best 4 seats you can do. He said ok he'd do some checking and get back to me.

15 minutes later he called and said a 4some canceled their behind home plate seats with him and since he knew I was serious about wanting them he called me first. Yoink. 21 rows (about 2/3rds) up right behind the plate. Sick luck. Schneider and I chopped it and I'll probably only go to like 20 or 30 games and just sell the rest. Scalping is now legal and especially for premium games (red sox/yankees etc) these could sell for 3x easy. Other games no problem getting at least face value for if not a good bit more...so it's actually a decent money thing too. It would be sweet to break even and still make it to quite a few games.

Having these also assures we'll get good seats when the new stadium comes out, which like I said was the main priority. I can't wait. Bring on baseball!

Ski trip report

2008-02-29T12:01:00.001-06:00

Dave P and I flew into SLC on saturday after a short layover in denver. Neither of us have flown frontier before so we were pleasantly suprised when we got on the plane and we had more than normal coach leg room + every seat has a TV that you can watch 1 of 25 or so stations of live tv for $5. The channel selection is pretty decent so we took advantage of it. Frontier is now my second choice to sun country. We stayed at the Cliff Lodge at snowbird which I also would reccomend as it was nice and the ski in ski out was great.

Sunday's skiing was just a normal old day of skiing and nothing worth talking about. We were sleeping by 10pm sunday night as it had started snowing and monday was looking to be really good early. I was up naturally monday by 5:45am and we were in the lift line by 8:30 (the lifts open at 9). It had snowed about 15" and We got the 2nd tram and were able to make some awesome first tracks on some great runs. The runs were the type of runs you pray and pray for. Sick powder and my new skis handle it wayyyy better than my old ones. By like 1pm everything had been tracked out/was bumpy and our legs were giving in due to the high water content snow so we decided to call it an afternoon.

It was supposed to snow another 6" or so after the lifts shut down monday turning to partly cloudy for tuesday so we were hoping it was going to be a good day. We woke up early again on tuesday but the snow report only reported 4" new so we were a little heasatant to get up, but convinced ourselves after a couple of minutes. Little did we know how huge of a mistake not getting up early would have been. We opened the drapes and it was a complete bluebird day. Not a cloud in site. We made it out a little later than the previous day...845 or so but still were able to grab the 3rd tram which didn't matter as we found a couple of perfect virgin snow lines. It was "only" 6 or so inches, but it was super buttery on top of a soft snow base. If the day would have ended there, I would have said it was the best run of the trip. Little did we know what was in store.

We grabbed another 2 sweet powder runs and were riding up the lift when we noticed a 10 or so person pile-up at the closed gate of an area that hadn't opened in 3 days...road to provo. As we were getting off the lift it surely seemed like it was going to open so we went over to it. Literally as soon as dave strapped into his board they dropped the rope and the race was on. As we rushed to get moving we agreed to just meet at the bottom and gogoogogo and not wait up as runs like this don't happen very often. The 20 inches from the previous 2 days hadn't been touched. It was a perfect run in the making: bluebird, 2 feet of snow, a decently long run with a nice pitch to boot. It was by far the best run I've had in years. I had fresh tracks from top to bottom. I guess I did cross one other persons tracks once when I had to exit a chute. Finally. I've been dreaming of runs like that forever and have been having horrible luck. Now I ran good on being at the top for the drop. We did a few more laps before it got pretty tracked and then I took a couple laps on a farther out line that required a little bit of sidestep/hiking up. These runs were all very unreal and better than anything I've had in probably 3 years, but still nothing compaired to that first run. Smiles from ear to ear. Everyone in the liftline kept saying how epic it was. It was sick. On our last run of the day we stopped mid-bowl and just hung out and took it all in for like 10 minutes. Just sitting in the middle of nowhere in the mountains and all this snow and perfect sun is sooo beautiful and peaceful.

Dave hadn't snowboarded in like 5 years and is now officially hooked again. It would be hard not to be after this trip. Simply amazing.

A couple vids:

frustrating sleep and off to utah

2008-02-22T19:45:00.001-06:00

The past week has been ridiculously frustrating trying to get sleep. My body was just sooooooooo messed up from LA that it just couldn't sleep for more than 4-5 hours per night. The last few nights have gone like this:

5am-9am
2am-6am
8pm-130am
10pm-6am but toss and turn most of the night not sleeping

I'm so worn out and I hope I can get a good nights sleep tonight before heading to Utah with Dave P tomorrow for some skiing. There's a sick storm coming in that could drop 2 feet of snow. It could be super nasty though with winds gusting to 90mph. Wish us luck with the snow!

As far as poker goes I've just been playing LHE since LA and it's been goin well, minus busting my AP account playing mark seif 200/400. I'm not sure if I'll play there again...it all just seems to sketchy. Losing to him makes me down dollars but up bets and I'm feeling pretty good about everything these days so I'm content.

2nd in tourney

2008-02-16T22:26:00.002-06:00

I decided semi-last minute to play the 2500 LHE tourney and got 2nd place for 30k. First was supposed to pay 42 and 2nd 23 but men the master and I decided to each take 30 and play for 6.5 for first. He ran super hot and got real lucky to beat me but that's heads up limit holdem for ya. I definitely ran hot myself in the tourney.

I wasn't able to wire money out before coming out so I didn't have a ton of money and was starting to really feel short which I think makes me play worse so before the tourney I took a cab to Wells fargo to get a cashiers check. Good thing I wasted time and energy with that.

The $400/800 games have been sick good the last few days. I broke evenish the first night and picked up a nice win last night, playing one of my longest live sessions ever of 17 hours.

Given that session I don't really feel like playing anything meaningful today and right now I just started watching Jerico on Itunes. I'll probably go down and play some 10/20nl and get some food cause I don't get to play live NL very often and no matter what happens it can't hurt bad. I heard there's another good 400/800 game but I'm not feelin it right now.

I'm going back tomorrow night and get back into MN monday morning. Kels is in town for some training so that'll be nice then I think towards the end of the week Dave P and I are going to Snowbird in utah. Man I'm pumped, the weather is looking great!

Off to LA

2008-02-11T04:02:00.000-06:00

Sun Country decided a 7am flight was better than their11pm flight they used to fly to LAX and 7am is a semi-annoying time for anyone on a poker-player schedule to have to leave the house at 530. A couple hours earlier or later would make a good difference. As is, it still doesn't really make sense to go to sleep for 2 or 3 hours because it makes more sense to just stay up all night and sleep at the hotel and you'll instantly be on a good live poker schedule (almost completely backwards)...but if it was a few hours later you could definitely get 5 or 6 hours sleep and be able to play when you get there...which I'm always excited to do.

I got back from a great weekend in duluth at about 1030pm and worked for a number of hours. I've really been playing more LHE the last few days with like 2 well table selected NL tables on the side.

Winter is just so busy. I don't think I've been in the cities at home for more than 5 days in a row since the beginning of december. I feel like I always get home and then by the time I've taken care of different details that don't get taken care of while I'm gone it's time to go again. I know I know rough life always being gone and traveling but not having very much structure to count on from day to day wears on me I think. I feel like this is why being a poker pro while in college was actually easier. I always had tons of other stuff with specific schedules that basically ran my life with poker thrown in. I didn't realize this until right now. I'm sure a number of people are thinking now...why don't I go back to school and get my masters or something. I bet I will at some point but it wont be the same as living on campus and I'm not quite ready yet.

I was planning on brining my skis to LA and going from there to Colorado to Brad's place but all the weather models are strongly showing warm and sunny which isn't my idea of good ski conditions in February so that trip will have to wait another week or something.

Kelsey got promoted at work today to be the manager of a new department at Best Buy stores -the mobile department! This is great news and should be the stepping stone to being an assistant store manager which is her short term goal. Congrats baby!

I better go finish packing.

no good title

2008-02-07T02:25:00.000-06:00

So far so good as far as the month goes. I've been putting in my 2k hands of NL per day and doing well and playing some limit on the side because the games have been good and I've been in the mood (for fun and frustration). The lhe has been treating me more good than bad, but at the same time getting runner runnered for a half hour in a row HU made me more frustrated that I've been in forever so it's not ALL good.

I tried playing HU nl again and ran super bad and have had about enough of that for a bit as well.

I've been playing sooooooooo much this month. About 40 hours through 6 days. I've just been really focussed and feeling great and I want the success ($) that comes along with putting the hours in. I just don't feel like settling for "decent enough" money this month. I want to crush. Even though I've had many bigger days than how much I'm up so far, EV wise it seems about right and I'll take that all day any day especially considering I feel like I've ran kinda bad.

I got some new skis yesterday and I absolutely can't wait to try them out. They are Line Prophet 100's. I have to get some bindings still but that wont be hard. I think I'm going to LA on monday and I'll be in cali for about a week and then go skiing as the long range forcast is predicting a good pattern for that time. I'm dyingggggg. Whitefish (where I was in montana) got 76" the week we left and the snow reporter guy said it was the best week he's ever had. Argh. Utah also got like 100" and had a phenominal week. I want to cry.

Forever I had a real hard time getting money off cake...and by real hard I mean I couldn't get it off other than about 5k per month but finally now I can get wire transfers from Epassporte so I finally get to 'realize/appreciate' some of the money I've won over the past 6 months. Time for some more investing. There are many things worse...but having 6 figures on a foreign poker site where you can't access your money for a long time sucks real hard.

I have been reading tommy Angelo's book "elements of poker" and realllly liking it. I definitely recommend it and I think all poker players will benefit from reading it.

Kelsey and I celebrated 2 years of dating yesterday...what a great 2 years it's been! She's amazing I love her I love her I love her.

a funny NL day

2008-01-31T02:01:00.000-06:00

I lost 3 2 card flush under higher 2 card flushes, a set under set, a top full under quads and I still broke even on the day. What a day.

ski trip, HU nl and broken bumper ftw

2008-01-29T00:39:00.000-06:00

Well, the ski trip was a super fun time but as far as ski trips go it was a pretty big bust. The snow was super windblown and crummy thick with subzero temps for the first few days and the sun beat it down for the middle of the trip. Brad and I both got a semi-nasty cold which worked out ok cause the skiing wouldn't have been great anyhow so we took a few days off and skied short days for most of the early part. This didn't bother us because it looked as if a big storm was coming in for the end of the trip and we were really enjoying focusing our attention on learning heads up no-limit together. More on this later.

Well, the storm was a little slower than anticipated so it looked like sunday was going to be the only sweet fresh powder day but the weatherman was very confident it was going to snow nicely, so this kept spirits high. We were excited to wake up to 8" sunday morning. We quickly got ready and got out only to find the main lift was broken. A lot of resorts have plenty of lifts so if one goes down, it may be a pain to get to where you want to go, but Whitefish isn't like that. Well, they have an old rickety lift that can get you to part of it but that wasn't open either. Given that it was a sunday and it snowed, a lot more people came than normal (probably 4x the other days) and we were all stuck on a couple small lifts with some okish terrain that got tracked out really quickly. It was also kind of sleeting at this point and we were soaked. We went to lunch and afterwards they said they doubted it was going to be fixed so we decided to play the sunday tourneys instead. Ugh.

As we are playing the tournaments it just keeps snowing harder and harder and it's really piling up. Brad kept insisting it was soothing, but I found this very tilting as I felt screwed out of good snow and I wasn't going to be able to ski it as we were leaving the next morning. When we got back from dinner a fresh foot or so was on the driveway. :(

I read the snow report this morning to find 18" new and a mid-morning update said that this was the best skiing he'd ever had on the mountain. ugh ugh ugh. Days like that are the ones I dream of and keep my head up in low times. When I say I live for days like that I pretty much mean it. Not a whole lot compares. This is life though, there will be enough in the future, it just sucks to miss one by 'that much' especially after such a bad day the day before and a week of mediocre skiing.

We looked into staying but since brad lives in vail and they were going to get snow it didn't make sense to extend given it would have cost a bunch for him to change his flight because he fly's into eagle airport in vail. I thought about switching my flight and joining him but I had made plans to visit kels and it makes more sense to just go there and watch the weather and go next week if it's good.

Brad and I decided to chop action and make a huge effort to learn heads up (1 on 1) no limit. We played a combined 25k hands at mostly $2/4 ($400 buyin) during the week and ended up down 4 buyins but running 13 buyins under all-in expectation. In other words if you took the luck out of it and split the all-ins by how much equity each player had in the results of the hand we would have had 15 buyins more of money. So while in reality we lost money, we played well enough to win 12 buyins. This includes some 'dumb' plays we made because we were learning or tilted from all of the sick beats. We played a lot of sessions with one person controlling the mouse with the other sweating/giving opinions.

While we are competent, we still have tons of room to improve but we've made leaps and bounds in the learning process and it was a really good experience. If a few hands went a different way I really think we would have done a bunch better because I find it really frustrating as far as the learning process goes when you get a ton of negative reinforcement from good play especially when it's vs the same donkey over and over and he has quite a few stacks of your money on the table. (basically we tilted a little :( )

By the end I'd had enough and felt like winning again so I pulled up some 6 max for the last 2 days and crushed while even running terrible (5 buy-ins under expectation). I'm giving serious thought to just playing 6max nl for the entire month of february just for some total peace of mind. It seems like if I put 2-3k hands in every day, there really isn't a whole lot of frustration. Sure you lose a handful of buyins some days, but the edge is just so much greater and it's not all to the same guy and it's not in the tilting ways of high stakes limit holdem. It really seems like so many more days are the very grindy win a couple buyins and quit satisfied days. I feel like i really keep going on about this in my blogs and I really should consider it for a little while. The other games are just often fun and interesting. Time will tell but maybe I'll give it a shot. I really think $30-50k is doable most months doing this so that is very tempting. It's just pretty boring and takes a super good work ethic (which I feel like i have but most poker players don't)

Weather is so annoying. It made me upset cause i wanted to ski, then delayed our flight a couple hours which I'm supposed to just get home at like 7pm and drive 2 hours to visit Kels, but the timing of the freezing rain/snow is a little further into the evening, which I may not be able to get there now and tomorrow is a snowy/blizzardy day with wind chills reaching -40 and I can't drive there in my TL (baddd in snow esp cause I am lazy and never bought winter tires) and that would put me in on wednesday which is her last day off (she has tues and wed off). Again, this is life but just like I was looking forward to the snow, she's really been looking forward to spending her days off with me (and me with her, but with her just starting work and me travelling it's a bit different...) I'm on the plane now so i don't know what the weather is like but I'm really crossing my fingers I can make it out tonight.

/update I made it but when I got here the rain had frozen in the parking lot into a glare sheet of ice on a slight slant so my car slid at about 2 mph into another car. Her car has a scratch on the fender and mine has a cracked bumper. Stupid weather.

finally an update

2008-01-22T13:23:00.000-06:00

The past month has been super hectic. The holidays always are and throw in there kels graduating, her grandpa dieing, going on a cruise (ok that was a nice break from everything) and then getting her situated in her new apartment. I ended the year by dropping a billion dollars straight over 6 days so from the 29th until like the 10th of january I didn't really play any poker. I shouldn't complain too much because if I would have quit on the 25th of dec it would have been one of my best months ever and I still ended up a healthy amount for the month. I think I talked about things going well and waiting for the innevitable floor drop in my last blog. It came. I was due. The world is fair and right. I ran sick hot for quite awhile.

Since coming back I've spent 90% of my time playing no-limit and 10% limit and man has that just been so much better. The limit I've played has been sick (in a bad way) judging by my stats. I don't ever have anything, and when I do have something, somebody has something better...and in the aggressive upper limit games that's just a recipe for disaster and it's wore me down a lot. I've been making money still because no-limit has been the bulk of my games, but it's really too bad I can't perserveer through the limit at the moment cause I feel like there is still a lot of money in those games if you can put up with the misery. Then again, pretty much everyone I knwo who plays limit is in the same boat (hates the variance) and that makes me feel better that I've made it as well as I have 2.5 years into being a pro playing almost 100% lhe.

With no-limit I've been playing mostly 3/6 and 5/10 chopped between the best games on pokerstars and fulltilt for now.

All that complaining about limit aside, like I said there is still a ton of money to be made at it and people who are interested in getting their piece, so I've decided to join up with CardRunners.com to make instructional videos. My first video should be out soon where I played heads up vs a friend of mine john hoppman.

Given how much time I spent at limit holdem HU my next undertaking is NL HU and understanding how to play with deeper stacks. I feel pretty comfortable in the midlimit 6max nl 100bb games now and want to expand my knowledge base. For that I've been playing some co-op sessions with friends as well as watching cardrunners videos. I checked out CTS's latest HU vid and liked it a lot.

One cool thing with poker is the network of people you make. Right now I'm on a flight to montana to meet up with brad L and his family to ski for a week. Brad and I have known eachother a few years though poker and 2+2 back in the day and have hung out a few times in vegas/LA and talk on aim from time to time but other than that don't know eachother super well. It's jsut a cool opportunity to meet new people and have a good time.

Blogging is like working out...if you don't make it part of any regular routine it's so easy to not do it and then so much has happenned so it feels overwhelming...so I'll try to get back into doing it more.

vacation

2008-01-01T12:52:00.000-06:00

Like I said, I kept waiting for the inevitable bad run at poker...and it came in full force.

I lost hard 5 straight days and now am on a vacation from poker until after I get back from the cruise Kels and I are taking on friday until the 10th. I think I'm going to come back playing no limit more for a little as it just doesn't seem to wear on me as limit does and kind of give myself some more lhe healing time.

I'm so used to being in a "if i don't have anything i WANT to do I play poker" mode that taking these vacations is kind of interesting. I got medal of honor heroes 2 for Wii for christmas and jon and I beat it yesterday. He is always mister working man (60 hours avg, sometimes 70+) so our paths don't cross as much as we'd like so it was nice to spend a bunch of the day with him.

New years was a fun time. Went down with jon and his gf and 3 of her friends to a local bar with some live music and what not. It was an older crowd but a great atmosphere cause it wasn't trashy, packed, or too loud for conversation.

I wish I could go golfing right now, I'm really in the mood. I booked a ski trip to Montana with brad L the 20th of January so I better get back to working out or it's going to be a struggle. Good luck to me on that one!

fine fine, I'll update my blog

2007-12-20T00:49:00.001-06:00

Lets see, where to begin...

I spent a week in vegas and it was a fun trip. I went with schneids, david w and dave p. Great guys and we were able to score an adjoining room so that was nice. Kirby and pokerbob were out there trying to collect the dollars as well. I didn't play as much poker as usual, but that was fine with me.

Kelsey graduated from college on sunday so I went up there as did her family to help her move and watch her graduate. Congrats to her! She also got a job with Best Buy. The only downside is she has to work in Duluth for 6 months, but it's what needed to be done. Time flies, it'll be fine...but I'm definitely ready for a non long-distance relationship...been almost 2 years! What's another 6 months i guess.

I keep waiting for the inevitable bad run at poker...and even though i have my share of -10 to -20k daily streaks, it always bounces back strong within a couple days...very aba like. I've been really mixing nl and lhe pretty evenly these days. Maybe that's been helping, as if you feel in a small rut with one, the other is so different you can forget about the other for a little bit. I have to thank schnettler, jay, and pickett for all the NL help. I wouldn't be here doing so well without them. I'm just so pumped to finally be competent at the game. That said, I still have so incredibly much to learn, but at least I understand the flow of the game now.

little inspiration

2007-12-14T05:08:00.001-06:00

I haven't had any real inspiration to write lately and still don't now, but click here for a little nugget from vegas:

stars nl

2007-12-03T05:05:00.000-06:00

I haven't played stars NL in about a year and I was getting sick of the UB waitlist bug and couldn't find any good games really so I decided to try 8-9 tabling it. For the first couple weeks of getting back into NL a month ago I played 4 tables...and after that somewhere between 3 and 6.

I figured it was filled with a bunch of 8 tabling nits and I was right. It's unbelievable how many 13/5 to 13/12 guys there are on there and there are plenty that are nittier than that. There are also just a lot more 'good' aggressive players who will 3 bet you a lot compared to any of the other sites...but all this said, most tables had at least one guy who played like 35/10...and the super nits don't really give me fits because most of them don't really have any idea how to play poker.

I'm still not quite there comfortability wise vs the regs when there is a re-raise pre. I've been doing real well but I think I've ran a little on the lucky side and they've had the lower ends of their ranges a lot. I'm talking about the JJ's and the QQ's and generally I've just been jamming with AK every time haha.

I definitely feel like I'm outplaying people more than they're outplaying me...but obviously we all get outplayed sometimes and I've made a few really dumb call downs where I made kelsey yell at me for being such a stubborn moron.

I also feel like I've probably flopped about 2x the normal amount of sets...but I really don't know...it just feels like every other hand I have a set...but that could be a product of 720 hands per hour...which is another thing...I've always been a PT/stats whore and being able to play 5k hands in one day leads to some interesting stuff to look through without having to wait weeks/months.

I also liked how I could 8 table on my laptop...whereas other sites I can really only play 4 tables.

I'm sure i'll get sick of the tougher games soon, but for now, this is fun and I've been killing it. Up 16 buyins (~10k) in the last 24 hours after 6500 hands.

Also, going out to vegas on wednesday...haven't been there since the summer and was so burned out from it, but playing all that live NL in san diego really got me back in the mood.

/update ended the 2 days at 21 buyins...and I imported my hands into pokerev and I'm running 6k above expectation on all-in pots...luckbox!!!

pokerbob hand conversations

2007-11-30T16:31:00.000-06:00

Pokerbob made a super funny post to his blog and it's definitely worth checking out here.

november coming to a close

2007-11-28T15:09:00.000-06:00

Wow have I played a ton of poker this month - somewhere around 45k hands online. To the 8 or 10 tablers out there that's nothing I know, but when I play limit I play 1-3 tables and when I play no-limit I average around 4 with all the table switching and laptop play...so hours wise it was a sick month and the most time I've spent playing poker in a long time. I probably averaged 35-40 hours online per week.

I finally put up a couple good sessions at Canterbury, too. I'm sure I'm still down there this year.. but I made a dent, that's for sure. My live NL session in Cali definitely helped the bottom line as well.

Because I played so much no limit and almost no $100/200 my swings this month were very low. The end of the month has been kinda slow, but nothing crazy. I did start playing some more limit again though because the good Canterbury session put me in the mood/a better mental place. Limit is just so sick.

3 good months in a row. Wish I could throw one of these in the sick 8 month streak i had last year into the middle of this year. Owell, I made it through it and am definitely more aware/seasoned because of it. I just have to stay sharp and not get complacent or before I know it I could be wondering wtf again.

I finally started buying stocks within the last month. Before I would just buy vanguard funds but I really want to understand the markets and be more involved and the way I learn things is hands on so I talked to a few people, read some stuff on fool.com and dove in. I have 5 positions and that should be enough for now. The next money I invest I'll just get another fund, as I don't know enough yet to want to put toooo much into individual stocks but I have enough in there to make me care/pay attention/learn.

I don't want to jinx her, but Kelsey is feeling really good about some job prospects here in the cities. She graduates in 3 weeks and has been really giving the job hunt her all and I think it's really going to pay off.

Thanksgiving was a fun time. We always go down to Worthington, MN (3 hours south west of here) where my dad grew up on a farm. I don't get to see them very often so it was nice. I also got to talk money and all that with my parents on the car ride and I always like soaking up what I can from their experiences.

2.5 more days left in the month...I can win another 5-10k right? Wouldn't that be nice.

an update

2007-11-22T22:48:00.000-06:00

I've really been spending quite a bit of time playing no limit these days and I've just been happier as a whole. The limit games were really sick for awhile and I took good advantage of that, but I haven't really seen them lately and NL has been so much more interesting and the money has been good. Also, it seems like everyone I know who plays limit is either currently frustrated by it or has been strongly in the last few months. It's just such a sick game...

I don't know how my earn compairs to limit as my sample size is pretty small (maybe 20k hands this month) but if it's around what I've been making I'll be more than content.

My guess gauging from my NL friends is I'll be quite happy with it...but I have plenty to learn before getting to that stage. I'm a pretty fast learner though and I spent quite a bit of time learning NL at the beginning of the year (perhaps 150k hands) so I'm not a complete n00b.

I've been very dedicated and have been putting in reletively long hours these days and have been splashing in HU PLO and stud 8 or better at low limits just to know more games.

One last bit is I've finally started buying individual stocks in addition to my mutual funds. I've been slowly tryin to better understand investing and going head first into the market has been seeming to assist the learning process. I probably spend a half hour per day reading about different things and soaking it all up. I've probably bought enough stocks (5) for a little bit and if I could get my money off poker sites faster it'd be time again for another good mutual fun investment.

I had nice timing on monday I think it was...as I was talking to schneider at canterbury and we agreed Target might be a decent company to check out for investing so tuesday I started looking at it and it had missed q3 earnings numbers by a hair which sent it down 4.5% to it's 52week low so I snatched it up right away as I think it's a good long term spot. Time will tell.

I'm in Worthington (3.5 hours sw of tc) for a few days seeing my grandparents which I see only once per year. I really wish it was more and perhaps this coming spring or summer I'll come out here again.

I'm dieing to get out skiing and the snow isn't lookin that great so far out west but you never know, it could come quickly. Brad L has a place in vail and if they can pull some snow out of their ass soon I'll probably go out there in a week or 2.

Til then, poker poker poker and crossing my fingers kelsey's interviews keep going well and she gets a couple job offers she really wants.

Leaving SD

2007-11-14T16:42:00.000-06:00

It's been a real nice 11 days...even though it was uncharacteristically cloudy and dreary most of the time but there was enough sun the last few days to make it better.

Having 3 good poker players in 1 house is hard for game selection...and jay often beat me to the limit games so I found myself playing some NL again. Ahhh, what a nice change of pace. It doesn't help that I've been running super hot at it, but it's been fun and there's just something really satisfying to stacking a guy. Just another tool in the toolbox...being able to play more games. They play higher than I do for NL so I didn't have to compete for games. Also, it was great timing cause I could always ask them about the tough hands and discuss other hands as well. It's no surprise they've all been killing it this year.

Dave and I were bored one day so we started playing $.5/1 PLO heads up. I played pickett as well as some random guys on the net and played 2400 hands and lost 12 buyins. I importing the hands into pokerev I found out that I was running 12.5 buyins under expectation in all-in pots. LMAO PLO is such a funny game I guess.

Kels comes tomorrow for some job interview stuff and to see me...which I'm really looking forward to.

free days

2007-11-10T04:13:00.000-06:00

It doesn't happen all that often...i mean, sometimes I'm confused as to what day of the week it is...that's normal and isn't what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the days where multiple times during the day you react to things as if it were a completely different day...and I'm sure everyone experiences this from time to time.

I went through the entire day today thinking it was saturday. I just got reminded for the 2nd time that in fact, it's friday. Tomorrow is a freebee. What a gift. Life is goood.

biggest NL pot of life

2007-11-07T03:09:00.000-06:00

Dave, Jay, and I went up to a small casino here in san diego to play $10/20 blind no limit. There was a player who as pokerbob would say had a "strong disdain for money" who we had played with for awhile. He had about 7k in front and I covered by like a thousand.

He open limped, which meant that he had 2 cards that were suited or remotely connected, another moron limped, folded to me in the small blind so I made it $220 with TT. The open limper calls and the other limper folds.

The flop comes T64 rainbow, I bet $400, he raises to $1400, I make it $3400, he goes all in for ~$7000 I call. Turn 4 river 7. 14k pot my way. Rigggged!

Still broken, leaving anyhow

2007-11-03T09:48:00.001-05:00

I really have no idea what's wrong with me. I've been feeling more or less good the last few days but I still have plenty of gunk and a stupid sometimes productive sometimes dry cough that is pretty prominent. I've don't really remember having a cold like this before (weirdness wise). Perhaps I have a sinus infection or bronchitis again. It's definitely not like the death plague of bronchitis we all had last year, at least not yet though which is good.

I was supposed to goto Cali a week ago but haven't felt up to it...but I wanted to go badly so I treated my body really well and didn't even leave the house from Sunday til Thursday. I just laid low - worked and watched 4 seasons of survivor lol. While I still have some symptoms I don't feel particularly crappy now so I'm outta here...flying out at 4pm today. Enough putting it off. It'll be plenty chill anyhow so it's not a big deal.

If this crap doesn't start lessoning maybe I'll see a doctor in cali.

late night music

2007-11-01T03:55:00.000-05:00

There something to be said about having a house to yourself and cranking the shit out of a sweet song at 4am.

october coming to a close

2007-10-30T23:57:00.000-05:00

I was supposed to go to San Diego to visit the boys on monday, but I've been cooped up with a pretty bad cold. The poker games have been a lot spottier lately and kind of annoying cause they've generally been in the 8-11 time frame when everyone else is around and like nothing in the afternoon when I want to play. It's ok but not completely not optimal.

I had such a great start to the month and since then have had quite the roller coaster and came off a little bit. This doesn't bother me at all as October was the best month I've had in a year or 2, it had potential to be even better. Limit holdem is just so funny.

I've been spending a good chunk of time trying to learn stud8 for fun. I've probably played like 15 hours in the past week of mostly 5/10 and I'm down about as much rake as I've paid. I feel like I've really been running horribly in the few multiway huge pots and a couple guys have really ginned their perfect cards. I definitely see the 'lower' variance part but that isn't to say that there's no variance.

For the first bit of stud8 most of it was short-handed and the last session I tried full table. There is suuuuuuch a huge difference. I think there is much more of a difference than in hold-em. I'm sure I'm still not good at it but I want to get better badly. I always like pushing my brain with new games.

Until a week ago, I hadn't ever watched a season of survivor. I had seen a few episodes from random seasons but never got into it. Having heard Jon-Robert (a fellow poker player from las vegas) was on the current season, I tuned in. I've been watching this season and when I got sick I wanted to get into something so I downloaded season 10 on itunes. Now I'm hooked. It's nothing worth getting SUPER excited about, but I've always been into strategy games and it's quite the social game/experiment too. I liked 10 quite a bit, 11 was very meh and not that enthralling, and now...halfway through 12 I'm really liking it. Definitely great for vegging out to when sick.