I’ve been kind of adrift for the last few days. I haven’t really been doing much of anything, and I didn’t even bother to play on Sunday for the FTOPS ME. In total, I played a single FTOPS event. I couldn’t even tell you what I’ve done since my last blog entry outside seen some funny movies, had some good meals, and killed time at the beach. The last couple of days I’ve developed a minor cold, but it’s nothing serious.

One strange aspect of going through a major break up is you wind up thinking to yourself “Well, now what?” It tends to sap your motivation and in many cases leaves people hiding inside for weeks or months at a time with junk food in one hand and a computer full of recently downloaded pornography in the other, alternating between gorging, jerking, and crying (bonus points if you accomplish all three at once.) I don’t have that kind of capacity for drama or misery, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say I was feeling unmotivated and confused as to what to do with myself.

For the first time in a long time the world is truly my oyster. I have my youth and health. I have enough money that I can create a life wherever I want. I have a job that let’s me live wherever I want. I have some degree of talent in poker and in writing (not trying to be an ego maniac here, but I’m pretty sure I don’t suck at poker.) Thanks to online message boards I know people in cities around the world, even if informally. I have absolutely zero responsibility or limitations. Most of all I feel I have the opportunity to make some kind of impact in my profession, to do something respectful.

So with that I’ve decided I want to write a book on poker tournament strategy. It’ll be based on the ‘Things it took me a while to learn articles’ (which I now feel a new commitment towards continuing.) But because it’s me and I can’t possibly do anything in a normal or straight forward manner, I want it to be a strategy book filled with various anecdotes and humor where appropriate. The challenge for me (outside of having to put in a shit ton of work) is trying to prevent the book from being too esoteric and incomprehensible to the casual reader, so I imagine I’ll have to submit it to a few people less experienced in the online world first.

I’ll also need to go back and ask my various contributors through the articles if they're okay with their words being used in the book. Considering the guys I’ve had work with me I doubt there will be any issues since they are all so awesome and easy going, but it seems respectful and honest to check with them first.

My plan going forward is to use the articles as a blue print for the book but it’ll need better organization. I’ll also need to add a ton more content in order for it to be worth purchasing the book instead of just reading the articles. In some cases it’s difficult to explore a topic more thoroughly than some of the guide lines I wrote, so in those cases I’ll be coming up with a shit ton of examples in order to illustrate them. Take the stack sizes article for example, outside of clarifying a few things there I don’t think the basics of what’s been written in the article have changed much or can be further clarified. However, adding a bunch of examples there would help to fill out the ideas and would add value to the section.

I might put examples of chapters up on the blog or forums to ask people for feedback and find out what they’d like to see more of or how they’d like things further clarified. I hope this will result in creating a book that people will feel actually addresses their questions. I also feel it’s very important that I stay true to my style in the book; otherwise nothing separates this from any number of the other quality texts out there which are high on technical and mathematical information pertaining to tournaments. I imagine having the book laden with sarcasm and occasional insults might reduce its overall professionalism, but I’m not writing this thing because I think I’m some professional author. I’m writing this shit because I want to and because I finally feel driven again.

So if there are any suggestions, comments, ideas, topics, or issues you want to seen addressed in this book, please let me know about it here. I’ll do my best to accommodate.

I just woke up and it’s past 2pm. Thanks to Cade forcing vitamins and water down my throat last night I don’t have any form of hangover and will likely live out a similar evening out tonight. What did I get up to last night? Um, it’s a bit of a blur, but with the help of Cade here’s what I do remember, in
semi chronological order:


1. First we went to a place that had live music. I went to the bar and got a beer while Cade stayed talking on the phone to Rachel. The WSOP final table was on TV and the people next to me were chatting to the bartender about how 22 year old Peter Eastgate now has nine million (MIRRION!) dollars. I blew their minds by telling them he got taxed for seven of it. I stood there for half an hour chugging my beer waiting for Cade and realizing the bar was predominately old people. I finished my drink, went back over to the Cade, swore at him, then asked him to use the phone.
”Hello Rachel? Hi it’s Tony how’s it going? Look I’m terribly sorry to intrude and interrupt, but I need to take Cade here on an excursion to find his penis which he has apparently lost talking to you. We’re going to go wasted now okay? Bye!”

2. I handed the phone back to Cade and walked over to the nearby ‘Hooters’ which was apparently having live music and $5 pitchers that night. I ordered what turned out to be a gigantic pitcher of ‘Blue Moon’ beer and sat down and started drinking alone while Cade finished his conversation. Cade came over when I was about a third through the pitcher and since he was driving the responsibility for drinking all of it but one glass came down to me. We sat there for a while drinking then realized there was not going to be any live music and instead we were just hanging around a bunch of douches at ‘Hooters’. I finished the pitcher and we headed off.

3. We went over to a club which was actually very cool. It had a downstairs bar, hip hop dance floor, then sectioned off area for salsa dancing. Upstairs they had booths and several pool tables, where Cade and I bought five games and I kept ordering screw drivers. There weren’t many people in the bar so we decided I’d keep drinking for an hour and play pool to see if anyone showed up. As it turned out the only people who showed up were dancing over to the salsa area, and seeing as I can’t dance salsa and it was super loud in there we had no reason to stick around.

4. We went over to another club by a mall and it turned out to be an Asian night. I was one of like three white dudes there and the place was packed. I kept drinking and the stuff really started getting to me. I vaguely remember hitting on numerous girls in the club, opening with the line “You know I have that exact same skirt and almost wore it tonight, that would have been so embarrassing.” It was pretty much impossible to hold any level of conversation as the bar was super loud. I remember hitting on one of the girls behind the bar at some point (also known as suicide) and being told she had a boyfriend. The club had two polls up on a stage where dudes with a microphone were yelling various shit as girls in bikinis danced around them. At my drunkest I told Cade I was going to get up there and strip tease one of the polls. I jumped on the stage and yelled something at the dude up there about my intentions and started throwing myself around the poll. He told me he was just about to take the poll off the stage and I need to get the hell out of there. Cade got a couple of blurry pictures of it which I’ll upload soon.

5. Cade and I went over to the all night Korean BBQ place at which point I was belligerently drunk. Cade did his best to keep me from doing anything retarded and my entire visit there is kind of a blur, though I do remember thinking the Kalbi was so incredibly delicious.

6. Cade took me home and started pumping water and vitamins down my throat while we had a long discussion about anime porn and how crazy it is that Johnny Depp somehow looks 27 despite being 45. I’m under the impression that I was not making a lot of sense.

So that was my evening. Hopefully there’s more of the same today and tonight. Also, we saw the new Bond movie was an action packed and respectable entry into the Bond canon but lacking in the wit and flair that we’ve come to expect in Bond films. Either way, I enjoy this new variety of Bond who feels like a constant legitimate threat to kill someone and Daniel Craig made another good showing in the roll.

As pretty much everyone reading this knows, the UIGEA regulations are out, the Bush administrations last attempt to restrict your personal freedoms before his abomination of a presidency comes to an end. For decades to come our country will look back and question how we ever came to elect a bungling, mongoloid, freedom hating retard like Bush twice and some of the damage he’s done to our countries international reputation and respect will take even longer to reverse.

I’m not one of these people who think Obama is going to swoop in and be the cure all to both the problems of poker players and the nation as a whole. I don’t know how Obama will function as president, but I am hopeful. What I do know is that we have nowhere to go but up. Obama is in the fortunate position that so long as he doesn’t fire a nuclear missile into the center of London pretty much whatever he does will look better by comparison to his predecessor. We all need to make our voices heard about our feelings on the UIGEA and I urge you to go over to this link and take a couple minutes out of your day to let the incoming administration know what you think:
http://www.pocketfives.com/poker-forums/7/Fight-UIGEA-with-Obama-and-the-transition-team-3555389?PageIndex=1

Now that I’ve done my complaining/nagging let’s have fun with an equally relevant but much more hilarious link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSE_saVX_2A

In other news, the new James Bond movie is out today and obviously I am going as soon as possible, though first I have to get to the gym and ‘sculpt my guns’. It’s a Friday night and I plan on getting wasted and behaving like a jackass so hopefully when I write tomorrow I have something hilarious to report.

So I’ve been in Hawaii for a few days now living with my friend Cade and his very awesome mom Jada. Let’s take a look at what I’ve done with myself since arriving:

1. Running a shit load. Both Cade and Jada like to go on a 2.25 mile run every other day and I’ve been joining them. I’ve always been pretty terrible at running, but the amount of time I’ve spent on the treadmill at the gym and with my pink jump rope at home has apparently put me in much better cardiovascular shape than I’ve ever been in before. I’m also running about a mile every morning before I eat breakfast.

2. Getting freaked out about the UIGEA regulations. God knows if they’ll have any effect at all but they certainly have people in a panic and many American players considering jumping ship on the whole country if they have their worst possible implications. I find it doubtful they’ll actually make a difference, but if they do I’ll have to scrap any possibility of moving back to the US.

3. Asking the Melbourne volunteer firefighting department if I can join. Being a firefighter was one of the few jobs I ever seriously considered and I remain curious about it to this day. I’d never give up poker for a new career, but I like the idea of doing something positive with my life and being helpful and firefighting is something I’d gladly do for zero pay. It also gives me a convenient excuse to be a complete nazi about my fitness. If I do end up moving to Hawaii I’ll look up their respective volunteer unit and ask them. I also realize it makes sense to do this just in case one day poker is no longer a feasible career (unlikely) since I wouldn’t have experience in any other form of legitimate work.

4. Sending hilarious text messages. Cade told me a story about how he once convinced a girl he was dating that he was a werewolf, and when this girl Desiree we’ve been hanging out with told us she had an instructor who kept asking her out and sending her text messages I insisted she let me to respond to his most recent one. I typed out something to the affect of “I’m sorry Ash, but we can’t get together. I’m not sure how to tell you this but…I’m a werewolf. You have to understand that it’s simply not safe for us to hang out, what with the mauling and all” then clicked ‘send’ and we all laughed our asses off.

5. Going to terrible stand up shows. After going to a great show in Melbourne I was hoping for more of the same here. I knew there was a problem when I showed up and there was like 12 people there. A couple of the comics were just painfully bad but two of the others were okay though nothing great. Jesus those other two made Larry the Cable Guy look like a comedic genius though.

6. Not working. I’ve only played one day since I got here, today, and as a result of trying to nine table on my tiny, broken laptop screen I made several awful plays as a result of failing to realize certain details of the hand. I restole on a guy who was never going to fold. I raised 67s to only 3X over a limp. I played a pretty terrible hand against 2+2’er Fatalerror (this wasn’t the laptops fault so much as my being a dumbass) with deep stacks in the FTOPS 300r.

7. Quoting Anchorman at every available opportunity. Cade and I have the exact same taste in humor (and in many other regards) and we must refer to ‘sculpting our guns’ a couple dozen times a day. Next time we go out I’ve promised him I’ll approach random women and say in the Ron Burgandy voice “Hello” *pause* “Do you not know who I am?” *pause for obvious no* “I don’t know how to put this but…I’m kind of a big deal. People know me. I’m very important…I have many leather bound books and my apartment smells of rich mahogany... I’m sorry, let me start over again. I wanna say something, I wanna put it out there, if you like it you can take it, if you don’t, send it right back... I wanna be on you.” It’s not a perfect quotation, but it’ll certainly do for the purpose of making a complete ass of myself for both of ours amusement.

8. Enjoying food items you can’t find in Australia. Like Sobe, and pop tarts. When I die I want my tombstone to be carved like a pop tart.

9. Listening to Hawaiian music. Fuck it’s cool. To give a description; its kind of like reggae meets hip hop meets Jack Johnson. It’s chilled out with a good beat and some easy listening lyrics. We’re going to a concert on Saturday which I’m pretty stoked about and I’m going to get my skank on (of the dancing variety, I couldn’t pass for the other variety of skank as they have vastly more dignity by comparison.)

10. Listening to Cade talk about his women complications. He’s got one girl who he is super into but lives far away from. Then he’s got another who he lives close to but is less interested in, despite her being very interested in him and an overall very awesome girl. I talked to the other girl today for the first time and told her “You know Rachel all I ever do is listen to Cade talk about you, I think I know everything about you at this point. For example I know your favorite color, its blue.”
“No, it’s purple” she replied annoyed.
I glanced up at Cade and said into the phone “Wow Cade, you’re a terrible fucking boyfriend” then handed the phone back to him and laughed hysterically while he tried to explain to her that I was only joking. She seemed to have difficulty getting it and Cade stood there for a few minutes repeating to her “No I know it’s not blue!”

What’s happening people? I’ve had a very pleasant few days since I last wrote in this blog. I spent a few days playing poker online at more relaxed pace since being let out of the bet before Chris, Stevo and I planned to go down to the beach house for the weekend. A couple days ago I even had a large score in the Stars nightly for $18,509 when I took second, making me feel considerably better about planning to take the rest of the month off.

As it turns out, we had to cancel the trip to the beach house for a number of reasons. As a result, I’ve moved up my departure to Hawaii and am leaving on Sunday afternoon, about 36 hours from now. I’ll be staying in Hawaii for about two and a half weeks before coming over to the Sydney APPT, staying at my friend Cade’s place while on the island. Cade is the son of famous American/New Zealand poker player and personal friend Lee Nelson. We met in Auckland and hit it off instantly and I told him I’d swing by to visit Hawaii as soon as possible. As it turned out, it ended up being very soon.

To touch briefly on the last entry, Celina and I are in fact broken up. However, we’ve done so very amicably and peacefully, and we continue to remain close and are speaking casually daily. We’ll hang out regularly around the APPT stops and have no current resentment or hard feelings, we simply both feel we have different priorities in life right now. I wish her the best of luck going forward in poker and in life. I want to stress to people that I’m not in any sort of freak out or melt down stage as a result of the break up. Yes, I’ll be taking a vacation as any break up can leave a lot of things on your mind, but I’m feeling very level headed and positive about the future. I would also like to say a major thank you to everyone who reached out and offered an ear to listen, I’m sure you’re all thrilled I didn’t opt to complain directly into it.

I’ve even got some creative writing done during this break in the form of an article that will show up on the front page of pocketfives in the very near future. Even though I’ll be playing minimal poker in Hawaii I’ll likely still be updating my blog regularly, though I have a feeling it will be much more drunken shenanigans oriented during my period there.

Currently my plan going forward is to visit Hawaii until late November, then attend Sydney APPT. After that I’ll spend the rest of December in Melbourne and hang out until after the Aussie Millions finishes in late January. At that point I’ll likely move to Hawaii for a period of time, though I’m not sure how long term. For the first time in quite a while I’m kind of free to end up wherever I choose, but after I ran through all the logical options and pros and cons of each I decided Hawaii makes the most sense. So unless my visit there results in my completing hating it somehow, it looks like where I’m headed at the moment. After that, who knows? The world is my oyster as they say. Perhaps I’ll convince myself that going around the world in 90 days as a single man would make interesting reading…or maybe I’ll just stay home and grind to my hearts content. I’ll just play it as it comes.