We Like Sportz

Ahhh it's fall again, definitely my favorite time of the year for sports. Football's back and my Jackets are looking like utter trash through 4 games. Embarrassing loss to Kansas and really just got outplayed by NCST this past weekend. Standing outside in 100+ degree heat while shitfaced is definitely ok if Tech is going to win, but it's just that much worse when we're getting owned.

The Falcons look really good through 3 weeks, and Sunday's game vs. the Saints was probably the best football game I've watched in a long time.

But, fall also means that all of my tennis league kick back into action. I played 0 times the two months I was in Vegas and came back completely out of shape and couldn't play at all. Well 2 months later I'm still completely out of shape, but I'm playing better than I ever have.

My singles league started last week. It's a 6.0 rating USTA league, so just about everyone I play is either a teaching professional or played collegiate tennis somewhere. My first match was no exception, and the guy was really solid. He definitely had better strokes than me, but ultimately my laziness just got the better of me. At 3-3 in the first set I just couldn't move around the court anymore and he picked up on it rather quickly. I actually had 2 break points at 4-3 in the 1st set which probably would have locked up the set for me, but I ran kind of bad and lost both. I fought back to 5-5, but was just completely out of gas by then and didn't win another game, losing 7-5, 6-0.

My doubles league started a couple of weeks ago as well. My partner Adam played 1 doubles at Michigan State and is an absolute monster (and ex-poker player as well) on the court, which makes playing with him ridiculously fun. I haven't been the weaker player on a doubles team since I was 12 years old or so, and was the #1 doubles team in the state with my buddy Ryan.

Anyways, Adam and I head out to our first match, expecting a complete blowout. We're playing in a league decently far below our actual skill levels, so we planned on tuning it down a little bit for the first match. Unfortunately, we find out that the two guys we are playing are on the Antigua and Barbados Davis Cup team. Both of them played college tennis in the states, and they throw on their Davis Cup shirts right before we start the match.

Luckily Adam and I played super solid together and won the match 6-4, 6-1, but these were probably two of the most athletic people I've ever played against in my life, and the match was infinitely closer than the score suggested.

Last Saturday was our second match, and I played with my partner Ricky from last year as Adam was out of town.  We played pretty horribly and ended up winning in 3 sets, but were definitely in danger of throwing this one away.  Luckily I came up with 2 monster aces on the last two points of the match to put it away.

Allrighty I should probably stop blogging and get to work...

- Daniel

I guess this was bound to happen eventually

I've been running bad.  Real bad.  I'm never really one to complain as I'm still running about at expectation on the year, but this month has been pretty brutal.  I've stopped playing anything below 2/4 when enough games are available, which is really helping with the SNE grind, but it means the swings are larger and the runbad seems that much worse.  But enough about that, I hate seeing other people complain about this kind of stuff, so I won't bore anyone here with it.  (And if you are for some reason interested, I've included a lot of fun hands from just the last couple of days at the end of this post)

A week or so ago, someone made a post on 2+2 about a new Heads-Up Poker game, which supposedly brought some fun into the game.  The game is played exactly like a normal heads up match, with a few slight rules changes.

1)  The two players must be in the same room, as to see each other's faces, taunt each other, and generally just increase the overall animosity towards the opponent.

2) Heavy drinking is absolutely necessary.

3) Any time a pot is won with the following hands (72, 83, 94, T5, J6) and the winning player shows, the other player is forced to go all in the next hand, and the original player has the option of whether or not to call.  This creates so many interesting situations especially as the stacks get ridiculously deep and we have to decided just how far we're going to go to win a hand with a bounty attached.

Anyway, Pat and I gave the game a shot one morning, and decided to keep the stakes friendly and played 25c/50c HU.  Needless to say, things got ugly quick!  Nothing like running $2200 under EV at $50nl in the span of about an hour.

Yeahhhhhh, things didn't go to well there.  About 2/3rds of the way into the match I finally clawed back to winning for the first time, but I lost just about every single hand for the rest of the match, including multiple $2k bounty hands.  Lets just say alot of people on the rail were very confused at what was going on, and much fun was had.

Pat is actually the 6th biggest winner at 50nl online this month just due to this 400 hand session.

What else, what else...

The SNE grind is coming along, and I crossed the 600k VPP milestone a few days ago and currently sit a bit over 620k.  Current pace is somewhere around 740k VPP, so I'm well behind, but I think I should be able to make it relatively easily.  Starting today, I need exactly 4k VPP per day the rest of the year, and now that I'm playing midstakes entirely, it comes out to a bit over 6k hands per day or 5 hours.  My goal is to grind hard in October and November (Vegas and Barcelona trips might hurt here) and be done with a week or two left in the year and go out west for a ski trip.

Definitely looking forward to the Ryder Cup this weekend, as I didn't get a chance to make it out to East Lake to see any of the Tour Championship which I had planned on doing.

- NOOOOOOOOOO TILT

as promised here's some fun hands from the last 24 hours or so (sadface)






























And here's one just for fun... Guys like this are the reason the game will never die.

Crazy Month of August

Well August is done and is was probably the wildest month of my life.  Lots of stuff changed, I fell way short of some goals but I'm not too unhappy with how everything turned out.  My original goal for the month was to play about 300k hands and pick up some ground on SNE.  Well that was an epic fail as I got only 160k hands in, so now the last four months of the year are going to have to be around 250k hands each to make it.  Considering I'm still planning a Eurotrip for EPT Barcelona, and a ski trip out west at the end of the year, it's going to be a battle.

There's definitely a few good reasons why I failed hard at playing this month.  I was AC-less, internetless, and homeless for a decent portion of the month.  My AC in Atlanta had been out for most of the summer, and the maintenance crew could not figure out wtf was going wrong, so it was in the upper 80's every day in the apartment.  Always nice to work in a sweltering hot place.  Then the internet started going out, more on this later.  And then I was homeless for a few days, as I had to be out of my 90 degree apartment and hadn't set up another place to live yet.  I ended up grabbing another apartment in the same complex with DrLuck, which is turning out pretty well.

At one point during the month I was all ready to move to Miami with DrLuck and Nolan.  We were halfway there in Daytona when Nolan decided he'd rather live in Austin, TX, and had bought a place there during his cross country drive from Vegas, so Miami was put on hold for a while.  The plan now is to wait till the end of the year, and then have Speedle meet us down in Miami for the new year to find a place.  I was pretty excited for Miami, but was going to lose probably another week of playing, so maybe it's for the best that it didn't work out right away.

Back to this lack of internet ordeal.  Comcast is, without a doubt, the worst excuse for a business in this country.  Their customer support is garbage, their technicians are garbage, and they charge about 2x more than AT&T for comparable services.  Upon moving into the new apartment, we told them we needed 2 separate internet connections.  No problem they said, and a technician came and installed 2 modems from the same jack using a splitter.  The connection worked for a few minutes, and he left.  However, we couldn't both use our connections at the same time as the connection would bounce back and forth between the two modems.  This was pretty unfortunate as we were both trying to play, and probably lost about 5k combined due to this garbage.

After about 10 phone calls to comcast, and navigating through their horrid answering machine system, we were told that it's impossible to have 2 modems from the same jack.  Oh sweet, thanks for charging us for 2 lines, and installing them before you tell us it's impossible.  Eventually we went down to one modem and set up another network, but that one constantly crashed as well.  Comcast tells us everything is fine, but the internet was in and out every session we played and it was nearly impossible to hold connection for over an hour.  More technicians came out, of course it was working fine when they were here, so it appears we are just SOL.  Eventually we had enough and switched everything over to AT&T, so hopefully that'll work better for us when it all gets installed this weekend.

September should be a pretty intense month.  I've got a few tennis leagues starting so that'll definitely keep me busy, and I'll have to put in about 7 hours a day online to stay on pace for the end of the year.  Oh, and Amybug is attempting to win the UGL at 25nl, and she's set up a little grind station in our apartment so good luck, run good, be like notilt, portion control, take vitamin, etc.

However, we now have a pretty awesome apartment to relax in while not playing, and it has working AC which is always nice.  I'll post some pics of the apartment in the next post.

Awesome August graph things:

Hands from the desktop:

Hands from laptop:

Also made about 8k in bonuses, a little over 1k on my new laptop (Dell studio xps, seems awesome so far), and played once live and this happened...

So all in all, my best month ever in terms of profit, a pretty bad month in terms of volume, and a pretty hectic month in terms of life.  Hopefully things settle down in September, I don't have anything big planned, so likely I'll be able to get into a good routine and crank out 250k hands or so and maybe make some money while we're at it.