I will not be homeless after all! The owner of our new apartment was just super anal about the niceness of his place (as I predicted) and was scared of us possibly living a crazy lifestyle and trashing his place. Once he met us and realized we were decent guys he seemed to have no problem renting us the apartment, so all is well!

We should get the keys tomorrow so I can start moving stuff in next week. I'm super pumped about finally having space for my own office -- I'm positive my results will noticeably improve too. I can't wait!

WARNING: RANT AHEAD!

It's true. Apparently for some reason the apartment Brandon and I submitted an application (and paid the security deposit) for is still not guaranteed ours. This was quite shocking news to me when I heard it, especially since we're getting VERY close to the move-out date for our current place.

This all started last Friday: Lee (our closing agent at the Chicago Apartment Finders agency we're renting through) called to let me know that since the owner couldn't verify my income (I only provided healthy bank balances) he decided not to accept our application. Additionally, the place is 3 bedrooms and we hadn't secured our third roommate yet, so he wasn't content with my insistence that I'd pay the third person's rent until we found someone else. I can totally understand his concerns: my occupation is very non-standard and he prob knows other ppl who "win lots of money at poker" who busto themselves regularly.

When we submitted the application paperwork, I made sure to let Corey (the leasing agent) know that I had plenty of other ways of verifying my income should that be necessary. This was apparently not conveyed to our closing agent, who apparently just said "ok" when the guy rejected our app and left it at that. So I told Lee to call the guy right back and tell him that I had numerous other ways of verifying my income and that I'd do anything in my power to secure a place to live. I even offered to front the entire year's rent as collatoral if necessary, provided he gave me a reasonable interest rate on my money.

Fast forward 3 days. I left nearly a dozen messages for everyone at CAF with zero calls returned. The place in question is back up on Craigslist with another CAF agent's name & phone# listed. I finally heard back from Lee that none of them can get the owner to return their calls. Today, I got ahold of our agents again and was told that the owner wants to meet us in person on Friday afternoon and would likely rent us the place if he didn't receive any other favorable applications before then.

Read that again. Is he serious? What more could a landlord POSSIBLY want than guaranteed rent from responsible tenants? I'm confused and frustrated beyond comprehension right now; life as a poker player is stressful enough as is...no need to complicate it with this BS. In the meantime I'm gonna be looking for more 3BR places to hopefully ensure that I don't have to spend any time living outside on the streets. Hopefully everything works out; if not I'm gonna be royally pissed @ CAF and will certainly blog about it here.

/rant

After posting that entry just now, I realized that pretty much all of my recent posts have been exclusively about poker, so it's time for something different. Those of you who know me know that I have an addiction to Rock Band. A huge addiction. Although it started out on guitar due to the transition from GH2 & GH3, I've since become a full-time drum fanatic. Music -- and especially rhythm -- has always been the driving force behind everything I do, so this shouldn't surprise anyone who knows me well. I've been consistently drumming out cool rhythms with my hands & feet since before high school (with a particular preference for rhythms in odd time signatures), which clearly explains my obsession with Rock Band drums.

That said, I've come a LONG way at drums in the past two months. For one, I never thought I'd beat Run To The Hills on expert, but I beat it for the second time again last night. I also completed another goal of mine last night: gold starring at least one song in every group of songs. Check out my scores here. It's cool that some of my poker friends are also quite good at RB drums (namely Blair & Echo, but Cole is very good too), but I honestly feel like I'm quite a bit better than all of them.

So, I'm opening up another challenge to anyone reading this blog: come play me HU @ RB drums. If you can beat me in a best of 7, I will ship you $100 on either PokerStars or Full Tilt. I know there's a good number of people who are way better than me, but I'm not looking to play those random gamers. I want YOU. And I don't think you can beat me. So bring it! Rules are as follows:

- We're playing on the Xbox 360.
- I pick 4 songs, you pick 3. We start with one of mine first, then alternate from there. First to 4 wins obv.
- DLC songs are fair game only if both players own the song in question. I'm not gonna buy a song to sightread vs you. Any song with a posted score on my SH scores page is fair game for you to choose.
- You can only win money from me once. After that it's for pride, which I obv do take quite seriously.
- You should prob have a mic for trash talking purposes.
- My XBL nick is brystmar
- Bring it on bitches!

I'm also open to other challenges, such as comparing DLC scores at midnight the day after each track is released (Tues). Bring it!

There's no way I'm ending my first musically-oriented post in forever without another few of my favorite songs. The first (and most relevent to this entry) is of an amateur drummer playing The Camera Eye by Rush. This guy is really good and captures the subtleties in Neil Peart's drum part quite well. Plus this song just rocks:

Check out this live version of Talk Show Host by Radiohead; although it's one of their lesser-known studio songs (found only on the Romeo + Juliet soundtrack), it's one of my top 3 favorite songs they perform live.

And this performance of Let Down is sublime:

We're halfway through August, and I'm still experiencing my craziest (read: swing-iest) month ever. That comes with the territory of playing mid-high stakes PLO though I guess. Here are some really interesting graphs & stats from this month. I've had more 5-figure up and down days this month than in all previous months combined, and it's quite difficult dealing with these enormous monetary fluctuations on a daily basis, but I'm sure I'll get used to it. This type of stuff does tend to happen when you begin taking shots at a $5k buyin game. Updated month-to-date graphs:

I've been doing reasonably well at 25/50, winning about $7k in the ~1200 hands I've played. It's hard for me to believe I'm playing for really big money again since I've only been playing PLO full-time since April or May of this year, but my game has progressed very quickly in those few months and I feel like I'm sooooo far ahead of the average 5/10 & 10/20 players. Here's a few of the biggest pots I've played lately:

- Coolered by a fish. PLO is sooooo sick...I truthfully wanted to fold this hand on the turn but that just isn't happening for less than around 150bb.

- Pretty big suckout vs gordo, but IMO he was trying to be a hero without a good reason to do so. I was playing really tight at the table and had been folding a reasonable amount to pressure from some of the better regulars, which almost certainly led them to believe I'm scared money at 25/50, so I decided to go nuts here with a very marginal hand for a few reasons. Firstly, I think I can pick up the pot pretty often given my image and the fact that I'm 3-betting an UTG raiser. But even if the hand went to showdown, I was totally fine with either result (win or lose) simply because it would let these regs know that I'm not afraid to gamble it up with marginal hands for >100bb. And if nothing else, a hand like this is great for metagame. :)

- I planned to float this flop vs a very good regular, but turned the best hand instead. I was gonna try to take this pot away on the turn/riv if I didn't improve since I think this guy's range for c-betting this flop is huge; plus, a call from a tight (and perceived "scared money") player like me on the flop would likely get him to shut down. Instead, I turned the best hand and played it pretty standard-ly on the turn+river. Even if I didn't boat up on the river, I was almost certainly calling a bet given how polarized this villain's range is here against an opponent such as myself.

- Massive aggrodonk bluffing off >$6k to me @ 10/20. In a vacuum I should be scared of quads or a straight flush, but if you were playing at the table with this donk you'd understand why this very clearly a snapcall. What can I say...I game select well :)

- Getting a ton of money in vs the same aggrodonk. I'm soooo far ahead of his range preflop (and he calls here OOP a *lot* so I can usu play a 4b pot in pos vs him) that I think not 4-betting here to get it heads-up with the donk is probably a mistake. Too bad he 5-bet and I lost after flopping huge. I'm 50/50 vs his actual hand preflop btw and waaaaaay ahead of his range overall.

- Flopping huge and losing to a donk regular. Standard PLO-aments.

- Getting a TON of money in very very good vs DJ Sensei. He's a pretty good regular in the games, but having watched all of the DC mad potters videos I knew he'd be a pretty big spewbox in a bunch of spots too. Spewing in PLO certainly has its merits, but he got it in atrociously bad here and unfortately for me he came out on top. Once again, that's PLO!

- Losing another strong hand to a donk. This game can be really frustrating at times, but you've gotta keep a level head and take the good with the bad.

That's it for now, GL at the tables guys!

Finally made it back into the green on the month! I haven't gotten to play much in the past 3 days due to apartment hunting, but the session I put in late last night pushed me back onto the good side of the graph. The last 1500 hands have been absolute hell, but you gotta take the good with the bad in this line of work. My month-to-date graph is so sick:

They don't call it Omahahahaha for nothing...

After finishing my lengthy session review yesterday (thanks again to those of you who helped!), I actually wasn't feeling too bad about everything that happened that day -- even in terms of those awful results. I still had an adequate bankroll to play 5/10 & 10/20PLO with the occasional shot at 25/50 if the games are exceptionally good. And best of all, the losses weren't affecting how I approached or thought about the game; I was still feeling about as "on top of the world" about my game as you can feel after dropping an insane amount of money in one sitting at a poker table.

I woke up this morning feeling totally refreshed and confident in my ability to play winning poker, and I'm happy to report that I had a great session this afternoon. This was mostly thanks to seeing a big fish sitting at 25/50 and being fortunate enough to randomly have the same huge fish from yesterday's 25/50 shot come and sit to my right. When it was all said and done, I had a $24k stack in front of me at one 25/50 table; it felt awesome to post my first big winning session at a truly high stakes game.

I actually ran about $2800 above expectation today and posted a solid profit of just over $12k (I'd dropped about 1.5 buyins earlier at another table with the same fish). Session graph; updated Month-To-Date graph. My roommate just walked in so I think we're gonna head out to a bar in Wrigleyville somewhere, but I want to get back into sharing some of my favorite music in this blog. Here's one of my favorite songs from a band called Opeth: it's called The Drapery Falls. Enjoy!

Ugh, where to begin? Everything that could have possibly went wrong did; long story short, I had my first (and hopefully last) -$20k day today. I did take a shot at 25/50plo chasing two pretty big fish, but that's not where I got killed. I was at two of the absolute juciest 10/20 games I've EVER seen for a few hours, and wound up losing just about every big pot I played. This one table was particularly amazing with an average of 4-5 players seeing the flop nearly every hand for 2+ hours! But obv I ran like ass and dropped $16k at that table. So standard...

Look at the pretty pictures I made! PokerEV allin luck graph: (disgusting)

...and here's my equally beautiful winnings graph for today:

Awesome, huh? To all you normal people out there, I cannot even begin to convey the utter misery that comes with losing $20k in a single sitting. I am, however, trying my best to get something positive out of this before I come back full force. I still feel like my PLO game is rock solid, but I'll definitely be reviewing all my biggest losing hands to look for mistakes.

This was the biggest hand I played today, and although I think the preflop raise is a little loose, I think I'm happy with how the rest of it went down. His turn half-pot bet was really weird and went totally against this player's playing style; I was actually fairly certain he had a hand like 77 when he bet that amount, and since my range certainly includes a TON of J9xx wrap-ish hands I decided to repot. I think he has to fold sooooooo much of his range here, and even with his TT he has to know that he's never getting it in very far ahead (if he's even ahead!) here. He did use almost 100% of his timebank before shoving, but props to him for making a big hero call and winning this big pot.

Ok back to session review...

Turn and face the strange; [I] want to be a richer man...

Part 1 of my 3-part 5/10PLO session review with my buddy Eric Liu was posted earlier today. (Well I guess technically it was yesterday...) The videos we did turned out great -- especially since I ran into some really nasty spots -- and there's a ton of great content to learn from in each video. I really hope you guys enjoy them!

I feel my PLO game is very, very strong right now; there aren't many players I dislike seeing at my tables, but I know the opposite is true for many of the regulars in the games. I'm really enjoying poker at the moment and feeling more confident than ever at my ability to crush the mid-stakes and lower high-stakes games. If I continue improving at this rate, I hope to be at 10/20 fulltime by Sept/Oct and possibly higher by the year's end. That is, assuming I start winning hands like this one.

This month has already been pretty nuts. I started out on Sunday with a great marathon session, clearing just over $10k at PLO (but bubbling 3 big tourneys), but obv I knew it wouldn't last. So I decided to just play 2/4plo during my visit to the new CR office on Monday. Within 30 minutes, I was down over $2k in allin equity, but I grinded back to a post a solid profit of just over $1600 by the end of the session -- despite still being down a ton in allin equity. Today's session was similarly swingy, starting out up a bunch, then down a bunch after running bad at 10/20, then up again, then losing every hand I played yet again. Some fun graphs:

Today's session graph

August winnings graph so far

August EV graph so far:

Shouldn't those lines be overlapping or something? Being $5767 (7.8 BB/100!) below expectation already on the month totally sucks...I really should work on running better. :(

Biggest hand I won today. I induced a nice donation from this spazz monkey and was fortunate enough to win the hand after getting all the money in as a massive 81% favorite 3-way. Hooray for the best hand winning!

This post was supposed to be about CH-CH-CH-CHANGES though, and the biggest one of those is that my roommate and I are looking for a third person to live with for (at least) the next year. I posted a thread about this on both 2+2 and on CR; if any of you are interested feel free to send me a PM on either site or leave a comment with contact info and I'll get back to you. Hopefully this can all get sorted out pretty soon so I can get a nice dual-monitor setup for grinding and put in some serious hours.

That's it for now, here's David Bowie:

I went with Taylor, Andrew, and some of their friends/roommates down to Lollapalooza yesterday afternoon with high expectations for Radiohead's 2-hour set. Once inside the festival grounds, we met up with Daut, Randall, Timex, luckychewy, and one other poker player whose name escapes me. I was pretty hungry at the time and stopped to grab some food, but this split our group away from the Taylor + Andrew crew for the remainder of the day.

It was a gorgeous night in Chicago; perfect for an outdoor concert!

Randall, Daut, Timex, luckychewy, and I pushed our way to a pretty nice spot just west of center stage for the concert, and I think being any further off to the side would have severely detracted from the experience as a whole from both audio and visual standpoints. The lights show onstage was phenominal but is kind of hard to describe. There were 6 rows of 12 long, vertical tubes hanging from the ceiling which emitted light in a bunch of different ways. It's too difficult to accurately describe here, so check out this photo album I threw together of the pics I took last night. Daut's camera went battery busto pretty early into the show, so my iPhone took over the photograpic duties for much of the night.

pre-show

this was pretty cool early on...

...but the complexity of the colors & patterns got more and more amazing as the night went on.

Linked this one from greenplastic.com, which is the most prominent Radiohead fan site and likely the origin of Taylor's nickname.

During Everything In Its Right Place, the light columns scrolled text with the song's lyrics in sequence with the music. How awesome is that? Unfortunately this was nearly impossible to capture with a still camera, but I tried anyway:

They played a decent mix of songs from The Bends to In Rainbows (no Pablo Honey love this time) with 24 songs in all according to Daut. I really wish they played Talk Show Host though, since IMO that's one of their best live songs. Overall the concert exceeded my expectations and is firmly at the top of my list of live performances. This show was *definitely* worth the rushed pace I took in my 1860-mile drive back from Vegas earlier this week. If you haven't seen Radiohead live, check their tour schedule and make a point of going to see them. You'll thank me later.

It really does. Maybe that's because I'm still hung over (in a sense) from the Vegas lifestyle, or maybe because I just spent 23 hours in my car driving across the country...probably a little of both. I made really good time pretty much the whole way from Vegas since I did the majority of my driving at night, and honestly not having to put up with traffic makes the drive 1000x more enjoyable. Or rather, 1000x less miserable.

Now for my rant about Nebraska: this was the only state I actually despised driving through. First of all, there's absolutely nothing to be found anywhere in this state save corn fields. And yet, despite its desolateness, there are ZERO open radio frequencies! For some reason, Nebraskans deem it necessary to broadcast the same goddamn radio programming simultaneously on nearly a dozen frequencies at the same time. So just in case your radio doesn't pick up NPR on FM 88.7, you can still listen in on 89.1, 89.3, 89.7, 90.1, 90.3, 90.5, 91.1, and 91.7. And I swear I'm not exaggerating. It's exactly like this higher up in the bandwidth spectrum too -- all the way to the top at 107.9 -- but with different radio stations all simul-casting themselves on multiple frequencies.

I'm used to not being able to use my dinky little Belkin FM transmitter in major cities where it's rare to find an open frequency, but experiencing this phenomenon in the middle of nowhere took me by surprise. Even more surprising was that these stations' signals somehow managed to remain strong during almost my entire 400-mile drive through the state. Colorado didn't have this problem, and once I hit Iowa, all was normal again. WTF?!

Other highlights from the trip:

- I arrived in Denver at 7:30am on Wednesday, which is the perfect time to visit an Apple Store to try and grab an iPhone 3G (they open at 8 daily nationwide exclusively for iPhone 3G sales). I got there at 7:45 to see 9 ppl waiting in line ahead of me, so I jumped in line and waited for about 2min until someone said "Ummm, the actually starts around the corner back there" as he pointed to the other ~35 people waiting around the corner. WTF, this is a weekday, don't these people have jobs?! Luckily, there were employees still handing out tickets guaranteeing you a purchase that day, so I walked over to get in line. As I was walking over there, a middle-aged guy and his two daughters ran down the escalator and jumped in line just ahead of me; I thought nothing of it at the time...that is, until the employees gave him the very last iPhone ticket and told the rest of us to come back tomorrow. Talk about running bad!

- I had a blast in the Denver wind tunnel and really solidified my sit-flying skills. I'm now totally confident in my ability to transition from back to front (and vice-versa), back to sit, and in almost every other sit-flying maneuver except for side slides. Another 15min in the tunnel will likely fix that though. :)

- My car gets nearly 50% better gas mileage when I'm averaging 75-80mph instead of 100+. But it also takes 25% longer to get places, which isn't very appealing. Obv it's gonna get worse mileage, but I had no idea the disparity would be that extreme.

- I found myself entering West Des Moines, Iowa at 7:45am on Thursday, and luckily there was an Apple Store nearby with only one person waiting in line for a phone this time. The 3G is really great; having 16gb of space is soooooooo nice, as is the greatly improved volume level. Now I actually have a chance of hearing my phone when it rings in a moderately busy environment -- shouldn't that have been a vitally important "feature" of the iPhone from the start? Battery life is pretty crappy thanks to the 3G chip's thirst for power though, so I have a feeling I'll keep 3G disabled the majority of the time I'm out.

- Sleeping in your own bed for the first time in nearly 3 months is awesome.

I'm going to see Radiohead @ Lollapalooza this afternoon with Wiggins, Taylor, and a bunch of other poker guys. Mass degeneracy will almost certainly ensue. I looked at the lineup of other bands and honestly don't care about pretty much anyone else playing the festival. Seeing Kanye would be pretty cool I guess since he's one of the very few rappers I actually enjoy listening to, but the park is really far away and I only have a 1-day ticket right now so my chances of seeing his performance aren't looking too good right now.

That's it for now; have a good weekend guys!