Nanananana

February has been going quite well for me online. I don't know how many hands I've played because my HEM is screwed but I've been playing 2-5 hours a day for the most part. This past week I went down to Marburg to visit Nik and inevitably ended up playing quite a bit of poker. Talking poker with a friend so talented is so immensely beneficial as a poker player, I can't stress enough how important it is to have smart poker friends if you want to keep improving.

Like I said my HEM is on strike so still no HHs, though I did manage to dig this one out to show the world how Ramin is my personal ATM. We have a pretty interesting dynamic due to the fact that we play together almost every day but I was still surprised when I saw this one get to showdown. Oh yeah there's one more hand that needs to be shown. It's probably the most retarded call I've ever made and I'm pretty embarassed to post it. Yup, more than 6x the pot on the river. Don't bluff me!

My next trip will be to Dortmund for the EPT. Sebbau is well on his way to winning his weight loss prop bet (congrats btw!) for 3k eur and 5% of EPT Dortmund. He's mainly been eating right and playing a bunch of squash, I guess that's the key to success. I challenged him to a squash money match while we're in Dortmund for 1k eur and 10% of the EPT tourney so I at least have a chance to win back my percentages and get a chunk of him if he sebboxes around. I used to play a ton of squash 6 years ago but have played maybe twice since then. Finally I have an excuse to start playing again!

After that I'll be heading to Vienna for the Spring Poker Festival at CCC which is always a great time! I'll go there on the 23rd or so to make it for the Main Event and the 2nd chance tourneys. Hopefully my Russian friends will be there for the cash games as well :)

That's it for now, I'll hopefully have an exciting announcement to make this week. I just need to clear up some last details but it's all looking very nice. Life is good!

Greetings from Austria

I spent the last week grinding (no hands yet, on my laptop right now) and on Thursday late afternoon I got a last-minute invitation to play in the "German Highrollers" cash game made for DSF. The only problem was that the filming was on the very next day in Saalbach, Austria. Eventually I found a flight to Munich early the next morning and then took a train and a taxi the rest of the way down, a stressful trip to say the least.

The game was 25/50eur NL with a 10k min buy-in. I don't think I'm allowed to talk about the results, but it will be broadcast in a month or two and then you can see what happened. I'm fairly happy with my play, but I was pretty carddead through most of the day which didn't allow me to get into too many interesting spots. Also, I was relatively quiet at the table so I doubt that will make for very interesting tv. It's not like I was nervous or anything, I just legitmately have problems understanding Austrian dialects plus I don't talk much at the table anyway. That's something I'd like to work on in the future, talking to have fun/provoke tells while at the same time not giving off tells yourself. Sounds simple, eh?

I only had the one day of filming and then today I did some skiing here with Johannes. The hotel that they picked is just sick. It's a 5star resort that just opened this past November and as you can imagine everything is brand new. It's also connected directly to a ski area so you just walk down the stars and can get right on the ski lift. Pretty sick. Too bad I have to leave tomorrow, it would have been nice to make a weeklong trip out of it.

Anyway, for my first real TV experience it was pretty fun. I hope I represented the "internet generation" adequately and I'm curious to see if tv audiences will enjoy that kind of cash game format. Tomorrow it's back to reality and back to online poker.

Lazy

It's been a week and a half since my last blog post. Usually I don't let it go that long but I've been feeling pretty lazy these past days. My plan to play a bunch online this month, which I plan every month but never seem to follow through with, has been going alright. I think my HEM is screwed up because it's only showing 6k hands for the month but I feel I've played more.

I'll try and make it a point to pick out some interesting hands from my next sessions and post them, I haven't done that in a while. My blog has become a lot more about my life rather than my poker playing, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. There are only so many cool or weird hands you can see before you've seen them all anyway. Bad beats are especially that way, plus to be quite honest no one wants to read about bad beats in the first place.

I finally ordered the Herman Miller Aeron aAU123CD chair which I've heard so many good things about but never came around to ordering. I have a standard office chair from IKEA which is alright I suppose but I'm really looking for something that will be healthy for my back and posture longterm. I slouch when I am sitting which I know is terrible but is a habit I find difficult to break. It's just so comfortable to sit like a slug. Anyway, when the chair arrives it should finally complete my home setup. I'll post a picture when it's all set up.

Other than that, I wish I hadn't eaten so much crap in Australia. I think I hit the buffet one too many times, in particular the chocolate fountain where you cover your desserts in an extra layer of chocolate. I didn't do a single workout on my trip and I paid the price at soccer practice the other day. I'm still hurting from it and I've got an indoor tournament tomorrow morning. Yuck.

In closing, I've been busy figuring out how deep Uncle Sam is gonna dig into my pocket this year. I was much better about keeping better records and hanging onto receipts and such during 2008 so I'll have considerably more deductions. Tax day isn't until April 15th but I figured I should get a head start to get the pressure off my shoulders. Whether or not I think it's fair that Americans pay taxes on worldwide income is a whole other blog entry that I'll save for another time. Adios!