Boardin', Grindin', Donatin'

Last weekend I headed up to Cataloochee ski area with Nate and Evelyn to get some snowboarding in.  It was a cold weekend up in North Carolina and they had been making snow all week, so there actually were some decent conditions.  It felt pretty nice to take a day off from poker and hit the slopes.  Unfortunately, my car didn't do to well on the ice on the trip up there.  I pulled a full 360 on an exit ramp and then we got stuck for a while on another hill, before we found the right route to the ski area.  So, it's looking now that I won't drive to Tahoe and I'll just fly out instead and maybe rent a car for a few months.

The SNE grind is coming along really well.  As I write this I'm just shy of 935k VPP's so only about 65k more to go before I'm done for the year.  With 19 days left it's under 4k per day and I've been averaging closer to 5k for the past 2 months.  Hopefully I'll be done a couple days early and get to take a few days off before the new year.  Then it's down to the Bahamas for the PCA.  Last year's winner got a bit over $2,000,000 which would be a nice start to the year.

After a really good start to the month I hit another big downer, mostly due to life stuff getting in the way of poker.  This seems to be the theme throughout the last couple of months, but once I'm out to Tahoe hopefully things will all be better.  After a good weekend I'm only down a bit on the month now, and historically the games are very soft around Christmas time, so with any luck I'll end the year on a high note.

A bunch of mid-high stakes player on Stars/FTP got together and donated a ton of money to Toys for Kids.  It's always nice when a bunch of guys who make more money then they know what to do with, and have a habit of blowing it on dumb things, get together and do something to make a difference.  Overall we raised about $6,000 for the charity in the US, Canada, and the UK.

One of the guys from UK made it out to the toy store and got to go on a huge toy shopping spree and managed to get some pictures of the whole ordeal.  Lets just say a lot of kids will be getting a lot of toys this x-mas.

Not sure if I'll get another post in before X-mas, so happy holidays everyone.

- Daniel