What's up everyone, long time no see. Hope everyone is doing ok since Black Friday and that nobody is in too much trouble considering what has happened. Since BF I haven't been playing too much poker and have been doing a lot more golf related stuff. I guess I'll start with poker. I threw $500 onto Lock poker and was just going to grind NLHE moving up everytime I hit 10 buy ins and down if I ever dropped to 5 buy ins. My plan was to do this until reaching 1/2 or 2/4 and then just settling there for a while. After a couple days I decided to scrap that plan and switch to PLO, the plan being pretty similar just allowing for larger swings. I started at .10/.25 and with bonuses and winnings have run my $500 up to about $2300 so far. I've always wanted to learn PLO and the major thing holding me back was knowing I would have to start at the lower limits to learn it, and the immediate opportunity cost was just too much. But now, sine I was forced to play the smaller limits no matter which game I decided to play I figured now was as good a time as any to learn PLO. So far it has been fun.

Away from poker I've been doing a lot of golf stuff. I played in a US Open local qualifier earlier this week. Leading up to it I had been playing some great golf, with 3 consecutive under par rounds. I had to get some new wedges a couple days before the event to conform with the new groove rules the USGA implemented and that kind of gave me a few problems. It wasn't so much the new grooves that gave me the issues, but the new 60* wedge that I got had 10* of bounce instead of the 6* I was used to. For those that are unfamiliar with what the bounce of the club is, it is basically that hump underneath the leading edge of your wedges. Bounce comes in real handy when you are playing out of the sand, but not so much on firm, closely cut fairways. I got the 10* bounce wedge because I thought I wanted slightly more bounce than the 6* I already had, and figured if 10* was too much I could just have it grinded down. Well I wasn't able to grind it down before the tournament so I was a little uncomfortable around the greens during the qualifier. I hit 13 greens in the qualifier but once you add in that I was 0'fer on up and down's and had 38 putts including 4 3 putts you wind up with a 79 which was 7 shots too many to advance to the sectionals.

Overall I'm not that unhappy, I only came up 7 shots shy and was only 10 shots behind the leader on a day where my short game completely abandoned me. I finished T37 our of 109 players. When you account for the strength of the field, made up mostly of nationwide, mini-tour, and college players I feel ok. I hit the ball great and just need to practice a little more, something I haven't really been able to do as much as I would like. Take away the 3 putts(which are all unforced errors that should really never happen) and give me a few up and downs around the greens and I would have been right in the hunt. Oh well, not too bad for my first tournament round in over a year. The highlight of the day was probably on the 4th hole, I had just 3 putted the 2nd hole to go to +1, but birdied the 3rd hole to get back to E. On the 4th hole I had about 25 right to left down the hill for another birdie. As I'm reading the putt I hear this guy who lives right behind the green talking extremely loudly on his phone. I recognize the voice and turn around to see Ron White sitting on his porch. I proceed to drain the putt at which point Ron waved and gave me a thumbs up in appreciation of the putt. Sadly that would be the last good putt I hit all day. The greens were super fast and I always seemed to leave myself the most difficult putts, especially after chips shots which is very unlike me.

In other golf news we nailed down a schedule for the junior golf clinics that I will be running this summer which is awesome. It's 6 days per week but my schedule is super flexible because of an intern that we just had for her first day yesterday. Also the 6 days only totals up to 19 hours which isn't bad. I think the longest day we have is Tuesday or Thursday which is like a 5.5 hour day. I should be making at least $50/hr with the clinics and then I will also be giving individual lessons for $60/hr as an instructor tailored to juniors/beginners who don't want to spend the $135-150/hr for my friend the director of instruction.

Were also looking into some more online based stuff, including a Twitter account and Facebook page that will help us spread the word of our junior academy. Were going to try to put up a lot of content including golf articles, swing tips, video drills and much more. The director of instruction already has a site www.robstocke.com and hopefully we will be able to just add a bunch of this content onto there. He's already initiated a huge surge on the 2+2 golf forums under the nickname "dagolfdoc", where he has an ask me anything about golf thread, as well as many others that are very informative. People are also posting their swings in their own threads on a pretty consistent basis looking for feedback from him, not to mention the abundance of PM's he is getting regarding possible online golf instruction. So yea I'm pretty excited about this golf season, looking forward to teaching a lot, as well as practicing and playing a ton. Once we get some more online stuff up I will link them from here so you guys can check it out and give us some feed back.

GL with whatever post Black Friday has lead you to!