The interview was a long time coming, but it did finally happen today. I'm proud to say I think it went well. ETA: sometime this fall.

Fun fact: it turns out dlpnyc21 (NYU Dave) and I went to the same high school!

Preview pics:

The second half of my stay in Fresno turned out to be a lot of fun. It was divided into three parts - the main event (lasted an hour; got two pair in against a set, then got my last 10 BB in with KK vs. the mighty 72 sooted. oops!), a few business meetings that went pretty well, and hanging out with shaundeeb watching him grind 25 tables' worth of donkaments. The guy is sick for that one thing alone, but he also manages to play good while doing it, too. I wish I could do that :(

Apparently, Shaun'd been having a pretty bad downswing for a while there, but it ended in spectacular fashion - he had a 20K day or so on Saturday, then won the FTOPS HUment on Sunday while I was sweating him, for another 115 grand or so. The HU tourney was hysterical; every time we saw any of his last 3-4 opponents make a big move that made no sense, we turned to each other, said "flush draw" in unison (no cheating involved, it was just obvious), Shaun would call/raise as appropriate and the other guy's hand would be a flush draw, which all somehow missed. Then there was the first hand of the semifinal that got posted in BBV; Shaun raised nines, the other guy (an aggro HU regular) 3-bet, Shaun of course 4 bet, the other guy tanked and 5 bet shoved, Shaun snap called and, obviously, the other guy had A8/was thinking on the exact wrong level. (Flop ace; river Shaun's 4 flush.) He then said "I thought you'd fold JJ-99" in chat. Why would anyone ever fold a middle pair on the first hand of a HU SNG?

While Shaun was doing that, I was playing my own weekend donkament sessions and basically posted an 0 for 13 ITM line in non-Cake tourneys while going 3 for 3 on Cake. This made me pretty suspicious that I was playing too much Cake and not adjusting properly elsewhere, which Shaun agreed with. So, when I got back the other night, I played another half dozen donkaments. Results: three random bustouts, one bubble on Stars, one 45'th place on Stars in the 150+12 100K where, as far as I can tell, I just played my cards, and, in my one Cake tourney - the 30r 20K - a second place finish that I got because I lost a 70/30 on the final table 6 handed, chopped another 3:1 3 handed, lost *another* 3:1 heads up and then got coolered/lost a huge flip to end it. Basically, lately, I've owned Cake (both literally and metaphorically) while simultaneously getting nowhere on every other site. It's not really a surprise because I've been putting in such a high percentage of my hands on Cake lately, but it definitely looks like I need to ramp up my aggression on sites that aren't as ridiculously soft as Cake is.

One other thing - the weekend accounted for lots of pics. Most of them are probably terrible :) but will probably be posted anyway :( when Kyle has the time to sort through them. Keep an eye on Kyle's blog - it'll be funny.

As is getting par for the course for me these days, the only tournaments I played all week were the Sundays just now. Results: four total bricks, one well played tourney I wound up bubbling after a couple of setups/whiffed flips, and the UB 200K (for the record, that's the only thing I play at UB now, and only because I've neglected to cash out the last couple of thousand), where I just picked up a final 2 table finish that turned out to be good to make $200 or so on the day total. Because a 15'th place finish out of 900-ish people does nothing for you even in a Sunday major, I'm once again reconfirming that I'd rather be playing MSPLO where it feels like I belong.

Every time I play the game, it feels like it'll take months for me to be anything more than > mediocre at it, but it also feels like I'm better than the competition. Most of that is because I do have a feel for the types of hands I should be playing, which, by itself, makes me better than the guys defending J622ss OOP. But PLO, especially shorthanded PLO vs. the Cake shortstacks that always want to hit and run someone starting a table, is a weird animal and constantly requires rethinking your approach if you are a NL convert*. For example, LFTV's last post, where a gigantic straight wrap/FD combo turns out to be a close fold in a 3 way pot, is not something I'd have ever thought of - although, admittedly, on Cake, I'd still get that in solely because their ranges are so much wider/they're worse.

*Oddly enough, as an FR MTT convert, I think the more loose/passive approach I take than most 6 max NL cash players would is better for MSPLO. Because it's easier to get paid off with the nuts and I very rarely get bluff raised in my games, it's better to play more hands, and the size of the pot preflop and on the flop is not a huge deal since I can still bloat it later if I want to. (Playing against a lot of shortstacks, making pot control irrelevant, works too.)

Long story short: I am playing only an hour or so of several tables per session largely out of laziness and an unwillingness to sit 250+ BB deep at a game I'm not fundamentally solid at, *but*, despite that, I'm booking decent wins even down at 1/2 and 2/4. Once I'm comfortable there, which should be soon, I plan to play more tables, partly move to FTP - there's no way I can handle > 4 shorthanded PLO tables right now and Cake doesn't have the PLO traffic for that yet anyway, so that's a must - and eventually settle in as a regular at 2/4-5/10, which is where I was at NL cash before I mostly stopped playing.

Before I get to Fresno later on, the other thing I'm doing this week is Intrade. Obama should announce his VP pick this week; after that's officially [not Clinton] and probably turns out to be [Bayh, Sebellius], I expect to have made a nice profit and begin to thoroughly handicap the GOP side of the race. For the time being, I'm strongly bullish on [Pawlenty, Eric Cantor] and think that Romney will *not* be the pick, but I need to do a lot more research before I'm comfortable doing anything but bottom feeding on the free 8-10% [not Charlie Crist] bets the market customarily leaves out there. So, while the rest of you guys are busy watching the Olympics, I'll be in Fresno and/or doing political research. Fun! (Well, okay, it is. Celebrity poker donkaments are always awesome.)

As promised to myself earlier, I'm temporarily done with MTT's except on Sundays (for the record, yesterday was pretty ugly, but mostly unavoidable - a lot of second best 2 pair/set hands were involved.) What I *have* been doing is playing a bunch of PLO on Cake with a propping deal I set up for myself (increased rakeback). The main downside is that I can't play a lot of tables as I have to start games, and playing > 2/3 tables of HU and shorthanded PLO while still learning the game is probably a bad idea. However, the actual results have been very good. I have a decent sense of when to get it in, and except for a lack of turn aggression (mostly because Cake players don't ever fold 2 pair or raise less than the nuts, so value betting them thin is not really a great idea), I'm much better aware of close plays. About the only thing I want to do is play more tables, probably on FTP (where I do have rakeback), and to understand how the cross-site increase in aggression changes turn and river play.

I'm also playing a bunch of 6max SNG's on Cake, as well. Those are more mixed; I find I don't have the best pushbot sense with 8-13 BB anymore, plus the Cake regs call a "proper" unexploitable strategy too light and decrease both their and my ROI's in the process. I'm still up a decent amount of money doing that, but I think I'm going to have to buy SNG Power Tools or some other utility and quiz myself for a bit before I play too many more of those.

The calendar in the next two weeks: a trip to Fresno to go play in Kyle's tournaments ;), a collaboration to be named later, and, at some point next month, the long awaited 60M interview/Washington Post photo shoot (I think you guys get to see me and dlpnyc21 play online on laptops or something - not too sure what they're doing with that.) By then, UB should just about be done naming the 19 cheaters and their 88 accounts, by which I mean they won't have named anybody but will be busy stonewalling until the end of time. I should really be done hoping they'll come to their senses by now...

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Offtopic: My wife and I got a Wii Fit game last week. So far, we've both spent 30 minutes (actually an hour once you factor in the downtime between games) a day on it 6 of the 7 days we've had it, and it pretty much beats a gym membership hands down. I totally recommend this thing and I'm sure it'll help me lose those 10-15 extra poker pounds in a hurry. Since when has exercise actually been fun?

For the last week, I've definitely been feeling the after-effects of the WSOP - namely, a lethargy and inability to play anything poker-related, especially after Watts' win (mostly unhappy that I wasn't at the Bellagio for it. I really have the best timing this year.) On top of that, I also managed to completely destroy my foot in an ill-timed encounter with the wet floor/bathroom countertop at 4 AM - no stitches, but I've been more or less hobbling around the whole time and don't expect to walk 100% pain-free for a few more days. Oddly, I wasn't even drunk; surely my chances to cripple myself were higher had I stayed for the Bellagio?

At any rate, there's nothing about poker I really want to put here. The little I've played this week has been a bunch of bad beats, including a hilarious 3/6 PLO spot where I ran top set into a guy who decided to bet/call the bottom end of a gutshot with no redraws and got there. Okay, whatever, but does he really have to leave the game 5 minutes later before I've won his bankroll that night? Dammit.

What I do have on tap are a couple of side projects I won't talk about yet, a trip to Fresno to see EdmondDantes (kinda following in Bond's footsteps; expect hilarious drunken pics and random Celebrity Donkament bustouts), 60 Minutes/the Washington Post at <whenever they feel like>, a couple of CR vids [these should be decent] and playing a lot more on Cake as opposed to everywhere else. Everyone else has 27 free TV's, videogame consoles and Ipods from poker per year; why shouldn't I?

Resolution: the next update is going to have some actual poker in it.