Growing up as a kid I was really skinny. How skinny? While walking into a taco bell at the age of 13 some random dude on the steps went “Daaamn boy you betta get some meat on them bones! Get some meat on them bones boy!”

Yep, I was thin in my day. Then in sophomore year of high school I got busted drinking and the only place wasn’t grounded from was the gym. A few weeks into lifting and dieting and I was a full blown addict. I went from 5’10” 130 to 6’1” 192 in about a year. To say I went off the deep end is an understatement. For almost 3 years I ate the same meals 5 time a day 7 days a week with almost no variation. No sweets, so soda, no fried food, no alcohol, no desert, almost no saturated fats, and constant monitoring of calorie intake. I worked out 4 days a week and missed probably under 10 work outs in a 3 year span. I took protein, creatine, glutamine, if it was legal and could make me bigger I wanted it. Sure I was a little psycho with it all, but man I looked like I could whoop some ass. People at school would ask if I was the running back since “you look like you could run through a brick wall.”

Then I went to college and picked up poker and suddenly routine became impossible. Just college is hard enough with maintaining one, but throw in an addicting and time consuming game that also allows the possibility of making more money than I ever dreamed (Holy fucking shit dude! I just won a 30 dollar Sit n go for 150 dollars! I’m fucking rich!!!) and the obsessive work out routine and diet found itself forgotten.

Cut to 3 years later. After spending 5 months cooped up in an apartment in China with nothing to do but play poker, and 6 weeks in Vegas where according to Elvis even 64 hours a day isn’t enough time to get some sleep, let alone a work out in, and I look like shit.

Lucky for me I’ve got a pretty easy, non time consuming routine going and there’s a sizeable gym literally 3 buildings over. Before I started working out last week I stepped on their scale; 90 kilos. What the fuck is this kilos bullshit? Fucking Australians and their English systems of measurement.

One online conversion system look up later, I find out I am roughly 200 pounds. “We here at Google conversions regret to inform you that you are a fatass. Please lose some weight lardo, thank you.”

200 pounds, are you fucking kidding me? Even at my biggest in the bulking phases of the weight lifting I was 193, and my weight sat around 185 for most of that period. Two fucking hundred? This will not stand.

So that’s it. I’m gonna do it all over again. The 4 work outs a week. The bland and totally lacking in variety diet. Hell, I may even spend half an hour a night standing in front of the mirror yelling “Nobody likes you fatty!”

Don’t get me wrong people, if you are overweight but happy with yourself then all the power to you. However, for someone with my quantity of vanity and insecurity, it just isn’t a realistic life style choice.

Meanwhile, in the me not bitching about things area of life, I am running absurdly hot at poker. Two nights ago I played incredibly awful poker but still managed to get heads up in the Full Tilt winners choice and made a deal with phatcat where he just sends me $5000 and keeps the 12k in the package, plus the $600 I got for 2nd. However, to say I played bad that night is a great insult to people who play badly. So bad spectators were asking if I was Phil Gordons secret account. It was a disaster and although I got second I still considered stabbing myself in the stomach with a long sword afterwards to preserve honor. I ended up playing video games instead.

Then last night I played inspired poker and came back from a short stack to win the Full Tilt 50/50 for $9,555. In totality for the week I won 5 tournaments, ‘chopped one’, and made what I think turned out to be 15 final tables. Every day but one I felt like I played very well, and a coaching session with NoahSD where he pointed out some post flop leaks of mine really helped my deep stacked game. Coach Junglen is busy crushing live tournaments so I haven’t worked with him for a while, but the sessions I’ve done with both Adam and Noah have been enormously helpful.

In other news, the United States passed a law that requires that tournament scores within the United States in the amount of $5,000 or more will be subject to having 25% of the winnings immediately withheld for tax purposes. In response I would like to say; FUCK YOU UNITED STATES AND YOUR JESUS LOVING SODOMITE LEGISLATORS. Perhaps you think my anger stems out of the lost money I was going to embezzle through tax fraud. Your wrong though, as I’m way to lazy to go through the steps it would require to hide money and would much rather just pay my taxes as quickly and honestly as possible so I can go back to playing poker. My anger stems from the fact that 25% of the money that would have been spewed back into the poker economy by the donks who win a tournament is now going to be held in safe keeping by the “We know better than you for you” government. Awesome. Also, this creates several annoying problems in regards to backing deals, and god forbid you have a vicious downswing mid year and have a big chunk of your bankroll stuck in the bureaucratic system. Meanwhile, the government may get to collect interest on your money (possibly, I don’t know how/where it will be kept but I bet they get to make money) while you sleep in a cardboard box eating dog food wishing you’d been born a few hundred miles north in Canada.

Since my temporary retirement from the live scene I’ve been able to really hit the online grind again. I’ve moved back to Melbourne Australia, and I was fortunate in that I didn’t have to bribe or kill anyone at the airport to get in. I’ve got an apartment a few minutes outside the city in St. Kilda with my girlfriend, and before I got down here she was nice enough to go out and get the monitors I need to get a full on poker set up.

Because of the time difference here my waking up for tournaments at 8:50am is 6:50pm US Eastern time. I play from 9am to what normally ends up being around 5pm. Of course some days you finish earlier and some take longer, but on the whole it’s very often right in the 8 hour area. So for the first time in years I’m living a fairly normal life and schedule. I have time to get to the gym next door, go to dinner with friends, see football games, see movies, whatever. It’s not bad actually. Unfortunately, it’s sure as hell to make for boring fucking writing.

So what’s next on the live poker schedule? It looks like this:
September 28th- September 30th AAPT in Seoul Korea.
October 26th-29th Poker News Cup in Melbourne Australia
Early November Betfair Asia Poker tour in Singapore
November 22nd-27th Unnamed event in Macau China
December date TBA AAPT in Sydney Australia
Mid January Aussie Millions Melbourne Australia

If you haven’t heard of some of these events it’s likely because I managed to attain I guess what you would call ‘inside information’ on some of them, though I doubt it’s that much of a secret. There’s also an event in Adelaide Australia somewhere in there, but I doubt I’ll get out of the comfy leather chair in my living room to go to Adelaide for one 3k event. Though, that’s basically what I’ll be doing with Korea, but that’s as much a holiday as anything. I fully intend on eating the country out of their stock of Galbi and Bulgogki.

Until then, it’s up to me to horde money for expenses and talk Timex into more staking. At this point I’m pretty sure he’s up for most things, and as he knows I’m working very hard daily to improve my leaks online. However, running the numbers shows that I’ve lost him in the area of $80,000 US. Man that is a sick sum of money.

So how have I been doing online since getting back? Ridiculous. At the start I could feel how rusty I was with the flow of the game, patterns, and players tendencies. After a week or two, I was back to normal. As for this week, I’ve won 4 tournaments and made in the area of 13 or 14 final tables, with a few days left to go in the week. Unfortunately, none of the scores have been very large with my biggest since coming back only $6,500.

One unfortunate aspect of my current schedule is that I miss out on a lot of the massive value that is Sundays (in the US.) Of the 5 sites that have a very large Sunday major only one is realistically feasible in my schedule, Full Tilt. I can make the mulligan and UB $500 as well, but overall I doubt I’ll get a chance to put up a very large score for quite some time unless I hit one of the nightly weekly $1000 buy ins.

With everything so in place, all that’s really left to question is what to write about. I guess the daily happenings of online, interesting hands, final tables, scores, gossip, whatever else comes up. So I’ll try that for now, while I settle into the queer normalcy that is being a 9 to 5er.