Let me offer the reader my most sheepish hello; its been a while. Why haven't I been blogging recently? A lot of reasons probably, not the least of which is that I have been very burnt out with poker, and since this is, after all, mostly a poker blog, I just haven't had much of a desire to blog it out. Since its been since just after the WSOP 50k, let me offer a quick summary of my last few months:

Bust out of the main event with KQhh AI vs J9 on J926hhh turn on day 2, ensue a sour day or two.

Extend my San Diego lease for an extra month and thus spend all of August in La Jolla back on the grind and taking in the last few weeks of sun/beach/clubbing.

Pack up Betsy (my car) with the bare essentials (clothes, computer, huge ugly painting purchased my first year in Vegas after a rush in the pit that I'm convinced brings me good fortune, other random crap) and drive solo from San Diego to Boston, stopping off in St. Louis for a few days and then New Jersey to see my parents and grind out WCOOP for a month.

WCOOP month goes awfully. Lose all MTT-related prop bets and get crushed in cash after finally having heatered up a decent online roll in August. Sad panda.

Get to Boston and move into new place in the Back Bay. The place is in a great location just off Newbury Street, and although my roommates are all still spread across the country and won't be here until the end of October, I can tell we're gonna have a great time.

In lieu of roommates not being around, I tentatively set up re-focusing on poker. New house/painting rungood kicks in and I'm currently in the midst of what will probably be my best month ever (the 3 month nosebleed degeneracy of previous years discounted).

Take break from grind to go to Miami where pokernews had rented out a mansion on Hollywood Blvd for a bunch of poker players to party it up and shoot a bit of promo stuff. Get to meet lots of much better poker players than myself - jungleman, urnotindanger, nanonoko to name a few - and kick it with old buds MacDaddy and UMD Tennis. Standard day on this trip consists of waking up at 3 in the afternoon, sitting by the pool or something, then drinking/2k PLO/Stud/whatever flips for a few hours before bottle service somewhere. Highlight of degenerate flipping was urnotindanger managing to lose 16k on the limo ride over to a club to UMDs in a matter of 30 minutes doing 3way stud flips. Luckily nobody got too badly burned on flips throughout the course of the week and we all wound up more or less even. Also I won 10k at Mario Kart/Smash Bros in one day; I won't embarrass who I crushed but step up your game brah :)

Get back from Miami in a daze and continue to grind. Grind goes well. All is good.

So that's the very very short notes on what has been an eventful, somewhat stressful, but ultimately very rewarding last few months.

The real reason that I wanted to finally sit down and pump out a blog is because I feel like in the last two weeks or so, I have made leap and bound type progress with regard to my poker game, specifically as it concerns game selection and more importantly, laboring through bad runs in individual sessions. It's funny, I'm more or less a dinosaur in the online poker world at the decaying age of 24 and have been playing for 7 years now, but I am still constantly surprised at how much more there is to learn about poker as a game, and about myself as its student.

I suppose that game selection speaks for itself. I am learning to stop pulling the trigger on 4 tables HU against competent players simply for the sake of learning a few new tricks but otherwise getting on the variance train for no reason. It's kind of amazing how easy poker seems after having gotten accustomed to playing in really tough 25/50 lineups for most of my life and then all of a sudden game selecting 5/10-25/50. But I guess that this is really only a revelation to me; it turns out most people always practice this principle!

As to toughing out bad runs though, this is something that I am really proud of. I readily admit that probably my biggest leak as a poker player used to be insta-quitting sessions, even against terrible opponents, simply because I dropped a few buy-ins really quickly and was afraid that my meta had gone out the window and I was just going to endlessly spew off buyins. Well, rewind to the last few days when I have had great games on both Stars and FTP, and have unfortunately been stuck huge at the beginning of almost every single session that I have played, despite playing in pretty soft games. I'm not sure what happened, but something finally clicked for me. I toughed out 3-6 hour long sessions every day this week, and have had really good results despite HEM telling me that I am still running below my EV. Specifically, I have been battling it out with a guy on FTP who will remain un-named but is likely a competent (though spewy) player using a formerly terrible player's account to get infinite action. As it turns out, I happen to think that I have an edge vs him and we have been 4-tabling 25/50 very regularly the last week. And this is where my new 'skill' comes into play. Here is the graph vs him for the last week:



The sessions went as follows: 1309 hands, 1624 hands, 939 hands, 779 hands, and finally 1472 hands. I'm too lazy to go through and do this myself, but it's pretty easy to pick up the fact that not only did I run unbelievably bad there in the middle of our odyssey, but that pretty much the start of every session coincides with very swift, bad downswings, peaking at -50k in under 200 hands at one point. Against a relentless, very aggressive player that villain happens to be, old me would have instantly quit and scorned my bad luck, but I am very happy to have battled through the variance this last week and let my good play shine through. I would love to post some HHs of spots where I made soul-crushing river reads but I've learned better than to post this free, specific, information on the internet, so just suffice to say that I have been playing really well lately :).

It seems that a return to blogging is always catalyzed by excessive periods of either losing/winning for me, so I'm happy that it happened to be the latter this time around since looking back to my previous posts, things had been getting a bit dreary. I'm going to try and post more in the future, both because I like writing and miss it, and also because PokerStars is taking more applications for online pros, and a little bitter to have not been selected last time, I am taking positive action to have more noticeable attributes for them this time around. Hope you are all doing well, thanks for reading and dealing with a bunch of shameless bragging.

Cheers,
Mike

So I busted the 50k early on Day 3, somewhere in 50th place or so out of 116 runners. I guess that a part of me is happy that I stuck around like I did and really felt confident in all the game formats and played for the most part very well. The field wound up being a lot smaller than I had originally thought and therefore a bit tougher, but I still think that I was +EV in the field, am happy that I took the risk and played in a really prestigious event, and am excited to do it again next year, assuming that is still of the 8-game format.

I got pretty lucky I think with my table draw for the first day. Although I wasn't at the softest table of the day, it was definitely one of them. From right to left, it was: ike (Isaac Haxton), me (hooray position on ike), John Cernuto, Mikael Thuritz, David Singer, Alex Kravchenko, harrington25 and our 8th seat was filled by... Gus Hansen. The blind structure was extremely deep so I mostly just played tight/solid the entire time. The second hand of the tournament I wound up making a 76542 in triple draw against ike on the second draw when we both drew 2, capping that street and putting in a bet on the end to get beat by his 76432, but otherwise, nothing really too gross.

There was one pretty interesting hand that came up in the PLO round that had the table split as to what the right play was. I called a small open with KKJ6ccss in the hijack and we saw a flop 4-handed. Flop came down KQ2ss, so I flopped the absolute joint. David Singer leads from the SB for about half-pot, ike calls, and I raise the pot (or what Gus later pointed out was a bit more than pot to 23k (150k starting stacks). Singer tanks and calls, ike folds. Turn comes the Jd, bringing a backdoor diamond draw. Singer checks, I elect to check behind. River comes the 8s and Singer makes a big bet of 45k, or 4/5ths pot or so. I tank forever and begrudgingly make the fold, assuming that any competent PLO player is never bet/calling the flop there without at least the A-high FD/gutter or a set, and I just don't give a random player enough credit to turn a small set into a bluff there when I clearly have the nut draw in my range after raising flop and checking turn. A few hours later, the table got to talking about the hand (I folded face up) and Gus vehemently argued that me checking back the turn is terrible, which I'm pretty sure validates the fact that it was actually a good check. Harrington25 also thinks the turn check (which is clearly the most interesting aspect of the hand) was bad, but I'm not convinced; in a cash game I think it's always a bet since my equity is just always so good, but in a tournament, with tournament life/relative edge over the field to be considered, I think a check is optimal against a competent flop b/c range. Anyways, Singer later told me he had JTxx with ten-high spades there, which is an absurdly bad river bet I think, but hey, it worked out, so congrats to him. That was about it for interesting hands on Day 1 though. Overall, the table played pretty weak passive and I picked up chips easily in the limit rounds. I finished the day a little above average stack.

Day two my table was infinitely harder. I'm not sure that I'm going to remember this all correctly, but the seats were, from right to left: Joe Cassidy... yeah, I'm just not going to remember all the positions and all that, but some other people at the table were: Cole South, Dario, Jason Mercier, Nick Shulman to my direct left the whole day, Barry Greenstein, Eugene Katchalov, etc. Not exactly a fun table to be at. I ran pretty damn bad at the limit games (especially Razz, where the equities run so damn close, and is just such a dumb game and should be removed from 8game IMO), chipped up a bit during O8 and PLO, and then played one of the sicker Stud8 hands of my life:

Katchalov limps an 8 in middle position; I complete with split jacks in late position, Shulman calls with a 3 up, and Katchalov comes along as well. Neither player improves their low on 4th, I bet and they both call. Fifth gives both players a low card (no aces), I bet again and they both call. 6th gives both players a low card but it gets checked through somehow. I don't improve on 7th and Shulman leads out, with K235 or something showing. At this point, Katchalov raises with 865Q or something showing and I had gotten the distinct impression that he had a very strong draw on 6th earlier in the hand. Thinking strictly about the hand, it didn't really make it a ton of sense that he would be trying to raise out my high hand here since I checked back 6th (and am therefore pretty much never stronger than two-pair/trips at absolute best) so it just seemed like everyone knew Nick was leading with what was clearly the best low, and Eugene was rather likely to be raising me out of the hand with a mediocre high hand now that a good open-ender or something had bricked. I tanked forever, wound up calling, then threw up a bit when Shulman put in a third bet, Eugene of course folded sheepishly, and I called Nick's bet to see a 6 low with a pair of kings made on 7th, to scoop out my pair of jacks. Clearly my line was very thin, but I was just so sure that Katchalov was raising me out there, and it was such an important time in the tournament that every big bet was crucial; I just couldn't fold IMO. I didn't really think everything through as far as the times that Nick shows up with a better high hand I have to put in 3 bets, and the 15% of the time or w/e it is that I read Katchalov wrong, I give away 2 bets for no reason, but it was just a frustrating time to make a good read and get punished for it. Oh well, whateva. It was a nice condolence that Barry came up to me early on day 3, complimented me on the read that hand, and summed the hand up well with, "it was just one of those times where the operation was a success, but the patient still died." Barry has always struck me as a nice guy, and my interactions with him during this tournament didn't disappoint.

The third and last interesting hand of the tournament came early on day 3, in the NL round. I was short (35BBs), and opened to 3x the BB with 99. It gets folded around to floes in the BB and he decides to 3bet jam with 96s. I won't comment too much on his play here since he seems like a nice guy and definitely has a solid tournament record, but I was just shocked at how unbelievably bad his shove was.. maybe he counted my stack out wrong or whatever. Flop 234s, turn Ks, river 7s. I don't think I've ever gotten up from a table and stormed out of a room as fast as I did after that beat. It was... rather unpleasant. So, all things considered, a pretty shitty way to bust out of the biggest tournament that I've ever played, but so it goes, such is the risk/reward ratio for a big buy-in MTT. I wound up probably having 20+ drinks throughout the course of that day, but the fog of that tournament has kinda stuck around with me, and I have just been absolutely spewing online since then. I don't know, something just feels off. Hopefully I get my head on straight soon since there are a bunch more events left to play and I would love to go about them with the same enthusiasm that I did the 50k. Here's to better luck!

Cheers,

Mike

Driving home from the Cards game with Craig last night, I had the random thought that every year as the WSOP rolls around, it's a very distinct feeling for poker players. Unable to put a unique sense to it, I wound up comparing it to the first day of school every year when we were younger. In many ways, this comparison rings very true for me: (1) being that Vegas is unquestionably a mecca of sorts for poker players during the summer, it brings with it the same 'hooray, I get to see all my friends that I haven't seen in a few months' vibe that the first day of school does; (2) sure, there are going to be some good/great moments, but man, it's ultimately a hell of a grind, and is mostly gonna suck; (3) for some reason, every year, you forget all the bad parts and can't wait to do it all over again! And so, as May comes to a close once again, I am feeling giddy in the wake of another summer of live tournaments, great Vegas dining and plenty of degeneracy mixed in-between.

The last few days have been the same old routine of figuring out summer housing, finishing up year-long leases, and just more or less planning out the immediate future. My immediate future looks like this: moving out of the La Jolla spot (just finished today, GODDDD I hate moving, so happy that all my stuff is finally in storage and all I have is a car-load or two to take to my summer house and then Vegas baby Vegas), moving into my WindanSea house with TJ/Cosmo, hopping on a plane the same day to get to Vegas the night before the 50k, winning the 50k, jetting back to San Diego then spending however much time I feel like beachin' it/golfing and playing probably 3 or 4 events more throughout the summer. After the summer, I get to take out whatever I may need from storage, pop my bike up on the rack, and start what will surely be a miserable journey from San Diego all the way over to Boston for a year-long lease with 3 of my very best friends from high school, which I am incredibly excited about. Can't say I'm thrilled for Boston weather/sports/people (haha mostly j/k) but I'd do pretty much anything to be around 3 people that keep me that constantly happy/entertained, so lets do ittt!

But that's a good way in the future. At this very minute, my life looks like this:

(if this doesn't show up, sorry but so it goes, I've been trying to get it uploaded for 20 minutes and that's pretty much my cutoff)

http://tinypic.com/r/2u88oxv/6" alt="">

Definitely one of the funnier glimpses I've had into what my own life looks like sometimes. Almost all of my stuff is in storage right now, so all I have left is my desktop, shitty desk, a microwave dinner, an IPA, some cash, and a sleeping bag (not shown) that I'll be sleeping in tonight. Ballin'! The box/chair is so crucial though... It may not seem like a huge luxury, but after driving a U-Haul truck around and lifting heavy shit all day, it feels pretty damn good to just plop down on a box and have a beer.

So that's the whole update I think; life is good. I have been running really well online recently as well, and it couldn't have come at a better time than now. I feel super confident about my game, am coming up on the biggest tournament I've ever played, and am just overall very optimistic about all things poker-related at this point. Let's hope the streak lasts for oh, another week or so!

Cheers,

Mike

I feel like a bear gingerly emerging from his cave after hibernation right now. The last 3 weeks have been pretty bizarre. Starting mid-way through the FTOPS and running straight through the SCOOP, I have probably averaged 11 hours of tournament poker per day. I miss the sun... While the FTOPS were more or less a bust with me crushing cash games on the side, SCOOP turned out for the better. While I don't really have the desire to count up how many events I played during this time, I would guess that the number is in the high 60s, low 70s; I cashed in 20 events. The list of cashes is as follows:

$215 6-Max NLHE: 851st - $339

$2,100 6-Max NLHE: 97th - $4,523

$55 6-Max NLHE + Rebuys: 420th - $281

$162 HU NLHE: 1st - $52,224

$215 PLO HU: 108th - $388

$265 NLHE Knockout: 124th - $754

$162 NLHE 2X Chance, Turbo: 153rd - $676

$16.50 NLHE 2X Chance, Turbo: 163rd - $124

$1,575 Mixed PLHE/PLO: 20th - $3,251

$162 Mixed PLHE/PLO: 95th - $389

$3,150 4-Max NLHE: 20th - $10,500

$33 4-Max NLHE: 1,106th - $38

$11 Limit Triple Draw 2-7: 221st - $23

$22 Limit 7-Card Stud Hi/Lo: 8th - $528

$33 8-Game: 73rd - $160

$1,050 PLO8: 41st - $2,082

$55 PLO: 2nd - $19,973

$270 NLHE HU: 59th - $1,142

$215 HORSE: 94th - $381

$2,100 NLHE: 25th - $8,774

Although all the cashes are nice and make me feel infinitely more confident about my tournament game heading into the World Series (especially because I feel like they're spread pretty evenly over a variety of different games), that list definitely makes my series seem deceptively better than it really was. My total winnings were $106,551.78 but I probably spent close to 75k in buy-ins, so all things considered I'm just happy to emerge from my first ever long online tournament series where I played almost every event as a slight winner. Oh, and on another sour note, I wound up bubbling the top 3 TLB for SCOOP where the prizes for top 3 were pretty sick (first received a 2010 WCOOP main event seat, 2011 PCA package, 2011 Monte Carlo package and some sorta trophy) and even more annoyingly, I had a very decent sweat for it yesterday and I wound up bricking out both chances. Oh well. Pretty unpleasant to be the actual bubble boy for it, but somebody has to do it I suppose. Here's the leaderboard for reference: http://scoop.pokerstars.com/player-of-the-series/leaderboard/

But now that all of that is done and behind me, I'm just looking forward to not touching poker for a few days, getting out on the golf course, and hopefully soaking in some sun before the WSOP begins and I'm flying back and forth between Vegas hopefully crushing some live MTTs. Between now and my first trip out to Vegas on the 27th to play the 50K, I have to move all of my stuff out of my current condo, put about half of it in storage and then move the other half into my house for the summer. So unfortunately, not exactly as laid-back as I might have wanted my time to be before Vegas, but such is life.

Hope everyone is well.

Cheers,

Mike

Hey, it's been a while. Not too much has been happening on my end; mostly just grinding the poker, working out and trying to sort out the next few months of my life. I had my wisdom teeth pulled shortly after Derric's wedding festivities and since 3 were impacted and 1 had grown in fully and retard-smashed itself into my gum, the surgery was apparently pretty brutal. Most of the people that I had talked to had more or less a 1-2 day recovery period but I was laid out on my ass for 6 days taking vicodin, slurpin up jello and generally pretty miserable. Luckily, drugged up and stuck at home are pretty much ideal conditions to be playing MTTs online, and I decided to grind a lot of the FTOPS tournaments. Craig and I made a bet for 10 best overall scores during the FTOPS/SCOOP series where the winner gets treated to tickets/beers/driven by loser to a Cardinals/Padres game when the Cards get in town for a series in late May. Not a very high stakes bet or anything but it's been pretty good motivation to stay on the grind as the weather has been getting better and I mostly just wanna run around in the sun!

Although the FTOPS was mostly a bust (although I made pretty good money actually game-selecting HU cash on the side) with the best finish being 13th in a big FR NL event, I finally broke through and had a strong showing in an SCOOP last night:

I apologize ahead of time if the image is smushed or otherwise blurry but despite the new changes to the site being very aesthetically-pleasing, it seems like they did nothing to update the blog software, which is still a pain to use. Oh well, can't do everything at once and I'm sure everyone involved in the upheaval process worked their ass off to get it done, so kudos. Anyways, gist of the image is that I won the medium HU NL event with a $162 buy-in and 2048 runners good for a total score of $52,224. Wee, I run good at MTTs. I plan on playing the majority of the rest of the SCOOP series so hopefully I can bust out another final table somewhere in there.

But Mike, why play all these tournaments lately you might ask? Well, good question. For one thing, I have been running terribly at anything above 10/20 PLO for about 6 months now and eventually let it affect my play to the point of just not feeling very confident in most line-ups, so I decided to look for a bit of a change of pace. Luckily, this led to playing a lot of mixed games with very good results, which in turn got me very excited to play a lot of live MTTs - particularly mixed/limit events - at this year's WSOP. One thing that I'm very pumped about is that I sold off enough of myself to play in the 50k Player's Championship this year. After seeing the general level of play in the 5k 8-game event that I won in the Bahamas and continuing to improve at the limit games through online cash games, I'm very confident that I'll have at least a slight edge in the tournament and have always wanted to play a huge buy-in event like this, so I'm stoked! In addition to this event, I'll most likely be playing the $2,500 2-7 triple draw, $10,000 limit Omaha 8/b, $10,000 HORSE, $5,000/$10,000 PLOs and of course the main event. I'll probably have all of my action for these events so hopefully my luckbox remains strong for the duration of the summer.

So that's what has been happening on the poker front of things. As for this so-called real life, my lease in La Jolla ends at the end of May and I'm going to be moving in with TJ (TeeJayorTJ) and Johnny (Cosmo) for 1.5 months while their other roommate packs up for the Vegas grind. They live in a pretty sweet place within a minute's walk of Windansea beach and I couldn't be more excited to fly back and forth between Vegas/San Diego really putting in lots of hopefully successful hours in Vegas then coming back to beautiful San Diego and unwinding on the beach. Afterward, I have a somewhat awkward 1.5 months before my future lease in Boston starts and unless I can find a convenient place to stay in San Diego, I am going to put most of my stuff in storage, pack what I can in Betsy (my car) and take off for what will surely be a brutal drive over to New Jersey to visit the parents. It has been way too long since I've seen my parents and they've been asking me to come and stay with them for a bit for a while now, so this seems like a pretty ideal opportunity. Also, I wouldn't go too crazy cooped up in small-town New Jersey since that time period is broken up nicely by a wedding of 2 of my good friends from college that is surely to be a week or two-long reunion in Chicago of all my college friends that will definitely be an out-of-hand mess. I can't wait!

And such is life... pretty damn good. Lots of poker coming up in the next few months, some Jason Mercier-esque rungood would be nice poker Gods!

Cheers,

Mike

So its 2:30 in the afternoon right now and I've been awake for almost 12 hours. While I can't say that I'm exactly loving the nasty jetlag I've got right now as a result of flying home from Switzerland on an overnighter 2 days ago, I did at least get to see the sunrise today for the first time in almost a year. I drove out to the Torrey Pines State Natural Reserve this morning around 5 and got in a little 3 mile run in the dark and watched the sky spread apart for the morning sun over the Pacific Ocean:



Not a great picture by any means but the cloud cover wasn't really cooperating with me on this, the one day of the year that I'll be awake before 7. Either way, it was really bizarre to watch the sun spread out over the ocean today when just a few days ago I was walking in the rain through the busy financial district in Zurich and just a week and a half removed from that, skiing in the Austrian alps. The last 3 weeks have almost certainly been the most hectic insofar as any of my travel schedules have ever been concerned; I've been in 4 countries and 3 very different climates. I know that for a lot of poker players - especially tournament players - this type of lifestyle is second-nature, but it was pretty enlightening for me to spend the last 3 weeks on my own bumming around Europe and getting to experience travel from the eyes of a lone trekker.

Starting at the beginning, I first spent 6 days in Saalbach-Hinterglemm, Austria, to play in EPT Snowfest at get a bit of skiing done in the alps. Arriving in Austria, I was obviously pretty jetlagged and mostly napped on the cab ride up to the hotel, occasionally stirring to watch with childlike fascination as the beautiful snow-peaked alps rose up over the otherwise green, spacious Austrian countryside. I arrived at the hotel to find that it was way more luxurious than I had been expecting, and likewise realizing that I wouldn't have much time to check it out since the first day of the main event had started an hour and a half ago, and I was supposed to be playing. Oops. I ran into the room, saw Haribo gummybears on the pillow (way better than the standard American mints), snagged a few for a quick sugar rush, put on a bit of deodorant for the sake of everyone else at the table, and begrudgingly went downstairs for a lovely 10 hours of grind when all I really wanted was a nice long nap. I came down to find that I hadn't really lost a ton of chips and my table looked fairly reasonable; a few younger guys, some foreign Pokerstars pros that I didn't recognize and a few older guys that looked like soft spots.

I had originally intended to write a lengthy summary of this tournament since I feel like I played some of the best poker that I have ever played on Day 1, but I think that I'll just settle for posting 2 of my favorite hands from the tournament:

Background info: I had been playing pretty maniacally, opening probably about 70% of hands that were folded around to me and 3/4betting very liberally preflop due to a very aggresive younger guy to my right that was willing to actually play poker while the blind structure was good.

Hand 1: I'm down to 23k or so chips from the original 30 after losing a medium-sized pot on a preflop coinflip and have slowed down a bit on my opening. I pick up AQs in middle position somewhere and open to 1000 at 200/400. A 30-something Italian sponsored pro to my immediate left that had been playing pretty loose preflop but nothing too out of line calls and we see a flop of A73ss. I had been cbetting close to 100% of the time as the opening raisor and cbet 1625; I had been getting the sense that villain was becoming frustrated by me opening so many hands preflop and was going to be floating a huge range of hands on this flop. He does indeed call and we see the Ac turn. I check and he obediently bets 2900. Thinking he very rarely has a hand here, I decided that my best course of action for inducing spazz was to basically min c/r in this spot, which I did to 7000. Staring blankly at me and at the board, he thinks for a bit, verbally declares "well, I know you don't have the ace" and jams. I laugh to myself and think that it would be pretty funny if he somehow had a boat here and call to see him turn up the old QT and be drawing dead. I usually play somewhat tight in live tournaments so this hand was just kinda special to me since I actually got him in drawing dead.

Hand 2: This one is a testament to how crazy the table was throughout the day. The young Finnish guy to my right and I have been responsible for opening probably close to 75% of the hands at the table and I get the sense that people are starting to loosen up their opening ranges since they are tired of not being the aggressor. Still at 200/400 but now close to 60k effective, a middle-aged fishy player opens from UTG and there's something about the way that he throws his chips in that makes him look very weak. The Finnish guy is UTG +1 and almost immediately 3bets somewhat large to 3800. Suspecting that he may have just picked up the same read I did, I 4bet to 9600 with the old 47ss. It folds around to him and he rather quickly 5bets to 22400. I think about it for a bit, trying to talk myself out of doing something silly, but I felt that the metagame was pretty much perfect at this point and 6bet jammed. He folds fairly quickly and I get to flip up 47 like a champ. Again, I'm usually kind of nitty on the first day of live tournaments so this hand was pretty fun. I out-Scandinavianed a Scandinavian!

After those hands, I actually picked up aces twice and otherwise accumulated chips and so finished the day 2nd in chips overall. I went into day two 5th in chips (two starting days) and then somehow managed to bust before day 3, just running absolutely terribly on my all-ins. So it goes. I was annoyed to have busted but it's tough to be too upset when you get to go up to your room, fix a drink, and get to look out at this:



After a few drinks and no longer steaming about the tournament, I wandered around the hotel and eventually found my way down to the poker room where there was the final remnant of a 50/100 PLO game which apparently ran almost every day we were there. Unfortunately, I wasn't traveling with any cash and people didn't seem to eager to lend/transfer, so I had to settle for railing a bit and retiring for the night. The next day I woke up early and hit the slopes but was honestly pretty disappointed with the conditions - it was really late in the season and since the elevation didn't go much above 7,000 ft, a lot of the snow was already melting. Also, I didn't bring any warm-weather skiing stuff with me so I was just skiing in heavy duty ski pants and sweating my balls off the entire time. I don't like to ski with a camera since I broke a pretty nice about a year ago (so no pics of the mountain, really) but here are a few views of the conditions at the bottom:





The rivers/waterfalls were raging, definitely a weird first thing to see when you get down a mountain on some skis. Regardless, as the conditions were, I didn't really want to have my otherwise good impression of the alps squashed by skiing in a low elevation area at the end of the season, so I only hit it that one day, taking the rest of the week off to do a bunch of hikes around town and sample all the delicious beer. I guess that the whole concept of 'apres-ski' more or less originated in the alps, and I made sure to be done with most of my hikes around 4 to take full advantage of the ridiculous beer specials and great atmospheres of all the bars in the area packed with wasted locals doing crazy Austrian dances. That's not to say that I didn't take full enjoyment in my hikes though, either. One day, having walked a fairly good ways out of the more commercial area of the ski town, I stumbled across a smaller village and saw what resembled a golf cart path of sorts slashing up through the side of the mountain. Intrigued, I decided to see if I could pick up the trail somewhere and take it up to the top. I did eventually find it and it wound up being one of the better spontaneous hikes that I've ever done. Here are some pics:



Not sure if it's going to be visible in the picture, but the trail started just above the bigger house in the foreground and then swerves straight up into what looks like a dirt road from here.



A little bit of the way up, a shot showing the winding road upwards ski town off in the distance.



Eventually, the trail started to have more and more snow on it until it turned into chunks of ice mixed with melting, thin ice, and the going got pretty slow and wet. I decided to push on but after falling on my ass and seeing a baby deer and her rather large mother not too far off in the distance, I decided maybe there were enough reasons to head down the mountain, so I snapped a pic from where I made it up to, and began the descent down:





The hiking stick that I picked up to support my jittery old knees on the way down nicely juxtaposes against the sprawling mountainous background.

So yeah, most of the rest of my time in Austria was spent hiking/drinking and while definitely a great combo, I eventually got a little tired of it and generally lonely being surrounded by tons of euro poker players and not really knowing any of them, so I was pretty excited when the end of the tournament finally rolled around and I could catch a train over to Germany. When the time did eventually come, I flip-flopped between a number of places and finally landed on Munich at the last minute. Expecting a fairly small city, I was a little taken back when I walked out of the train station and saw a sprawling downtown. Luckily I found a hostel pretty quickly, put my stuff down, and being in what people refer to as the beer-drinking capitol of the world, couldn't see what I could do but sit down at the bar.

A liter or two later, people are starting to gather at the bar and coincidence being what it is, a Brazilian guy sits down that I recognize from my EPT tournament table... small world I guess. After a week or so in Europe alone, I had been getting kinda lonely and a familiar face was nice; we started chatting and eventually joined up with his friend and two other random Aussie travelers for a few rounds. A few liters and a ton of traveling stories later, I find myself pretty damn drunk at like 9. Realizing we had all skipped dinner, and most of us lunch, we head out on the town to find some German sausages or something. Instead, we somehow find our way to an "Australian Bar' that was absolutely packed; our Aussie companions are already pissed that we're going inside this place and then turns out that we've somehow found the only Aussie place ever to serve Fosters. Gross. We all pound our drinks and scurry out of there into a restaurant along the street. I get some sort of spicy sausage meal (terrible decision) and we keep the beers coming. Here, I have my first encounter ever with a mentally-disabled from another country. I was too drunk to really understand what was going on but this guy came up uncomfortably close behind me in the bathroom and just kept laughing and saying "hello, how are you".. I got out of there lightning-fast and told the table about the bathroom situation and was informed of his condition. I'm still not sure that I believe them; I think that a person having control of two languages rules out significant mental deficiency, but who knows, I'm probably not even remembering this correctly. Anyways, he was at the table next to us and if nothing else at least drew some eyes away from how belligerent everyone at our table was. Fast forward a few hours and we are at one of those beer halls that every 18+ male in the world associates with this picture:



I've always wanted to put down one of these liter monsters, and despite knowing that this was gonna be the straw that broke the camel's back, I couldn't resist. The last thing that I truly remember before 4 in the morning head halfway in a hostel toilet is singing lots of German songs with drunk locals, trying to explain to someone where St. Louis is, and just cheersing beers with everyone around me as hard I could since these glasses were an inch thick and basically unbreakable. Morals of the night: Germany is awesome and don't eat spicy sausages if you plan to spend a few hours later that night throwing up.

The next day it rained all day and it was the perfect excuse to just sit around and write a bit since I wasn't exactly feeling super anyways. If there's one thing that I'm really grateful to this trip for, it's the fact that it re-catalyzed my writing. I've always enjoyed writing in general, and specifically random short fiction, and I busted out a few small pieces on this trip during train rides and just random off-time throughout the days. A pretty standard end to the night wound up being a glass of Black Label and putting pen to paper; it felt nice and archaic:



Anyways, I spent another day after that in Munich checking out the public park in the middle of downtown and just otherwise walking around soaking in the culture. From there, I took a train to Frankfurt where I basically just spent three straight days drunk from 12 in the afternoon onwards and just hiking around taking in the sites. The weather was really pretty terrible the entire time in Frankfurt so I don't think I took a single picture, instead opting to just walk around backpack-less and stop into as many pubs as possible and chat it up with whatever degenerates happened to be drinking midday during the middle of the week. My time in Frankfurt went by reasonably quickly and before I knew it, I was heading off for Zurich, having made the last minute decision that I didn't really want to do the more adventure-based activities of Interlaken by myself and would rather save it for a trip to Europe with friends, which I'm sure will happen in the next few years anyways. Since Zurich was more or less a last minute decision, I really had no idea what to expect of the city. I guess that I had somehow forgotten about the whole 'swiss banks' thing so was pretty shocked when I walked out of the train situation and found myself in what frighteningly resembled the financial district in NYC (I hate big cities):



After walking around for 20-30 minutes and not seeing a single hostel, I decided to look for a hotel. This also failed. Getting kinda frustrated lugging around my suitcase (wish I had taken a backpack but all the skiing clothes hadn't fit), I finally spotted a hotel and basically skipped over to it, just relieved to be somewhere that I could put my stuff down and rest for a bit. I walked in to see marble/gold plating everywhere, everyone dressed like they were going to an opera, and for probably the first time in my life, just left without asking how much the price was per night. Not a frugal person by any means, this was a weird experience. (I later went back to the hotel and just out of curiosity inquired how much the rate was; it wound up being 1700 euros or something absolutely absurd per night).. Anyways, I eventually found my way over to the 'Old Town' part of Zurich across the river, and was happy to find a bunch of 3-4 star hotels clustered together, though still a bit frustrated by the total lack of hostels (I like to live by meager means when I travel, I find it's much easier to bond with people that way.. plus I hate shaving when I travel and the upper-crust doesn't really get down with the hobo beard look I've learned). Eventually, I got a 3-star room for something stupid like 250 euros per night. Zurich is an expensive city I guess. After my initial anxiety about the financial district, I actually came to fall in love with Zurich. As a city, it has everything: a big University, a modern financial district, a quaint/hip Old Town area, a red-light type of area, and everything is separated by a beautiful river and tons of beautiful parks. I'm usually not a fan of big cities but I could very easily see myself living in Zurich. Since this entry is already at absurd lengths, I'm not going to go through daily specifics in Zurich, but rather just say that I hiked around a TON in Zurich, probably averaging 20km a day, and just really loved how easily accessible nature was in such a large metropolis. Here are some pics:



First views of the canals, at dusk.



Not really sure what's going on in that statue, but it sure does contrast nicely with the alps rising up in the background.



Not a lot to say about this one. I love swans. Seriously, get stoned and go find a swan, I guarantee you won't regret it. The way they move their necks around to clean themselves is delightful.



I love the 'respect' signs they had around all their wildlife; everything just seemed so, I don't know, serene.



Alcohol menu from hell.



A pretty spectacular view on a beautiful day.



I know my Mom reads this thing and she's a fan of me with facial hear so here's an obligatory shot of the travel beard for her.

So yeah, sorry for the absurdly long entry but I got on a roll at some point and couldn't stop. I've been absurdly jetlagged from this trip because I got bumped up to business class on the flight from Frankfurt to San Francisco and the bed actually allowed me to sleep almost the entire flight which had me arriving at 11 at night completely awake. Whatever though, the comfort was well worth it.

As for April, the plan is basically to just get back into the swing of things with crossfit, play a ton of poker, enjoy CR's own SixPeppers' wedding/bachelor party, and then finish the month off with a sour note and get my wisdom teeth taken out. Either way, 2.5 weeks solo in Europe was probably a little bit too much, and I'm very happy to be back in San Diego's balmy weather and in the comfort of friends. If anyone actually made it all the way through this entry, congrats.

Cheers,
Mike

Sorry I've been so lazy with keeping this thing updated lately, but I've had grind on the mind and haven't really had the desire to give up an hour or two of good games for the sake of an entry. Luckily action is kinda dead tonight, I'm satisfied from a long day of watching amazing basketball games/seeing my brackets get decimated, and I always like to throw out a little update before I take off traveling for a while. Soooo where to begin? Poker always seems like a reasonable place to start and for once I have nothing to complain about! I finally put together a solid winning month in March, running way above EV at 10/20 and actually putting up winning numbers in every aspect of the 8-game rotation on Stars. To start the year, I had made it a point to get better at LHE, limit O8, and 2-7 TD. Although I'm admittedly probably still a loser in good LHE games, I have made 2-7 and O8 my biggest winning games by a wide margin in the rotation, which I'm really proud of - especially the O8 improvements. For some reason it really bothered me to be so bad at a game where I had a good grasp of hand ranges coming into it, but I just stubbornly kept playing in tough games and have finally gotten to a point where I'm noticing the leaks that other people are exhibiting and always working on curbing my own. Since the month is essentially over for me (leaving for Europe in 2 days) I figure I can't do too much karmic harm to myself by posting results, so here they are:



So poker has finally taken a turn for the better, I've been happy grinding lower limits, and honestly see myself doing so at least up until the start of WSOP events in late May. Aside from poker, my schedule for the last few weeks has basically just consisted of going out a ton and getting kinda obsessed with crossfit workouts. On the going out front, there was a stretch in early March where 3 of the poker players here in San Diego all had birthdays (myself included, I feel way old at 24) so there was basically just a week straight where we got tables/shitfaced every night... good times! As for the crossfit aspect, I guess that I have been doing it for just under 2 months now and I can already feel tremendous improvements in my general health/strength. At certain points, I entertained thoughts of starting to keep daily updates on here with the crossfit workouts/my times, but ultimately laziness prevailed and I abandoned the idea. I'm already kinda regretting the idea since I think it will be pretty neat to see the strides that I make if I keep up with the workouts, but meh. For example, there are certain workouts that are sorts of benchmarks for crossfit progress; we did one today called 'Cindy'. A round of Cindy consists of 5 kipping pull-ups, 10 push-ups and 15 air squats. You go for 20 minutes straight, as many rounds as you can do. I wound up doing 19 rounds, which equates to 95 pull-ups, 190 push-ups and 240 squats in 20 minutes, which is kinda sick when you think about it. Normally I would go ahead and give myself the 'ol pat on the back here, but in our 3 person class today, a 49 year old guy got 23 rounds and a freakishly fit woman somewhere in her 40's did 18 2/3 rounds. Pretty inspiring to see how damn fit a lot of the people are that have been doing crossfit for a while...

But enough ranting about crossfit! After tomorrow's workout, I'm gonna get a 2 week break to once again wreck my body. I'm flying over to Salzburg for EPT Snowfest this coming Saturday and I'm super stoked! It's the inaugural year for this EPT event, located at the Alpine Palace Hotel in Saalbach-Hinterglemm, which is a luxurious ski resort in the Austrian alps. The package that I won on Stars includes a week's stay, the standard room/meals, and a 6 day lift ticket/rental for the slopes, which is awesomely unique and should make for a great trip! Basically, I plan on either shipping the tournament or just busting within the first 30 minutes and taking the rest of the trip to hit the slopes. Tough life, eh?

After the week in the Alps, I'm gonna bop on over to Switzerland and just explore for a bit. This will be the first trip to Europe that I've done by myself, and always having been a bit of a closet loner, I'm pretty excited to just be on my own for a bit and meet some randos/have some adventures. I have heard great things about canyoning in Switzerland and the basic plan at this point is to train it on over to Interlaken at some point, shack up at a hostel, go canyoning for a day, then maybe get a famed Swiss mountain guide to take me up on a quick 2-3 day summit in the Alps. No matter what happens, I'll be diligent about taking tons of pics, and hopefully won't flake about posting a comprehensive trip report when I get back to the States.

Either way, life is good. Hope all's well with you, reader.

Cheers,
Mike

Hey again! So it's 9 in the morning here in San Diego and I've been up for 3 hours already; I just got back from Vail and aside from the ridiculous week of skiing that I got in, I'm also finally on a sweet sleeping schedule that I'm hopefully gonna be able to keep up with since Craig is in LA and I've got the place to myself for a bit. Realistically, not a ton has been going on since my last entry. I took an 8 day trip to Vail and otherwise played a ton of poker in-between then and when I got back from Utah. Poker-wise, things have been going very well. I've finally found a happy balance for myself where I'm very content playing 5/10-10/20 PLO and higher-stakes mix games and just kinda chugging along, having significantly cut down the 25/50+ PLO variance of last year. I'll probably jump back into 25/50+ some time in April or so, but for now, the grind has been going well and I'm happy with the results. This month so far:

The left is FTP and right is Stars; why I don't combine the two in HEM I have no idea. Obviously I'd prefer to be running a little bit better on Stars, but it's still a month in the black and I'll take it! So poker has been going well and hopefully I just continue to grind along for a while.

But enough poker, let's talk skiing! I left for Vail on the 13th and wasn't really expecting much of anything since I'd heard pretty much nothing but bad things about the snowfall in CO so far this season. Well, apparently I bring the snow everywhere I go. After luckboxing a terrific weekend in Utah a few weeks ago, I did the same thing in Vail, catching what will likely be the best week of snow they get this season. We got in on Saturday night and it snowed a ridiculous 20 inches that night and made for an absurd first day on the mountain. All of the back bowls were pretty much thigh-deep powder and the powder Libertys that I demo'd worked out fantastically. It continued to snow at least a few inches every night we were there and just made for great conditions. I was also pretty lucky to be on the mountain with a couple guys that were Vail experts and so I got led around to some of the best runs that I've ever been on - Shangri-La, Wow, Rasputin's Revenge and Highline are definitely some of my all-time favorite runs after this trip. The shitty weekend lift lines and annoying catwalks aside, Vail really is tough to beat when the snow is good.

My last few trips, I had made it a bit of a habit to try and force myself to hit a bigger jump every time out on the mountain. Well, I think it's gonna be pretty tough to beat this trip. One of the last days out, it got a little hairy up at the top of the Orient Express lift on the backside of the mountain; everything was whited out and I was hitting a few of the runs that I'd been shown earlier in the week by myself. Well, I wound up trailing a bit too close to the OB ropes on Shangri-La and wound up skiing to the absolute edge of a cliff drop that I couldn't see the bottom of. Not wanting to swan-dive an unknown distance I just clipped out an decided to hike out. First step, I sank into chest-deep powder. Uh-oh. I tried to take a few more steps but kept sinking and wasn't really making any progress at all. Like the idiot that I am, I obviously didn't have any avalanche/radio gear with me, and the last people I had seen on the mountain were Swiss tourists who looked terrified and lost, and had asked me for directions. Not gonna lie, I was a little scared. Not really sure what to do, I just decided to clip in and take my chances off the cliff. Legs shaking, I basically just rolled off this thing, and screaming like a little girl, fell what was probably only 15 feet or so into some very soft powder shoulder first. Seeing as how I had no idea how high up I was and whether or not the landing was safe, the whole situation worked out really well and it just wound up being a pretty exciting run! I've never been so happy to find myself on a catwalk after that drop in my entire life..

So yeah, the skiing aspect of the Vail trip was fantastic! I went on this trip with a couple of my high school buddies who had just gotten a new family house in East Vail. The house was ridiculous (really made me interested in CO property; I picked up a few real estate brochures for the flight out) and we took full advantage, going pretty hard every night. Everyone on the trip was supposed to bring a drinking game with them, and it wound up feeling like a big college trip, which I'm not gonna lie, I've really missed. We played a ton of baseball (like beer pong but with four straight cups, a side cup for stealing bases/throwing out runners etc) and I went undefeated throughout the entire week. All the guys with real jobs just can't keep up I guess :).. Otherwise, we just watched a ton of the Olympics, and I had a great time bonding with my friends' girlfriends, who I hadn't really gotten a chance to meet/get to know very well yet. Solid trips all things considered!

As for the most memorable moment, it definitely had to be my buddy Ross eating 50 chicken McNuggets in one sitting. We have a thing between us known simply as "challenge". Basically, if you see something ridiculous and someone expresses an ability to do it, or you just wanna make someone do something absurd, you can just utter the phrase and wait for them to either confirm their manhood or walk away with slumped shoulders. Not one to have his manhood questioned, Ross quickly picked up the 50 McNuggets (the whole reason this even started is because this McDonalds for some unknown, absurd reason had a 50 McNugget suitcase type of thing on their menu and we obviously couldn't resist experimenting with it) and somehow managed to down the whole box in what was definitely less than 30 minutes - an incredible feat! Picture for proof and manhood confirmation:

Haha, man, I love my life/friends..

Anywho, Ive gotta get some breakfast in and win this 4mil guaranteed Sunday Million on Stars today. Back to the grind I guess....

Hope everyone's well!

Cheers,
Mike

Hey, so I was sitting around feeling particularly bored this afternoon and thought hey, why not throw out a little update. Since last time, I've mostly been putting in a bunch of hours playing online, starting up a new workout program, and finally getting in my first days of the season in on some skis.

Poker has been going pretty meh. I finished up January on a big heater at 10/20, decided to move some money onto FTP, did well in the mix games on there, and things have kinda settled since then. Running a bit poorly the last week throughout a few different 4-tabling HU matches, but so it goes. Obligatory graph of a particularly annoying session 2 days ago:



All things considered, I've actually probably run a bit above my expectation the last few weeks, I just think its fun to post these sorts of -17 BI/session graphs and scare the people transitioning from NL to PLO away from our beautiful game. So yeah, I've just been trudging along with poker, putting in the necessary hours and assuming the results will be there eventually. I've been playing mostly 10/20 HU/6-max, 100/200 7-game mix, and occasional sessions of 5/10 HU PLO and 150/300 mix. Barring some huge score or epic downswing, I'll continue to play these same games at least for the duration of this month, and most likely March as well.

In other avenues of my life, I've finally gotten my shit together and joined a pretty intense gym that's close by in downtown La Jolla. The gym is under the crossfit umbrella (crossfit.com, or crossfitlajolla.net for our specific workout regimen) and has been pretty great so far. I joined up with Craig and fellow poker-playing friends TJ and Oscar, and since we're all in dubious shape and crossfit is a pretty damn serious workout program, we have all been getting our ass kicked pretty hard. For example, out last workout was 5 descending sets of:

50-40-30-20-10 jumprope double-unders (bringing the rope under your feet twice per leap.. for those that couldn't do this - aka all of us - it was 5x as many jumps, so 250-200-150-100-50)

then 50-40-30-20-10 sit ups.

Like most of the crossfit workouts, this one was timed and I finished it in just under 12:30 minutes, which I feel like is pretty quick given how out of shape I am. I really like the way that crossfit workouts are designed; they all work your physical core and are done in quick bursts, really strengthening cardio and quickly bringing muscles to full exhaustion. Also, the fact that many of them are timed is definitely gonna make it pretty fun to compare the times that we are posting now to those that we do in a few months, assuming that we all keep on going with the workouts. I had been planning on going in for another workout today but then I checked the website and uh, no thanks:

The day: too much time has passed, I don't even remember. The time: lateish, maybe 12 at night or so. The occasion: I had just finished writing what was far and away my most epic blog entry ever, complete with probably a solid 2000 words and tons of pictures. The predictable problem: my masterpiece was somehow deleted (and not saved as a draft WTF) and I had to wander around trying to de-tilt and not be pissed about the 2 or so hours of my life that had literally dissapeared.


Well, I'm back for round two, but this time it's going to have to be the cliffsnotes version, and most likely sans-pictures. Although I'm really itching to write about my Kilimanjaro trip, and will force myself to do so in depth before fragments of emotion/experience start to slip away from me, I want to write mostly about poker and my life/career-related resolutions for 2010 right now. First things first, I just got back from PCA a few days ago and it was a blast! The bullets:

• On the flight from Orlando to Nassau, I legitimately felt like there was a 25% chance that I was going to die on that airplane. First, we get boarded onto a rickety old plane that winds up being the wrong BahamasAir plane, and we get herded onto a smaller, somehow more rickety plane where the charming flight attendant (sarcasm) doesn't know how to turn the cabin lights on, and then later, properly close the cabin door. Meh, that wasn't so bad. An hour later, we hit the absolute worst turbulence ever. I'm a pretty experienced traveler and actually kinda childishly enjoy a bit of turbulence most of the time but this was the kind of "riding in a Wrangler in the desert over 3 ft speed bumps without a seatbelt" turbulence that made you wanna lose your lunch. Luckily for me, I was too busy being freaked out by a couple women on the plane screaming/crying to worry about myself.... Anyways, we got there safely eventually, but there were a solid 15 minutes in the air when I was legitimately running through my happiest life memories in case the pilot lost control of the plane.
• This was the first year I had taken a girl down to the Bahamas with me. It was a terrific decision and I doubt I'll ever go back without doing the same in future years.
• For the first time in four years, I didn't make at least day 2 of the PCA main event; I had a pretty tough table and an especially tough HSMTT guy to my immediate left that played probably 80% of the pots that I did. Meh, I lasted for an extremely long time with 10-30 BBs and made it to within 20 minutes of day 1 ending... All things considered, I'm fine with the performance.
• The next tournament I played was the 5k 8-Game Championship. 64 players, pretty tough field. I actually wound up winning this tournament (who knew all that spewing at the 8-game rotation on Stars would eventually pay off?!) and feel pretty great about it. The structure was deep the entire time and I really think that I played my A+ game for 3 days straight. I went into the final table with 86k chips (120k avg stacks) and clawed through a tough lineup of Michael Binger, Josh Arieh, David Williams, Noah Boeken, Pat Pizzen (sp?), Jean-Robert Bellande, and a solid older guy named Jim who plays online as BiilieD to take down the 105k first. It's my first ever live donkament win and a great way to start the new year! I'm a little upset that Stars didn't have a bracelet or plaque or something that I could donkishly treasure as proof of my live poker success but I'm gonna e-mail them and see what their fabulous support can do about that for me.. If nothing else, I'll take the 5k that I made from my buddy Greg on this tournament (he foolishly crossbooked me against a way better player at 5%) and buy myself a huge gold trophy!
• The weather in the Bahamas happened to suck pretty much the entire time we were down there. The lady companion and I wound up watching a lot of shitty movies and just wine n dinin' most of the nights instead. Unfortunately, I also wound up losing almost every CCR I had over $500 but c'est la vie, can't ship a live donkament and expect to run good at anything else for quite some time to come I suppose.

• Keep most of the cash game play to 10/20 and under. Well, I've already kinda failed this on account of one session where I just wasn't getting any action anywhere and had to settle for playing tougher than optimal 25/50 games. That said, I would still love to keep most of my play to 10/20 PLO and 100/200 8-Game this year. I can play both of those games and not be the least bit bothered by the swings and still make a projected 400-600k pretty easily I think. After the variance-heavy stress of the last two years playing 25/50 and higher, lowering my cash game stakes and maybe putting in a little more effort towards live poker and tournament theory sounds pretty damn satisfying.
• Get a 2-7 and O8 coach. Although I've improved by leaps and bounds in all of the game formats in the last year simply through trial and error, I really need to just sack up and admit to myself that I'm not going to get to a profitable point at either of these two games by myself. Try and try as I might, there are just certain concepts that higher-stakes players understand at these games that I've failed to grasp through simply observing and mimicking.
• Study away from the tables. This goal seems to be something of a 'flavor of the year' with people as far as 2010 resolutions go, but I would really like to try and force myself to put in at least a few hours a week towards studying specific traits for the few regulars at 10/20 and 25/50 that gave me a tough time throughout the last year. This post/pre-game studying is pretty heavily advocated by the two Brians and Cole on their CR blogs, and hell, tough to find better people to listen to as far as improving your poker game is concerned!
• Be more disciplined about quitting sessions. I've actually already been pretty good about this, but basically, I need to start quitting once I lose a few big favored pots. Ideally, I should be making some sort of resolution about being more level-headed and even-keel throughout my sessions, but shorter sessions just suit me better and I inherently play worse post-beats.

• Be more active. Yes, this is really vague. More specifically, I'd like to join the CrossFit (crossfit.com) group in La Jolla and get into a more regular workout routine. I'd gotten a bit lazy about staying in shape towards the later part of '09 and the Kilimanjaro trip and the training beforehand was a really nice reminder as to how much better I generally feel when I'm exercising every day and generally spending more time outdoors. Ideally, I'd love to supplement CrossFit with picking up running again and continuing to learn how to surf and play tennis, but that all sounds fairly lofty, so I'll take it slow I guess.
• Do more local travel. In '09 I found myself traveling a ton, but most of it was international and honestly just wore me out a ton. I find that I can't spend too much time locked down in one place, but also, doing huge trips with lengthy flights is just pretty draining, so I'd like to commit to at least a few trips this year to visit my high school friends who are scattered around the country and hopefully get some outdoorsy things planned around the trips. For example, I'm going to a friend's cabin in Vail in a few weeks for a week of skiing/partying. Many many more of these sorts of trips would be ideal. If I'm lucky, maybe I'll even get a quick mountaineering trip in on this visit to CO as well; my friend recently hiked a 14er and slept in an igloo; this experience intrigues me!
• Be better about staying in touch with family/close friends. What can I say, I suck at staying in touch. I just need to force myself to spend my absurd amount of free time calling/e-mailing people every now and then as opposed to sitting around staring at the sun.
• Break 100 at golf. All of my goals were too vague, I needed something specific. With how much everyone in San Diego goes golfing, I just have no excuse to not get this done. Apparently, my golf swing is "worse than Charles Barkley's" (ouch) so I've got a long way to go, but with how much money we have flying around on prop-bets most of the time that a bunch of poker players get out on the golf course, I honestly just have no excuse to not get some lessons and improve my game a bit.