Life's been a bit of a whirlwind lately and I'm going through some pretty big changes in the next couple of weeks.

On June 8 I'll be getting married to my long-time girlfriend Lauren. We've been together since high school and have persevered through 9.5 years of a long-distance relationship. After the wedding, I'll be moving places in Chicago and adapting to the concrete jungle of Downtown.

I fly out on Thursday for a short bachelor party with my groomsmen for a golf at Oxmoor Valley and white-water kayaking trip down in Alabama.

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I strongly recommend everyone to check-out today's latest video by our new CR Pro zelwood. He's an expert on Poker Tells and has authored a book about the art as well.

This is the first-of-its-kind type video at CR and I think the members will really enjoy it. Zach takes footage from the 2011 WSOP Main Event and analyzes situations to illustrate live tells. This particular video focuses on eye-contact by Pius Heinz in hands where he has a strong and weak hand. There'll be another video next week that focuses on Jamie Gold's WSOP win and one of his tells.

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In other news, I'm anxiously following (and cheering) for the success of Ultimate Poker, the first regulated real-money online poker room in the US.

Personally, I'm not convinced that the state of Nevada has enough of a population to sustain an online room, but I hope that it spikes during the WSOP and will lead to bigger and better things for online gaming in the US. All it takes is for the company to show signs of success to get some other supporters and (hopefully) widespread legalization.

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Last comment - the PGA TOUR season is shaping up to be pretty memorable. As a huge Tiger fan, and one who always believed that he would 'be back', it's funny to see the same critics and experts who doubted him jump on the bandwagon with his recent success.

Sorry for the fragmented post. Promise to share more thoughts soon!

I thought I'd cross-post this from the 2+2 Golf Forum.

Credit to Rob Stocke, 2012 Georgia PGA Teacher of the Year, and an avid poster at 2p2 who is always willing to share his widom and insights.

He posted about this training game that is really great for several reasons:

1. It gets you out on the course -- something that appeals to me since I hate the driving range and mindlessly hitting balls.

2. Due to the structure of the game, it can be condensed into a 1-hour time-frame. This is great because, let's face it, not many people have four to five hours to spare for a full round of golf.

3. The game really focuses on the core skills to help someone see a material improvement in their golf game. This is paramount because seeing immediate improvement is a great driver for motivation and continued hard-work.

The game is deceptively difficult. Rob even mentions in his post that the best score he's ever heard was 30 and the guy is a Masters Champion.

So without further adieu here is the game:

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Drive +5

In Drive +5 you only play 7 holes (you skip the par 3's), you can play in about 1-hour, but you'll actually "play" more holes and focus on the areas that reduce your score. Here's how:

Take 2 balls to the tee - hit both drives, if a ball is in the fairway it is 0 points, in the rough 1-point, anywhere else (hazard, OB, etc) 2-points. Go pick up the drivers and move to a yardage inside 100 yards - pick a different yardage each hole, maybe 83 yards one hole, 66 another, etc. You'll hit 1 shot shot to the green as close to the flag as possible. Next you'll pick a chip shot - one hole pick an easy shot (makeable), next hole medium, next hole difficult (a good shot would be 4-5 feet). You only hit 1-chip shot per hole. Now you go & putt out both the wedge shot & chip shot. Total your score and add any points you acquired with the driver. Par is 5. For example:

A player hits 1 drive in fairway, and 1 in rough = 1 point
Hits a wedge to 20 feet = 1 shot
hits a chip from just off the green to 10 feet = 1 shot
2 putts the wedge shot = 2 shots
2 putts the chip shot = 2 shots
Total score 6 shots + 1 point = 7 total score. Remember par is 5!

I was reminiscing about my high school years the other day - particularly how I got started with poker. Looking back, it's pretty crazy how a series of innocent little gatherings, where a bunch of us brought our piggy banks (literally), evolved into a career for me.

Part of the fun in these get-togethers, was the random games that we would play during dealer's choice. While we played a great deal of Texas Hold'em (while having Rounders on loop on TV), we'd spend hours each night playing a variety of poker games that included wild cards, random rules, and plenty of chaos.

Keep in-mind, these games were tiny stakes ($0.05/bet, etc), so a huge losing night would be $20 and on rare occasion (story below) people might have lost $100. We were just a group of high school friends who had the itch to learn poker and satiate our inner-degen.

Anyway, my bachelor party is coming up and we'll likely be engaging in some of these games again between our golf / kayaking plans - so I decided to highlight a few of my favorite games below and encourage you guys to try them out!

Screw Your Neighbor: To start the game, you establish a certain number of 'lives'. For instance, you can decide 4 lives of $1 each.

Once this is decided, dealer shuffles cards and then everyone puts out their lives in front of them. Each player is dealt a single down card. The goal of each round is to not have the lowest card out there (Ace = low).

Action starts UTG and he has the option of either keeping his card or swapping it with UTG+1. UTG+1 cannot refuse the swap. Next to act, UTG+1 has the option of swapping with UTG2, etc etc. Lastly, when action gets back to the dealer, he has the option of keeping the card, or playing the card off the top of the deck.

Obviously, the best part of this game is when someone swaps you a 3 and you pass them an Ace. One additional thing is, Kings freeze the hands. So if someone is dealt a King, they simply flip it up and you are stuck with your original card.

Once this is complete, everyone reveals their cards and lowest out there pays a life. The deck is not shuffled and UTG becomes the new dealer. Play continues until a single player remains with lives.

Country Store:

7-card stud with a twist.

You get dealt 2 down cards and then the purchasing of your up-cards begin via the country store. 3 cards are turned face-up a la a Flop and each card has a price tag. So UTG has the option of buying any of the Jc, Ts, Js OR he can buy a card off the top. Once a card is purchased, everything else goes down on discount - so for example, if the Jc was bought, UTG would pay $0.10 to the pot and then the Ts moves to $0.10, Js to $0.25, and then the top card is revealed and placed in the $0.50 window.

After every street, there is a round of betting. Best 7-card stud hand wins. Adding wild cards makes it even more fun!

3-5-7:

This is far and away my favorite game variant. It's a little complex so try to follow.

Before you start, you need to decide on the number of points you are aiming for.

Once that's done, everyone antes.

ROUND ONE: Every player gets dealt 3 cards. During this round, 3's are wild and flushes / straights do not count. Once everyone sees their hand, you hold your cards up and dealer counts down. Release your cards to declare you're out or hold on to them to stay-in. If you are the lone player to stay in, you win a point. If more than one player stays in, the players pass cards (face down), see each others' hand, and loser pays the winner the pot-size. Cards are then returned to their rightful owner.

ROUND TWO: Dealer gives each player additional cards. During this round 3's are no longer wild and 5's are wild. Straights / flushes play. Same declaration of being in/out occurs.

ROUND THREE: Dealer gives each player a final 2 additional cards. During this round 5's are no longer wild and 7's are wild. Straights/flushes play. Final round of being in/out and then hands are turned over.

Once this is complete, reshuffle the deck, re-ante, and then start over. First player to win the predetermined number of points wins the pot.

I tried to illustrate how the rotating wilds can make this game very interesting.

Below is a scenario of ROUND ONE. In this spot, Players 1 and 3 would be OUT and players 2 and 4 would stay in. Players 2 and 4 would swap cards and Player 4 would pay Player 2 (Pair of 7s loses to Trip 10s).

Now, what's interesting in this spot is that Player 2 knows that Player 4 will have two wild cards in Round 3 while the other two players don't, so he can adjust his calling range accordingly. It makes for some very fun dynamics - especially if you get to watch someone else at the table get waxed when Player 4 makes Quads or better and just crushes everyone.

In-Between:

This one is simple and a classic.

Rotational game -- best if you use multiple decks of cards.

Dealer displays two cards and you have to wager that the next card is in-between the other two. Wager amounts can vary between a pre-established minimum and the pot-size. If the first card is an Ace, the player has the option of electing the Ace to be "Hi" or "Low". So, in an ideal scenario, you would declare Low Ace and then the 2nd card will be a King.

The twist to the game is when the middle-card ties one of the first two cards. The penalty is twice your bet.

This leads me to one of my favorite moments from our days in high school.

Now keep in-mind, we were hardly playing for any significant money. Most of us were broke high school kids who were making $8/hr waiting tables or working at Country Clubs. Nonetheless, there were a few kids in our class who had that super-degen characteristic that lead to $50+ swings on a daily basis. At the time of this hand, the pot had ballooned to an amazing $80 with us playing mostly $0.10 forced bet (situations such as 1st Card 5, 2nd Card 6, you pay the pot $0.10).

With $80 in the middle, the perfect storm had developed. One of the more gambly regs of our school was dealt an Ace and declared it low. Second card was a King. I don't quite recall the number of decks we were playing with, but this is obviously as +EV a situation as you can find. B pots it and then the dealer peels another King. $160 owed, dreams crushed, $240 now in the middle, and dozens of guys losing their shit over what just transpired. Simply amazing.

What the hell is wrong with the state of news media?

We've gone from delivering accurate and meaningful news to an arms race for the latest sensational headline or story, in an effort to maximize viewership. It's truly pathetic.

The tragedies that occurred in both Boston and West, Texas this week have really brought the poor news quality to light. As a semi-addict to current events and news, I've been glued to the coverage and have seen hours of reporting on multiple news stations.

To give you an idea of how bad things are, I've seen the following over the last few days:

- MSNBC repeatedly showing a man laid-out on the pavement at gunpoint. The man was released, but the MSNBC loop continued to show the footage and suggest that he might be one of the at-large suspects.

- CNN posting the address of one of the suspect's relatives on-air

- News stations reporting the suspects were Tweeting more threats (despite the Twitter account existing for only a few hours).

- Most famously, CNN reporting that a suspect had been arrested mid-week, which was completely inaccurate.

Now, I realize that a lot of these news stations are reporting on-the-cuff and reiterating things they here on the police scanner, but a little due diligence on certain stories would definitely help your credibility.

What has been most amazing during this week of chaos is how the collective efforts of thousands of internet people have helped to expedite the investigation. Digital sleuths of Reddit and 4Chan did their own detective work and were able to identify potential suspects, victims, etc. It's truly quite amazing how the evolution of social media and technology aided in the investigation.

I don't usually get excited or pumped up for any type of sporting event - I'll watch the Super Bowl or the National Title Games with diverted interest, but the lone exception is The Masters.

Of course, my bias is that I am an avid golfer, but there's something about the mystique of Augusta National that makes the tournament so compelling and exciting each and every year. The Tournament itself is pretty special, having been played at the same venue for 77 years. History has been written and rewritten on the same grounds as the games' greats over the years and it makes the whole week very unique.

One other neat wrinkle to this year is that an avid TwoPlusTwo'er named Michael Weaver is competing at the Masters. Here's a sweat thread if you want to follow his progress or read about his experiences in making the Finals of last year's US Amateur or playing collegiate golf.

Anyways - no need to bore a poker blog with stuff related to golf, so I guess I'll discuss some of the bets that I have going on for Masters week in-case any of you may want to cheer my teams on!

Bet 1: Snake Draft Fantasy Team - The format here is easy. Masters competitors are playing in groups of 3. My two buddies and I did a snake draft where we have to each draft 1 player from each 3-some. Low player after 36 holes in that 3-some wins. We also threw in some bonuses (and penalties) for high rounds, top finishes, and holes-in-one. What makes this format most fun is that it gives a little sweat on each and every shot.

Bet 2: Auction Pool - My Golf Club grouped some 2nd-tier players and auctions off the 1st-tier players. To give you an idea - Tiger went for $3300. $21k in total prizes paid out for:

Champ: 40%

2nd: 20%

3rd: 10%

Last after Cut: 4%

Daily Low: 4%

High Daily: 2%

First Hole in One: 2%

We got the "Rookie Group" and a group consisting of Sergio Garcia, Francesco Molinari, Gonzalo Fernandez-Castano and a group of Adam Scott, Bill Haas, Robert Garrigus, and K.J. Choi.

I love this team. I think the rookies are very capable of shooting the High Daily score and Nicolas Coelsaerts (a rookie) has the capability of shooting something low and grabbing that bonus once. I think Adam Scott and K.J. Choi have pretty good chances of placing Top 3 (let alone winning).

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For those of you who haven't checked it out - make sure you take 15 minutes and watch Nikachu's video that was released yesterday. The guy is a creative genius and absolutely hilarious - oh yeah, and he's pretty good at poker too.

Also, make sure you visit our On The Go Video thread to chime in and give some suggestions for us. I have some ideas for some other cool series that I'll be pitching to a few of our pros, but feedback is always helpful and appreciated.

I've written about a half-dozen blogs over a variety of topics but haven't been too pleased with any of the results - so I decided to just write a quick little piece about some of the new updates at CardRunners.

New Header - We gave our top nav bar a little face-lift and cleaned up some of the fonts. While strictly aesthetic, I think it is a definite upgrade from our previous one.

Improved Blog Editor - Let's be honest, our blog software has been in need of a big overhaul. We finally made some improvements that added some features and capabilities to make blogging a bit more pleasant of an experience. We've also improved the commenting feature to make it more conducive to dialogue.

Also -- here are some instructions on how to leave blog comments: http://www.cardrunners.com/cr_forums/showthread.php?205772-New-CR-toolbar-blogs

Mobile Forums - The new update also included a new mobile display for our forums

We'll be coming out with some more features in the near future so stay tuned! I also hope to finish one of my other blog pieces that are more about myself than CR-related.

I'm pretty excited about the release of our newest video format this week.

Debuting this week is the new "CardRunners On The Go" videos. These videos will feature high-intensity, low time commitment training videos, where CardRunners pros take an interesting hand or situation and analyze it from their angle.

There are a few things about the videos that I think will resonate with the community and make them very popular:

1. These videos are very quick. Let's face it, in a day and age of 140 characters or less, we all have shrinking attention spans and our schedules aren't getting any less busy. It can be difficult to block out a one-hour time to watch a video (and usually those videos need to be digested in multiple sessions). Well, we've cut out the fluff and constructed the perfect video to watch during that 5-10 minute window you have free during lunch, or while you are riding the train home after a long day's work. Try it on our new mobile-optimized site!

2. Return of favorite pros. These videos will not only feature the return of popular pros like Nikachu and David Benefield, but they will also provide videos for all forms of poker. On The Go videos will feature many game types including PLO8, Courchevel, 5-card Omaha, Omaha H/L, Badugi and more.

The first couple of videos will be available tomorrow (Monday) - a NLHE hand with JBaller (who will return to making regular contributions at CR) and a PLO spot with Gakn29.

I would love to get any feedback on these new videos to help with future videos so please leave me a comment here or shoot me a message on Twitter @alexjhuang if you have any thoughts!

What a spectacle.

Match Day lived up to its hype - a roller coaster ride of tears, jeers, and overwhelming emotion.

Let's set the stage. 100 Medical Students who have dedicated the last four years of their lives in pursuit of those two elusive letters: M.D.

As a dropout failure of the CPA Exam, I can't even pretend to fathom what they've gone through. Hell, just imagining the 24+ hour rotations at hospitals combined with the constant grind of textbooks is enough for me to need a nap.

Nonetheless, these brave souls, sporting their green 2013 Match Madness T-Shirts have all made it to the finish line. While spirits are high, there is a certain tension in the air as one-by-one each of these kids will soon learn the fate of their lives. Some will be staying local but others will be uprooting their lives (and families) and moving across country.

As we neared Noon, the directors of the Medical School entered into the room with a bag containing the envelopes. After a brief intro, I learned that the programs themselves actually have no clue who they matched with until 1p ET. Imagine being an employer and you're hiring is decided by a computer algorithm!

The envelopes were dumped into a Bingo tumbler and the envelopes began being drawn. Each student was to receive their envelope on-stage, open the envelope, and announce their placement in-front of 99 of their peers and another 300 or so friends and family of their peers.

I was admittedly a little shell-shocked when my fiance's name was drawn eighth. The next thing I knew, I was on-stage with her as she stood there and opened her letter. First-off, I have to say, screw you Medical Association for having a giant page of text, numbers, and letters and burying your match at the bottom of the page in regular-sized font. Second-off, I have to say, thank you Medical Association for matching her exactly where we wanted!

My reaction was surprisingly calm and exceptionally overwhelmed. Up to this point in my life, I had never been in a situation where I was so overjoyed by something that I was overcome by tears - but this did it. 9+ years and an estimated 50,000+ miles driven later, and I'll finally be living with my fiance. We won't be living together until after we're married, so I guess I'm not going to live in sin either (though I punched my ticket to Hell long ago).

The rest of the event was pretty enjoyable to follow. It was amazing how differently each person reacted to their placement. Some letters were met with tears, others with total looks of disbelief, and others with a jump of elation.

The action-junkie in me wishes that they would show a person's rank list (or top 3 choices) - just to add that extra level of anticipation / joy / disappointment for the enjoyment of the audience, but I understand the sensitivity of that information.

The last highlight of the event was that after each student received their placement, they were given a thumbtack and had to go to a map to mark where they were going. It was amusing (or scary) how many of our future doctors had absolutely no clue where they were going geographically. I watched on student spend about 20 seconds in the Rocky Mountains in search of Virginia, and another student in Northeast Ohio, nowhere near Toledo.

Stay tuned for some pretty exciting CardRunners-related news later this week!

Tomorrow marks a pretty significant day for me in my brief life - it's Match Day.

For those who don't know much about me, my fiance and I have been together for nearly 9.5 years. Of those 9.5 years, 9 of them have been in a long-distance relationship. We attended University about 70 miles apart, and after graduation, I moved to Chicago to work for CardRunners while she remained in my hometown to attend Medical School. After four grueling years of Med School, we've finally reached Match Day.

Match Day is the day that 4th-year Medical Students around the country receive their assignment for their Residency placement. While this time is an opportunity for these students to be recognized for their academic achievements over the last four years, it is also an extremely stressful time for many because of the unknown.

Throughout their 4th year in school, the students somehow scrape themselves away from their clinical rotations to find time to apply and interview with prospective Residency programs that they wish to attend. Oftentimes, this means traveling across the country (at your own expense) for an interview, only to scramble back home so you only miss a day of class.

All of this work and the dozens of hours spent interviewing culminate in a spectacle known as Match Day. While the actual experience varies from school-to-school, the gist of the event is that the entire class congregates in an auditorium. Each student is called up one-by-one to receive an envelope. The contents of the envelope will reveal exactly where the student will be going for their 1st year (and likely all 3 years) of residency. Apparently, some students opt to open the envelope in front of their student body, while others choose to open it in privacy.

Students are contractually obligated to go to their assignment for a minimum of one year, which makes for some potentially dramatic moments if a student gets a lesser-desired Residency.

Matches are derived from a combination of a Residency program's rank list of the students they interviewed and student's ranking of their interview sites via a computer algorithm.

I'm actually looking forward to watching each student as they approach the stage and take the envelope. It is always interesting to see how differently people react to high-pressure / high-intensity situations.

Of course, the hope for me is that my fiance ends up in one of her desired programs in Chicago. Unfortunately, Chicago is an attractive location for a good number of Med Students, which makes the program extremely competitive. I read somewhere that the programs in Chicago interview a few thousand students and only have 15ish spots available, so it's certainly a minefield of WSOP Main Event proportions.

Should I use my "one time"?

I thought I'd just point out one last highlight of my Vegas trip worth mentioning...which was easily the biggest highlight of the trip - experiencing Bobby's Room.

As a poker junkie over the last 10+ years of my life, I devoured stories and accounts of the big games in the famed room at the Bellagio. Each time that I had been to Las Vegas, I had gotten glimpses of the action - gazing at the pretty stacks of $100 / $1k / $5k chips scattered around the tables.

We had a few hours to kill one day and Brian was grinding in Bobby's Room so we stopped by. I felt like a geeky little 5-year old as I sat there in amazement. I was actually sitting in the room, decorated with the larger-than-life images of some of poker's biggest icons, among some of the elite names in poker that I've followed so closely. One table was full with Eli Elezra, Jen Harman, and Nick Schulman while Brian sat at a game with David Oppenheim.

Oppenheim was nice enough to let my buddy and I sit at their table as they played a 400/800 mix with 100/100 big bet NL / PLO games. Here I was literally sitting at a table in Bobby's Room among some of poker's elite and I sat there wondering how many thousands of other players would love to just be in my shoes!

I'll sum up the rest of my trip in some quick bullet points:

- I finally got to meet CR pro augie. We played a great golf course called Spanish Trail, which I believe is the same course where Negreanu and Ivey live. I posted a few pics of the course below.

- I got to experience the Aria's Multi-Action tables. For those unfamiliar, each player at the table has two unique stacks and you get dealt two separate hands. There are two buttons, two dealers, and tons of chaos. I ended up playing a guy heads-up for about an hour which got even crazier, but I had read a lot about the games on 2p2 and I wanted to make sure I tried them out while out in Vegas.

- Brian, Matt and I met up with Lauren Kling for lunch and she joined us in sweating what ended up being Brian's last match vs Joe Serock. We should get some TV airtime on the rail but we'll see!

Here's a pic of Stinger vs Dwan in the Round of 16:

- Funny moment during filming of the event as Tom Dwan showed up ~ 10 minutes late. The whole set was ready to go and he was nowhere to be found before his match with Doyle. Then, after arriving late, he had his cellphone confiscated as he couldn't stop from taking it out during the match.

We'll also be releasing a video of Brian analyzing a few key hands he played during the NBC HU. The vid should be out in mid-late March so keep an eye out for it!