With Celina back in Australia I was alone in Milwaukee with nothing but time on my hands and minimal interest in going out partying with my friends since I wouldn’t try to pick up. As a result I spent the vast majority of my time playing tournaments online and posting heavily in MTT strategy on 2+2. Thanks to the entire campus having wireless internet even when I was in class I often found a seat in the back row and fired up a few tables or zoned out posting online.

When December rolled around Celina and I discussed how we would find a place to live together. I was banned from Australia and she couldn’t come back to the US as the immigration department had removed her visa waiver program instead of trying to help us find a legal way to get her into the country (thanks cocksuckers!) As a result, we decided that we’d go live in an apartment Celina’s mother owned in Shanghai China while we worked through an Australian lawyer to get me back into the country. I left Milwaukee at the end of December 2006 and that was the last I saw of many of my long term friends and much of my family. I’ve had the chance to stop over for a couple very brief visits since, but unfortunately there was never enough time for everyone.

When I arrived Celina and her uncle and aunt picked me up from the airport and took us on a 90 minute drive out to the apartment. As it turns out the apartment was way out of the city, to the point that down the road was a farm. It was actually a pretty nice apartment, despite the building itself looking fairly shoddy. We were so far out that when I went outside people would freeze and just gawk at me as they hadn’t seen a white person that far out in years. People would often walk up curiously and say “Hello!” then sort of run off amused.

I didn’t speak a word of Chinese and knew nobody in the country except Celina and was unable to get around myself since I knew where nothing was. As a result most of my life was contained to the apartment grinding tournaments online and doing everything I could to learn tournament poker. About once a week we’d go into the center of the city and go to dinner or a movie or meet up with her family. The closest thing I ever had to a friend for those six months was Celina’s cousin who spoke rather broken English and I had nothing in common with. Living in China was a strange but educational and eye opening experience. Things were extremely cheap when you did the conversion to USD and when I went out I was able to live like a king. I remember I once took Celina to one of the best French restaurants in town on this park lake in one of the fanciest parts of town. We had numerous courses, beer, wine, dessert and the whole thing for two of us came to $50 USD and the food quality was as good as anywhere in the US. I remember one strange experience where at the Korean BBQ place we often went to I was given a choice between two sizes of bottle of beer; a regular or large. Celina asked what the price difference was and the response was “none.” I don’t get it to this day. People would stare at me everywhere and constantly, no matter how obvious it was. The people in Shanghai are pretty rude and competitive until they’re introduced to you, at which point they become excessively polite and nice. I remember when we went to renew my visa we had to take a government official with us in the car on the insistence of the Chinese who were trying to curb bribery in such situations.

Around January or February 2007 I became quite good friends with Adam Junglen online and because I had (and have) considerable respect for his game I asked him to coach me. He gave me a very reasonable hourly rate and we went to work on fixing my leaks and spent considerable time discussing strategy on Skype. Adam was really the one who imparted the fundamentals and advanced strategy of tournament poker to me, teaching me about things like stack sizes, position, and ranges on a depth that I’d never come close to previously perceiving. Around that time I final tabled my first Sunday major, the Full Tilt 300k (which has become the 750k.) I finished fourth for about $24,000, by far the largest online score of my life. Over the following months Adam and I spent a lot of time improving on my game and in May of 2007 I spoke to Timex online and told him that I was going to the WSOP and if he was interested in backing me my action was available. Because I knew little of backing at the time I was expecting that if he said yes it’d be for just a few events, but when he and Steve Paul-Ambrose agreed they told me they wanted me in as many events as possible. It’s obvious to me now why they insisted on that, but at the time I was pretty floored.

Also in May our lawyers informed us that the Australian government had approved Celina as my relationship sponsor to get me back into Australia and that after the WSOP I would have no problems reentering the country. We left Shanghai in late May to hang out with friends in Kuala Lumpur Malaysia for a little while, which I can tell you is a very cool city worth visiting. In early June I headed off to Vegas for the WSOP again, this time having to leave Celina behind because she wasn’t able to enter the country. When I got to Vegas Steve and Sirwatts got a hold of me and asked if they could crash in my hotel room for a night or two. It was my first time meeting anyone off of 2+2 (except for a very brief hello to Nath in 2006.)

The 2007 WSOP marked the first time I thought to write trip reports for each event after having seen numerous other posters put interesting ones up. They were never proof read or edited, but because I tried to mix in humor and goings on outside of the poker the trip reports wound up proving rather popular and essentially provided me the motivation to continue writing permanently. I really ought to go back and make sure I get all of them saved onto my tworags blog, as they still persist in the archives of 2+2. From a financial stand point though, the 2007 WSOP was a disaster. I lost Timex/Steve over $60,000 and only cashed four of the 30 events I played. I made one final table at the Bellagio during their Bellagio Cup preliminaries but near instantly lost a flip for most of my stack and busted in eighth not long after. Overall I ran pretty horrendous throughout the summer (as was chronicled in the trip reports) though it’s clear now that I also had massive leaks at the time.

Following the WSOP I went back to Australia without any visa problem. Celina had gotten us an apartment in St. Kilda, about 10 minutes outside the central business district, where I still live today. I started grinding heavily online with a roll that was hanging around ~$60,000. I began working six or seven days a week, roughly seven to 10 hours every day. I got post flop coaching from NoahSD and spent an enormous amount of time on Skype with Luckychewy and with their combined knowledge of cash play my game steadily improved. I started blogging consistently and as well as writing articles be they on strategy or satire on the poker world. Most of all though I just kept grinding my ass off.

In late 2008 Celina and I traveled to Macau after both winning our way into the tournament on Stars. Celina wound up running deep in the main event and finishing 24th and making enough of an impression that it jet started her sponsorship career with PokerStars. They first sponsored her into the APPT final in Sydney which we both attended and busted fairly early in.

The 2008 Aussie Millions came and went without any major result. I managed to go from first in chips with ten left in the $1000 rebuy to finishing tenth, and although most recall that as some sort of epic blow up it was the result of two hands; the first where I shoved over a SB raise in the BB with Q3s 20 BB’s effective and the BB spent a minute swearing and debating before calling with JJ, and then two orbits later shoving my last 20 BB’s over the same SB’s raise while in the BB holding TT and getting snapped by KK. By the end of the Aussie Millions I was comfortably over $100,000 USD in make up and had a reputation as a blow up artist in live tournaments.

I spent all of the first few months of 2008 grinding very heavily online and making a considerable amount of money as a result. In February of 2008 I cemented my idea for ‘Around the World in 90 Days’ after having kicked it around in my head for a while. I approached numerous poker sites and poker reporting sites with the idea, my first real interaction with the business side of the poker world. Full Tilt eventually responded that they were quite interested in the blog idea and after a phone meeting where I stated on the subject of payment “I let my agent Kyle do all the asshole negotiating for me” it was agreed upon that I would sell my blog to them for 90 days but with the conditions that I couldn’t write about drug use, other poker sites, or overt sexual content and that they had last say in editing.

Up until leaving on the trip on May 1st 2008 I spent my entire life grinding and studying, except a week or so leading up to the trip which I took off to “Get high and play video games” as I stated in an interview on the upcoming trip. At this point I had grinded my roll online up to around $200,000. Celina and I left Melbourne for Venice on the 1st of May and spent a month in Europe playing tournaments across the continent. I came within 10 places of the money in all four major tournaments I played, finishing on the exact bubble in the last one, WPT Barcelona, which plunged me into around $140,000 in make up.

After Europe I made my way to Vegas for the WSOP and Bellagio Cup in very late May. I blanked out my first 10 events but then started making progress. I final tabled a $2,000 deep stacked event at the Bellagio and made a deal that gave me far above equity for a score of $24,000. Not long after I final tabled the $3,000 WSOP event and finished eighth for $54,000. Then as the WSOP was drawing to a close I wound up finally running good live and winning a $3,000 Bellagio Cup preliminary event for $193,000 though $25,000 was taken out to force me to play in the 2009 WPT Championship. The score came with a gold Bellagio bracelet which I gave to Celina and enough money to totally eradicate my make up.

The WSOP main event came and went without serious incident, and leading up to the Bellagio Cup main Sirwatts and I agreed to swap five percent, which was outside my staking arrangement with Timex as I was swapping five of the 40% that belongs to me in each tournament (though it is accurate that were I in make up and made a score for less than all my make up when I had swapped I would owe money out.) As most know, Mike ‘Sirwatts’ Watson went on to win the Bellagio Cup IV main event for $1.67 million USD, and I received over $83,000 as a result. Unfortunately there’s no epic stories from that night, we simply got a limo and went to get Korean BBQ at 3am then went to sleep because we had to wake up at 11am the next day to check out of our Vegas house.

After Vegas Celina and I went off to Macau for the Macau Poker Cup for what was the last stop on around the world trip before heading home to Melbourne. Celina got second there for her first five figure US score. By the end of the trip I had fallen considerably behind in the writing, as I realized juggling the responsibilities of playing, having a social life, managing a relationship, and trying to find the time to write several pages each night became too much to manage. When we arrived back in Melbourne I began playing online leading up to the Victorian Poker Championships and had written up through day 99 in the series. Throughout the trip I had heard whispers that Full Tilt was considering sponsoring me if I won anything during the writing of the blog. Before that could materialize I managed to shoot myself in the foot and ruin any chance of a deal.

During the FTOPS that came on previous to the Vic Champs I entered the first event, a $200 no limit hold’em event. The event caused my computer to freeze and crash and made Full Tilt unplayable for most of the day, costing me around $1000 in lost entries. I posted on 2+2 to find out if anyone else was having problems with the FTOPS and several replied that they were having the same problem, resulting in my raging in the thread at the incompetence of Full Tilt promoting a massive tournament series that their site couldn’t even support for all the players and that we should demand our money back in the tournaments that we got blinded out of. My superiors at Tilt saw the thread and asked me to please stop bashing them in it, which I did, but the damage to my business prospects with them was clearly done. At least a bunch of my 2+2’er friends got some money back after considerable back and forth with Full Tilt support.

After the Vic champs finished and leading up to the APPT event in Korea Kyle approached Full Tilt about the possibility of bringing me on as a red pro. They responded that they would be happy to have me continue writing for them but were not interested in my being a pro for them. At the same time Stars offered me a free seat to APPT Korea so Kyle sent Tilt off one last email saying that Stars had expressed interest in sponsoring me for the Korean event and that I’d be working with them if Tilt didn’t want to go the sponsorship route. Tilt’s response was close to a 180 of their previous one and they said they could see how I would fit in and they’d talk to higher ups and get back to me within a week. I discussed the situation with my contact over at Stars who advised me that it likely wouldn’t be smart to show up in Korea wearing a Stars patch while Tilt was considering sponsoring me. I was happy to sit that live tournament out considering how tired I was from all the travel, so Celina went off while I stayed home to grind and awaited Tilt’s response.

The grinding went well but the response never came. Even a month later Tilt had never sent any response, not even so much as a “Thanks but no thanks.” I took it as there way of saying ‘get fucked’ for having shot my mouth off. Around this time things started really falling apart with Celina, and when we went to New Zealand together in October we ran into numerous problems. New Zealand also marked the first poker seminar I took part in with Lee Nelson, Joe Hachem, Dennis Waterman, and Tyson Streib. Lee organized them and had asked me to partake in teaching after reading my strategy articles and the review I had done for his ‘Kill Everyone’ tournament strategy book.

When we returned from our trip things with Celina continued dissolving and my response was to spend even more time grinding, compounding the problem. When she left for APPT Philippines we discussed the idea of it being ‘a break’ and she left on uncertain terms. At home I began making plans for a massive prop bet against Stevo and whoever would take us on as a team of two to see who could do better by grinding enormous volume in November. On the second of November I spoke to Celina and she informed me she didn’t want to be a couple anymore. I asked the guys in the bet if they wouldn’t mind letting me out and since there was only three guys to check it with who were all friends, they agreed to let me out and do it some other time. I wasn’t devastated by the break up in the traditional spend all day crying and hiding inside my house sense, but I had completely lost my desire to grind.

I decided to take a vacation to Hawaii leading up to APPT Sydney and in mid November went up there to visit Lee Nelson’s son Cade who I’d met and really clicked with in New Zealand. We spent two weeks chasing girls on the beach and watching me get horrendously drunk at night and writhe around on his floor between stints of intense vomiting and demanding we go for Korean BBQ at 3am. By the end of all that I felt much better. At some point during my trip I messaged the guy who’d been my contact point at Tilt and told him good luck in everything he does in the future since it appears we won’t be working together anymore. He was confused as he’d thought I was going to continue writing for them, and when I explained the situation he told me he’d look into it though I’d assumed our dealings were over a long time ago. A few days later he got back to me that they were in fact not interested in any business regarding sponsorship as I’d expected, though it was certainly charming of them to inform me with such priority.

I left Hawaii for Sydney in early December where I did another seminar and played a couple of events between going out and hitting on anything that moved and pouring alcohol all over myself after bribing my way on stage.

Upon returning to Melbourne I took an easier approach to grinding and wound up taking many days off to enjoy the summer and immediately get back into the dating game. I spent most of my summer grilling and smoking pot with people on my porch and playing sport during the day. I met a girl I started seeing regularly and after the Aussie Millions was over heavily reduced the amount of time I went out partying. I made one final table in the Aussie Millions, the $1000 rebuys which I’d finished 10th in the previous year, and improved upon it by one in getting ninth this year after running KK into AA on the final table then losing 99 to 55 on a 876 flop the very next hand all after having shown up 30 minutes late thanks to some kind of freak accident.

Shortly after the Aussie Millions a group of us headed off to the very first ANZPT event in Adelaide where after a drama filled weekend I wound up finishing second when a disastrous club hit to fill the flush draw of my opponent for 95% of the chips in play. Again I had erased the make up I had worked up (this time more like $50,000) and upon returning to Melbourne returned to the online game.

Now I sit at my computer on the 1st of March after completing a day of grinding. My life mostly consists of working out and grinding for the moment, though that will all change when I go traveling again on April 11th on the trip that will be known as ‘Around the World in 150 Days’.

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