April 8th, Melbourne Australia: I look over my two packed suitcases and carry on bag for anything I might have forgot. I recheck the list I created at the start of the day for things I had to get done and make sure they’re all accomplished. They more or less are, so I zip up my bags and instruct Steven to make sure the place is spotless before Celina gets here in a few days or she’ll kill me. I give him an hours wage and tell him that the remaining weed in the house is all his if he does as asked. He was originally going to be my ride to the airport as well, but after taking me to a movie the girl I’m seeing told me she’d like to drop me off at the airport too.

The traffic through the city is awful, though it frees up considerably once we hit the freeway out towards the airport. My flight is at 7:40pm and we get to the airport at about 5:45. She walks with me into the airport, and I go up to the Qantas international business check in to get my bags sorted
“Hi, I’m here to check in for the 7:40 to Honolulu.”
She pauses and looks at me strangely “Um, do you have a copy of your ticket.”
“I do.” I take it out of my suit pocket and hand it over to her. She examines it for a while then looks at me befuddled.
“Sir did you mean to check into your flight to Sydney? The flight to Honolulu doesn’t leave from Melbourne.”

Suddenly my conversation with the travel agent rushes back. The ticket was booked for all major flights, but I’d have to book my own flight from Melbourne to Sydney, as well as the ones to Wisconsin and Nairobi to Mombasa. I’d remembered the later two, but for some reason blanked on the first one, which was now clearly the most pertinent.
“Oh I can’t believe I did this. Christ I am so stupid it’s amazing” I remark.
“Excuse me sir?”
“Yeeeeeeeeeeea, I don’t have a flight to Sydney cause I’m a huge idiot. Is there anyway to get me to Sydney in time for the 7:40 flight?”
“You’ll have to speak to our sales desk sir, its right down there.”

As I walk out of the line the girl I’m seeing asks what happened. I explain to her and naturally she bursts into laughter. Who could blame her?

I walk over to the sales desk and explain the situation to the guy behind the computer. He tells me we’ll have to take it over to the international lady down the desk. We walk over and he tries to tell her what’s going on
“It seems the gentleman has a flight to Honolulu from Sydney at 7:40 but no flight to Sydney.”
“What?” she asks.
“It seems the gentleman is a moron” I remark.
She looks at me apparently confused as to who I’m calling a moron
“I’m the moron, I thought my flight to Honolulu left from Melbourne. Is there any way to get me to Sydney in time or get me to Honolulu tonight?”

She starts looking through the computer and describing my options. There’s a 6:30pm flight to Sydney but that won’t get me there in time. I can spend $600 in fare differences, $300 on a flight to Sydney, and god knows how much on a business ticket from Sydney to Honolulu on Pacific airlines in order to get there tonight. Otherwise I can wait 48 hours and pay nothing except for a $130 flight from Melbourne to Sydney. I decide on that option and she books me a flight in the mid afternoon to make sure there is no recurring moron related fiasco.
“This is only slightly embarrassing” I tell her as she hands me my ticket for Friday. “Thanks for all your help.”

I walk back to my girl and tell her “This was all part of the plan really, I felt like spending a couple more days with you but didn’t want to come off needy so I organized this. Yep, all intentional. So what are we doing for dinner?”

We get back into the car and decide on steak for dinner, which means ‘Rockpool’ at Crown. She takes out a cigarette and asks “Do you mind if I smoke?”
“Do you?” I ask as I whip out one of the ‘Bolivar’ cigars from my suit pocket. The plus side to being the kind of person that’s so forgetful that you fail to remember to book a connecting flight is that you also sometimes forget you bought Cuban cigars and left them in your pocket until an opportune moment presents itself. I light up in the car, roll the window down slightly, and celebrate my last 48 hours in Melbourne in carcinogenic style. I’ll try this again on Friday.

That’s right, I put a serious foot up the ass of that losing streak by hitting four different five figure cashes in a three day span. It all started when I won the Tilt morning $100 rebuys for $14,553 three days ago, then won the Stars morning $100 rebuys the next day for $15,050 after getting very lucky when getting it in with AJo against QQ heads up for most of the chips in play and spiking an A on the turn. Then yesterday I got second in the morning Tilt $150 for $18,032, then somewhere in the area of eight billion hours later I finally busted out of the SCOOP $500 rebuys in 17th for $10,318 (though that tournament was under Timex.)

I obviously recognize that the major reason for these results was due to a major shift in variance in my favor. I didn’t exactly lose a lot of coin flips during that period, and 80-20’s were closer to 95-5’s. Still, a winning streak inevitably has an affect on your confidence level, particularly after spending a month getting pummeled day in day out. Allow me to give you an artists rendering of this concept. Here’s me four days ago:

I don’t know if I should be betting here, umm, let me see, oh God, maybe I’ll just check.

And here’s now:

I FUCKIN RAISE MOTHER FUCKERS! BLAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!!!!

While making that visual analogy it is important to note that I am in better shape than the Hulk, and would prove this were he a real person I could challenge to an arm wrestling contest and not merely a character invented by Marvel Comics with an anger management problem.

Anyway, as many people already saw in my BBV4L brag post, I’m being kicked out of my apartment. They sent me a double notice, first that the dog needs to be gone immediately or I would face a $1,500 fine, and second that I have 60 days to vacate the property because they are putting it up for sale. I assumed this was their polite way of evicting me, but who knows and it doesn’t really matter. It’s Saturday morning here now and I’ll be leaving Melbourne for five months on Wednesday afternoon, so I’ll just have my stuff thrown in storage and live at Stevo’s balla ass house when I get back until I get my own place, hopefully in Eureka tower.

Until I leave I’ll be at my house all day grinding, or at the gym. So if you want to stop in and say hello (or technically, goodbye) you know where to find me.

I’ve been trying to work on updating and fixing the leaks in my game lately. I feel over the previous six months I got involved with a lot of stuff outside online poker and really stopped working on improving, and considering how quick the pace of the online game moves that’s all you need to fall behind a bit. Some might think going through a downswing has just got in my head (and it has a little) but a few threads in HSMTT and various conversations with friends about strategy have confirmed to me that I have indeed developed some noticeable leaks.

I started talking to friends about doing HH review swaps or paying them for one. Then I thought; why do a few when I could probably do a bunch? Then I realized I could use them all to make a really interesting video series for Pokersavvyplus. So here’s my idea, I’m going to either swap or pay for HH reviews from around 10 players who are close to me that have a game I respect greatly. Once I have them in my procession I’ll put the HH in a replayer, fire up the review, and make videos of my going over the notes and discussing what the reviewer has brought up and why I agree or disagree with him. So far I’ve got a HH review swap agreed to with Sirwatts and Grafyx, have an old review from Seabeast that can be used, and Luckychewy has agreed to do one for me in exchange for a balla ass dinner in Las Vegas. I think this is exactly what I need to get back to speed, feel sharp going into my trip, and is a great opportunity to make some cool Savvy video’s that will showcase a number of smart players great poker minds. Let’s do this shit.

My Monday got its start at 3am my time, around noon in the States. I accidentally over registered throughout the course of my day, and wound up 22 tabling with over lap everywhere and my computer slowing down because of all the activity, though it was mostly manageable.

Near the end of my day I wound up going very deep in the Titan $250k guaranteed and the Full Tilt Sunday Brawl. First on Titan was 55k, Tilt probably something like 60k, I haven’t checked. At the final two tables on Titan there was a knock on my door. In came a real estate agent from Century 21, the apartment owner, and two people evaluating the apartment. I didn’t mind the interruption, but considering the apartment looks like a fucking grenade went off in here they certainly minded a few things. Also, when they came in I was shirtless, so I threw on the nearest article of clothing which I soon realized had a large stain on it.

What’s wrong with the apartment? It’s generically trashed in the same way most disorganized and lazy male 20 something’s apartments are, clothes strewn everywhere, surfaces cluttered with all kinds of random shit, some food strewn about, used glasses all over the place, tons of dirty dishes piling over the sink, various crap on my floor. There’s towels hanging up on various chairs, an empty milk carton by the couch, a plastic martini glass that fell apart lying on the floor near the coffee table, I could really keep going here. The sink in the bathroom has been clogged for a couple days now, so it’s full of murky water mixed with toothpaste and mouthwash. There’s a hole in the wall in the bathroom where the towel rack connects due to some…reckless behavior in there. Outside on the balcony the tile is stained because we dropped a bottle of olive oil that wound up making any filth it came into contact with stick like hell. I’m also taking care of Leo for a week or two, and there aren’t supposed to be any dogs in here.

When the group of four came in the look on the agents face was fucking priceless. I paid them basically zero attention because I was busy with my poker, and briefly apologized for “The place being a wreck.” A few minutes after they arrived my internet dropped out and I wound up being on the phone for most of their visit trying to get a friend to cover, and my internet fucking never drops out. Christ.

When I finally got back online I had basically blinded out of the Tilt tournament and got to enjoy watching AK being folded to a raise because it couldn’t connect. I wound up having to shove Q4o with like 7 BB’s on the button and got owned. On Titan I came back with a very good stack because I had been so huge, and with 11 left got it in with JJ against the other big stacks AK (and a very short stacks AQ) and off came the K. There was 25% of the chips in play in that pot.

The apartment owner wanted to go into the bedroom but I calmly told him “Don’t go in there, there’s a girl sleeping in there.” He was none too pleased with this statement and his ‘I’m gonna do it anyway’ attitude made me think he’s not used to having people talk to him like that. Then they went outside to the balcony and spoke in a tone I couldn’t hear and afterwards everyone left except the agent. He was actually a very nice guy and told me he plays on Full Tilt and was pretty fascinated by my playing for a living, but he also had to explain to me that the owner wasn’t pleased, particularly about the dog, and there’s no way in hell they believed me that he wasn’t actually living here. I told him I’d have a professional cleaner in within the next couple of days and the place would be much better soon. Still, I got the feeling the owner will probably spaz out no matter how well they spruce up the place, and I certainly won’t be using him as a reference for the next time I get a place. Normal people don’t seem to much care for the average poker player’s method of solving problems; shrugging and then throwing money at them until they go away and acting like nothing is a big deal.

On the plus side, by some miraculous bit of luck I had put my weed away in the cabinet instead of just leaving it on the table as I often do. So there’s that.

Things are about to wrap up here in Melbourne, I have barely over a week left. In reality my free time in Melbourne ends tomorrow when I start pulling 10-12 hour days of high volume, particularly with the upcoming SCOOP on Pokerstars. I’ll be waking up at about 3:30am every morning to get a work out in then start playing poker at 4:30am, assuming the events are on the same hour the WCOOP ones were, which I believe they are. I’ll be grinding from now until the day I leave.

I woke up at 4pm today and I’ll be pulling an all-nighter to play some of the early Monday tournaments (Sunday for those of you in the States.) Within a couple days my sleep schedule will be so fucked that no real social life will be possible, so this weekend was pretty much my last time hanging out with people in Melbourne. I’m sure I’ll catch up with a few more in the next few days, but the vast majority of my day will be on the tables or at the gym, plus I need to finish my taxes. For those who are curious; living in Australia does not absolve you of financial responsibility to the United States government. So long as you’re a citizen Uncle Sam owns your ass and that pointing pimp is ‘gonna get his’.

I’m looking forward to my trip, but not particularly to the upcoming $25,000 WPT championship I’m locked into. I don’t feel like I’m playing that great lately, and a few strategy threads on 2+2 have made me wonder when I got so behind the times (polite talk for saying I might suck at the pokers.) It’ll likely be a pretty damn tough live tournament, though a few people have told me that they wound up with very soft tables last year. I believe the start bank will be 75,000 at 50/100 blinds though, and let’s just say I’m not the most experienced 750 BB stack player. Leading up to it I’ll keep trying to post more hands and keeping a more active eye on HSMTT and running hands by the friends whose play I respect. I also told Grafyx I’d do a HH review exchange with him and need to get my ass on that, and should likely do it with a few other smart guys. This is the largest buy in I’ve ever played and I have 40% of myself with no make up, so I’d really best not show up and play like a fuck-tard. I wonder if using a hyphen is correct for fuck-tard.

I’ve been keeping up my obsessive fitness regime pretty nicely. I’m playing a lot of tennis and my swing has improved substantially over a few regular matches, closer to what it was back in high school. If anyone who reads this blog plays wants to play tennis in Vegas please let me know. I’ll try to keep the diet pretty tight, but I’m sure to fuck up a few times in a place with restaurants as good and free booze as tempting as Vegas. I’ve also started practicing taking punches in my boxing training, and just a few days of that makes it clear that my trainer could whip the living shit out of me in one round despite being like half my size. I’m going to try and keep training whenever and wherever possible when I’m stationary for long periods of my trip, as experiencing the skill gradient in the sport really fascinates me and it makes for awesome training. Plus it never hurts to know how to punch someone. Speaking of I saw a massive fight when I was out last week, man what the hell are people doing fighting each other in bars when they could be hitting on chicks? Yes I’m aware it could be over a chick, but if you crack onto some dudes girl and he starts getting all touchy about it you just need to be polite and apologize to avoid conflict, no need for people to get all nuts. That said, it was pretty fucking fun watching those eight or so dudes totally trash the place and wreck each other, then keep going out on the street. Ah to be young again.