Haven't updated this in 8 months but I promised a few people that I'd update everyone on what I've been up to. After seeing that my last blog post got 17,000 views I guess over the last 8 months plenty of people have been checking for updates. I definitely find this pretty flattering and I appreciate that people are still curious what I'm up to. As much as I'd like to give an empty promise that I'll be blogging more regularly, I'll probably just stick to fairly infrequent updates.

Last time I updated I was in Monte Carlo and the trip went quite well financially after I got 5th place for 80k in probably the largest tournament of the year with 0 publicity. 1st was over 400k and we were just playing in the corner of the room with maybe the toughest final 5 I've ever played(me, menlo, mement_mori, rubenrtv and Frederik Jensen). The tournament was bigger than like 50% of WSOP events and we were off playing in the corner of the room in the same area as people playing SNGs. It is sort of strange how much the media dictates which tournaments are considered "big"... I've played many major televised events with dozens of reporters and a smaller prize pool than this.

In my last blog post I mentioned I would be applying to Wilfrid Laurier University- a school in Waterloo with a pretty good business program. It was a pretty huge sweat(I was probably the last person to hear back from the university) but in the end I got in.

This Summer I didn't get up to a whole lot... I was probably the least jealous I've ever been of people down at the WSOP but at the same time I probably refreshed pokernews 5,000 times when I had 30% of one person, and 3% of another in the final 50 of the main event. Neither of them final tabled, but that was definitely exciting.

This year I've gotten fairly serious about lifting weights and I think its a pretty awesome hobby for me. One complaint I always had with poker(especially tournament poker) is that any performance related goal is pretty stupid to have since its always completely outside of your control. I find with lifting I constantly have a goal to work towards and as long as I work hard I can pretty accurately deduce exactly what I need to do to accomplish it. I think there are VERY few things where you can get constant numerical feedback, make substantial/consistent improvement for a relatively long period of time, be completely in control of your own success and have the goals be useful beyond just goals for the sake of creating goals.

This summer I went through a couple weeks that were fairly shitty in August. I used to get about one bad migraine every few years, but within the span of a week the following things happened 1) the person who was planning to buy my house bailed a couple weeks before school was starting and I knew I couldn't dedicate a lot of effort to selling the place while I was in school 2) my girlfriend of 1.5 years and I broke up- this was the only serious relationship I've been in and the only substantial breakup I've ever had and I can say it sucks 3) I got 3 bad migraines in a span of 4 days. Anyways that was pretty brutal but at the same time I now haven't had a migraine in a few months, I managed to find another buyer who paid 3.5% more and Molly and I are on better terms now than we were for the last couple months of our relationship.

School started in September and I can still remember the first 2-3 days of class I was feeling overwhelmed by the amount I had going on. It is crazy just how few obligations I had for the last few years, but its amazing how quickly people adjust to their settings and by the end of the first week I was completely used to the routine. This term I played on 5 rec sports teams and joined one other club and overall was just much more involved than I had been in the past. I had 2 pretty interesting classes(economics and business) this term and 2 pretty boring classes(math and sociology).

I originally thought that taking a huge variety of social science type classes might interest me, but even though I had a really good prof in sociology I just found it to involve less critical thinking than I thought was possible. Every single topic we would just graze the surface and then get asked multiple choice questions where we spit out what we've heard. Perhaps upper year classes might be interesting, but from talking to people about other first year electives it sounds like that is pretty much the norm. Next term I plan on trying to get over-rides to take more difficult business/econ/math classes to keep more interested but all-in-all this term was very enjoyable and I am very happy with my decision to return to school.

One kinda cool aside was that our University has a yearly stock market competition which several thousand people compete in, and I may have set an all time record by turning $100,000.00 into $100.85. I find it kind of absurd that a good chunk of our mark is based on performance trading stocks over 6 weeks, but I guess you can't argue with results. Overall this term my marks were extremely good and although I really should have been aware I *could* do well in school if I tried, I honestly do feel quite validated after my performance in University 4 years ago was so poor that I failed some classes and had like a 65 average.

Regarding poker, I played a decent number of Sundays this summer with quite good results but since school started I've played only 1 full day and 2 random tournaments. The one full day I got 30th in the WCOOP(this was a sick sweat, but definitely not as exciting as having %'s of people deep in the WSOP main) main which mement_mori and I are turning into a massive video series, and then I hosted an FTOPS and took 3rd in the CR 5 year anniversary tournament. Although I haven't been playing much, I am actually much more excited about poker than I was 6 months ago. Last Summer I wasn't even excited about the WSOP and thinking I might not go there in 2011, but at this point I'd say theres a bout a 95% chance I show up, and a decent chance I grind most of the series. I'm currently on my way to Montreal for the opening of Playground Poker(a new club in the area where they wanted to get a bunch of Canadian pros to show up for the grand opening tonight) and later during the Christmas Break I plan on attending the fallsview poker classic to play a couple tournaments. I've also been enjoying making the videos with mickey, and recently did an interview with pokerstatic(http://www.pokerstatic.com/hot-seat/interview-with-mike-timex-mcdonald/) that I think was one of the top 2 or 3 most enjoyable interviews I've done.

Anyways, returning to school was overall a good move- I don't think it gave me "all the answers" or anything, but its certainly a step in the right direction. I mentioned in the 2nd most recent blog post that my friend and I were thinking of starting a business, and now we are getting more serious about that. He has his last exam of University today and then is taking a year off to work on it... likely the business will be up and running this Summer if things go according to plan. I still can't say what it is but it has nothing to do with poker but at the same time I think almost every single person who likes poker will think its a pretty sick idea.

All in all I think 2010 has been a really good year, financially I made more money in January than I was expecting to make in the whole year and think I managed to take some good steps in the right direction of finding what it is I want to do with my life which has pretty much been my New Years resolution every single year and this year I feel as if I have progressed much more towards it than I usually do.