What is up, just got back from an epic houseboating trip in Northern California. Basically just a bunch of friends drinking and wakeboarding for 3 days. I managed not to get too dehydrated, sick, or hungover, which is great news. I am looking to be back on the grind for the next few weeks, hopefully increasing my time spent at the tables to the maximum possible. Since my last post things have been going fairly well, I have made some more monies playing poker and have been pretty active socially. On top of all that I have been grinding Starcraft 2 nonstop, just trying to get better. It's a great game with many similarities to poker, and I feel like it helps keep me ready for pokers. Other than that I am thinking of getting a new computer: http://www.falcon-nw.com/desktops/talon and my assistant officially has her own desk in my office, which is improving productivity tremendously. Sorry for the big hiatus, its probably directly related to SC2 which is all I do when I am not playing poker but still near my computer. Over the next few weeks I intend to get things in order and probably pump out a few videos. Also I am still reading the PLO books written by Tom "LearnedFromTV" Chambers, they are amazing but dense, and I haven't been spending much time on "the dark side." That should all change soon though.

Next blog post I will put up some pics and videos from the last few weeks and our wedding.

After winning 2 10 person sngs, I got down to the final 14 and then the final 9 in the 1500 shootout yesterday. I was fortunate enough to hold with TT vs Annette_15's a7o and another overshovers AQo to move us to the final table as chip leader. From there I played pretty tight solid and ended up kinda being card dead for a while, still managing to stay about even in chips from steals and playing some marginal hands. I made a bad call down 3 handed that 1) I didn't need to make to win the tourny, and 2) was probably based on playing so long all day, and I am just not happy about it. I basically went with the read that my opponent is good and will 3barrel bluff K high boards, little did I know my opponent just instabets 2 pair even on scary rivers (I also missed a good check raise bluff allin spot rather than a hero call). Making the bad call down put me at 20 BBs 3handed and I never recovered, losing a flip QJs to 88. I played pretty well and am happy with the 3rd place cash for 161k, but more importantly the final table experience is teaching me alot about my endgame tourny play and how I should be thinking about opponents who maybe haven't EVER made a big cash and are much less likely to make a "move." There is something to be said about live poker reads, which is generally just you can get more information on your opponent than you usually can online, and they are less likely to bluff if they aren't comfortable with the stakes, because of the pressure of their surroundings. Oh well, I will take third and continue improving my game. Soon I will be reading and reviewing LearnedfromTV's extremely extensive books on PLO, and I intend to switch over from playing 10/25 at the rio to playing 5/5/10 PLO. This has been a good month and a few months coming, I will try to final table something again soon!

Taoromina is a small, beautiful city. Located on the North East coast of Sicily, it is the tourist trap of the island. The prices are jacked up, and alot of people speak English. We stayed in a junior suite in a 5 star hotel called Saint Pietro. The service was amazing and the view from the room was incredible.



Taormina is a cool city with a one street strip downtown area, where everyone just walks in the middle of the street and an occasional car will drive through. Lined up and down this strip are trinket stores, nice restaurants and some bars and pubs.

Here we are having a nice (expensive) lunch overlooking the ocean. The drink of choice in Italy is definetely Proscecco, which is essential champagne from Italy.



After getting acquainted with the area, we headed out on a tour of Mount Etna, an active volcano.

Here is me conquering the volcano.




And here is Shana on the volcano.



After seeing the view from the top of Etna, which apparently can see over half of Sicily on a clear day, we headed back down the mountain to a small winery called Murgo for lunch. The wine and food was good and quite different than any other meal we had, the food was fresh picked and homegrown and delicious.

Here is the view from our lunch, we were the only people in the whole restaurant.



And here is what our food looked like


After Etna we had a couple more days in Taormina to enjoy the beaches and nights out.

Us at dinner yet again

A view of the outlining areas of Taormina at night



On the beaches of Taormina, the sand is not very sandy, its more like a bunch of small rocks, probably because of the ACTIVE VOLCANO nearby.



Me overlooking Taormina


So there is a small island called Isla Bella right off the coast that is only seperated by a narrow sandbar that you can walk across in low tide, we made the journey only to find out the island is closed off, so we just walked back across.


Shana crossing over to Isla Bella



That pretty much sums up our trip to Taormina. I bought Shana a dress and a couple of necklaces, and we looked for places to drink and have fun every night. We didn't realize it, but when we got there it was the weekend and the strip was packed, then we wanted to go out Monday night and the town was deserted, so we had missed our opportunity. Oh well, we still managed to drink some good Prosecco and mix it up with some locals.

This scedule should keep me relatively busy all summer long. I will of course be mixing in some live cash games and probably still some online pokers as well. I am really excited to be working really hard this summer. I really need to lucksack one of these donkaments to put myself back into a comfortable financial situation. If I end up not making any money in Vegas I will probably have to drop down to 3/6 and go into uber grind mode for a couple months. GL ME! I will be continuing on with the honeymoon tirp report when I get around to it.

Our honeymoon begins with a long flight Wednesday morning from San Diego, thru Chicago, thru Rome, and finally ending in Catania, Sicily after 22 hours. The time difference is 9 hours and it was morning in Sicily and we haven't slept more than a few uncomfortable winks on the plane. I remember being delirious while falling asleep in the car ride from Catania's airport to Syracusa, 50 minutes away. When we arrived we found that noone spoke english, more than a few broken phrases and lots of pointing. We were at a hotel on the beach across from Ortygia, a cool little island town connected to the mainland by a few bridges. After sleeping until 9PM we had to get some dinner before every place closed (there was no room service to order off of). We were just completely wandering around down a somewhat vacant semi scary street in the middle of Syracusa looking for food. We found some food, drank some house wine and headed back to the hotel to prepare for the next day.

Day 1 - Ortygia

Here is the view from our room, thats the island of Ortygia, just to the right of the pic are some short bridges that connect it to the mainland (the island of Sicily that is).

The hotel was a little wierd, the toilet is shaped differently, and the flusher is on the wall. Then next to it is a bidet, except this bidet doesn't shoot water up, apparently you are suppose to fill the whole bowl with water and then wiggle your butt around in it or something, I never bothered trying as the great invention of toilet paper was in abundance.

If you look, the bidet and the sink are the exact same, except one is like a sink for munchkins.

Sink

Bidet

The completely too small uncomfortable round European Toilet

Now on to the important stuff. We traveled into Ortygia to do some sight seeing and perhaps a little shopping.

We checked out some ruins. The term "ruins" became a joke between Shana and I, because it was really just old fallen down buildings, which is kind of funny to keep around isn't it. Anytime we saw something that was falling apart (which was frequent) we would just point and go "ruin."

These are exactly what the streets of Ortygia look like, cars drive down them and people walk down the middle of them, its really cool, but not very functionally optimal (of course the streets were around since before they had cars so it made more sense then).

Here is a castle we visited, pretty cool, it was apparently a really good place to defend, they had cannon rooms setup on all the sides of it.

We saw a ton of other things including a church, and a bunch of Piazzo's (plazas where people like to walk around with both hands behind their back and talk to each other), then we headed back to get some beach time in before dinner.

At dinner we found a really nice place, they spoke a little English, and then after dinner they took us to this crazy basement room that hand natural fountains in it. The room above the basement had a glass floor, and was filled with Italian families, when we went down there it really felt like the "tourists" weren't suppose to be visiting this hidden place, it was pretty cool.

After dinner we hit up a few bars and drunkenly stumbled the 1.5km back to our hotel.

Day 2 - Greek Theatre

On the second day we woke up pretty early, still having trouble adjusting to the time change and our lack of sleep, and planned to head out to the far side of town where a bunch of "ruins" lay around. We never really found an English speaking guide so we pretty much just looked at a bunch of falling down things and made our own conclusions as to why they were so cool.

This is what Shana and I never got, the star attraction is the 2000 year old Greek Theater ruins that still last, and they are covering them up with new age stuff to turn this back into a Theater, seems kinda sill to me, they could build a theater anywhere, why cover up the ruins that everyone is coming to check out.

We think these were caves where they held prisoners, but we don't really know.

This is called Dionysus's ear, we know they stored prisoner's here, and apparently when the prisoners whipsered to each other, the people outside could hear the conversations perfectly.

This is the gladiator arena, where people would apparently fight to the death. They had crazy animals involved in this as well, including lions and crocodiles.

This is a hilarious store sign that I had to show you :-P

And that pretty much raps up Syracusa, next we head to Taormina where we stay in a fabulous 5 star hotel.

I have been in Sicily for a while now. We have hit up Syracusa, Taormina, and are now in Palermo for a couple more nights before heading to Rome for 3 days and then home. The journey has been epic, we have done lots of touristy things, had tons of trouble and fun trying to talk to people (there is a huge language barrier), and have spent tons of money. I am already recounting my trip into blog posts which I will put up when I get home with accompanying pictures (I left the cord to transfer pics from camera to computer at home so can't do it now). Here are a couple pics we took with our iPhone to hold you over.

The view from our room in Syracusa, looking out into the island city of Ortygia, where all the fun is happening.

The view from our Taormina Hotel room, high up on the hillside.

This is a picture of a cool looking church and far away hillside in downtown Taormina.

Thats it for now, stay posted for more updates as soon as I get back around the 12/13th of May

Lets start at the beginning. My bachelor party was a blur of a weekend. I went to dinner Thursday night with my lovely fiance, only to come home to a surprise party of 15 of my good friends, including brystmar and tcblade from out of town. It was a good night of drinking games before heading out to what at the time was an undisclosed destination. The next day they drove me to Oceanside, CA where we got a 7 bedroom baller beach condo. The 22 of us dudes proceeded to party the weekend away there, playing bochi ball IN the ocean, and beer die on the roof. Saturday night we all hopped in a party bus and I am not allowed to talk about what happened after that, except it was a blast and I did nothing that would piss off my wifey. Sunday morning I was still too drunk to drive and had a friend take me the 45 minutes back to my house. That was an awesome bachelor party, I don't think I have too much of a chance of surviving it if we have to do it again. Thanks to everyone for showing up, although I do gotta admit, I don't remember all that much of it.

It took 3 days to get unhungover from that one, and then it was wedding time. Family and friends trickled in Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. Friday we had a BBQ at my house, where my Mom got to embarass us by showing 65 people a video montage of childhood photos of Shana and I (soon to be released to you). We ate some food, got some beer die going of course, and then everyone had to leave around 2 or 3 as we had to get our tux's still, and we had a rehearsal ceremony at 5:30 (not in the tux's). We had a rehearsal dinner at Buca Di Beppo (which my Dad has trouble spelling and saying, it usually comes out, Boca De Pepto or something). It was an awesome time, where a couple of my friends, and my sis, fell victim to a few too many drinks, leaving passed out (half) corpses everywhere. Shana and I called it an early night and headed home to prepare for the big day. Saturday was no walk in the park. From the moment we woke up something was going on. We were preparing a ton, then I got to the Grant, tried and failed to set up 2 monitors to show videos (because I brough DVI cables and needed VGA), then literally the last 5 minutes from 4:25 - 4:30, I am scrambling to find a "wine glass" that I thought my Mom brought for Shana and I do drink out of during the ceremony (yes we incorported drinking into the ceremony as a symbol of our sharing our lives or something like that). I found out she brought it for a candy bowl and said, meh lets drink out of it anyways, so the final minute my Dad and I are at the valet, and we go, he is getting married in 2 minutes and we need something out of the back of the car, we find the candy bowl with candy still in it, and are cleaning it out of M&M residue 30 seconds before I have to walk down the isle. We barely made it (or they waited for us) and within 5 minutes I am struggling not to just burst into tears as emotion finally flows through me. I remember during the ceremony I stared alot at Shana, she was of course beautiful. Anytime I lost focus I would start to cry which made her start to cry so we were literally both having to work together to just make it to the end. We drank out of the same candy dish, broke a champagne glass, everyone shouted Mazel Tov, and we ran away together. There were tons of pictures (nutedawg will no doubtedly share how gay the guys had to pose together). After the ceremony we ate drank, danced, and were generally merry. I got to talk to alot of people that I haven't seen in a while, and some I see too often. It was kind of awesome being able to jump right into the middle of any circle of people and totally being the center of attention (a guy could get used ta that). But now the glamour is over and we get to retreat to 2 weeks in Sicily by ourselves with no phone, and little internet. By the time we get back we should have most of our wedding pictures and some from the honeymoon too. i will make sure and keep you in the loop. Until then, Mozel Tov!!!

So I just got a beta copy for Starcraft 2 and have been playing every free moment of the day. I am still getting in decent hours playing poker, but now I just don't go out of the house unless it is of dire importance :P I'm not very good (bronze league if you know what that means) but I really enjoy the game. Its easy to see how the intricacies are similar to poker, or even more comparable to chess. Both players start with an equal playing field and must manuever their pieces towards the objective of destroying all of the opponents pieces. The game is rather complex. Build order, threats, metagame, these are all the conecpts you have to conquer to get good at the game, as well as my worst enemy, APM - actions per minute. The pros are making 200 actions per minute, jumping around the map and position and attacking with skill and grace, I am at like 60 APM so basically I just don't get as much done as them and therefore don't do as well as them.


If you haven't checked out nutedawgs blog, check it out. He organized a group donation to charity, and we are encouraging people to chip in what they can. It's really easy and he has offered to give free coaching to one lucky participant. I only donated $50, but right now is like the worst time for me. After a huge downswing, just paid taxes, and paying for a wedding and a honeymoon, I am not exactly loaded right now, but I will survive.

My bad on a whole month without a blog post. I will get one up after the bachelor party, this weekend, then one after the wedding, then one after the honeymoon. Stay tuned in. Later

I have been holding out on telling anyone about this, mainly because I suck, but I got a Numark NS7 Performance Controller, which is just a fancy way of saying a DOPE turntable setup. When I was 15 I got a couple of turntables but they were the super starter kit and they sucked and I sucked, so my needle drifted all over the place and I couldn't keep a beat for the life of me. Now I have some free time, and I little bit of money, so I thought I would give it another shot. So far I am having fun (sucking) and it's really sweet. I am working on my DJ skills and will release something to you guys shortly. Until then I will show you what the pro's can do with this thing. PS my DJ name for a while has been DJBlAcKFlAmE.






This guy is a little douchy acting, but he is throwing down some sick shit so I'm gonna let him slide on that.

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Talk about a true test of someone's strength. I have nearly hit the -100k mark and its really starting to take its toll on me. I have retired playing 10/20 for now and will just focus on grinding some 3/6 until I get some of my confidence back and get back into the groove of things.

This graph doesn't show a couple of marginal tourney scores. This graph shows some of the runbads that I showed in a previous graph, combined with how the last 2 months have been going, which is not so good. If I can run 80k under EV, than I can run 80k over EV, and when that day comes it will be awesome.