I've got 69K heading into Day 2 (~45K average, 360 of 500-odd left, 54 paid.) It was a tough table/seat draw, with John Hennigan (last year's winner and, I think, one of the best poker players I've ever sat with) directly to my left, but I got the best of him all day - it helps to flop lots of sets. In addition, Rhett Butler was to my right, Rizen spent all day in Seat 8 (I was Seat 4), and a shortstacked Tmay420 showed up for the last couple of levels in Seat 9, but there were a few soft spots and I chipped up off all of them. I never ended a level with fewer chips than I started with, which is always a good sign, and will have > 100 BB going into Day 2, another good sign. As I've usually been saying on here, I'm getting more and more comfortable with the way live play flows and all of my moves are working/I'm picking off small bluffs with third pair repeatedly. This type of stuff (winning small pots with next to nothing, picking the one good spot every 2 hours to bluff, only losing one pot making a "wrong" calldown postflop all day, seeing no showdowns but constantly chipping up just a little every hour) is really big for me; when my reads are on like this, I only need to win one or two big pots a day to go very deep.

I'll post as many hands as I can when I get back home to a working computer.

Other notables: Vivek @ 110K, Thayer @ (I think) 50K, Shaun Deeb busto with 2 hands to go in the day.

Got here last night and just played the $5200 event ("just" as in "busted an hour ago".) It was another non-starter where I never got over my starting stack, although I played moderately well before running KK into AA with an effective 22 BB. Doh.

More (okay, not more) importantly, after struggling for a day or so, my laptop hard drive looks to have totally died. In fact, I'm typing this from the hotel lobby's free Internet PC's. This means no updating the blog until I'm back home on Monday or Tuesday (or maybe Thursday if I run hot in the ME, heh) - I already ordered a replacement off Ebay, but not having a working PC is really going to suck till then.

The good news is I always make sure to copy all the data over to my desktop/vice versa, so I think the only thing I've permanently lost is a few photos I was too lazy to transfer the last time. The bad news is the amount of time it's gonna take to install Windows/Office/Pokertracker/all the other stuff on the new drive...not to mention that my desktop hates rendering videos in Camtasia for some reason, so I've been doing that on my laptop. There are a bunch of raw video files on there that I've made into videos already, but will not be able to reproduce if they ever ask me (this comes up from time to time.)

All the same, this pales in comparison to what would happen if I didn't have a backup copy of (nearly) everything - I don't even want to think about trying to do my taxes with no proof for anything I did last year. 500-odd tournament 'sessions', hundreds of hours of cash games, and no convenient Excel spreadsheet for any of it/records scattered across eight sites, some of which are way less cooperative than others...yeah, okay, that wouldn't be good. If my desktop in NYC gets hit by lightning in the next three days, I'll either have to shell out a billion dollars for data recovery or kill myself. So, basically, the moral of the story is "back up your damn files".

With that in mind, I'm off to, uhh...watch TV and/or spend 12 hours a day in the poker room to avoid boredom, I guess?

Quick update:

-Played one big AC tourney, a 1K sat (too busy the next day to play the other one.) Won 0 hands in 3 hours. Highlight (also the only light): calling a 10x UTG shove with 9x and TT to see the other guy turn over Q5s. I river a boat, except I was drawing to quads on the flop. lols.

Sunday went okay, not great. Made two deep runs in both Stars and FTP. I wound up bubbling @ FTP on a reshove gone bad when someone behind me had kings, but making it to the top 300 on Stars. It's not a good result or anything, but I had built up deep stacks on both tourneys, and that's how you final table them eventually.

Making the second half of my CR vid before I go back out to AC for the 10K ME (and a couple of more prelims) on Wednesday or Thursday.

Very nice IMO :)

My poker vacation's stretched to an unprecedented 2 weeks (granted some of that was involuntary and Wednesday was the first day I could really talk and walk around), but it's time for it to end. I'm heading down to the Borgata tomorrow morning and will be playing the $1500 the day after that (theoretically I could play the 1K tomorrow as well but something tells me I'm not gonna get there on time. doh.) Assuming I don't FT that, I'm heading back after I busto, then playing a full Sunday (if you have a Cardrunners subscription and see my latest video...there's a reason I play these things, OMFG was that FT awful) and resuming a full schedule after that.

For whatever reason, I've been strangely hesitant about starting to play again, but it's time to let go and enjoy it.

Pretty much out of it since Friday. This is gonna be the first Sunday I've voluntarily missed in at least a year. Dumb flu :(

Totally wrecks my schedule, though I should be alive and moving again within the next couple of days.