After a nice two mostly poker-free weeks (although I've put in a few hours in the last several days), I'm finally leaving Seoul tomorrow. It's been a lot of fun, but I'm ready to head back. More pics forthcoming (although not too many more because our camera decided to die. Tip: putting in wet, probably sandy seashells in the same bag as a digicam is dumb.) Take it from me, though, that Seoul is a great city to be 20-something in...if I spoke Korean I'd probably never leave. The nightlife is hopping, everything's cheap even with the bad dollar, and the food is surprisingly good even if you don't touch anything spicy. Mmm, Korean bakeries.

On the poker side, I played 3 tourneys today and wound up making another Cake FT, although it was only 50K this week and I still only got 6'th for a couple of thousand. No video this time, but the highlights included 4 shoves with 2-5 BB stacks and getting 4 folds, and sucking out on aces AIPF for the donkament life twice. In further fitting Cake fashion, my bustout hand included me shoving 8 BB UTG and getting called by the button's J8 sooooted for 98% of his stack. lol. Regardless, consecutive Sunday tourney FT's are always nice.

Looking forward to more playing time/videos/etc. after Tuesday.

The proposed regs are out. Here's the 2+2 discussion.

I haven't read these yet and am not planning on it until I get back from vacation, but I've read the thread and looked over the key paragraphs quoted in it. If there's nothing in the .pdf that's missing from the discussion, my initial half-assed legal opinion is that this is a total win and the best case scenario for online poker players as a whole. There's no definition of poker as illegal (I expected this and would have been very surprised if poker was even mentioned in the regs, but that was the worst case outcome); the regs fall back on the state laws surrounding Internet gambling, which further muddies the waters for everybody; and they all but exclude the possibility of a blacklist of ACH processors/merchants.

But wait, there's more; these regs allow banks to expend absolutely no effort on verifying whether an ACH transaction is proper at all, as long as the last foreign entity in the transactional chain says it is. That's basically the ballgame, because all a site has to do to go back to the Neteller, "money in your account ASAP" era is to find a non-US bank willing to make that certification. Moreover, as long as the bank sticks to poker sites and excludes sportsbooks, it's arguably not even doing anything wrong, because it's not violating any federal laws (at least from the Fifth Circuit's point of view, and there's no way the DoJ will ever bring another case on the matter - if the Fifth Circuit [hint: Texas] is that unwilling to give the government's broad definition of the Wire Act any credit, nobody else will, either).

This plus the ongoing WTO saga means a very rosy future for US online poker.

Since I'm a Cardrunners pro now, I took half a day off today and made a few videos.

Good news: I made a final table!

Bad news: I read souls :(

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuNL2LLFlQE

edit: Bah, Youtube screwed this one up. Cliff notes: I spend 20 seconds talking about how my AQs probably wants a call from 99 although it's close, the BB calls with 99, flop = 9 high. Oooops.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7200014428284116874&hl=en <----- slightly fixed, but still blurry link

I went to Korea to play a poker tournament and then go on vacation for two weeks. The tournament part turned out to be quick and painless - three hours into the thing, QQ ran into a set on a 6 high flop with 60 BB, then, 15 minutes later, ran into another one on an 8 high flop with 25 BB. As they say in this country, gg no re.

I don't actually care about this because, as it turns out, I've been busy watching this:



Yes, that's right, they really do have a Starcraft channel here...actually, two gaming channels, which both mostly show non-stop Starcraft games complete with breathless, excited commentary. If poker ever catches on here, the results will either be really really good or really really bad. I'm not sure which.

When I haven't been watching that, we've been doing stuff like this:



In that shot, I'm paying 10 bucks to have lots of fish eat dead skin cells off my feet to make them healthier. Oddly enough, this not only actually works, but is probably the most fun thing I've ever done in a foreign country.

If fish that nibble substantial parts of your legs off aren't your thing, you could always do this instead:







Those are shots of a 1300 year old, partly rebuilt Buddhist temple basically in the middle of nowhere (it helps to have in-laws that love you despite not actually having a language in common who will ferry you around to places like this one.)

Bonus shot from a particularly nice cliffside:



Prettiest. Country. Ever.

I'll probably get some more card games in and/or find Adam [censored] Junglen's mom at some point, but right now, I'm enjoying this vacation a lot.

After about 18 hours of travel time, I'm writing this from my hotel room in Seoul, where I'll be playing the APPT event in a couple of days. Initial impressions - this city's awesome, and I'm jetlagged as hell. I'll probably post more about it tomorrow or the day after, and, of course, once I busto/robusto the actual tournament.

Final Absolute update: still rigged, regulars apparently back in action. Okay, you guys won, good luck with all that.