Cliff notes: No longer in school and running better than I ever have in my poker career

I blogged about this a bit back in the spring but I was super excited by my first 6 months back in school but by March/April was excited for a break and enjoying my Summer. I had probably the most fun Summer of my life and figured by the end of Summer I'd be looking forward to the consistency of being back in class. In early October after a month back in school I just wasn't really feeling it. I really missed the freedom of poker so the next day just booked a flight to Europe.

That trip went pretty well and I got final 20 in EPT San Remo and got 3rd in the high roller to make it a fairly profitable trip. Part way through the trip I got a message from my friend Johannes asking if I'd be willing to coach a friend of his. I get extremely frequent requests for coaching but I charge more than any other tourney coach and as a result almost always end up pointing someone in a different direction that seems like better value for them.

Anyways, after telling him that I charge a lot, he said thats not a problem and he explained that his friend Pius was at the final table of the WSOP main event and just wanted to touch up his game. Anyways, he won it and it was really cool living vicariously through him since I'm sure no matter how well I play I'm a dog to ever even get top 50 in that tournament. Before people ask- no I didn't have any equity , I just charged my normal coaching rate but it was still an amazing sweat. We mostly just talked about ICM and how not to make huge mistakes as a short stack, but he pretty quickly was chipleader and just bossed the table after that so I don't even think the coaching was too relevant. Still a cool brag

During November I spent a week in Vancouver visiting Brian Hastings and having him teach me how to play mix games. Vancouver is such an awesome city and I highly recommend anyone check it out if they're visiting Canada. I also ran insanely good this trip- I bricked both the tournaments but managed to make like 50k off of having pieces of people in various things, and sweating Pius win the main event was sick. It was super funny since we went to this really nice restaurant for dinner and everyone else there was on a date but we had 10 loud poker players at the biggest table in the middle of the room sweating the final table on my laptop. I doubt the restaurant appreciated our business all that much.

After that I flew back to Waterloo, moved into a new condo which I bought(for the last year I was just renting a place in my building but after seeing how much I like the area I decided to buy a big 3 bed room condo and moved in with 2 of my good friends). I moved in Nov 28th but flew to Prague Nov 30th so I've barely had a chance to unpack everything. I'm heading home on about the 16th and look forward to relaxing for the holidays.

I was invited to put on a tournament seminar(as mentioned in my last blog post) in Vienna from Dec 11th-13th but unfortunately we only got about 10 people confirmed when we were aiming for 20+ so we decided to postpone it. As a result of booking a trip to Vienna I figured I may as well play the WPT and EPT Prague since they're so close(in terms of both location and timing). Even though the seminar didn't happen, this turned out to be a great decision!

I played 4 regular MTTs in prague, and cashed all 4 including a 2nd and a 3rd. I chose the wrong 2 tournaments to final table as my mincashes came in the EPT and the WPT and the 3rd came in a 1k for 15k euro and the 2nd came in the high roller for 113k euro. I had never cashed 3 straight MTTs before so cashing 4 straight(and 6 of my last 8 after bricking 2 in BC but cashing 2 in San Remo) felt great. I've recently made some big changes to my game and although its a super small sample, I've been running great live and great online so I'm feeling more confident about my game right now than I ever have before.

Right now I'm boarding a fight to head to Vegas and hopefully defend my EPL title. This year has been incredibly sick both live and online for how little volume I've played and I'm really pumped for this tournament. If I keep up my run good I may have to sell off pieces and play the million dollar buyin next WSOP.

Thats it for now, this entry was kinda summarizing a longer period of time than I'd have liked and as a result wasn't as detailed as I'd have liked. I'll try to make entries more frequently and aim for maybe one a month or so.