Meant to update this before the MLB playoffs started but I forgot. Roy Halladay is good at baseball. I put money on all the Pinnacle underdogs because everybody loves betting on the highest variance baseball there is.

Predictions--

Twins in 4
Rangers in 4
Reds in 5
Giants in 5

Twins in 6
Reds in 5

Twins in 5.


I don't play poker anymore because I'm swamped with school work. Midterm tomorrow morning and a presentation Wednesday and then I'm like done with work until finals in December.

-Grady

Getting ready to move back to school in a couple days. I'm typically pretty excited to get back, but this time around it feels pretty different for a couple reasons. A quick warning that this is probably going to be both long, and all over the place.

Last year was pretty different from previous years given the fact that I had taken a year off school a couple years ago, so a lot of my friends that I spent my first and second years with had graduated and weren't back last year, but I was still living with one of my best friends (among 6 girls and another de facto* roommate in the form of a boyfriend of one of the girls) in a great big house and we all got along really well for the most part, so things went well (as I'm sure they will this year, in which case, the upcoming tl;dr post will be fairly useless in say a months time). It was still different in terms of downtime, in a sense that I had never not had the ability to sit around somewhere and have 4+ of my best friends sitting in the same place and just talking shit or drinking or whatever, not to mention going out drinking was always awesome, since there just seemed to always be a party to go to or enough people willing to go to the bar to make it worthwhile. Having said that, I'm finding out everyday that more and more friends of mine are coming back so meh.

*I've been trying to use the term "de facto" properly in a sentence without trying overly hard to work it in there for as long as I can remember. If I find out that I used it incorrectly I'ma be pissed.*


This coming year seems kind of weird though. I'm moving in with a fellow poker player for the first time, which is actually going to be a breath of fresh air from trying to grind in a house full of girls/people who don't understand poker, so that's good.

I can't think of a ton of other positives though. I'm obviously not excited to get back in to the grind of going to classes and writing papers and stuff, especially since I have a bit of a schedule conflict going on in the sense that I need to take an overload of classes this coming semester, which is huge considering I've taken reduced course loads in each of the last two years. I figured that I'd be way more excited to be finished with school than I currently feel I am, though I suppose there are another 8 months in front of me before that. Still, I think I'm just pretty much tired of school. This will be my 5th year of University (2nd didn't really count since I just drank my face off and stopped going to class after Christmas, instead opting to party and hook up with strange women-types), and I just feel so tired of the town and the school.

I hate to let the following come in to play at this stage of my life, especially given the actual nature of it, but anyway.... For the first time in my University life, I'm going to end up leaving a girl back in my hometown when I go back to school. We haven't been together for a very long time per se, and thus we don't really know what's going to become of the whole thing, but still. I've never had to deal with this kind of thing, and this is definitely a downer. The fact of the matter is that most LDR's don't really work out for very long, which we came to terms with before we got together, and I think this whole thing is what's getting me in to this mood that I'm in.

As result of all these things being on my mind lately (plus another 100+ABI downswing), I've not played much poker at all. I just haven't really been in the mood to do a whole lot, which has in all likelihood contributed to the downswing when I actually am playing. That's usually how I get when I head back to school, but it's moreso out of excitement. Instead I've just been bored as balls considering my lack of motivation to play, leaving me with little to do. The summer as a whole was a disappointment, though the last month or so has been pretty good, with more people coming home, getting involved with a cute girl, and losing less money at cards than I did in July. I expected a bunch of fun to start the summer, and while it was less fun than I had anticipated, it was pretty good for a couple weeks until people ended up getting so busy with work that they couldn't really do much. Had poker not gone stagnant for 2 months then I would have gone somewhere to visit friends, but I needed to save money to pay for school, and I've now found out about my upcoming trip to Seoul for Christmas which ought to set me back another several buy-ins.

Still, lately I find myself being a lot more cranky than I've ever been (which for me is like a 5/10 for most people. I've never had a temper or anything, and generally stay pretty positive about things, or at worst, make a joke about whatever I'm feeling riled up about and I'm fine), and completely restless but at the same time not in the mood for anything if that makes sense. I can't come up with any music that I seem to be in the mood for (except Ratatat. Those guys are fucking cool.), same with TV (now that I'm caught up on Mad Men), I'm finding myself making so many more negative comments about things/people/ideas than I ever have and just generally trolling people more, and it seems like I'm just checking the same 4 websites over and over and over all day long, etc.

I guess I'm doing that whole cliche thing and learning a bit about myself. I've always thought that I've been a pretty hard worker at anything that I actually didn't mind doing. For example, any class that I've ever been modestly interested in, I've done pretty well at, vs. the ones that are mandatory or that I just found myself disinterested in, I've just kind of skimmed by doing as little as possible. When I started to golf seriously, I could see that I was getting half decent and started just putting in all kinds of hours at it until school sort of got in the way of that.

But now I'm starting to realize that this might not be the case. Coming in to this summer, my plan was to grind my balls off 5 days a week minimum, and from the end of April to Mid-June, I did that. Beyond that though, I wanted to read tons, watch a bunch of training videos, and just simply get a lot better at poker. If I'm going to be playing poker instead of getting a job for the summer, then I should really be putting a lot of time in to it, since I realize that I'm not good enough at poker yet to be doing this for a living. I feel like I really turned a corner in early June, booking a pretty big couple of weeks, but I don't really know what happened after that. I haven't had the motivation to grind, I'm hardly reading any strat (though the MS MTT on 2p2 has changed that a little bit), and I've taken more days off since Aug. 1 to today than I had from Feb 1-end of July. Just kind of reflecting on this has made me realize that there have been a ton of days that I've been playing this summer in which I've thought "Man I can't wait until these tourneys are over, I have no desire to be playing right now.", not that it's really affected my bottom line on those specific tourneys, but a while ago it would be standard for me to fire up mttsng's until the end of my session if I still had 2 or 3 mtt's left, but I haven't done so in a while it seems.

I'm starting to think that I'm less tough mentally than I had once thought, or I'm at least less mentally tough than I used to be. I so rarely get upset or angry with things, and things just don't ever seem to get to me, but recently I've been kind of cranky at the weirdest times, coming up with snappy answers to things and being just generally short with people who don't deserve it. Things just seem to irrationally affect me so much more than they used to, and it doesn't make any sense at all. I'm playing a game instead of working at 22 years old, when all my friends are either working summer jobs, or having started careers and have all these things to care about. On top of that, I've fallen ass backwards in to a thing with a great girl who, to this point, I'm not exactly sure what initially drew her to me. I have a great family, with my first nephew on the way, and I pretty much have no responsibilities in the world, at least for the time being. Yet still, at times, I consider whether I really want to be playing poker at all. I've put so much time in to it but still have sooooooo much more to learn and I'm really having doubts as to how much commitment I really want to devote to poker. Then I remember what it's like to go to work at 8:00 on a Monday and shrug it off.

So basically what this blog consisted of was me saying that I'm cranky with all these things that are going on in my life, yet listing a billion positive aspects about each one, which pretty much reinforces my original point of view that says that there is really no good reason I should be feeling like this and that I should just man up and count my blessings. Which is actually something that writing this whole thing down and saying it all has helped and now I feel better. So thanks.

-grady

PS-- Kind of considered not even bothering with posting this after having reread it, but I think I'm going to be better of getting it up and coming back to it in a couple months for a perspective blast.
Hope I don't regret that one.

Nothing much to report, hence the lack of blogs lately. I've been downswinging since mid-June, which I suppose is to be expected after a really heatered up May and early June. I think I'm going to try and spend some time kind of looking over some stuff from the last couple weeks to see if I can spot anything that I'm doing wrong. Having said that, this past week-10 days has been a bit better than the previous 5-6 weeks, so who knows.

I've taken a lot of time off over the last 3 weeks, which is a combination of not having the motivation to grind, as well as having some stuff to do outside of poker. I had taken off maybe 12 days from the end of school (End of April) up until mid July, but have probably doubled that since July 15ish. I had to take a trip over to my grandmother's house for a family get-together, which obviously turned itself in to a 4-day bender. Immediately after that, a friend who was on vacation spent half that crashing in my house drinking and playing live poker (which we kicked ass in btw), and now I have family down for a week visiting and getting drunk with us until Saturday or Sunday. Long story longer, I average 5-6 days off/month, I've already taken 7 in August. Gonna have to fix that pretty soon.

It's all but official that I'm going to Seoul, South Korea for Christmas this year. My brother has been living over there for the better part of 4 years teaching English, and he and his girlfriend are expecting their first child in Late October/Early November. He can't come home for Christmas since the Christmas holiday in Korea is apparently 1 day for North American's/Euro's/whomever (as in Asians don't do Christmas), and then right back to work the next day. It looks like we're flying out on Christmas day and coming back on the 11th of January, so like 16 days total. Apparently we're going to be deep-frying a turkey in a garbage can.

I'm pretty jacked for this, since I've never been out of North America, and only out of Canada twice, not to mention my lack of nieces/nephews. Online poker is illegal for the most part over there, which is sort of lame I guess (not that I'd want to spend my first trip to Seoul playing online poker), but my brother says that there's some kind of law that prevents Korean Natives from leaving a casino with any more than what they showed up with or something stupid like that, so basically people play holdem for fun and then spew off their profits towards the end of the night. I'll have to ask him to clarify that for me next time I talk to him, but that really sounds like the best thing ever.

-Grady

(1:09:21 AM) Grady:
someone was talking about phil laaks marathon session and how he played 104 hours or whatever, someone mentions that his longest was 14
(1:09:31 AM) Grady:
i explain that i play online all the time and do 14 regularly
(1:09:58 AM) Grady:
he goes on a rant about online being rigged and that he's gotten deep in to tourneys all the time only to have AK run in to AA
(1:10:17 AM) Grady:
"oh you know, 2000 people, get down to 300 and you get suckered"
(1:10:21 AM) Grady:
deep?
(1:10:25 AM) Grady:
300/2000?
(1:10:29 AM) Grady:
head asplode
(1:10:35 AM) Brett:
hahahahaa
(1:10:42 AM) Grady:
and then a guy goes $5 utg dark
(1:10:46 AM) Grady:
i pop to 25 wiht AK
(1:10:55 AM) Grady:
he jams 42 more i call he has AA
(1:11:01 AM) Grady:
i ask to chop he says no
(1:11:26 AM) Grady:
then i jam A2 on AK7 get called turn 7 i'm going home for a beer

-2 buyins! spite winning like 1k tomorrow. online tho.

I'm on a heater. Won a $2r turbo for like 400, took 4th in $25 MSOP for 5k, won $15 super turbo for 1500 all within about 24 hrs. I thought it was cool.

But it's not all sunshine and blowjobs around here. I got comedically drunk last night and have a terrible hangover/headache. So yeah.

-Grady