Man Brian, you have been hitting the tanning bed hard. I see you gave up your measly job as a pro poker player in order to truly make a difference in the world of counter terrorism...

So the new season of 24 has a main character named none other than Brian Hastings. The first time I heard this I found it hilarious. Do you think someone writing the show heard about Stinger and decided to use his name? Or do you think it was just a pure coincidence? Something tells me the writer was jealous of Stingers recent big score and thought they would write him into the plotline. They just were a lil off with his caricature.

If you aren't watching the new season of 24, you are dead to me. This show is awesome, every season is a roller coaster ride that you don't want to miss. Watch 24 because:

http://t2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:Hc5K3JHiWw-c_M:/url?source=imgres&ct=tbn&q=http://www.realclearsports.com/blog/24%2520Jack%2520Bauer.jpg&usg=AFQjCNFXoK1GQNM_DgIy9rC-anbfs4Klcg">

Aww the New Year is upon us, and many people choose this time to correct the mistakes they have been making the past many years. I will partake in said action as well.

1. Become Brian Townsend - What this means is I need to become a better learner/studier instead of just using my mediocre knowledge to get me mediocre results. I must study, this means running calculations, understanding combinations of hands and which action is the best action, and the trickiest is understanding the whole "tree" of actions that I can take with a hand from beginning to end.

2. Become a solid HU pro - I have been playing more HU, but still not a ton of it. Knowing HU extremely well is key for a few reasons. The first is that once you acknowledge that you can beat someone HU, you then can most likely beat them at a 6max or full ring game as well. This is awesome because making money off of regulars can greatly boost your success. Another solid reason for knowing HU is for finishing off a tournament. Getting down to the last two of a tourny where 100k is first and 60k is second, its quite a big deal to know how to get that 40k profit as frequently as possible. And finally knowing HU well makes you better at 6max and fullring. After all so many hands only have 2 people that are participating in them anyways.

It's been 7 days since I got back from All Cal, and as I promised myself, I haven't had a drink in 7 days. But I really want one. I can tell I am a true alcoholic because I really crave booze. Firstly, its a source of entertainment. Drinking is usually an activity where me and a bunch of friends, or strangers, compete while we are drinking. Other times we are just sitting around and having fun conversing, while we are drinking. Secondly, alcohol makes me feel good, all warm and silly inside, allowing me to be a little more "free" with myself in situations where I might be more of a life nit.



But there is a downside, alcohol is bad for you. The first thing it does for me is it gives me wicked hangovers. My body may be out of wack for up to 3 days, which is worse than most people's hangovers I think. The second thing is it kills brain cells, I swear I used to be smarter and quicker at recalling things than I am now. The third thing is it destroys your liver. This I fear the most, even though I have no idea what kind of condition my liver is in, I imagine it to be not so great if I keep up this amount of drinking until the time I am 40. Hopefully by then I can get a new pig liver!!!



Alcoholism isn't necessarily a bad thing. I still get work done, and manage to have fun. I am not drinking all the time, I just like to drink often (nearly daily). Two difference's between me and a true alcoholic is 1) they go to meetings and 2) they are miserable drunks. I never intend to do either.



Tomorrow will be day 8 of no drinking, but after that I intend to start drinking again (just in time for New Years). I will continue to monitor my intake from a safety standpoint, and be weary of what consequences can arise from binge drinking with such a high frequency.

Just as the title says I was either drunk, drinking or hungover for 10 days in beautiful Park City, Utah. The All Cal is the trip I went on. It's a week long snowboarding trip that ski and snowboard clubs from all the UC's take. This year I got there early and stayed late, making it the most intense drinking time I have ever had. We played a ton of drinking games like beer die (tons of beer die), flip cup, thumper, and a little beer pong. We also went on a pub crawl, did some dancing, and drank at bars after coming off the mountain. There was a fair bit of spa parties and spa drinking as well. We even found the time to play the Crank 2 drinking game. If you haven't seen this movie, DONT, its horrible, but its funny at how bad it is, and if you are drinking along with friends, its pretty funny. Don't see it alone.

I didn't get a ton of snowboarding in, but did hit some nice powder on Monday, and then a couple hours pretty much every other day I was there, except Thursday. Thursday we decided to stay in and play beer die all day. We met up with some friends, who had already finished 2 bottles of wine and a bottle of champagne (its before noon), and I proceeded to go on a sick beer die run, skunking 3 teams in a row (and they were all pro's). This was quite the feat for me. The special thing about skunking your opponents biz-0 is that they have to do a naked lap around the building, which we quickly enforced. After 3 games of beer die, you tend to get drunk and make mistakes. I let some dice drop but still managed to win 5/6 games that I played that day. As we got drunk during the day we busted out the fake tattoos and all the guys proceeded to get tramp stamps. While I don't have a pic of mine (conveniently) I do have a picture of my friend Mike's.



Isn't that cute!

That night we had a farewell party, which was pretty fun. There was dirty dancing, thumper, and then they announced which school had won (not us-UCSC). I saw something pretty funny when my friend Jil, who had been drinking all day with us, ran behind the bar area to puke into the garbage bucket. The bartenders weren't even mad at her and didn't even kick her out, they said, "Well she looks fine now, she's probably not going to puke again." It was hilarious, and this is morman country too don't forget.

Here is a pic of Park City right before the sun goes down. Its truly a beautiful place. We are all gathering here to play some snow volleyball, which is where you tie your snowboard boots together and play volleyball in the snow. It's very disfunctional.

I wish I had more pics of the mountains, but I never took the camera out while riding, and I spent most of my times indoors with a frosty beer. I will post more pics as they show up on facebook.


The future: Today I pretty much decided I'm not going to PCA this year. It will be the first year in 4 years I haven't gone. It's not that I can't afford the cost, but its going to cost alot, especially including the opportunity cost of staying at home and working. I mean the travel and hotel will be over 7k, and thats for a crappy hotel room. Then it takes 24 hours to get there and back, and once there I will buy into the main event which I won't cash in most of the time, so I am looking at a 20k trip most of the time. It's not sooo bad, but I'd rather avoid the variance especially since my downswing of November. We are just going to find some other vacation at some other time. I hope everyone that is going will have fun for me. I am going to Tahoe Dec-28 - Jan 2nd for New Years, and now it looks like I will be staying at home and grinding some time after that.

Peace Out for now

I am leaving for All Cal, an awesome snowboarding trip with college students, tomorrow morning. I will be out of contact for a bit. I have been slacking on my video production and will need to make up for it when I get back. I think the downswing has bruised my ego in a lot of ways. I got into a debate with Tom Berg - brystmar - while he was here about people's intelligence. I believe that people's experience's mainly denotes what most people would consider intelligence in a specific field, he believes some people are more inclined to be good at a field because "thats just the way they will work." While I do not deny that people have an overall ability to understand information faster or slower than others, I believe that every small experience leading up to a challenge or test characterizes how someone will perform at that test, and general intelligence has very little to do with it. The reason I am saying this is because I feel I am really not a good poker player in a couple senses of the word. I have spent a ton of time focusing on analyzing the game, and therefore I'm not horrible, but I have slacked in a lot of areas where others haven't and because of that my success is limited. When I get back from All Cal (and the Bahamas Dec 28-Jan 14) I intend on focusing on some of the things I have been overlooking in the past. I want to take the Brian Townsend approach to the game and work a TON behind the scenes until I really begin to grasp motives and hand range's, etc. I guess what I am saying is that only hard work will get the job done, and in a downswing (and since the release of Call of Duty MWF 2) I have not been working hard enough. Self-motivation is the toughest and often most important quality to possess.

Mad props to Stinger, mad mad props.

I played an amazing month given the circumstances. November was a tough month with many large losing days, most of which were Sunday, shockingly enough. I also took a piece of some people in some high stakes action and they all failed miserably. Tournaments went okay, even though I think I am down a fair bit in them as well. I made some mid cashes in a few tournies, but busted all my $700 PCA qualifiers. Overall this month is a really big hit to my bankroll, I lost at least 35% of it. This means I will be playing less 25/50 for the time being, and just working on grinding back what I have lost (not that I am looking at it that way, it wasn't my money to begin with, it was my tool for making money). At 25/50 I ran 11 buy ins under EV, which is very crappy since I was already taking a shot just by playing it. At 10/20 I ran 12 buy ins under EV. At 5/10 I pwned and made 20 buy ins. I played really well and picked really good spots, but to no avail. I will be back soon and still sitting when huge fish sit, but I will be more careful with my multitabling, which definitely got out of hand in November. I remember playing 18 tables with like 1 headsup and 2 25/50 6max, that just seems silly. The reason I played them all was because each table individually was a +EV spot, but I timed out so many times its tough to say how much I lost by not having enough time to play each table, but its in the thousands for sure.

I am not angry tilted, but more likely slightly depressed semi-tilted. I just wanna grind my way back to the top ASAP, because being at the top feels so good, keeping you in a good mental state, and it opens so many good opportunities, allowing you to get better and make money.

Tri asked me to do another review, this time of his newest workbook, titled "Exploiting Regulars." You can check out all his books at dailyvariance.com. Sorry for the delay on putting this up.




This book is a solid follow up to "Let There Be Range" at a fraction of the price. The primary focuses of it are in evaluating how your opponent perceives your hand and what their likely actions are going to be because of that (and what you should do vs that). The book has a very fast paced lingo that newer players may find slightly disorienting. The book targets intermediate's and expert's players who have recently experienced difficulty playing against better opponents, possibly through moving up in stakes. I would recommend this book to anyone who read "Let There Be Range" and anyone playing 1/2 that wants to make it all the way to 10/20.

At the end of the book is a very detailed exam section that has 35 questions, each with an entire page dedicated to answering and explaining each problem. I found this part of the book to be the most helpful as it brought the talked about concepts to practical application. It was also the most boring part unfortunately, but work is not supposed to be fun.

Overall while I feel the book is a good buy, it is discussing many things that I already know and apply in my daily sessions. The book helped refresh my understanding of concepts in many areas, kind of keeping me in line, which is helpful after a few losing sessions. I would give the book a B+ overall, A for information, A for practice problems, but C for revelation, and C for entertainment or captivation (not that it is suppose to be). It's kind of hard to top "Let There Be Range." I will be recommending and reviewing this book with my students in the future, and the book has inspired me to save my hand history reviews in a more detailed way, so that I can go over them in the future in a similar way to the practice problems they laid out.

This halloween weekend I had a few friends in town and we partied pretty hard from Thursday night on thru the weekend. Thursday night we had a small party at my place and played a lot of drinking games. Friday night we went out to a SDSU - San Diego State University - party, and I gotta say it was really good. I haven't been to a college rager in a while and they had a nice setup, with a good dj, and 3 kegs. We had a friend that lived a block down from the party so we were able to pregame and postgame there, then take a $40 cab ride back across town to pass out.


Here are me, Nick, and Shana's costumes:



Costumes: Dexter, Boob inspecting sheriff, the queen of hearts (in vampire form apparently IMO)

Saturday started in true baller fashion. We played Veuve (champagne) pong pretty much as soon as we woke up.

For those of you that don't know, Veuve is my favorite champagne, it costs around $35 at Costco, but brings the quality of Dom or Krystal. We didn't pour the champ in the keg cups, but just used water, and drank our side glasses whenever a shot was made. After a few hours of this, some friends came over with a pumpkin. Shana. being the artist she is, grabbed a couple of knives and got to carving. A few minutes into her carving we start hearing some cussing from the backyard and see she has cut her hand pretty badly. Our sober friend Lauren, who brought the pumpkin, drove Shana and I to the ER where it took about 4.5hrs to get her 16 stitches and get out of there. The cuts were only superficial and are expected to leave no lasting damage to her hand.

Semi graphic pictures below:



Before stitches:






After Stitches:







By this time its midnight on halloween, we were sober and hungover, and all our friends were out partying at the places we were suppose to be at. Shana and I gave up on the night and got ready for the Charger's game today.




This was the first time I have been to any football game besides my very weak high school games. It was really exciting; San Diego has a lot of team spirit. We played the Raiders and won the game, it was all pretty exciting. There was a little bit of tailgating, which we were a little late arriving for. They stopped serving beer after half time, so we all left pretty sober. All in all it was a cool experience and I will definitely be going back.


Poker Results:

This month was another really good month in poker, on top of a huge online month, I made a fair bit of live monies as well, between 10-15k. I probably lost a few grand in online poker tournaments, even though a made a handful of small cashes. Here is the results/graph:











November:



This month should be a little bit more into grind mode (don't I always say that). Shana and I are anticipating a quick Vegas trip to see comedian Chelsea Handler, for a night or two. Then we have my family coming into town for 4 days during Thanksgiving. Other than that I plan to launch Shana's art website, even though she can't draw right now, and continue to work on a few start up concepts, which are kind of in a tread water type mode, until we can get some pricing info from companies. All in All I would say life is looking pretty good. I have concerns for my liver and brain cells, but what the hay, my health insurance plan just started today.

Peace

I'm getting old, I tell you hhhwhat. After moving all my stuff from our 3 story apartment downtown, into a moving truck, and then into our new house, I had a sore back for a few days. On that sore back I decided to go wakeboarding. Near the end of what was becoming a successful ride I was just getting out of the water and something went wrong. Today I saw a physical therapist who told me I likely had a bulged disc and while the disc seems to be pretty much healed, the muscles in my back are all out of wack. On the day of the injury I couldn't bend over for about 3 days straight. Now I get around and everything just fine, but the pain is persistent. The therapist gave me some exercise advice that should help me get back in shape faster. Hopefully I will make a full recovery, as I have put off buying a wakeboarding boat until I am at my best again. I rode today just fine, but took it easy at the same time.

Just bought my halloween costume. I plan to be Dexter. For whatever reason I think I can play the role of an urban father/serial killer.

I have been doing a fair bit of golf recently, and although I am horrible, I am up a little in prop bets. We just make fair bets with each other on who can 2put or make it on the green in one shot, or clear a bunch of trees, etc. I was trying to get a crew together for tomorrow but couldn't do it. It looks like I will be heading to LA tomorrow -Thursday or Friday to play some poker and go to Magic Mountain.

Kinda a lame update but thats all I got for now.

This is bound to be a long post with lots of pictures. Let me get the poker stuff out of the way first.

This month I won a big Sunday major, cashed in the WCOOP main event, cashed in a WCOOP 1k, and took down and placed in the 2-7 single draw, with maybe a couple other minor cashes for a total of about +105k in tournaments, then I had a pretty decent cash game month as well. I took on a more full time roll at the 10/20 and 25/50 6max games (game selecting of course) and for the first time I had really good results. I even took a shot at 40/80 NLHE, selling a piece of my action but lost bigtime in this hand (below) that I don't think I could have played any differently. I am going to make it a big goal to put up a bunch of hands on high stakes where i had questions about but I won't bore you with them here.





This is by far the biggest pot I have ever lost. I meant to buy in for only 8k but accidentally auto bought in full and still decided to play. I do think I have a small edge in this game but not sure if its worth the variance. I do think its helpful to play this high in preparing myself for the nosebleeds. Most importantly I wasn't pissed at all after I lost the hand, I still had a whole day of work ahead of me and kept my head on straight.

Seat 1: actionDJ ($16,271 in chips) -

Seat 2: Suic1de_K1ng ($23,556 in chips) -

Seat 4: gdluck ($5,339 in chips)

Seat 5: Alexonmoon ($16,956 in chips)

Seat 6: Jas11 ($19,704.50 in chips) -

PRE-FLOP:

actionDJ posts small blind $40

Suic1de_K1ng posts big blind $80

Dealt To: actionDJ

FOLD gdluck

FOLD Alexonmoon

RAISE Jas11 ($240)

RAISE actionDJ ($880)

FOLD Suic1de_K1ng

CALL Jas11 ($640)

FLOP:

Pot: $1840

BET actionDJ ($1334)

CALL Jas11 ($1334)

TURN:

Pot: $4508

BET actionDJ ($3567)

RAISE Jas11 ($17490.50) - All in

CALL actionDJ ($10490) - All in (Pot Odds: 2.44)

UNCALLED Jas11 ($3433.50)

RIVER:

Pot: $32622

SHOWDOWN:

Jas11:

actionDJ:

Jas11 collected $32619 from main pot with two pair, Tens and Sevens

SUMMARY:

Total pot: $32622

Rake: $3

Final Board:

Seat 1: actionDJ small blind showed [Ac As] and lost with a pair of Aces - Net Gain/Loss: ($-16271.00)

Seat 2: Suic1de_K1ng big blind folded before the Flop - Net Gain/Loss: ($ -80.00)

Seat 4: gdluck didnt bet folded - Net Gain/Loss: ($ 0.00)

Seat 5: Alexonmoon didnt bet folded - Net Gain/Loss: ($ 0.00)

Seat 6: Jas11 button showed [7d Td] and won 32,619 with two pair, Tens and Sevens - Net Gain/Loss: ($ 16348.00)