Whats upppppp

Heyoooooo!

So I'm sitting around Georgetown in D.C and realized I haven't updated this in a couple of months, since midway through the Vegas trip probably. Since I'm not doing much at the moment, figured I'd pop in for an update. I am way too lazy to give you a full update to cover all of that which has happened since the last update in its entirety, but we'll see if we can't capture the rest:

I ended up playing the main event of the world series, $10,000 No Limit, at the last minute, when my friend Max bought up all my action and sold some of it off to the other guys living at the ranch.

The short of it is that the main event was wild. A long day one left me sitting at a pretty 71k up from the 20k starting stack, and finishing in the top 100 of day 1C. Day 2, I ended the day with 73k on what was literally the most insane single day of live tournament poker that I've ever witnessed or played. 71k to 110k, down to 20k down to 10k, up to 25k up to 60k, down to 30k, up to 80k down to 40k up to 70k and I ended just above 70 ending off the day squeezing JohnnyBax for my last few K in my stack.

Day 3 was horrible. I was playing well and owning the table, but made a bit too trigger happy of a move and ended up costing myself the tournament a couple hundred from the money, finishing a very disappointing day 3 exit of 950/6000. Busting out of the main event hurt more than my final table exit, so needless to say it wasn't a good day all in all after the bust out. I'll go into details another time, but it was a great experience and I did learn a ton this summer. Vegas was fantastic. A lot different than last summer but still as usual a valuable and fun experience. Can't wait for next WSOP.

So, since the middle of July, I've been back in Washington, D.C with nowhere to live. I was essentially forced to move out of my apartment with Aaron (manchild) and Steve (tubasteve) because the commons people are a bunch of morons and drive everyone who comes into contact with them insane. My parents are having our kitchen redone at their place, so I decided all in all, crashing at my brothers place for a while was a good idea. He said he was fine with it, I have the couch and essentially my own room, and living in Georgetown is great. I walk everywhere so get plenty of exercise, and it's just a beautiful area in the city, and I do enjoy city living.

Since being here, I really haven't done a whole lot other than hang out with some friends, go to the gym, and try to play a shitton of poker. I really am aiming to make a ton of money this month and next month to set me up for easy living in europe and during my travels. I will of course try my best to keep up with the volume while abroad, but I figure may as well do it when I know I can instead of whatever the unknowns of traveling might bring, if I end up not being able to play for any amount of time, etc...

Most of my volume, I've decided to make in big tournaments recently. I don't suffer from the "big score" mentality, though I do enjoy it thoroughly, and I am also playing some small field MTTs, and STTs (and cash games).... it's moreso that I feel well versed in STTs and never put in the same study or volume in MTTs, so while I feel confident in my MTT game, I felt this was the time to get in the volume and the study with it to balance out my tournament game.
Additionally, I've been trying to watch the deucescracked cash game videos, namely krantz's heads up videos and any other ones that I have time for. When I do put in cash time, I'm trying to make it at heads up. I feel heads up still has plenty of weak opposition, and will give me an opportunity to ensure that I'm not mega tabling, truly am focusing on my reads, hand reading, deeper stack play, etc... I feel the overall balance for myself of single table and multi table tournaments, in addition to cash games of all types, even if its weighted in one direction, is crucial to my development and thought process as a player, and eventually I'd like to work more time into the games that I haven't spent a ton of time working on recently, even though I do consider myself to put in time at all games still and will continue to do so.

In other related news, this week episode 8 of Last Man Standing, the final episode in my 'introduction to SNGs' series, aired and I'm happy to say that the series, in my opinion, was a success overall. I really felt lost in coming up with content for a lot of the episodes, simply because no one has ever put together any similar material as this in the past, but I felt I came up with the bare essentials, and a thorough explanation of the basics for any n00b with a basic poker foundation to get started playing STTs at the low buy ins. Some jackass trolls me on the forums everywhere, and goes into all of my videos and rates me a 1/5 on the star scale under each video without even watching it in order to bring down my ratings, but other than that, the comments are very positive and I'm glad that this was my first series produced. There are certain aspects of this series that became somewhat stressful and overbearing for me, and as a result I'd like to take a short break from video making, but when I return, I'm probably going to cover some MTT content due to high demand, and we'll see what happens from there. I haven't planned anything overly specific yet and don't want to say anything/get anyone's hopes up too early.

So other than the basic hanging out, I plan on continuing my regiment of gym/people/poker until my exit to Europe, probably coming in September, or as late as sometime in october, depending on what tournaments, various poker classic series, EPTs, etc... I end up playing, and when I decide on Amsterdam. As of right now, I plan on extended stays (at LEAST 1 month) in both Amsterdam and Israel. Other than that, tentative stops in the UK, spain, Czech republic, Greece, or anywhere else I deem appropriate are possible while abroad. Don't know how long I'm gonna be away, but likely to be several months.

I think that's about it. I'm heading up to Philly this weekend for a Livestrong 5k walk. I probably won't update this much while home, but will definitely aim to get back into regularly updating (as long as internet allows for it- and it better!!!) when I take off on travels. Thanks for reading.


-Alex