It's Been Awhile

Long time no blog! I can’t recall going more than a couple of weeks without blogging in the last oh, half decade or so.

A lot has gone on in my life the this year so far. First off, I have switched to a vegan diet on the recommendation of my doctors. While this sounded like an awful idea to me at first, after having been on it for over 3 weeks now, I am actually loving it and can’t imagine going back to my old diet. It turns out a diet rich with meat (for me anyway) is really not a good thing for my body. My body doesn’t process meat well and was not working well for me and my heart. Before going vegan, I experienced palpitations in my heart 50-100 times a day that always made me feel uncomfortable. Over the last 3 weeks I barely even notice my heart anymore as it beats regularly now. I also feel much better. I have shed 25 pounds since November of last year to drop to 182 pounds. I usually gain weight in the winter (since the weather sucks here in Oregon) and lose weight in the summer as I play lots of golf. So I am excited to see what I can get down to by next November after playing a bit of golf.

Speaking of Oregon, I am back here now after spending a good deal of time down in California playing golf tournaments. I announced at the start of the year that I was going to focus on golf this year but unfortunately that didn’t end up happening the way I had envisioned. I could not work it out with my family to move down to southern California which caused a lot of tension, but fortunately things are going well now. My golf aspirations are likely never going to come to fruition, but I have my family in tact and that is a good thing.

Golf went pretty good considering I hadn’t played competitively in forever. I didn’t shoot above 74 in any individual competitive round and won one event on the Pepsi tour. I consider that pretty good given I hadn’t played in forever and was excited to see how things would go after a few years of playing full time. But I am back and focusing on poker once more now and am having some fun with that.

Getting my game back in good multi tabling shape has been a challenge. I am working hard on getting my game in shape for the mass multi tabling stress that is associated with playing your best over many tables. When I review hands and talk about hands, I feel my game is better than ever. And over 3-4 tables, I am playing VERY good for me at the moment. But I am not handling mass tabling well. I am making far too many mistakes. Namely calling down too light trying to find a few combos of hands that I beat and also running bluffs that just aren’t going to be successful often enough to show a profit. I have been making a little bit of money overall in the past few weeks while running 40 buy ins below EV according to HEM, but I still know I am making way too many mistakes and that is costing me big at the tables.

It is going to be a process to get back into it. The games are much more intellectually challenging than they were several years ago and success won’t happen overnight. Just like a break from golf is going to cost me strokes, a break from poker will do the same. The two sports aren’t really that different. I expect within the next 2-3 months at most that I will be playing some very good poker and am excited to see what kind of win rates I can attain. Right now I would guess I am making 500 big blinds a day in mistakes over a full days play and that is quite a lot. I am excited to reduce those mistakes in game time play and see what happens from there.

Funny story. Back when I was a 2/4 limit holdem grinder trying to make ends meet back in 2005 and 2006 on America’scardroom.com (which then was a part of the ongame network) a guy named Phil who worked for the site used to call me quite a bit and hook me up with bonuses to encourage me to continue grinding on that site. We would chat on the phone and I always found him to be absolutely hilarious. When I moved to Poker Stars to play the no limit, we lost touch. But a couple of years ago we connected again and I have got to hang out with him in Vegas and the Dominican Republic. He is a great guy and recently he got me pumped to play some MTT events over on America’s Card Room. I was amazed to learn that they have a $250k guarantee event on the first anniversary of Black Friday (April 15 NEVER FORGET). I say that like it is 9/11 since it kinda was in our world. Anyway, if you are looking for a big event with a soft field, come join me in that event. Americas Cardroom is where the event is at. Soft fields and $250k guaranteed seems like a nice way to spend the day instead of mourning the day that will live in infamy for us online grinders.

I am hoping to get in there and blog more. To be honest I was going through a tumultuous time in my life and I just kind of retreated from doing a lot of the things I normally do. I even took a little break from making videos for about 6 weeks, but I made about 5 in the last 2 weeks that will be out soon. I wanted to be sure my head was clear enough to make a video with my best stuff and just didn’t feel I was in a position mentally to do that. I feel solid now and I hope you guys enjoy the content that will come out in the near future.

Until next time, may all your cards be live and your pots be monsters. OK I completely robbed that from Mike Sexton, but seriously though, run good!