CardRunners

I didn't bring a laptop or my blackberry to PCA/Aussie, but Watts did, so I'll be able to update my blog occasionally, but probably not regularly.

The day before leaving for the PCA I woke up at like noon and was kind of concerned about what my sleep schedule would be like since that was the 3rd, I was playing at noon on the 5th and my flight was from 640-1150 on the 4th. I went to the gym and went rock-climbing that day and ended up tired enough that I fell asleep for a couple hours from like 8-12pm which worked out perfectly. I hadn't gone rock-climbing in like 3 years and it was pretty fun. I have no idea what the learning curve is like, but it seems to me like the type of thing where you would plateau really quick(ie. after going a few times, you would be as good as you'll ever be). I saw a rock-climbing wall here at PCA, so I may need to try it out a few times to see if I'm right or if I do get better.

Anyways, I tried packing for PCA at like midnight, but as always, I can't pack unless I feel like I'm under time pressure, so I played some scrabble with Mihai and his girlfriend and I sucked it up hard(I used to do cross-words with my dad, and I guess my standards for what a word is are much lower than the scrabble dictionary's), and then realized my flight leaves in less than 4 hours, so I may as well start packing. Since I'll be on flights for over 50 hours, I brought some books of my own and also borrowed a bunch of books from Mihai. On the flight here I read "The Old Man and the Sea" and have am currently reading "The Pleasure of Finding Things out" by Richard Feynman. A bunch of my friends have huge man-crushes on him, and I can see why. The majority of people who excel at things seem to be pretty proud of the fact that they excel at these things and think that they are better than people who are less accomplished. I've noticed this in almost all things I've competed in, whether it be volleyball, badminton, poker, chess, math, video games, pretty much anything. And as I've specialized in poker, and excelled at it, and seen friends of mine excel in every other area mentioned, I've realized that although some people may have an inherent edge, in general, the more effort you put in, the more you will excel at the top level, and there isn't much reason to think you are better than someone simply because you have worked harder at the thing you work hard at.

When I first started playing poker, I was trasnitioning out of chess, and assumed that I would never reach the top levels in poker just because I didn't have the dedication to reach the top levels of chess and assumed most games are similarly competitive. I was mistaken since people take chess a lot more seriously and instead of taking 20 years of hard work to become quite skilled, it takes only a few years in poker. Things like math and physics seem even more exclusive to me(ie. more difficult to become the best at than chess) but Feynman writes like a normal guy who has logged his hours, constantly thought about things, made significant contributions in physics and still views himself as a normal guy.

Anyways, about PCA, I got here, planned on sleeping, but then stayed up, went to the  water park followed by the welcome party where I ran into tons of people I know. It could just be that I'm too introverted but PCA is almost intimidating. I kind of like going to tournaments like Aussie last year, or random EPTs where I'll only have a handful of close friends, and a couple dozen people that I know by name. The difference kind of reminds me of seeing highschool friends at highschool verses at university. At highschool you'll give a head-nod, say whatsup etc when you pass them in the halls knowing that you'll see dozens more friends before your next class, in university, since you run into them like once a month you can legitimately have things to catch up on. PCA verses most tournaments is the same way, at most tournaments you're like "sweet, someone else who speaks english", here if you try to catch up with everyone you know, it could take over an hour to get from your hotel room to the poker room.

The next morning, I woke up and went to the gym with Jschnett and Watts and the gym here is actually surprisingly decent. Its a little too hot, and to my knowledge there was only one olympic bar in the whole gym, but as far as hotel gyms go, I probably shouldn't be complaining. While doing pull-ups, I hurt something in the lower right part of my neck, and it hurt to turn my neck at all to the right(it still hurts now), so I called it a workout after that since I had dips/incline still to do and figured neither of those are going to make my neck feel any better.

I was kind of concerned about my table draw, and really hoped I didn't get like seat 5 or something where I'd have to constantly look right. Fortunately I drew the 2 seat, and had what I thought was a fairly soft table. I had Greg Raymer to my left, Evelyn Ng  across the table, and no one else who I recognized, but the average age amongst them was probably like 35 or so. As the day went on, I realized that there were more competent people than I thought, most people didn't have big leaks, some of the 25 year old guys were actually good online regs etc. It still wasn't a ridiculous table, but I think I would have preferred a random table over it. I basically won no pots(less pots than you'd think after reading this, and after reading the disclaimer) and had 8.5k at 200/400 and ran TT into KK small blind verse button. I wish I got to play one or two interesting hands, but overall this is about the best result I could have expected given that I didn't cash. I really didn't want to be stuck indoors for 3 days only to bubble.

This morning I went to breakfast with Watts, Mastr, Randal and LFTV and Randal was telling us about a 50/100 game that was going last night involving a 200 button ante, the 72 rule, as well as a 62 and 63 rule. We spent most of breakfast talking about how ridiculous the big games are and how to adjust to games like that, I don't plan on playing much more poker while I'm here, but if I was still playing NL cash regluarly, that game sounds pretty sweet.  Anyways, I'm gonna go down to the waterpark again.

2007 started with me and ActionJeff each making 100k within the first 2-3 hours, 2008 I hung around at Pacmann's and watched Scrubs, the decline continues.

I recently decided that I'm not going to mix drinks using any mixer I wouldn't drink on its own(ie. no Rum &Coke since I wouldn't drink coke on its own). As a result, I spent 12:30- 2:40 of New Years praying to the porcelain god. I'm pretty sure I'm "better" at being sick than most people and actually enjoyed most of the night. I was expecting to black out so wrote down some of my thoughts while I thought I still had my wits about me. After reading what I wrote this morning, I realized that perhaps I am not as clever as I think while drunk.

Anyways, I posted my New Year's resolutions a few days ago on 2+2, I'll post them here and comment a bit more on them.

MTTs: How many online MTTs I play depends on something kinda outside of my control, as does how many live MTTs, but at the moment I'm not overly motivated. I guess goal-wise I'd be content if I can not start to suck while not having to play too many.
Get off my 45 live MTT non-cashing streak
PLO: play a bunch(by my definition) get good enough where I can play nosebleeds comfortably if there are any soft-spots
Mixed games: Continue improving at all mixed games, there's pretty clearly not as much money as in PLO, but by the time I'm 21 I want to scoop up a lot of ridiculous bracelets, get to the point where in just about every game I can understand where my profit comes, and be able to determine which things my opponents do are good/bad

Athletic:
Run a marathon- Meant to run a 1/2 marathon at some point this year, but it got cold too quickly, I definitely could run a 1/2 right now, but haven't. I don't have any time related goals for this, if I run one and enjoy the training/race, maybe I'll have a time goal for next year.
Bench/Squat/Deadlift 225/300/400- I guess these are kinda arbitrary numbers and I have no idea what are reasonable gains, just going by people in H&F's goals who are about where I am right now
Get competent at Olympic lifting - I have really inflexible elbows, gotta do more Yoga/start foam rolling or something
Get into BJJ - My lifetime fight record went from 2-0(thanks Dan and Tufat) to 2-3 this Festivus, want to get back above 500
Play more volleyball- I played way too much in high school and decided I didn't really want to play more after that, so took a few years off. I've been getting back into it the last few months and enjoying it, I don't really have any measurable goals regarding this

Life:
Eat better, cook a wider variety of meals- I don't eat enough vegetables, and suck at cooking, want to change this
Drink healthier- a week or two ago I decided I'm not going to ever use a mixer that I wouldn't have drank on its own(ie. no more rum and cokes etc), gonna try to stick to this as long as possible, and also just drink less
Get better at getting stuff done- Still don't have a car, just need to be more pro-active
Read more- I've read a lot more this year than previous years, but I'd like to read a few good books a month

Possible goals:
Learn to play an instrument- the more music I listen to, the more I think it would be cool to learn to play music/understand music better/ potentially join a band

Figure out more about what I want to do with my life- At this point, live tournies are just about the only thing that prevents me from being in school(play little enough volume/kill enough time that I could easily take a few courses while maintaining my lifestyle), not sure that I want to go back to school per se but I don't really see myself having a switch flip that tells me I want to go back to grinding every day and playing poker full time for the rest of my life. I remember talking to Stevejpa and Terrence Chan about potential jobs we could have if it weren't for poker, and in general I like teaching, but aside from poker don't have that many things I'm an expert at. I said that I could see myself being a personal trainer just since I enjoy teaching my friends how not to suck at the gym, or maybe go back to school and become a prof. I guess I'm just rambling, I just kinda feel like the only thing I'm a true expert on at this point is poker, and would like to be more well-rounded. Obviously none of these things would really be necessary to make ends meet, I just always kind of envisioned that after I made enough money at poker I'd have accomplished all I'd ever want and just be able to chill the rest of my life, but am realizing now that I'd much rather force myself to keep busy.


Anyways, overall the holidays were pretty sweet, Festivus/Christmas were awesome and New Years could have gone better. I'll be heading to PCA in a few days, and Aussie immediately after that(Watts and I are renting an appartment for a month there). Oh ya, I just watched the movie "Slumdog Millionaire" and for the first time in a few years have a simple answer to the "whats your favorite movie" question. I'd guess most people won't like this film as much as I did, but its definitely worth a watch.

So my computer was out of use for a few days, but I think I've got the viruses almost sorted out. I also finished reading "The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rulres our Lives" and recommend it to just about anyone, specifically to poker players. There were so many interesting applications of pyschology, economics, and mathematics in this book and a lot of interesting things I had never considered. I've got a few more books lined up to read, but now that my computer is fixed who knows if I'll go forth with that. At least I have some audio-books to get the best of both worlds.

Before editting I started this paragraph with "for some reason I don' feel that motivated for WPT Niagara", but I know the reason is just lack of motivation since I haven't been running particularly good in live tournaments for the last 8 months. An interesting thing mentioned in my book is that most people feel safer behind the wheel when they are driving intoxicated than they would in planes(even though planes are safer than car being driven by sober drivers) because people hate things that are outside of their control. This is part of why live tournaments can suck so much, no matter how big your edge is, a career of live touranments won't get you anywhere close to the long-run. When I used to grind limit, I used to always just assume I'd run 2 standard-deviations bad at all times, and if a bad session or bad month equated to a larger loss than I'd be comfortable with, I'd re-evaluate my situations and consider moving down. The problem with live tournaments is that over say 5 years, running 2 standard deviations bad probably results in you losing money. I guess I'm rambling, I just find that I lose confidence in live tournies faster than all other forms of poker.

I'm gonna watch the new episode of the office(and hopefully not pick up any viruses) and possibly head to Niagara tomorrow, if not I'll be there Sunday to play day 1c.

Well, I slept in too late to buy a piece of Sirwatts in the high roller event, but he took 3rd for like 400k. Was a pretty sick final table, I've played with everyone at the final table, and know 4 of the final tablists pretty well. It was nice to see Jason win, I was really hoping if Watts didn't win one of the other online guys I know would take it down, so Watts busting wasn't too disappointing.

One of the things I plan on doing more is reading. Since I started university(a little over 2 years ago), I had read basically no books that I wasn't forced to read. This summer I read Fooled by Randomness and a few poker books that had been sitting on my shelf and enjoyed them all. I'm not sure whats a reasoanble goal, but I'd definitely like to read at least a book or two a month. For my birthday, my room mate got me "The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives" and it is awesome. Its fairly similar to fooled by randomness, but a lot more enjoyable to read. Its primarily about the history of the mathematics behind games of chances. A  pretty good example is that several 100 years ago, when people were playing a game involving points where the game ended at a certain score(ie. the first person to flip a coin heads 10 times when alternating who flips) people often had to adjourn the game and continue it later. No one knew how to calculate the likelyhood that someone would be the first to 10 when they were winning 6-4. A well known gambler asked Blaise Pascal to do some work on this problem, and came up with "Pascal's Triangle" which can be used to predict the results of such a game for any current score so that 2 players can split up the "pot" as fairly as possible. Its pretty interesting to see how little people knew about games of chances not that long ago. Often I think about how much I could have crushed poker if I went back in time 10 years, if you could go back in time 500 years with what we know now, you could probably win all the gold. Literally.

One of the main shows I follow is Dexter, and after missing the episode this Sunday I decided to download it online. Sure enough it was actually a bunch of viruses, and now I'm going to need to reformat my computer. I ended up finding it on my laptop, and it was a pretty awesome episode, I just wish they were to get rid of basically everyone besides Dexter since most of the other characters are terrible. I also went to the gym for the first time in over a month and I wasn't nearly as weak as I expected. I also went out for a jog last night and jogging when it is really cool out is sweet. I've talked to some people who said that air that is too cold is bad for your lungs when jogging, so I may need to look into that. 

One thing I forgot to add was how good of shape my house was in when I got back. Normally when I get back from a trip, I expect things to be a pigsty, but the house was remarkably clean. So clean in fact that I decided to thoroughly clean my room for the first time ever to keep up. I threw out and put away a bunch of things that had been sitting there since I bought the house. The one problem with throwing things out is that you always find that you need them immediately after. During my cleanup, I threw out an old antivirus CD(which I could have used to run a check of the system and possibly get rid of the viruses that I got) and my economics notes from University. Later that day, a friend from the states had to interview a Canadian on the differences between business in Canada and the United States, and thats what 25% of the course was about. Oh well, its good to be home