I failed to mention my twitter account. It's twitter.com/andrewwiggins

Wow I haven't had a real blog post since Oct 8 after the tigers had their pathetic implosion. That day sucked. On an unrelated note, I basically decided I didn't want to blog anymore. I could have been a man and posted that, but I took the bitch way out and just disappeared. Anyway, you can always count on the Main Event to bring me out of the shadows.

So I'm playing tomorrow. I'm bringing the twitter back as well. I'm going all out baby! I'm hoping to have a good run. I've played a lot more NLHE this year than the past few years and I think I can have the necessary patience that I didn't have last year. We'll see if I live up to that.

This summer hasn't been that great pokerwise. I wanted to play a lot, but it just seemed like there was always something going on. Whether it was Cardrunners work, friends in town or me dealing with some things back in Chicago, I just didn't get a chance to play. I went 0/3 in the smaller events I played. I wasn't planning on playing any, so I guess it's good I played a few. It will definitely help me tomorrow. That being said, I never lasted longer than 3 hours in any event...

Tune into twitter tomorrow if you are interested in any updates.

Oh and we have the Cardrunners party tonight at El Segundo. It's from 8-11 so you should try to make it out if you're in Vegas.

We're hosting a $15 + $15 charity mtt on FTP today. The proceeds will go towards a college fund set up for Lou Pinella's son. Right now Townsend, Caby, Hastings, Schneids and Andrew Feldman are signed up.

We used to do more mtts like this in the old days and they were always a lot of fun. In fact, I took 2nd the last time I played in one.

If you can't play and would like to donate anyway, you can send money to my FTP account. "Andrew Wiggins" C

Let's raise some money!

I'm sure that anyone that has been a longtime CR member knows of David "Lou PInella" Doerr from the forums. He was a great guy who always loved to chime in with a sarcastic and maybe controversial comment. I always got a kick out of his posts on the forums. You could tell he was one of those people that just loved life.

David or LP as I always called him was one of the first Cardrunners members and I was lucky enough to get to know David over the past few years. He used to follow me around on UB and always needle me from the rail. Of course, his intentions were always good and I always appreciated his interest in my poker success. In those days, we often had exchanges through the CR forum. The forum wasn't so active back then, but you could be sure you'd always see a post from LP. Eventually we began talking over AIM and after the decline of AIM, through email. It was always a pleasure interacting with him.

LP was a HUGE basketball fan. I had many long email exchanges with him discussing up and coming NBA players. He loved watching kids from their early years and followed a lot of high school basketball. I never had much interest in that, but always got a kick out of the long emails that he would send to me that discussed a ton of 13 year old kids I had never heard of. On Tuesday we were talking about the emergence of a 13 year old kid named Andrew Wiggins. As soon as I heard of Wiggins, LP was the first guy I contacted. Of course, David didn't disappoint. He already knew all about him. He also let me know of a few freshman I needed to follow this year in college hoops. These were guys he had already been following for years.

Unfortunately, that was the last time I would talk to David as he was killed in a car accident on Wednesday.

David is survived by his wife Patrice and his son Davis. I can only imagine what they are going through. If David wasn't talking about basketball he was surely talking about his family. Rarely do you come across people as dedicated to their family as he was. I always had great admiration for the way he acted as a father and a husband. Please keep his family in your prayers.

If you knew David and would like to send flowers or attend the memorial service here is the information:

Flowers can be sent through Saturday to:

Acacia Funeral Home
14951 Bothell Way NE
Seattle, WA 98155
202-362-5525

The service is at 11am on Monday:
Phinney Ridge Lutheran Church

7500 Greenwood N. Ave.
Seattle, WA 98103

Life is so fragile and so unfair at times. Cherish the times you have with the people you love, because you never know when it could end.

edit: jtphila posted a link to a great blog post he wrote about LP a few months back. Here's the link:
http://blogs.cardrunners.com/jtphila/lou-pinella-separating-myth-from-reality

...suck at life.

A lot of people who read my blog think I'm a Cubs or a Sox fan. I have gone to a ton of games for both teams since I moved to the city, but I'm not a fan of either team. I go to those games because I have friends that are big fans of those clubs and I just really enjoy going to baseball games over the summer. I'm actually a big Tigers fan. The Tigers didn't have a great team this year, but they are in the worst division in baseball. I was very confident that they would be able to make an appearance in the postseason. In my opinion, the post season is a big crapshoot. The key is to get there and hope for the best. Well, the Tigers were in first place since May and even had a 7 game lead entering into September. That, unfortunately, wasn't enough. On Tuesday, they completed one of the biggest collapses in MLB history. Despicable really. There is nothing more frustrating than watching a team that you invested a lot of time, emotion and, unfortunately, money in just die at the finish line.

I did learn an important lesson to not bet on my own team. You have enough of a sweat without money on the line. In a drunken Vegas argument about if the Tigers would win the division or not, I ended up putting 5k on the line. It's impossible to say, but I'd estimate this wager occurred at about 5am Vegas time. I do know it was after a night of hitting the clubs pretty hard. I don't typically bet that big but the Tigers had a 5 game lead and I was being the cocky drunk that I can be. That being said, the bet was over the course of a few months so it didn't bother me too much. The one big mistake was that I actually gave odds against the field. So dumb. I bet 5k to win 4k. Come September, that seemed like a deal. That changed rather quickly. It seemed downright awful when the Tigers had to go play a 1 game playoff at the Metrodome. The line for the Tigers on that game was something to the tune of +160. Not fun to be giving odds in a situation like that.

As a side note, I think the Twins are making a huge mistake by moving out of the Metrodome next year. They have such a massive advantage when they play there. I'm confident they are going to lose that when they are playing outside. Furthermore, how the hell do they plan on playing games theres in April and October? It's going to be so cold and shitty outside that I just don't see how you can play baseball.

Back to the game...The actual game had to be one of the best baseball games I've ever seen. If the Tigers had won, it would have been the best baseball game I'd ever watched. Having a sweat on it made it that much crazier. The lead changed like 4 or 5 times. The emotional roller coaster it put me through was insane. I thought the Tigers had it won in extra innings, but I guess it wasn't meant to be.

The bottom line is you have enough of a sweat on your own team. You don't need to have money on the line too. This is something I have usually stuck by. I won't make this mistake again. The disappointment of losing just stings too much when you have both emotion and money on the line.

Unfortunately, I've had to go through a bunch of painful loses in huge games over the past few years - Illini in championship bball game, Tigers playing the worst world series I've ever seen, Bears in superbowl, Illini in Rose Bowl (never really had high hopes on that one), Bulls in the insane playoff series vs Boston last year. That's sports for you though. Thankfully, I think both the Bears and Bulls teams could make some noise during their respective seasons. I don't really think the Bulls are quite there yet, but they have a promising future. When we add Dwade and Bosh next year, we'll be a dynasty again. The Bears are looking good and anything could happen with them.

Gotta love sports.

Bears are on a bye this week and I get to see them play in Atlanta in two weeks for Sunday Night Football. I'm really excited for that.

I've barely played in October because I've been pretty busy with work stuff. When I have played, it's been a disaster. I'm losing at like -25% ROI for the first 100 or SNGs I've played. Obviously, thats a really small sample size. I started off last month in similar fashion and ended it really well, so I know I can turn it around. I'm likely going to put in a big session tonight. Hopefully I start running hot.

Check out this video. It's pretty insane. I got this off Krantz, so thanks to him for posting this on facebook.

Shit. It's been a long time. I was a bit upset with poker after my main event bust out and that got me away from blogging. I had played solid poker and was blessed with some great situations and I blew it all on one hand that I knew I misplayed. Tournaments suck like that. At my best I was still a player that made mistakes but made up for them with quantity of play. That style doesn't translate well to mtts. I always envied those people that seemingly didn't make mistakes. It's a hard thing to do when you're playing long hours. I digress. My break got to the point where I felt like I wanted a really interesting entry to get myself back into the blogging game. Nothing really came up. I still don't have anything. I decided to forget that mindset and just put up an entry to break the ice.

I'd say I've spent the majority of the last 2 months just living a normal life. I haven't done anything too out of the ordinary. After blogging for 3 years or so you can feel like you've said your piece. I'm definitely in that camp. I don't have much to say when I'm going through the motions. I've also spent a lot of my time on two things that I don't think are very bloggable. One is SNGs. I've spent a ton of time grinding SNGs lately. I decided I wanted to get at least semi-serious about making some good money with poker again and after some thought I determined SNGs were the best way. There is absolutely no glory in them and I had to swallow a bit of my ego to get back into them full time, but I just don't really care at this point. Money is money. I've had some mixed success with them, but with the 100% rakeback you can't go too wrong. I was able to clear $260/hour last month. I'm a bit behind that this month but still having a good month. I think that even if I was on top of my game and beating a couple tables of 5/10nl at a time, I probably wouldn't make a ton more money than that. Not to mention, the swings would be a lot higher too. I like the low stress of SNGs and the fact that I can watch tv/do other things and still perform well. My biggest gripe with them is that if you are in a bunch of them and want to quit you have to play them out. That's not a huge deal though. Another complaint is you can't really blog about SNGs. What is there to say? So many decisions are so standard. They just aren't interesting.

The other thing I've spent a ton of time on lately is immersing myself in the current political landscape in America. I was drawn in by the unprecedented things that were going on over the course of the last year. I've spent a lot of time listening to both sides of the argument and I feel like I've become very knowledgeable with what's been going on. I had never really paid a ton of attention to politics outside of presidential elections, so it was a lot for me to take in. I'd say it took me a few months to get a reasonable perspective on everything. People are so animated and take things to such extremes that's it's hard to not get dragged in. I hate that about our political system.

I don't have much interest in talking politics in my blog. There's just no point. I've realized that there are extreme ideological differences between the left and right and there's no logical way to bridge that gap. People also put way too much emotion into debates. I think a lot of that is due to people not knowing all the facts. When you don't understand what's going on, you tend to get defensive and that leads to hostility. It's a shame that people on both sides can't spend the time to get informed and then sit down and have a rational discussion. We'd be a lot better off if people could.

I did do two pretty cool things in the past week. I took my dad up to Kohler, WI for 36 holes of golf for his bday. We played the Irish in the morning and Whistling Straits in the afternoon. Goddamn are those courses nice! Whistling Straits is the most beautiful course I've ever played on. The views you get of lake Michigan are breathtaking. The courses are both very difficult. I was hoping to break 90 on at least one of them but I came in at 91 and 92 respectively. Ugh. I had a triple bogey in the first round and a quadruple bogey in the second. That will kill you. This summer was a lost summer for me with respect to golf. I was consistently in the low 90s and never got in a round below 80. Last summer I averaged low 80s so it was frustrating to have a 10 shot regression. Golf is a funny sport though. Hopefully I'll come out next season and be back in the low 80s.



The other fun thing I did was go to the track. My dad goes to a track in South Haven, MI a few times a year and he'll bring me along every now and then. Going to a track is an absolute blast. I highly recommend doing it if you ever get the chance. One of the fun things about this trip was both my uncles were there so I had some people to rally with on the track. It's great when you are tailgating the shit out of your uncle to the point that he has to let you by. As soon as he lets you by you have to keep him off your ass. I did manage probably the worst spin out of my life. I was turning into the final straight away and was chasing a 911 turbo (i was in a 2008 vette z06). The entire time I had been chasing him he was gaining on me coming out of the turns. I kept trying to push it more to keep up with him. Going in to that last turn I accelerated far too much coming out of it and spun out going about 70. I spun a number of times in the grass and was heading for a dirt wall. That pretty much scared the shit out of me since my dad would kill me if I wrecked his car. Luckily I came up a few feet short and avoided any trouble. When we got off the track he reminded me that he had 4 wheel drive and therefore could take the turns faster. I wish I had been thinking about that before I almost hit the dirt wall.

I'm going to update on twitter today.

Twitter.com/AndrewWiggins

I'd like to start off by saying I just saw a kid in the airport who was probably about 8 or 9 years old and had a mushroom hair cut. WTF? I haven't seen that haircut in 10 years and there's good reason for that. it's got to be one of the dumbest haircuts in the history of the world. I feel bad for any kid who's parents would give that haircut. I should have taken a picture of the kid with his mom and put it up as a fail pic.
 

I've always been a big fan of live music. There's no better way to spend a summer day than getting together with a bunch of friends, tailgating and then going to a show.  I took that mindset to an extreme this weekend and went on a mini-tour of the midwest to follow around Phish. I was a big Phish fan in high school and managed to see them 3 different times. Unfortunately, as soon as I was entering my prime years as a concertgoer (college), Phish decided to call it quits. I may never forgive them for that. That decision by them robbed me of many great summer nights. Luckily though, they weren't done for good. My friends and I were able to secure tickets for 4 shows by them this summer and 3 came this weekend (next one is just outside Chicago in August)
 

We kicked off the weekend on Friday. The first show was in Indianapolis at a venue called Deer Creek. I had long heard good things about Deer Creek, but I had never actually gone. I was excited to check it out. The day didn't start off great. I woke up to torrential downpour outside.  To make matters worse, the weather called for severe storms to hit Indianapolis that night. There isn't much you can do about that except wear shoes instead of sandals. I'm not one to wear shoes in the summertime, but I made the sacrifice on this rainy Friday.
 

Our next problem occurred when highway 90 out of Chicago turned into a parking lot. I was literally able to get out of my car and chill outside for 5 minutes at a time. We decided to take an alternate route. We didn't realize it at the time, but this route took us directly through downtown Gary, IN. Gary is one of the poorest and most dangerous cities in the US. In the past, I've been in the vicinity to go to Casinos in the area, but I had never actually driven through Gary. It looked like a scene out of the Wire. There were many houses and business boarded up or in great decay. We were about the only white people in the area. There were also kids slinging drugs on the corners. At one stop light there were 3 kids about 10 feet from us that were clearly selling. I felt like I was about to hear "Yo, got yo WMD right here." We were able to safely navigate through Gary, past the traffic jam and back onto the highway.
 

Regrettably, we ended up hitting traffic a few other times. We made it to the concert with time to spare, but our delays had significantly reduced our time to tailgate. To be honest, I didn't care too much because I was the DD that night. I volunteered to drive us there and home that day so that I wouldn't have to worry about driving to the next two concerts. The weather was nice in Indy at this point and after waiting for my friends to slam a few beers, we headed in.
 

Being around hippies is always an experience. They are very much unlike the people I typically interact with. I have mixed feelings about them. On one hand, they are typically very nice and outgoing. On the other hand, they dress like idiots, don't shower very often and overuse "Dude, man, bro" to such an outrageous extreme that I don't even know how to describe it. Keep in mind, I'm one to use those phrases on the regular. They also take the task of getting fucked up before a show to an extreme. Again, I'm all for getting fucked up before a show. Literally within 5 minutes of the show starting, 2 people within 5 feet of us collapsed. The first guy fell to the ground and landed on my foot. I looked down to see a guy using my foot as a pillow. His eyes were rolled back in his head and he looked very white. He looked like shit. Luckily, his friends helped him to his feet, got him some water and he was fine. I don't need anyone dying on my foot. The next guy hit the deck right in front of us. His friends seemed to be ok with him staying down. He stuck his finger in his mouth like a baby and just went to sleep. Seems like a bad way to enjoy a concert.
 

The concert was a great show. One of my favorite parts about it was the storm I mentioned earlier. As soon as it got dark out, we could see the storm starting to roll in from behind the stage. It was far off at that point, but we could tell that it was going to be very severe. The lightning was very persistent and very big. As it got closer it seemed to be coming from all angles. I've never seen a lightning storm like this. The lightning would shoot out parallel to the ground and go for miles and just keep branching out. It was truly amazing. I couldn't get my Doppler radar to work on my phone, but I assumed there was a lot of red coming at us. I had a sinking feeling that we were only going to get to see 1 set that night.
 

This is kind of what it looked like. It was more extreme though.

The first set ended with one the best songs I've ever seen performed. They did a 20 minute rendition of Fluffhead, a song that they rarely play. It was a great way to end the set. In fact, it was so good that I was ok with the concert ending on that note. When the set ended the storm was very close and it was all around us. It wasn't raining yet, but I knew it was coming any second. As expected, they came out and announced the concert would be delayed and asked us to go back to our cars. While in our cars, we got rained on pretty hard, but the lightning and really severe stuff was content with circling us rather than on dropping on top of us. I couldn't believe our luck. An hour later, we were back watching the 2nd set. It started to rain pretty hard towards the end of the set. It downpoured through the break and through the encore. It was only water though. In the end, we got completely soaked by rain, but the show was great and I didn't mind getting wet at that point.  

That night I had to drop my friend off in South Bend so that he could attend a family wedding. I needed a pickmeup after the show, so we stopped in at a Steak N Shake and got a feast. I think Steak N Shake is my favorite fast food restaurant. It's so damn good, so cheap and has a huge menu. If you have never eaten there and ever get the chance, go in and get a steakburger with a shake.
 

After we dropped my buddy off in South Bend, I was on the lookout for a McDonald's so that I could get a coffee. About 90 minutes from Chicago, I saw a sign for a McDonald's open 24 hours. It was one of the blue signs right before an exit with all of the food listed, so I assumed it was the next exit. I was wrong. As soon as I got off there was a big toll booth that somehow had a big line at 4 in the morning. I immediately flipped a U-turn to get back on the highway. I wasn't too pleased by this scenario, because I wanted a damn coffee. As I was making the giant turn to get back on the highway, I looked over my shoulder trying to find those beautiful golden arches. The next thing I heard was "Holy fucking shit Wiggins, what are you doing?" I looked up to see that I was heading straight for the guardrail and was about 2 feet from hitting it. Due to my amazing driving skills, I was able to swerve at the last second and remain in control of my car. I have to give credit to the Neon for responding like a BMW in the face of crisis. That's what Neons do though. They step it up when they need to. I ended up getting home at about 5am.  It was a long, but great night. I was ready to get up and do it all over again the next day.  

Vegas has been Vegas so far. There isn't really a ton to note. We've all been playing a lot of poker. I took a venture into the 2/4nlhe games and ran pretty poorly. I was rusty too. I dropped about 10 buyins over 5000 hands. I've been running pretty poorly in SNGs as well. Luckily, I've been running really hot in PLO. PLO is saving my trip pokerwise so far.

I haven't played any events yet.

I haven't really gone out a ton and when I have gone out, there hasn't been a ton to note. I did realize this year that there is no reason to ever book bottle service through a 3rd party. We were always led to believe that we couldn't get good tables with out the help of a VIP Host. They are full of shit. Every table we've had this year has been great and we've contacted the hosts ourselves. It's actually a really easy process. You can use JackColton.com to get the phone numbers for the club hosts.

I met Jermaine O'neal at a club.



Dell Rant

I've had the biggest nightmare scenario with Dell over the past few weeks. I'm going to post this story with the hope that potential Dell buyers won't buy from them and to explain a complicated monitor situation that may come up for other poker players. Before I came to Vegas I purchased a new Dell Studio XPS 16. When I was thinking about making the purchase, I talked to not one, but two dell technical support people. I needed to confirm that this laptop would support a 30" monitor at 2560x1600 resolution. Unfortunately, FTP and Stars only give out monitors that only have DVI ports. It's not a big deal if you have a desktop, but it can get dicey if you are trying to attach it to a laptop. I knew the laptop didn't have a DVI port, so I needed to make sure that I could convert from the HDMI or Displayport. They both assured me it would not be a problem. They both lied.

It took me about 4 other several hour long conversations with Dell support and the purchase of 3 different converters to realize I would not be able to support my monitor. I should note that these were special converters that I had to find online. I overnight them each time, because I was assured they would work. They never did. I blew close to $100 on shipping and now I have to go and return all of these converters. Good times.

To make matters worse, I have two of the same monitors. I was going to keep one at work and one and home and take the laptop back and forth. Basically, the dell technical support is the most clueless group of people I have ever come across. At this point I know far more about monitor resolutions than anyone on their team. This is because I had to spend hours on google figuring shit out on my own. I'm not particularly computer savvy overall.

I tried to talk to managers to get a clear answer on the converting issue and to also voice my displeasure. They don't really seem to have managers at Dell. I could never talk to anyone with any authority. They also didn't seem to care that I wouldn't have bought the computer in the first place if they had given me accurate information. I considered returning the laptop, but I actually like it a lot and there doesn't seem to be a ton of options on the market at a reasonable price for what I need (I'm mostly looking for a high powered graphics card in a portable laptop). Most of the laptops with great graphics cards are huge and very heavy. That's not good for me.

The bottom line was that I would need to get a monitor that supported displayport technology. I should mention that Dell invented this technology to seemingly fuck wth people like me. What is wrong with HDMI or DVI is beyond me. Guess what? Only Dell makes monitors right now that can support Displayport. So, as much as I'd never like to purchase from Dell again, I went online and ordered a 30" monitor for $1700. I overnighted it for $100 so that I could finally get my grind on. I was supposed to get the monitor on Monday and was excited to finally be done with this saga.

I got an email over the weekend saying that my order would be delayed a week. Fucking great. Luckily, a day later I got another email saying that it would actually come on Tuesday. I woke up today again excited to get the monitor. When I checked it's status on line it was flagged with a delivery exception note. They had called me the day before to confirm that my vegas address was where the monitor should go and to make sure there wasn't any fraud going on. At the end of that discussion, they assured me everything was good to go. This morning I thought back on that conversation and shook my head. Fedex confirmed that Dell had ask them to hold the package because there was a fraud concern. I called Dell and they said they needed an email from AMEX. I then called AMEX and they said they had not flagged the transaction like Dell claimed, but they would email Dell anyway. I then called Dell back and they confirmed the receipt of the email. I called back later in the day to make sure we wouldn't run into any issues and they told me that we wouldn't. Well I just called Fedex to confirm that I would get the package tomorrow and they told me it's already in Nashville on it's way back to Dell.

Fuck Dell. I don't even know what to say at this point. It's so ridiculous. Ok, end rant.

I'm going to 3 Phish shows this weekend. I'm really excited for that. Hopefully I survive.