Off to San Diego and Vegas

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

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.