Shit. It's been a long time. I was a bit upset with poker after my main event bust out and that got me away from blogging. I had played solid poker and was blessed with some great situations and I blew it all on one hand that I knew I misplayed. Tournaments suck like that. At my best I was still a player that made mistakes but made up for them with quantity of play. That style doesn't translate well to mtts. I always envied those people that seemingly didn't make mistakes. It's a hard thing to do when you're playing long hours. I digress. My break got to the point where I felt like I wanted a really interesting entry to get myself back into the blogging game. Nothing really came up. I still don't have anything. I decided to forget that mindset and just put up an entry to break the ice.

I'd say I've spent the majority of the last 2 months just living a normal life. I haven't done anything too out of the ordinary. After blogging for 3 years or so you can feel like you've said your piece. I'm definitely in that camp. I don't have much to say when I'm going through the motions. I've also spent a lot of my time on two things that I don't think are very bloggable. One is SNGs. I've spent a ton of time grinding SNGs lately. I decided I wanted to get at least semi-serious about making some good money with poker again and after some thought I determined SNGs were the best way. There is absolutely no glory in them and I had to swallow a bit of my ego to get back into them full time, but I just don't really care at this point. Money is money. I've had some mixed success with them, but with the 100% rakeback you can't go too wrong. I was able to clear $260/hour last month. I'm a bit behind that this month but still having a good month. I think that even if I was on top of my game and beating a couple tables of 5/10nl at a time, I probably wouldn't make a ton more money than that. Not to mention, the swings would be a lot higher too. I like the low stress of SNGs and the fact that I can watch tv/do other things and still perform well. My biggest gripe with them is that if you are in a bunch of them and want to quit you have to play them out. That's not a huge deal though. Another complaint is you can't really blog about SNGs. What is there to say? So many decisions are so standard. They just aren't interesting.

The other thing I've spent a ton of time on lately is immersing myself in the current political landscape in America. I was drawn in by the unprecedented things that were going on over the course of the last year. I've spent a lot of time listening to both sides of the argument and I feel like I've become very knowledgeable with what's been going on. I had never really paid a ton of attention to politics outside of presidential elections, so it was a lot for me to take in. I'd say it took me a few months to get a reasonable perspective on everything. People are so animated and take things to such extremes that's it's hard to not get dragged in. I hate that about our political system.

I don't have much interest in talking politics in my blog. There's just no point. I've realized that there are extreme ideological differences between the left and right and there's no logical way to bridge that gap. People also put way too much emotion into debates. I think a lot of that is due to people not knowing all the facts. When you don't understand what's going on, you tend to get defensive and that leads to hostility. It's a shame that people on both sides can't spend the time to get informed and then sit down and have a rational discussion. We'd be a lot better off if people could.

I did do two pretty cool things in the past week. I took my dad up to Kohler, WI for 36 holes of golf for his bday. We played the Irish in the morning and Whistling Straits in the afternoon. Goddamn are those courses nice! Whistling Straits is the most beautiful course I've ever played on. The views you get of lake Michigan are breathtaking. The courses are both very difficult. I was hoping to break 90 on at least one of them but I came in at 91 and 92 respectively. Ugh. I had a triple bogey in the first round and a quadruple bogey in the second. That will kill you. This summer was a lost summer for me with respect to golf. I was consistently in the low 90s and never got in a round below 80. Last summer I averaged low 80s so it was frustrating to have a 10 shot regression. Golf is a funny sport though. Hopefully I'll come out next season and be back in the low 80s.



The other fun thing I did was go to the track. My dad goes to a track in South Haven, MI a few times a year and he'll bring me along every now and then. Going to a track is an absolute blast. I highly recommend doing it if you ever get the chance. One of the fun things about this trip was both my uncles were there so I had some people to rally with on the track. It's great when you are tailgating the shit out of your uncle to the point that he has to let you by. As soon as he lets you by you have to keep him off your ass. I did manage probably the worst spin out of my life. I was turning into the final straight away and was chasing a 911 turbo (i was in a 2008 vette z06). The entire time I had been chasing him he was gaining on me coming out of the turns. I kept trying to push it more to keep up with him. Going in to that last turn I accelerated far too much coming out of it and spun out going about 70. I spun a number of times in the grass and was heading for a dirt wall. That pretty much scared the shit out of me since my dad would kill me if I wrecked his car. Luckily I came up a few feet short and avoided any trouble. When we got off the track he reminded me that he had 4 wheel drive and therefore could take the turns faster. I wish I had been thinking about that before I almost hit the dirt wall.