Gettin' Hustled

Yep it's finally happened.  The hustler has been hustled.  My buddy Dan (GT30 on 2p2) had been talking some trash about racquetball for a while so I finally accepted his challenge a few days ago.  Now I knew that Dan had been the punter at Georgia Tech a few years before I was there, so he had to be reasonably athletic, but I didn't expect anything like the force that hit me on the court.

Basically he cheated as he neglected to tell me he plays 3 times a week, actually leaves his house more than once a week, and probably eats like a normal person so he doesn't nearly pass out on the court 5 times per game.  Yeah I kinda need to work on being a normal human being.  We played a warm up game for $100, and Dan won 15-3.  It was even more embarrassing as I had a few friends at the gym seeing me get my ass handed to me in a racket sport, which just doesn't happen.


The next 2 games Dan gave me 8 and 9.5 points, and still won both of those games handily.  It's ok though, because I got a free dinner out of it so I only lost about $300 on the day.  Hopefully he gets his ass out to PCA so we can have a rematch at the ping pong table where I will take back my crown.  Oh and Pettey ur going down too you clown.  And I don't wanna hear all these excuses about what paddle I'm using.  Just watch the ball go by and applaud my awesomeness.

Oh, and I played alot of poker today

- NIT

ALTA city champs, PLO pro, Tahoeeeeeeeee!

ALTA:

Yep, some things have happened in the last week or so.  And I have lots of pictures to prove it.  I mentioned last time that I was about to play in the ALTA city championships (a huge tennis league in Atlanta) at one of the highest levels.  Well, i think this picture sums up the day pretty well...

Yeahhhhh, we won, and it was an awesome day of tennis, drinking, and racket smashing.  The way ALTA works (well, playoffs) is there are 5 doubles matches and it's simply first to win 3 of them.  I was playing line 2 with the guy on the far left bottom... oh wait more picture time

Anyway, by the time we got on the court, line 1 was down a set and not looking too good, which was surprising as one of the guys on our line 1 is hands down one of the best players in the city.  He played D1 at Michigan State, and actually was a poker player before he inevitably found blackjack.  Ah, how that story resonates.  But back to our story.

My partner played, for lack of a better word, reallyfuckinshitty.  It happens, people have off days, and we still kept it close, but we ended up losing our first match of the year in the finals 6-3, 6-3.  After the match, I took a racket to a concrete walll and created a good amount of destruction, scaring the women and children in attendance.  However, line 1 came back and won in 3 sets, so it was all square at 1 match a piece headed into lines 3 and 4.

Action shot...

Line 3 ended up playing pretty bad as well, and went down in straight sets, and line 4 ended up losing the first set.  Things weren't going very well as line 5's took the court.  It turned out one of the guys playing line 5 for the other team was someone I used to play juniors with, and remember him being pretty good, so at this point I though we were pretty much a lost cause.  To make things worse, 4's went down a break in the second set. However, they got it back and went on to win the set 7-5.  And 5's scooped up the first set easily as well, so it was all coming down to the 3rd set of line 4.

Now, you may be wondering what the rest of the team is doing while all of these matches are going on.  Since we only get 2 courts, and most of the matches went pretty long, we ended up being there for about 7 hours.  That's a lot of time spent drinking in the hot sun yelling at the other team.  Needless to say, we were all pretty much gone by this time and children were starting to cry as the volume level and profanity level had gone through the roof.

The 3rd set of 4's was incredible.  It's a few days out of memory now, but I believe it was on serve to around 3-3, until we got a break, and then had one of our biggest servers serving for the match at 5-4.  Well, needless to say that went poorly and then it was 5-5.  We ended up getting another break there (and racket of opponent was smashed), and then held at 6-5 to take the match.  A couple minutes later line 5's won their 2nd set and clinched the title.  And the champagne was flowin', and the plates were ours.

PLO:

I started dabbling in some PLO (pot limit omaha) recently as the holdem games have been pretty bad in the morning time and I don't want to have to drop down limits or play shortstack tables to fill up the 24 table queue.  Naturally, I jumped right into 24 tabling the game with little experience, and have had some decent success.  The best part about it is my hands/hour and vpp's/hand are slightly higher playing a mix of .5/1 and 1/2 plo then playing 2-4/10-20 holdem so I get closer to SNE faster.  The downside is I definitely make more $$$ playing holdem, but PLO is a nice change.

The game is definitely very much more exciting then holdem, as you get it all in a lot more, and will rarely be too far behind when you do.  This is great for the weaker players as they don't realize the significant edge they give up until much further down the road, which keep the games going longer.  However, the game does come with an extremely high variance level, so it's easy to get frustrated if you lose 10 all-in's in a row.  I played for about 3 days or so while on my holdem break, and ended up slightly positive, while running slighly below EV.  I also managed to figure out how to not get absolutely murdered in non-showdown winnings, which is really important.

Although, it does take some getting used to (coming from a holdem background) that aces are more or less trash, and hands like below are the moneymakers.

TAHOE:

I'm all but booked to move to Tahoe for the first 3 months of next year.  I don't wanna post pics until we've actually signed the contract just in case one of you aholes decides to scoop up the place from me.  It should be a blast.  The group as of now is ryanmack, speedle, blaabar, and myself, so I'll be the only american in the house amongst 2 euros and a candian.  Drluck might end up coming out if we stay longer, but it's still up in the air.  I purchased my season pass for heavenly, and I'm ready to buy a board and hit slopes almost every day while I'm out there.

I still need to decide what I'm doing after Tahoe though.  Vegas for the summer is still definitely going to happen, although I'd like to go for a considerably shorter amount of time than this past year.  So, I'll either keep the place in Tahoe for an extra couple of months until the series or do some traveling around the world.

- notontilt

And down the stretch they come

Well, Zenyata lost the Breeder's cup, so much for perfection.  But that's not what this blog's gonna be about.  After today there are 49 days left in the year, and I'm at 792,000 VPP's.  I need 1,000,000 by the end of year to get there, and something pretty crazy would have to happen for me to not get there.  I have to average a bit over 4,000 a day which is only a bit more than 6,000 hands, or about 5 hours a day.

Speaking of something crazy happening, it almost did a few days ago.  I lost it and just started open shipping on every table for a few minutes.  Ended up blowing through about $5k, before some awesome regs got a hold of Zep who called me up and talked me off the ledge.  Thanks a lot to Marc, Klaaric, kaki, and Zep in no particular order.  There was actually some interesting aftermath to the whole ordeal.  Prahlad Friedman was at a bunch of the tables with me, and blew up at some of the regs in chat after I quit.  It sparked a pretty interesting discussion of whether or not to let someone play in that state, and while both sides have perfectly valid arguments, I definitely lean toward the side of not letting someone in that state dump their livelihood in a matter of minutes.

For the record, I was just completely stressed out, was running pretty bad at poker, and just hit a breaking point and decided I didn't want money any more.  Weird huh, that most people my age would do anything to have a bit more $$$ in their pockets, and here I was trying to give it all away.  I'll probably make a big post on this at the end of the year, but having seemingly unlimited money at a pretty young age is definitely a recipe for disaster if you don't balance it well.

Bleh, but enough about poker, it's the last thing I want to write or think about so we'll move on to more interesting topics.

My tennis season is coming to an end.  I ended up dropping out of my singles league as my shoulder is starting to flare up again, and I wanna save it for my doubles league.  That league actually ends tomorrow when we play for the city championships.  We have an insanely strong lineup, and definitely should be able to pull out a win.  I haven't lost all year in that league and don't plan on making the finals loss number 1.  It's gonna be a blast either way with tons of drinking and cheering, stuff that just never was a part of junior tennis.

I've also been playing a bit of golf.  My short game's an absolute mess, and is killing me, because everything else seems to be working right.  I shot 79 last week with 40 putts, which is just downright ridiculous.  The next day I got invited to play in a scramble by one of the alumni from my fraternity.  I had no idea what the outing was for until I got there, and ended up recognizing a ton of people.  It turned out to be a golf outing for ASHRAE which is short for something really long I don't feel like typing, but is basically a big society of engineers headquartered in Atlanta.  I had to join while at Georgia Tech, and the company I worked for in college was a big part of the group as well.

So anyway, I get the practice range, and see all of guys I worked with in college.  I had actually told most of them what I'd be doing when I got done with school (poker of course), so they were pretty interested to hear how that was going.  I may have left out a zero when they asked how much I was making though :) .   Back to the golf portion, we end up shooting 52 in a hilariously easy scramble where we were basically given 8 shots.  It was good enough to tie for first, but we lost a tiebreaker and had to settle for the silver.

Well, that's about all that's going on in my life at the current moment.  I'm getting ready to book a place in Tahoe for the first 3 months of next year with ryanmack, BLAABAR, and speedle, which should be an absolute blast.  After that I think I'll probably go and travel through Europe for a while before heading back to Vegas for the series.  Oh, and if anyone wants to live it my place in ATL super cheap for the first couple month of next year let me know, I'd like to hold on to it.

I will leave you with something I posted on another forum a while back, but is still rather interesting.  I think I'm in love with this girl, hopefully I'm rich enough / attractive enough to meet her low standards for men.  You should read the whole thing, it's worth it.

http://www.plentyoffish.com/viewprofile.aspx?s=1&profile_id=22529849

- N O motherfuckin' T out