To Barcelona and back

First off, thanks for the comments from my last blog entry, they were well thought-out and certainly got me thinking about a lot of things. No, I definitely won't be writing a book though! My blog started as a pure poker results thing but has developed into more of a journal to a certain degree. To be completely honest I don't even enjoy blogging all that much but I do take pride in the fact that I have been able to keep it updated for years now when several of the blogs that I enjoyed reading have died off over time. Most lose the battle against laziness, I haven't given up the fight yet.

Barcelona was obviously a disappointment on the poker front but was definitely enjoyable as a whole. I built up a 90k stack pretty quickly on day 1 only to drop back down to 52k by the day's end due to a questionable 4bet shove with TT against a Russian spewbox. On day 2 I had the pleasure of eliminating Daniel Negreanu when I completely owned him. Well, maybe not owned him but I definitely taught him a lesson. Well, maybe not that either but my 99 was good enough to hold against his 85s when he openshoved 11BB from the CO and I reshoved the button.

I had around 100k when I got into a blind battle with Joram Voelklein on a 662 flop. His A6o obv had my JJ crushed and I lost all but 10bb that went in an orbit later with TT vs the AA of my neighbor to the left. All standard as far as I am concerned. Anyway, enough poker talk.

I had the opportunity to play tennis outdoors twice in Barcelona, once on clay and once on a hard court. Both were firsts for me and I gotta say that I still prefer playing indoors on carpet or astroturf more. There are just less things that need to be factored in like sun or wind making the game much more fair for both players imo. Getting used to how much the ball slows down on clay took a little while for me but once I was got in the groove it was pretty enjoyable. Ok, enough tennis talk.

My plans for the rest of September are to relax, finish watching seasons 2+3 of 24, finish reading Fooled by Randomness, plan/coordinate my winter trip to USA/Bahamas/Australia and hopefully in the meantime recover from my online poker downswing. It's easier said than done!

One final note: Congrats to my sister who just found out she passed the bar exam and finished her first day of work as a lawyer!