I guess I'll start off what's sure to be a long, rambling entry with the news that I finally caved and got a twitter account. I still think it's a mostly self-inflating platform but damn is it useful during WSOP time and tournaments in general.

You can follow me at http://twitter.com/#!/GordoLikeAFox. Twitter is a nice medium for me since I get into moods where I'm too lazy/unmotivated to pump out a solid blog entry but it's always pretty easy to describe a day's swings, activities, etc in a few sentences. Either way, check it out, I'll do my best to exaggerate my boring life.

...On to the real updates!

I hardly even know where to start. I think I'll go chronologically since early January and try to post a pic or two from each trip/event where applicable.

PCA: Good time as always. Coming in from Boston as opposed to San Diego this year was a plus since I could finally enjoy the significantly warmer weather as opposed to constantly bitch about how cold it was. I played a bunch of poker on this trip. Cashed in the main, finished 2nd in the 5k 8-Game (won it the previous year), won at the 300/600 mix game that ran the whole trip and somehow even crushed Jason Mercier betting 1-2-4-10k flops (I've run about as bad as I ever have in my life since then; I should've known the amount of luckboxing it would take to beat Jason at neutral props would empty me out for a lengthy spell).

We'll start out the pics with something artsy:




My memory has gotten a bit hazy at this point but I'm pretty sure that all I did after the Bahamas was play a ton of volume online at 25-20/100-200 PLO on Stars, 150-300/250-500 10-Game on FTP and get absolutely crushed at both. My record-keeping hasn't been great of late, but if I had to throw up a guess I'd say I was probably on a 500k+ downswing online entering into Black Friday. If nothing else, at least I don't have the enormous FTP $ sweat that I would have had if the downswing hadn't occurred.

I guess that it's more or less a professional expectation for me to at least touch on Black Friday and how it has impacted me/my general thoughts on the legislation. Regarding the legislation, there was a reason I never kept more than a few hundred on each of the respective sites. Not that I was necessarily expecting this Pokermageddon, but I always felt that something shady was a small, but nevertheless real possibility. I'm truly one of the "lucky" ones to have downswung immediately before the legislation passed and have not been seriously impacted, financially-speaking. That said, a lot of my close friends/my brother have a large percentage of their net worth locked up and it's a pretty sick feeling for everyone to have to just sit back and anxiously wait. But alas, call it an occupational hazard and move on I suppose.

Like a lot of other confused poker players post Black Friday, I drowned my boredom with alcohol and a marathon of Mad Men but soon got bored, found that the itch to play poker was pretty damn strong, and decided to pick up with the EPT.

My first trip was for EPT Snowfest and WPT Vienna (which looking back on the dates seems to have occurred before Black Friday anyways). I traveled with the one and only jcmoussa who's general nittiness was definitely a good influence on me. I only took 10k euros with me and had a seat in Snowfest guaranteed. I wound up bricking all the tournaments I played, (WPT Vienna being a brutal one where I 4bet jam Q3s in a weird spot on the bubble only to get 3 minute slowrolled by KK, flop a pair + FD, then brick out) but absolutely crushed the 20/40 PLO game. I think I made something silly like 60k euros across 5 or 6 sessions where most people sit 2-4k deep. Either way, it was a sweet trip; great for my confidence playing live and Austria was a beautiful country to explore. A few random pics:



Mozart made Kevin and Moussa hold his hands, it was a little strange.

Hmm, despite Vienna being a totally gorgeous city, I apparently didn't think it worthy to take any good shots. But LOOK AT THIS BUTTERFLY:




So Austria was pretty cool and gave me the EPT bug. I got back to the U.S for less than 2 weeks and instantly ventured back off to Europe with Clay (MesmerizePls or however u spell it) to hike the Cinque Terre then play EPTs San Remo/Madrid. Cinque Terre was just stunning. We hiked 4-8 miles a day and pigged out on amazing seafood every day. Pretty ideal. I'll try not to overdo it with the pictures:



A pretty standard view along the hike :)



Rusting locks along the first of the trails connecting Riomaggiore and Manarola. It is called the 'Lover's Walk' and the locks are meant to symbolize couples locking in their love. Clay didn't want to hold hands :(



I probably have upwards of 20 pictures from this trip that all look like this. Seafood risotto, bread, and lots of red wine. Mouth watering uncontrollably.



Just some more of the beautiful views.



For the 3 girls that accidentally find their way to my blog. Back in the good old days with beard and fit before Vegas sucked the life out of me :(



A typical Chinese poker session with Clay; my hands are set and he's still deep in the tank.

Aaaand I'm going to cut myself off with Cinque Terre otherwise this blog is going to get to unreasonably long. From Cinque Terre we went straight to San Remo by train just in time to catch the start of the EPT. Not a ton to say about this trip, really. Due to the Italian government/local casino's incompetence, it was pretty much impossible to play any poker aside from the tournaments. I busted out of the main event in a pretty brutal way, getting in KK vs QQ on KJT2 where he flats 3b pf, c/calls flop and overbet ships turn for a 3x average stack. Pretty annoying but one of these days a big buy-in MTT run will materialize for me. On the last day of the trip, I min-cashed in the high-roller turbo and that was more or less the extent of my poker playing. Otherwise, I met Gavin (gavz101) on this trip who's a great guy and was a blast to party/be a degen with in San Remo/Madrid and spent lots of time basking in the sun. A couple of random pics:




The standard post-tournament routine in San Remo: mojitos, snack, pool, drinks and gamble.



Oh just your average heterosexual shirtless bearded-man tandem bike ride along the San Remo coast.



Gav, Clay and Melanie stopping for a pic along our bike path.

San Remo was then immediately followed by EPT Madrid, during which I was able to take a whopping zero pictures. I was hard on the grind. Unfortunately, the grind was a little hard on me as well. I somehow managed to bust the 10k main in the 3rd level which is a new record for me. I then proceeded to lose 3 40k+ euro pots as a minimum 58% favorite in the 25/50 PLO game, busted every other tournament I played including the 10k turbo, and all-in-all had a pretty terrible time financially-speaking. Thankfully the company was good so I maintained sanity long enough to make it back to the States, rest up for a couple of weeks and make my way over to Vegas.

Vegas was, predictably, 100% terrible. I went an impressive 0/23 in tournaments and lost another 100 or so the few times that I played cash. Pretty annoying but I actually maintain that I played well through it all so all I can do is sigh, shrug it off, and look towards future tournaments. I would elucidate more on Vegas, but honestly, it was such a physically/emotionally-draining experience that it all blurs into 1.5 months of nothing and I'm happy to be past it and not thinking about it anymore.

So presently, I'm back in Boston gathering my things together, piecing together last-minute sublettors for August, and once more looking forward to sunny, stress-free days in San Diego. I've had a great time in Boston; living with good friends that don't play poker was a breath of fresh air and it provided a terrific opportunity to travel which is otherwise a huge pain coming from the west coast. That said, my friends are splitting across the country again and I'm ready to get my GRE book out, finally adopt that puppy I've been dreaming about for years, play some cards on the side and finally settle into a more or less quiet routine in San Diego. I probably won't blog again for a bit as I gather and reorganize my life, but I'll throw out a little update once I settle in San Diego.

Sorry it took me so long to throw out an update but traveling a ton and downswinging excessively aren't exactly great catalysts for blogging. Hope all y'all are well!

Cheers,

Mike

P.S. I'm currently in the process of producing content for a new poker training/community site; I'll throw out a link once it looks like it's ready for a public opening. Suffice it to say that I wouldn't put my time into something that I didn't believe in, so I think it's going to be really innovative and a positive force in the online poker community. Excited to share it with you guys :)