Hey, I'm back in Waterloo and after thinking lots about whether or not to post trip reports I realized this really wasn't a very worthwhile tournament to comment on. I basically won allins for a few days, then lost a ton of chips on the final table bubble, won 2 allins at the final table, then lost 2 allins and was out. Overall won almost every allin this tournament and thats more or less how I went deep. I had very few hands that were very interesting, if I remember any super cool hands I'll comment on them

Anyways, since getting back I've been lifting a lot and playing online a lot. Lifting has been going great and I made a log on 2+2 http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/85/health-fitness/timexs-ss-log-706333/

Online I was on a bit of a dry spell... I suppose I haven't entirely ended it but it was nice to get some winning days in. In recember I won 8/8 online sessions, up until yesterday I had lost 8/8 sessions in 2010. I profited yesterday and today so that was kind of nice for the confidence... I've been cashing everything lately, these 2 winning sessions I cashed 19/74 tournaments which was pretty insane. I won my first online tourney in a little while today(the 50r on cereus) and have had lots of deep runs in biggish tournaments. This Sunday was really weird, I didn't have any decent cashed but I had enough like $800 cashes that I managed to only lose very slightly despite playing 12.5k in buyins.

One other pretty cool story... yesterday me, shaundeeb, funkimunki, stealthmunk and yellowsub were crossbooking 100,000% in the $0.02 990 man hyper-turbos, such that if one of us one you would get $4,400 from each of the other 4 players in addition to the $4.40 you get from winning the tournament. We played 3 or 4 and funkimunki lasted the longest in each of them and ended up winning $250 from each of us, but we flipped for that, and shaundeeb had to play everyone's share. Stop the presses, shaun deeb is back to playing MTTs and losing 1k 50,000 buyins in his first session

Hey, the well is more or less done(feel free to keep posting, but I'll probably only check it every 1-2 days rather than every few hours). At the start of the year, I kinda thought a reasonable goal in my head would be to spend 1m on buyins maintain a 30% ROI or something like that. January ended up being my 2nd best month ever thanks to my live run good. Online I did really mediocre, maybe like lost 30k across 40k in buyins or something along those lines. Fortunately live I cashed 4 of my 6 live tournaments for a combined ~575k across about 30k in buyins... now I just need to lose less than 200k for the rest of the year and I'll be right around my goal :P.

Alright, I'll end the shameless bragging. Today I was sick in bed for whatever reason. All of a sudden I got a bad headache this morning(think it was the 3rd one in the last year which kinda sucks) and slept/threw up/complained most of the day. I'm feeling a fair bit better now and really hungry so after this entry I'm gonna go grab a sub or something.

I've also been lifting about as consistently as ever lately and really enjoying that. I've been eating tons lately, maybe that was a contributing factor to me getting sick this morning. Who knows

I'll give a recap of Deauville sometime soon, but am getting really hungry now, I'll definitely start it in the next week or so.

Hey, for the next few days I'm going to be "In the Well" feel free to check it out, just go to
Forums and then choose "In The Well" under General Poker Topics and ask away. I'd try posting a link but I fail pretty hard at that so I'll just say anyone who can't find it will be out of luck

Hey, I've had dozens of people offering me their condolences for getting 3rd after losing those 70/30's and at least this time around, I feel like I'm pretty much over being super disappointed when I get deep and come up short. In Dortmund last year after coming 5th, I made a blog post entitled fml(it was really short, and was actually not that much complaining but I was really upset, and one of the first readers commented and said "FYL..... WTF FML!!!" or something along those lines and I sort of realized how stupid I was an took it down). This year after busting despite getting it in pretty good in the major hands I lost(JJ v A7o and JJ v ATo for people who didn't watch) I was pretty happy, I could have so easily just came 8th or 500th. I've been realizing so much over the last few months, that basically when playing poker its the money that matters, if you are winning money, you shouldn't be upset about poker and if you are losing money, you shouldn't be upset since you are accepting a profession where you can lose large sums of money over a long period of time. This year I was thinking about how much I expect to make with playing a reasonable amount of live volume, most Sundays and an average of about 1-1.5 other days during the week, and have now made almost twice that in January. If I don't make my goal for the year, then I might go back to the immature ranting Mike of Dortmund last year.

I'm likely going to writeup daily trip reports so you guys can see just how well I ran. For the people who watch my videos and say I need to "play more poker" and outplay more people and do less coolering/getting it in bad and winning, I REALLY don't recommend reading these

Hey, 850k euros for first, the final table starts at noon or 6am EST.

Yesterday was a pretty swingy day as far as these things go, I got from 1.9m up to 4.1m when average was 1.5 or 1.6m or so after JJ>AK (he flopped an A, I turned a J) and after 44 >77 bvb (flop 543, turn K giving up a flush draw that I somehow faded) + winning lots of small pots. After that I lost one huge pot where I called a guys HJ raise pre(the current chipleader who I had covered by a bit at the time), called his bet on a K54cc flop, raised his bet on a J turn, and thankfully checked behind the Q river after much deliberation to be shown ATcc for a 2.3m chip pot, then A9s<66 then lost many other small pots where people just flopped pairs or outplayed me or something along those lines.

Anyways, right now chip counts are

Seat 1: Claudius Secara - 795,000
Seat 2: Jake Cody - 4,650,000
Seat 3: Michael Fratty - 1,595,000
Seat 4: Teodor Caraba - 6,915,000
Seat 5: Peter Eastgate - 695,000
Seat 6: Craig Bergeron - 3,135,000
Seat 7: Stephane Albertini - 3,555,000
Seat 8: Mike McDonald - 1,815,000

and payouts are

I ran sick good yesterday and my timing was impeccable(in both the things I can control but more notably the things I can't). The highlight was when a guy who hadn't done anything decided to click it back 3bet, then check jam 8-9 times the size of my bet with A5o on a 653 board when I had 66. I also picked up Kings in 2 ridiculously good spots, one which resulted in to my knowledge the biggest pot I've ever played in a live tournament for the stage of the tournament.

26 players remaining, average is a little under 900k, blinds 10k/20k, I raise the HJ 1.6m deep with KcKs, Shaniac shoves the CO for 350k or so and Peter Eastgate calls about 1.5m chips deep. I consider like clicking it back(probably would have if we were like 1.8m effective since that way it looks like I could really be doing it light, and with a hand like AQ it likely would be the right play, so with KK it could fuck with him), and elect to jam. Those first 2 seconds were about the stressful I've had since his range is not wide, after 2-3 seconds he kind of shrug calls and I'm pretty sure he has the same hand as be, but who knows hes Scandi and has lots of money so it could be like QQ or AK. He ended up having KK and Shaniac had A8o. Peter flopped the backdoor flush draw but bricked the turn and Shaniac didn't hit the ace. That would have been for solidly over the final table average if we had different hands or one of us hit the flush.

Anyways, I have 1,895,000 and am 3rd/24 left with an average of 960,000. I've been running so absurdly good the last several months(or years I suppose) and winning this would be a pretty cool addition. No one has ever won 2 EPTs... I've had a couple sweats (5th in Dortmund last year, 11th or 12 in Barcelona this year), gonna try capitalizing this time. You can find updates on pokernews.com or watch the online stream(in the event I'm at the feature table) at eptlive.com

Ran super hot yesterday, went from 66k to 258k(was down to 24k at one point), currently like 130 left and 104 pay, I think I'm about 30th, 850k euros to first. The remaining field is pretty soft still but extremely tough compared to the starting field(about 1/6th of the field is left and I'd guess probably like 12 of the 30 best players are left or something stupid like that)

We play down to 24 today, could quite easily be a very long day

Oh ya, one more thing- I'm going to be making a new leak finder video series for a cardrunners member who final tabled the FTP BLT within the next week or so. I haven't done any leak finder's and am definitely looking forward to this; lots of people have commented that they want to see me make videos for more donkish fields, so this should be a pretty good opportunity.

Hey, I had a hectic day of travel getting to France. I would have guessed it would take about 3-3.5 hours from the time I got out of the plane until the time I step into my hotel room(knew there was a 2h train ride). All told, it took about 7hours because of multiple subways, and multiple trains with a huge connection in between and then difficulty finding the hotel once we got to Dortmund. At this point it was like 4pm, I had been up almost 24 hours and had to play the next day at noon and wanted to try staying up until like 9pm so I could like wake up at 6am and have a reasonable sleep schedule.

There was a 250euro rebuy satellite to the main event starting at 5pm, so we decided that would be a good thing to play to force us to stay up a few hours and even if we win it would be done by 11pm. We get down and the registration process was horrible. We were there at about 4:50 and about 25th-30th in line. We ended up getting to the front of the line at 5:45 or so and they announced that they would be delaying the tournament until 6. The process was so inefficient. After that they announced we would be alternates(250 players, about 50 were alternates) and that was super slow as well. Once I got seated, it was about 6:35. I was having trouble staying awake at the table and just kind of hovered around starting stack(after addon) for a while. Then one or two people spazzed to me and I was about 1.5x average after 2 hours. They announced there would be a 1h dinner break at 9:00 or so. This was pretty upsetting considering the whole tournament should last like 6 hours, its pretty late for dinner and there definitely aren't enough restaurant seats at the casino. I guess this is a lot of complaining, I should have warned you guys in advance.

We didn't end up getting dinner, but after dinner break I came back and hovered around the same for quite some time. Soon it was midnight and there were still plenty players left(maybe 60 with 30 paying). I eventually kind of "woke up" and stopped dozing off for 5-15seconds at a time and wasn't really tired any more. People played the tournament surprisingly well for a live satellite(ie. with 45 left, I jammed 7BB in the CO which was like 60% of average and the SB who had about average folded TT) which worked out decently well for me since I am extremely risk averse in satellites and really don't like the idea of having to try getting it in good... at one point I raise folded KQo getting almost 2.5-1 with about 85 left in a spot where I think almost everyone would underestimate the ICM considerations.

Anyways, soon it was like 1am and there were 40 left, now play really slowed down. Blinds were about 4k/8k, with average ITM stack of about 74k and I had about 40k. It was slightly frustrating since there was quite a bit of minor-collusion going on(one of the few times someone spoke English at the table they were explaining to me how if we all fold around, we'll all get seats) and the lack of understanding of satellite concepts really slowed things downs(so many times someone would walk a guy who was probably folding aces to his shove)

Anyways, at 2am, blinds were 8k/16k avg of 72k or so(31 left), median of like 60k and they just announced that everyone should throw in 175 euros and we'll each get a seat. Everyone agreed(I had like 37k or something, if I had over about 65 I'd have been fairly pissed, but was pretty happy to accept this in my shoes). It took about 30 minutes to sort out giving everyone seats and then me and one other guy had to stick around since we had also won seats online and they had to explain that these are:
-non transferable
-can't be exchanged for cash
-can't be used in cash game play
-cannot be used at other EPT events
-can only be used at Deauville casino events(there is a decent postlim schedule, but if I make it past day 1 of the main and don't play the highroller is almost impossible to play 5300 euros worth of events).

I eventually talked to John Duthie and he managed to sort things out so I can get cash so that relieves some stress.

Anyways, after being awake like 35 hours, I got some sleep then played day 1a and ran pretty good. It was one of those days where given their hands I did the wrong thing in like 4 of my 5 biggest pots but ended the day with 66k(the biggest pot I played, I got it in QJss against K3ss on a T62ss board and won a nearly 60k pot at 300/600). I played one hand pretty awfully during the day, but most of my guessing wrong was just a form of runbad.

Today I grinded online and lost like 2k despite playing a light schedule and final tabling the 109r on Stars, tomorrow should be pretty fun, this tournament is ridiculously soft, gonna go grab some food if I can find anything.

I've heard mixed things about Deauville but hopefully it ends up being alright. I think it almost has to be one of the softest EPTs and should get a pretty good turnout.

I've only been home about 4 days so I kinda wish I had a little more time between tournaments, but after this I should have over a month until my next live tournament, so it should be a decent break.

Currently I'm down to my last table, today was an interesting day. It was the first time in a while where I wasn't that interested in playing, I wasn't dreading playing or anything, I just wasn't as excited as I usually am. That combined with the fact I hadn't played online in 2 weeks meant I tried playing a few less tournaments than normal. I ended up cashing a ton of stuff(14 cashes assuming I don't cash the 109 rebuy turbo) but didn't really make many deep runs. The only final table I made was in the 20+20 6max super turbo I hosted which managed to raise $6920 for Haiti relief. I ended up spending about 11k on buyins with 5k in cashes, I had plenty of semi-deep runs in tourneys that paid 25-60k for first but nothing that was that exciting of a sweat, lots of like 50th place finishes.

Thats about all there is to comment on for now, hopefully the weather in France is nice. Actually I hope the temperature inside the poker room is nice

Hey, just posting about this on behalf of FTP. There will be several options to donate, and FTP will be matching all donations. All money raised will be given to various charities that FTP selects(Red Cross, Doctors without borders and UNICEF).

Exact details can be found here
http://www.fulltiltpoker.com/aid-for-haiti

The ways to participate/donate are:
1. Aid For Haiti tournaments: Starting tonight and running through Sunday, there will be a number of "Aid For Haiti" tournaments at a range of buyins for players to participate in. The first one is at 2PM ET (under an hour away) and it's a $5 + $5 ($5 from every entry will be donated).

2. Aid For Haiti "no-play" tournaments: These are "fake" tournaments that won't run. For anyone that wants to make a direct donation, they can enter one of the 10 different tournaments (all "scheduled" for Sunday at 6pm ET, 3pm PT) and not worry about playing a tournament.

3. An "Aid For Haiti" user has been set up for direct P2P transfers. Anyone can transfer any amount greater than $5 to that player ID.

On top of that, I'll also be hosting a 20+20 buyin 6max super turbo at 1:35pm this Sunday. The tourney ID is 132657628