What goes up...

...must come down (otherwise known as gravity).

A downswing was inevitable and it has arrived in full force. Since my last blog entry I picked up another few buy-ins before losing $13.5k over the course of the last 7 days. In the grand scheme of things, 13.5 buy-ins is not that big of a deal unless you are one of those guys who plays on a short bankroll (with 20 buy-ins or less). I could list off 20 things that aren't going for me at the tables right now but I know no one wants to read that. They say that you can learn a lot from a player by seeing how he/she deals with a downswing. I basically just need to clear my head and hopefully things will start playing out the way I want them to in the near future.

I fly to Kansas tomorrow morning, which is something I am really looking forward to. I'm gonna try to take Sutti and Olli to a couple casinos in Kansas City to get warmed up for Las Vegas. The only problem is that the KC games are pretty tough and they only spread $2/5NL with a max buy-in of $300, due to the law in Missouri that each player can only lose $500 during two hour period (a law which they recently re-enforced). I'd like to play a little higher than that but I suppose I'll have to wait for Vegas.

Rushing, Vienna, Vegas

My upswing just doesn't seem to want to stop, not that I'm complaining. This is without a doubt the longest (and simultaneously the largest) upswing I've experienced in my 3 years of playing poker. As of right now I'm up just over $22.7k for the month alone and we're just 9 days into June. It's time like this when you feel invincible and I'll be the first to admit that I feel pretty damn good right now. I've played around 9k hands this month so I'm definitely on target to get in at least the 20k hands that I wanted to before flying to Kansas.

It looks like I won't be making it to the Austrian Masters at CCC next week. This will be the first week of tournaments that I'll be missing in Vienna (made it to the last 3 or 4 I believe). I was really hoping to make it down there again but it's not looking like it's gonna happen this time, oh well.

As each days goes by I'm getting more and more excited for Las Vegas. In my mind I'm kinda disappointed with myself for only booking one week to be out there, I feel like the time is going to absolutely fly by when I'm out there and I won't realize what hit me until it's time to go again. Who knows, if things go well for me as well as Olli and Sutti we can think about extending the stay a little bit. I'd also like to hop over to California for a day or two if possible. So many things to do, so little time to do them in...

On a rush

Just a quick note to say that I've been picking up buy-in after buy-in these past few days. Yesterday I added a solid 9 buy-ins to my roll and today I followed it up with an additional 4. It feels great to be on the positive side of variance and quite honestly it could not have come at a better time with Vegas right around the corner.

So long, May!

May was without a doubt my most successful month ever. My results in cash games (all $5/10NL) even heavily outweighed my $12k tournament win at Everest Poker, which I never thought would happen so quickly. In total I played slightly over 30k hands in just under 100 hours. That's way more than I've been playing these past months but is something I would like to retain for the next few months.

We fly to the States on June 21st, where we'll be in Kansas for a week before flying on to Las Vegas for a week. I doubt I'll be playing much online poker there, so my goal is to fit in a good 20k hands before the trip. If I can avoid a downswing that should leave me with a nice chunk of change for the WSOP, where I have my eye on 2 events so far (Event 47 - $2000 NLH Freezeout and Event 49 - $1500 NLH Freezeout). Those would both be somewhat in my price range and even more so if I sell off any action. I will also be looking to satellite my way into the Main Event somehow but definitely do not have my hopes high on that working out.

We'll be staying in the "villa" with a bunch of other German poker pros (Sebastian Ruthenberg, Johannes "Seri" Vogel, Benjamin Kang, etc.), which I am most certainly looking forward to. I'm definitely interested to see if one of them can manage to take down a bracelet, sidebet anyone? It certainly would not surprise me.

Btw here's a pic of my current set up that I mentioned in my most recent post. Nothing fancy, but it gets the job done.