And a deep run or two I got.

I'm gonna keep this post pretty short since I'm playing the Fallsview Poker Classic main event in 90 minutes and still need to buyin, but I ended up busting near the end of day 2 in the PCA, ran AQ into KK and then shoved 22 into a bigger pair to bust something like 400th when 224 paid.

The next day I bought into the 1k which started at noon and as of 3am when they shut down play I was still in with I believe an above average stack with 24 left(390 played, 1st got 100k). Early in the day I called a HJ raise from a very agro player with 55 from the BB and checkraise-called it off on a 332hh flop against his TT to bust 19th for 3,050 but was able to latereg for the 1.5k as the 2nd last player to get in.

Again, at 3am I was still in, this time with a little under average with 27 left(450 played, 1st got 168k). The day started pretty well and I worked my 160k up to like 350k. I was told by a player at the other table that the guy who got moved to my left did a decent amount of 3betting in position, so when he 3bet my HJ-1 raise 22BB deep and I had AJs, I ended up jamming into his aces and was down to 49k at 5k/10k. I then shoved UTG, got a walk, shove the SB, and then shoved JJ in the CO and doubled through A8o to get up to like 200k. I then lots K8o to a short stack's Q5o but was able to keep picking up lots of blinds(which were now getting quite high). I enterred the final table with about 700k when average was 550k, but the table was looking fairly tough. There were 5 young online guys and 3 older guys, a bunch of short stacks and a few huge stacks(I was in like 3rd or 4th despite being well above avg).

One player busted early at the final table and then commandorcool shoved UTG at 10k/20k for 120k and I had K5o in the BB. I called and lost to K9o to double him up which later prooved to be annoying since he did about as much 3betting as the rest of the table combined(although given the timing of some of them I'm pretty sure a good amount of it was having pretty solid card). Commandorcool eliminated 2 short stacks and we were 5 handed and I was the short stack with about 550k and everyone else had about 1m.
On the last hand of 12k/24k, I shoved the button for 520k or so with 44 and doubled through AJo(flop QJT, turn 4) to get up to like 1.1m and be right around the chip lead.
After that we played another whole level 5 handed with average under 30BB without anyone busting before getting to 20k/40k.
Fairly early in the level, I raised SB to 90k with A7s, commandorcool shoved 880k and I called. He had done a lot of 3betting small with a fairly short stack and given I 4bet his last bvb 3bet, I thought it was pretty likely he was value 3betting small with almost all of his good hands(maybe jamming like AT-A8 and 77 though, maybe 1-2 more hands, but also plenty of more marginal hands that I'm in good shape again. If this were the main event I'd have pretty much snap folded given the payouts in that,(actually I'd have just open jammed in the first place) but this one was pretty top heavy(something like 168,95,65,43,33 or something). Anyways, I called and held against QJo to have about 2m when average was 1.1m

A few hands later the SB who I've also played a lot online with shoved 560k with A6o and I called with AKs and held that as well to get to like 2.7m, and the other 2 stacks each had like 800k.
JP4est won some chips off of the other remaining player(who said hes the original the maven... a name he used as his horse racing handle in the 90s and had the phone number like 1900themaven where people would ask for tips or something along those lines) and I won one pot off of JP who misclick 3bet(meant to squeeze 85k's to 250k but made it 300k and I jammed and he folded) and then I got allin A9 against 66 against the maven who only had like 11BB.
Flop: 976
Turn: 9
River: 7
I have a pretty good life and now have a 3.5m-1m chiplead going into HU.

Jeff played really well and mentioned chopping earlier and I knew I'd be super pissed if I lost the HU match after having this huge of a chip lead(which isn't all that unlikely) so we agreed to play it out for 10k and chip chop the rest which gave me like 147 and him like 104, and then early in the match I lost A5o to K9o, then AJo to KK, then blinds went up again and I shoved my 13BB stack with K7s into KK and he held that one too... glad I chopped. It was a pretty fun final table, we knew a lot of the same old school MTTC guys who came out and railed... overall a really fun experience.
Now I'm about to go try to register for the 5k and hopefully keep up the 2010 rungood.

I arrived in the Bahamas 2 days ago; a 3hour flight is soooo much nicer than the typical 7-12h of travel to get to an EPT. I'm staying in the coral tower with Stevejpa and I was kind of relieved(at first) that it wasn't too warm out since I wore jeans/a hoodie on the plane. Now I wish it were warmed(Bahamas is close to Florida, and we were watching Florida weather reports, and today will be a 50 or 100 year low temperature in some cities).

Anyways, we dropped by the Stars party and I was able to change my starting date from 1b to 1a which I prefer quite a bit. I got to bed at a reasonable hour and slept ok before the tournament. My starting table was definitely well above average but not spectacular(I doubt there were many spectacular tables... the field seems relatively tough). A few people showed up late so we were 5 or 6 handed a lot of the day. Average age was probably about 22 and almost everyone at the table probably makes money at poker. A couple hands in, DPeters who was the only person I recognized 3bet AA, and called a checkraise and called down on a Q4226 board with aces to lose 2/3 of his stack and then ran AK into KK to bust in like 15 minutes which was definitely good for me since he was on my left. I didn't really have any interesting hands until like 45 minutes in when this Canadian limit holdem player opened UTG 6 handed, I called JJ in the SB, BB called as well.

Flop: 442r, check, check, he bets 750 at 900, I make it 2150 with the intention of checking most turns and value betting most rivers if called. He called pretty quick which from a LHE guy really made me think he had something fairly marginal more often than not, like a middle pair , maybe occasionally a float with like 65, or A5 or something. And obviously occasionally a bigger pair or like 22, A4s etc
Turn: 6, check, he bet 3100 at 5200, I called planning to fold most rivers since I figured after calling my hand looks pretty solid and I don't think many people will try turning like 77 into a bluff or something.
River: J, check, he bets 11k at 11.4k, I jam about 13k more and double to 59k after he calls with 64s

After that I don't really have many big hands for the rest of the day, I had 2 interesting river decisions but other than that it was a lot of winning small pots to get up to about 95k, before losing a few hands at the end of the day to have 79k to finish

Anyways, the 2 river decisions
I raise HJ with AQss to 800 at 150/300 Jeff Madsen calls in the BB kind of weirdly(I think he was considering a reraise or a fold, more likely a fold I think)
Flop: A94cc, he check calls my bet of like 1050 fairly quickly(and he had done a decent amount of checkraising postflop so I think he has a FD less than most people)
Turn: 3c, check, I check behind
River: 2, he bets 3100 and 3900, I have no idea what he has exactly but opt to fold just since I doubt he'd try bluffing me off an Ace, and if he did think he could bluff me off like JJ or something I think he'd almost always just bet less.

The next one was against the same guy who I doubled through earlier with JJ, and I raised the CO to 800 with A9o, he called the BB.
Flop: Ac7s5s, he double checks his cards and leads 1175
Now when he double checks, he almost always probably has an offsuit hand almost always where he's wondering whether he has a spade. Obviously some people will do this as a trick with like a set or a flush draw or something but I felt this opponent had the mentality that a lot of pretty good tourney players do where they don't want to get too FPSy with the levelling especially early in a tournament. I hadn't really thought about this much at the time, but if he has a spade I can probably slightly discount the As since he can see the Ac on board.
I elected to call with the intention of calling down a fair bit
Turn: 9s, he bets 2375 at about 4300 and I elected to call. I feel like even though I've discounted sets and flushes a fair bit, theres not much reason to call since I doubt he's calling me light very often at al
River: 8c, and he bets 5200 at 9100
This got kind of lame... I think a lot of the worse hands he could value bet would all slow down, I don't think he'd turn all that many hands into bluffs but on the other hand he just seemed like the type of guy who wouldn't do a ton of bluffing. I thought it was pretty likely he had like 6s6 or JsT Ah6s or something and had backed into a straight but felt that even though he could easily have any of these hands, theres still plenty opportunity for him to continue all his bluffs after the 4 straight hit, so figured I'd have to call pretty much anything I get to the river with that beats his bluffs. I called and he had QhJs.

After that as mentioned I didn't do much the last 3 hours of the day. I was hungry at the last break and got a slice of pizza which ended up giving me food poisoning or something similar. I'm so glad this happened when I have a 1 day break since if I had to play again today I'd be so miserable. I woke up almost once and hour last night to go clear my system and today I feel super weak and tired and really wouldn't want to have to play poker for 9 hours.

Average stack is probably like 50k so I'm in pretty good shape, it looks like this will be a pretty huge tournament so I'm gonna try focussing my rungood.

So my 8 day win-streak ended today, after having about 4.5 in cashes across 11k in buyins. December was an extremely good month, and I profited just under 80k all things considered. January will almost certainly be much less consistent as I'll probably be playing ~12-15 live tournaments and not that much online. I'll be playing PCA and grinding super hard there as well as EPT Deauville which I think should be one of the better value EPT events. My flight to PCA leaves in 10h, and I'm pretty excited for the series of tournaments. I really hope that they won't be that tough of fields, but I feel that the bigger buyins will be almost all decent players.

Beyond that, I don't have a ton to mention, I'll try to make some deep runs in events at PCA so that I have some good stuff to blog about.

Didn't play at all last week because of Christmas and whatnot, had a lot of fun, saw a lot of people I haven't seen in a while(friends and family) but not gonna right too much about it since I'm sure everyone has had enough of their own Christmas and don't need to hear about mine.

This Sunday I didn't have too many deep runs but in one of the 3 or so tournies I got deep in, I manage to win(the merge major) for 11k to profit a little over 5k on the day. The only really big tourney I got deep in was the Sunday 500 which I got 24th in(an improvement on my 27th in it last week) but December keeps going well, I've now made money all 8 days I've played.

Also, the 7th and final part of my recent video series is up. Enjoy

Overall MTTs have been going extremely well, today was no different. I would say that in the pretty big pots, I ran the best I've run in quite some time(maybe ever) but wasn't winning the massive equity pots.

Not gonna write much about the day, but I decided to not cut my Sunday short(I usually stop regging at Mulligan) and also had my 30' monitor to play on, so I played 72 MTTs with 14 cashes.

My cashes in reasonable sized tournaments

18th in the 55 cubed on FTP
42nd in the FTP Brawl
Mincash Sunday Million
27th Sunday 500
AP 109r like 17th
1st in 33r 3x turbo to Deauville
FTP Million 37th
Mincash 2nd Chance
Mincash Sunday Mulligan
23rd nightly 100k
6th in 33r 3x turbo to the PCA (2 seats)


I don't think I've ever had this man deep runs at major tournaments on a Sunday, and it was pretty cool that even without the Deauville package I would have been only slightly losing despite not really getting any significant cashes. It would have been pretty sweet to just focus all my flips on one or two of the major tournaments, but overall it was a pretty sick Sunday and December keeps going really well(won all 7 sessions I've played for a total of a little under 70k profit)

I likely won't play until next Sunday, but I enjoyed having my 30' monitor working for a session and found that it was a lot easier to watch what was going on when there was 0 overlap

Hey, super quick update

I had been running pretty bad at PCA sats, but am almost certainly up off of them now(unless I ran even worse than I had remembered by a fair bit). This Tuesday I played 42 tournaments in an afternoon session which turned out to be a bit too much, but ended up winning the 50k guarantee on IPoker and a 3x turbo to PCA for about 30k in cashes across 5k in buyins, today I played 40 MTTs which was more reasonable, but next time I'd probably only play 38 or 39 if things went similarly and won another 3x turbo for about 16k in cashes across 5k in buyins, pretty solid couple of afternoon sessions.

I've been watching the videos of my current video series and commenting on things that people ask about. For my upcoming video on Saturday I'll try to refresh the page a couple times throughout the day and comment on anything people ask, since I feel kind of dumb answering someones questions by PM a few weeks after they ask, from now on I'll try my best to keep up to date.

Flying back to Waterloo tomorrow afternoon for the holidays, and am pretty excited for that. I'm also excited for PCA and plan on grinding pretty hard throughout my time there.

Oh, also if anyone is interested in living vicariously, I'm selling 1% of my action at PCA to the highest bidder in this thread forumserver.twoplustwo.com/163/staking-selling-shares/selling-1-my-pca-me-action-659338/

From Monday to Saturday I only played 1 MTT(a freeroll for people who were still in ECOOP event #3 when the server went down) and ended up getting 11th. After that Molly and I went to Montreal for a few days just to hangout and see the city since its definitely one of the cooler cities in Canada, pretty close to Ottawa and neither of us had been since we were kids. We got a foot of snow the first day there but other than that it was pretty cool. The city was really easy to get around on foot, the hotel was really nice(pretty crazy how different a $200 a night hotel is in Canada versus in a major European city) and I managed to get my Christmas shopping done. We went to the restaurant toque one night, which was definitely one of the best meals I've ever had and not that unreasonably priced all things considered. Their like "specialty" is this 7 course meals which was definitely too much for her to eat so I ended up having about 9-10 courses and a stomach ache but it was definitely worth it. Not gonna go into too much detail, but Montreal was fun.

We came back to play Sunday and after feeling so good about last Sunday I really felt motivated for this Sunday and decided to play quite a few more tournaments than I normally would since I was so comfortable 16 tabling. Unfortunately(or fortunately) I wasn't really losing out of any tournaments and between the hours of 4 and 6 I usually had 17-19 tables going(when I really shouldn't play more than 16 under optimal conditions... probably even less considering I had the Carbon Major which isn't that resizable and the betfair major which also has a bad interface). I managed to somehow do minimal timing out, but I definitely was auto-piloting more during this phase than I'd have normally liked. In spite of this, I made deep runs in 6 fairly major tournaments and had a fairly profitable Sunday(23k in cashes across 10k in buyins). For some reason I thought it would be a good idea to play some of the huge field 26 FO's on FTP and had trouble losing them early(I mostly played them since the structures are so fast that by the time where lots of tournaments have started, I should probably be out, or semi-deep in a super soft tourney). Anyways, in the big one with 16k runners, I ended up coming like 103rd. I also made deep runs in the 100k euro guarantee on Boss(45th) and the 250k on Ongame(about 70th) before the really deep runs started. I was accumulating huge stacks in the 109 cubed turbo on Stars as well as the 250k guarantee on Ipoker, and was something like 1/30 with 3 times average and 4/22 or something like that. In Stars I kept running insanely good and at one point had 5x avg with 26 left(one of the most epic chipleads I've ever had), and in the Ipoker one I went card dead for a while. Going into the final table on Stars I was 1/9 with about double 2nd place and was like 8th/12 in Ipoker. I got it in KK v AJs on Ipoker and lost that to finish 12th(kinda disappointing since it was the biggest tourney I got in + thats one of the sites I haven't really made money on, so getting in the black there would cure up some of my insecurities) and then kept running hot at the final table of the 109 rebuy turbo until I was 1st/4. I lost one pot where I limped AA in the SB against LXIXME who I thought would shove pretty light like 20BB deep and ended up getting a QJT8T board with a 3flush where I lost like 6BB before folding, and then ran AQ into AK bvb like 16BB deep and then ran K7o into AT 3handed to bust 3rd for 19k. After that tournaments slowed down for a while before I was down to 1 table(the Mulligan) and I ran good for about 4 hours in that before finally losing a 40/60 and 2 flips to finish 19th.

I was definitely pretty happy with my play today, not as good as the previous Sunday but I felt like I was focusing a lot better at analyzing the dynamic and trying to take good notes, and adapt well to my opponents etc. I realized after the whole 19-table debacle that I need to have more method to selecting my Sunday tournaments. I usually will probably play between 45 and 60 tournaments on a Sunday but there are probably about 80-100 reasonably candidates for tournaments worth playing depending hours, screen space, how much I want to multi-table, other dynamics(ie. durinng major live series, the tougher online tournaments will get softer) and decided I'm going to make a spreadsheet for Sundays and weekdays where I list them all as well as a bunch of info about each tourney and then attempt to assess which one is the better alternative under certain situations so that I don't have to make the judgement call when 16 tabling.

Not too much new besides that, I'm heading home for the holidays in a couple days and am excited to see my family as well as friends who I haven't seen in a little while, I'll probably still have time for some poker, but I'm guessing once I get back home my volume will probably shrink a bit until PCA where I currently plan on grinding a ton and getting the year off to a good start.

Today was a pretty epic Sunday(ECOOP Main- 1580 buyin, 1.5m guarantee, Party Million- 640 buyin, 1m guarantee, Betfair monthly 1k, as well as the usual lineup which is pretty impressive in itself)

My computer has been fairly prone to crashing lately, so I opted to not read the forums when I play and also talk much less on messenger. I found that this lead to me focussing much better and overall just completely changed my whole mindset.

Usually on a Sunday, I have 12-14 tables going and am reading the forums or talking to a handful of people and then just the tables pop up and I make my decisions accordingly. I think this is the same grind that virtually everyone gets into where they know they're +EV in the tournaments but they also find that they aren't enjoying them that much and instead of really trying to capitalize on their time at the table, they just try to stay out of trouble, not take unnecessary risks and always err on the side of not playing a hand since they have so many other tables and other opportunities to profit.

Today when I had nothing running besides 12-14 tables I was thinking more about the hands before the action got to me, constantly watching pots that I wasn't involved in, really trying to make the best decision at all times and at numerous times I felt as if I didn't have enough tables(a sensation I often get on Sundays when I have like 8 going) and then counted to see that I have 15. I also felt that all throughout today I was really just in the zone and constantly making the right decisions and correctly assessing the shape I was in.

What I mean by this is that I often give regulars too much credit in a lot of spots where I feel that I "shouldn't" be able to have that much info as to the strength of their holding but in actuality when ranges are tight enough, people are exploitable enough and don't really have predefined sizing(I used to always do this a few years ago in an attempt to be unexploitable but now I have joined the masses and try to exploit since in all honesty I think I'm much better at exploiting others than they are at exploiting me) and today both preflop and postflop I was able to do a lot of things that I wouldn't have otherwise done to capitalize off of this.

All in all, I felt extremely good, and in the future I definitely think that I'll continue to try focussing more when I play since its just satisfying to do my job as well as I can.

Onto how the day went results wise:

I started the day at noon and by 3:00 I already had a first place and a second place in 2 tournaments. They were both turbos on ongame, I won a 108 turbo for 2511, and got 2nd in a 54 turbo for 1105. I run super hot on that site and was pretty close to winning both, but I was hoping I hadn't wasted all my run good getting 3.6k in cashes on a day where I'd eventually spend over 12k in buyins.

After that I went through a phase where I lost like all my small tournaments but was getting a few reasonable stacks(in the Party Million, Warmup, Brawl and 530 on UB). I then lost a bunch of allins to leave me remaining in just the Brawl and UB, including busting the ECOOP AK to KK which was kind of lame, but possibly foldable since the play in that tournament was quite nitty. I ended up getting around 70th in the Brawl after losing some allins which I can't quite remember and cashing the UB 530 but being quite shortstacked. After getting in the money, I went card dead for a while, then won a flip to get to nearly average, then got AA against 99 to get into great shape. I then eliminated 2 people KQ>AJ and some flip to be chipleader with 10 left. The final table was super deepstacked(like 55BB avg stack) and I thought there would be a lot of play since I had like 80BB. There were a bunch of coolers but the shortstack usually won, but we were soon down to 7. I then missed an OESFD with T9hh on a 877hh board but I played it like a nit so I didn't get stacked, then lost A9 to KJ and AJ to 55 within like an orbit to bust in 7th for like 6.6k. I was pretty happy to make big final tables back to back days(1st was 38k), but it would have been nice to capitalize on one of them. I ended up having a bunch more cashes, one in the 108r on ongame, one in the 109r cubed on Stars, but didn't really connect on either of them, overall I spent like 12.4k and cashed for 12.3k today

I've been really happy with my poker lately(both in how I've been playing at the table and how its been going away from the table regarding stuff like record keeping, planning my schedules etc etc) and hope that it continues and I can turn one of my deep runs into a big score sometime in the near future.

Sorry for the cocky tone of this blog, I've just been really happy with my game lately

Hey, not really updating about anything in particular but realized that I haven't updated in a while. The most notable thing I've done recently is highly improve my record keeping. I used to keep ok records in like 2006 but then kind of stopped once I got to the point where I was in good enough shape that a mid 5-figure downswing(which was about as bad as you could go through in MTTs back then) wasn't a major setback. Over the last couple years my record keeping has been pretty sporadic and I haven't really complied things. I compiled all the live tournaments I've played into a database, and decided to add additional spreadsheet pages for other things. For the last several months I've always kept a notepad file open while I play to record what I've played, how many times I've rebought, what I've busted etc, primarily to get an idea how much I spent/cashed in a day as well as to keep me more alert if there is a table that may have closed and not reopened(euro sites aren't as amazing as all you Americans think).

The primary reason I never really recorded all my online results in a spreadsheet is unless I play like 20,000 MTTs I'm not gonna learn much from the stats, instead I'll just find ways to be bitter about my short term results. What I've been doing now is just inserting the stats of # of tournies played, total $ spent buyins, total cashes($, and #) and then show profit, ROI and ITM%.

I also have pages in the spreadsheet for Swaps(% and site-to-site), pieces I've bought, prop bets I've made, and other sources of income/poker related expenses I've incurred. Hopefully I can keep this up, but who knows.

Since getting back, I've been profitable 4 out of 5 sessions which when playing MTTs seems pretty damn unlikely, I haven't made a killing by any means, but the sessions have been pretty interesting. I've been putting a lot of thought into how to play specific tournaments, or how to schedule specific days lately and think I'm getting a fair bit better. I'm usually not the type of guy whose big into "hiding information" but I feel like I don't really want to say which specific conclusions I've drawn, since if 50 other grinders start copying my schedule/ideas it kind of defeats the purpose, since a lot of the things are really small/nitpicky and although they likely lead to slightly more profit now, they'd probably mean significantly less profit if everyone did the same. A lot of it just boils down to playing more tournies and skipping several of the highest buyin tournies,

Last Wednesday and Sunday I had 2 Rocky like comebacks to save my sessions. On Wednesday I played in the afternoon including the 109 rebuy turbo ECOOP event. I was fairly disappointed since I was in for 709 in the rebuy period, then finally ran up a stack before the server crashed and they said they'd be refunding people. I figured the refund system would kind of screw me and distribute equally to everyone left, but it was in their T&C's that they pay back everyone whose still in the amount they spent and then split 1/2 even, 1/2 chip-chop, so it worked out to be a pretty favorable refund for me. Other than that tourney, I spent like 3700 on buyins and had 300 in cashes + a 26 FO that I registered in for some reason. I was 1 tabling for ages, but after cardracking like crazy at the final table I won it for a little over 7k(it was the biggest field tourney I've ever won, 17xx players).

On Sunday I more or less repeated the same thing, and until ~930pm I had 1 cash of my 50 tournaments played(a mincash in the morning 109r) across nearly 10k in buyins. I then got into comeback mode and ran up stacks in the 2nd chance, 750k and 109 turbo on Stars. The 750k was fairly disappointing, I was a fairly sizable chipleader for quite some time in the money, then got it in AA v a midstacks KQ vs TT and lost the main pot and the size pot to the TT. I then built my stack back up and IIRC got the chiplead back. I then got it in AA v KK on a low flop against the same guy and then he got there against me again to bust in like 100th. The 109 turbo was actually ridiculous for a Sunday tournament. I'm pretty sure in the final 18 there were only a few people who were even close to winning players and I remember thinking about 5 of the final 9 were probably bottom 10% in the field. I'm likely underexaggerating, several people folded down to an ante, people were folding out of the BB when they had less than 2BB to start the hand, people raise folding to 5 or 6BB stacks, it was ridiculous. I ended up coming 2nd for 10k to make the day profitable.

Monday was my one losing session of the 5, and then today I decided to play 38 NLHE MTTs and cash 6 for a total of 2k across 6k in buyins, and play 3 PLO MTTs and final table 2 for a total of 14k across $860 in buyins. I think overall I have run pretty mediocre at tournament PLO before today(and am almost certainly down overall after playing the 10k in WSOPE 2008 and some of the big SCOOP/WCOOP PLO events), but today was pretty sweet. It sucks how my big blog post is about winning 10k at PLO when you can consult another cardrunners blog and see a guy win 2million at PLO and then boast about his cooking abilities instead. Anyways, I got stacks in all 3 of the PLO tournies I played(the 200's at 2:00 on Stars and Tilt, and the 400 ECOOP event), and eventually dwindled out of the FTP tourney but kept winning pots in the stars one. I managed to final table, knock out some shortstacks, get there against a big stack when he had about the perfect hand against mine but I binked the 30/70 and then was 5 handed with 1/2 the chips. I then just lost a bunch of allins and came 3rd but with Poker Stars payouts, its hard to be too disappointed with a 3rd place finish.

After that I was still in a few tournaments with stack, most notably the 400 PLO ECOOP. I was absolutely crushing and had about double the ITM stack(30 paid) with 40 left. I kept building on that and with 18 left I was the chipleader with about 2.5x average. The guy to my right was limping ridiculous holding quite regularly and then eventually decided to mini-limpraise AA52 against my QT98ss and then win the flip on the 762 flop for the chiplead which took me down to average. People were busting extremely quickly(the bubble lasted ages so average was really low) but I managed to coast to the final table and then hold AQJJ against 9875 against a shortstack to be about average with 7 left. I then went extremely carddead and eventually busted in 5th for 9k.

Tomorrow should be pretty exciting, it appears like it will be one of the more epic Sundays of the year(at least 3 of the euro sites are having their monthly/quarterly tournament) so I'm going to try to get some sleep and wake up to run good.

Hey, the Portugal leg of the trip may have been pretty profitable or slightly unprofitable depending on how tomorrow goes. I busted the main event faster than I had busted a big tournament in quite some time. I lost a big pot to get down to 40% of starting stack in the first 30 minutes and then 2 hours later busted to deep. I also played 4 side events and although I lasted a while in all of them, didn't cash any. My closest call was the 300 euro turbo where I went from 2nd/9 to busting 9th when 8 paid, but it was small enough where winning would have but me just about even off of tournaments from this leg of the trip.

That said, other aspects of this leg of the trip have been profitable. I played some live cash and made about 1600 euros, bought 10% of a guy whose at the final table of the main, and crushed at degen propbetting.

I stayed with Ricky "TT_fold" Fohrenbach who seems to love 0-ev gambling and hate people who try getting an edge at 0-ev gambling(such as playing chinese) so we ended up booking a lot of bets that were essentially just obscure coinflips. We were betting on birth months of people, amounts of bills at restaurants as well as more conventional bets like last longers, and betting flop colors. Eventually we came across an excellent gambling game.

In our hotel the garbage cans have 4 color-coded quadrants, for like waste, metal, glass and paper or something like that. We thought it would be cool to throw coins from across the room and if they land in the garbage can, you win money. Ricky thought that involved far too much skill so we altered it to say that we each select a quadrant, constantly rotate the can, and whoever's quadrant the coin lands in wins money from all other players involved. To add to things we also placed some side bets involving how many people would sink when it came their turn(throwing one coin each quickly became too tame for us).

The second night we played with Mr.BigQueso and Shaun Deeb(hours after Shaun quit tournaments). Shaun ran worse than we thought was possible and at one point all of our quadrants had 10-15 coins in and his had 2. We then decided to up the variance by taking a handful of coins and throwing them all at once, this brought on some swings since they all follow similar paths and are far less evenly distributed. We then decided to finish the night, everyone would take a turn blindfolding themselves and dropping a whole handful of coins from right above the bin while someone else spins the bin- JustLuck took videos, dunno if they'll find their way online anytime. Anyways, Deeb ran even worse here and ended the came down enough that all 3 of us were sizable winners.

Anyways, Portugal has been a pretty fun few days of degeneracy but I'm definitely looking forward to getting back home to Waterloo and Ottawa, getting on a more reasonable schedule(woke up at 1130pm today) and spending some time not playing live poker until the new year. The trip has been pretty fun and fairly profitable, I'm excited about getting off the flight to Toronto and finding out what place my sweat got.

Alright, thats it for now, part 2 of my video series came out btw if anyone wants to check that out