My ~3 week trip through Europe couldn't have come at a better time: I've been at the top of my game lately and was fortunate enough to book some great results so far this year. But as much as I wanted to keep playing, I knew my mind needed some vacation time, and what better way is there to accomplish that than traveling?

After returning on Thursday, the early part of my weekend was mostly spent reading back up on the game to ensure my head was in the right place before resuming my daily grind; full-time play started back up on Sunday. There were a couple of spots yesterday where I played very poorly (mostly due to rust on the gears), but overall I think I played pretty well. On a side note, it's really disheartening how much tougher the 2/4 - 5/10PLO games have gotten in the past ~2 months; some of those games can be quite bad.

Anyway, I'm happy to report good results from yesterday and today:


Thanks to today's session, I've just crossed the $100k mark for the year:

...which puts me 25% of the way to my goal of 400k for this year. The last number in that snippet ($26k) is the amount of rake I've paid so far in 2009, and it makes me very thankful for rakeback & Supernova benefits. Honestly though guys, we're on the wrong side of this business!

So I'm a little behind the pace for 400k right now, but I plan on putting in a bunch of hands this month to make up for not playing hardly at all for the past ~3wks. Some hands from the past few days:

- Here I run into the top of a very aggressive regular's range; I was surprised he was this strong because I'm usually much farther ahead (vs his range) when the money goes in on the turn.

- Not sure about my postflop play here, but maybe I'm just being results-oriented. Preflop is pretty standard as part of a balanced 4-betting range vs solid/aggro villains like this guy. It just really sucks to run into one of the absolute worst hands I could be up against.

- I tilted this fish pretty bad and got him to stick it in really far behind in this hand. Still have no idea wtf he was doing getting it in with me on the turn there, but as always I do accept donations :)

- This guy berated me in chat for awhile after I stacked him in this hand. How dare I flop well when he flops a draw!

On a final note, my buddy Nate was visiting some friends in DC this weekend and ended up partying a little too hard, as can be seen by the text messages he sent prior to crashing:


Nate also makes his CR debut this Thursday in my first PLO video for CR when we review a session of his at $25PL. Until then, I'm gonna grab a beer for myself and toast to the next 100k!