Slowin' Down For a Couple Weeks

What's up kids!  I've been pretty ridiculously busy for the last 2 weeks, so I haven't had a chance to update this shindig.  Aw hell, who am I kidding, I haven't been doing shit but laying around and playing the occasional few hands of poker.  I'm right on the verge of losing SNE, which would be most unfortunate considering how close I was to offing myself at the end of last year trying to get it.  If I can somehow get 2 more hours in this month, fortunately, I'll retain those sexy black stars till at least the end of April.

Yep, there you have it.  That's the clown takin' all your money.

And now, since I don't really have anything super exciting to talk about, I'll just talk about a bunch of random crap and hope that at least 3 of you find something in here worth reading.

I'm back in Atlanta now for a couple of weeks.  I don't have a very good explanation of why I left Tahoe early, but it seemed like the right move at the time.  Unfortunately, I forgot that I can't walk 5 minutes and be on a mountain in this place so now I'm homesick.  I think I'll likely go back for one more week of boarding before we lose the house.

Here's a picture of my Dynamics professor from Georgia Tech.  He was likely the best avatar I ever had.

Baseball started today.  I hate baseball.  Does that make me un-American?  Nah I don't think so, and I buy enough silly electronic things and fast food to balance that out.  On a side note, Jason Heyward is kind of good at this excuse for our national pastime.

I'm currently homeless, which is rather exciting.  Fortunately, my parents live in Atlanta and for some unknown reason are o.k. with me stumbling in at 3:00 each morning smelling like you average hobo on the street corner.  What excellent parental figures I have!

I'm going to be in Atlanta probably until the 11th of this fabulous month of April, so if you are in town and would like to see me make a fool of myself somewhere, give me a shout.  After that I'm off to Tahoe for one more week of boarding, and then will probably be going right to Europe for about a month.  I'm pumped about Europe, mostly because I imagine all Europeans to be just like Speedle, Joop, and Blaabar, and these 3 individuals are simply prime examples of the human race.  Look, I will show pictures to justify this claim...

speedlebot

joopaloop

blabby *PUSS*

So that's pretty much what I'm expecting when I go to this foreign continent.  I'll be playing the 5,000 euro buyin tournament in San Remo on April 27 (27 April for you Euro folk) and then the 10,000 euro buyin tournament in Madrid on May 6 (6 May if you're still confused).  In between I plan on having speedlebot teach me how to properly buy a 391 piece suit and spend over $1k on drinks in a strip club after getting cut off.  He's quite the champion.

After Madrid I have a friend with entirely too much hair flying out to bum it around Europe with me for a couple of weeks before she starts school in Germany for the summer.  It will likely be a thrilling adventure of epic proportions.  Amsterdam, Prague, Budapest and many other cities are on the to-do list, so hopefully we can have some fun and avoid accidentally ending up in the basements of too many sex dungeons.

I'd also like to update everyone on the current scores of my ongoing Words With Friends games.  You're going to pretend to care, because if you've gotten this far, you are thoroughly bored with your life.

Jooooooooce 113

matthorsecock 111

tiles: cielegu

Jooooooooce 123

heatherwhizkid 98

tiles: haha heather i'm not gonna tell you

Now that all of the important topics have been covered, I will end this blog with a song I've been listening too a lot lately.  It's nice because I often do not know what day of the week it is, so I count on Rebecca to keep me informed.

Ok, I'm kidding.  If you haven't watched it, then I'd suggest you watch a few dozen times to let it soak in.  Because "WHICH SEAT CAN I TAAAAAKE?" is likely one of the deepest lyrics I've come across in a while.

And here's a good song for a change.



NOTONTILT OUT!

Vegas, ugh

Let me start this blog off by saying that I really don't like Vegas all that much.  You may think it'd be my Mecca given the whole 'you play poker for a living' thing, but the city itself is just too much for me.  Most of this stems from the fact that I lived a ridiculously crazy 2 months there last summer, and every trip I've made to Vegas since then has just brought back shitty memories of lighting way too much money on fire.

I was hoping this trip would be a bit different.  My good buddy Nolan randomly decided he wanted to go for a few days and wanted someone to share a hotel room with.  Given that I do absolutely nothing with my life, it seemed like a good chance to get down there for a couple days and hopefully not spew money like I usually do. Well, we failed pretty miserably at that part right from the get go.  Speedle and Blaabar ended up wanting to go as well so we just ended up booking a Penthouse Suite at the Mirage.  I know what your thinking, "don't spew money... Penthouse?"  It was worth it however.  The room was awesome (Kim Kardashian was staying next door), and we didn't really spend entirely too much on the room.

I don't think I took any pictures of the room itself, but it was gigantic with 2 master bedrooms and a living room area that was about twice the size of normal Vegas hotel rooms.  We were also at the top of the Mirage which was pretty awesome.

Now, the plan was to not play any poker, and just go see a show and have some nice dinners.  Unfortunately, nothing in my life seems to go as planned and I found myself playing a $500 poker tournament at the Wynn the 1st day we were in town.  I'll save a everyone reading a bunch of time talking about boring poker hands and such, but this was the outcome...

Yeahhhhhhhhh, wooooooooooooooooo.  We ended up chopping the remaining prize pool when there were 5 people left, and then I went on to win the whole thing for about $16,000 and that cool looking trophy thing.  Of course, Blaabar swapped 10% with me again so although he busted just short of the money, he still made over $1k in the tourney.  What a luckbox.  Oh, I guess it wasn't too lucky when I busted him with A3 vs. his QQ all in preflop.  Sorry buddy, but clearly a straight is better than a pair.

So the tourney ended up taking up most of the time on the trip.  The guy I beat heads up was a pretty nice guy and was in town with a couple of friends so I took everyone out that night.  I was more than content just getting bombed playing beer pong at O'Sheas, but Speedle was with us, so naturally we ended up at Sapphire.  A bunch of bottles and champagne rooms later, I was reminded of why I hate Vegas so much.

So that's about it for this time.  I'm definitely on a major heater in live poker with 2 'wins' in my last 3 live events, and I'm pretty excited to play some more live tourneys.  The next one on my schedule is the EPT Grand Final in Madrid on May 5th, but I'm eying an EPT tourney in San Remo, Italy the week before that should be a lot of fun and a pretty soft field.  I've never been to Europe and I'm planning on spending the majority of May over there, so expect some cool pictures at the very least in upcoming blogs.

I've got a few buddies in Tahoe right now, and one of them has a GoPro camera that attaches to a snowboard helmet, so we've got some interesting videos of snowboard action.  Hopefully I can get a few of them onto my computer and I'll throw them in the next post.  From what I've seen they're rather excellent given that I've been very much inebriated every time I've worn the camera.

Finally, although I had planned on being out in Tahoe until April 20th, I'm going to be coming home much earlier, probably sometime in the middle of next week.  I'm about ready to be out of the cold, and I think I've snowboarded plenty for one trip.  So watch out ATL, this busto ass clown in about to come home (for a whole month this time!)

- Weinman

To Flo-rida and back

Hello world!  I'm back in the fabulous Lake Tahoe after a week in West Palm Beach, Florida, and a lot has happened.  So what better for me to do then tell the whole internet about it.

I guess I'll talk about the boring stuff first since this is a blog about poker, and I have to get my little fix in each post.  Poker went really well down there.  I lost about $1k in cash, which was actually a pretty big accomplishment since each of the 2 out of the 3 nights I played cash I was stuck over $5,000 within the first 20 minutes.  One of the nights I lost $6k in the first orbit and vowed I wasn't leaving until I was a winner.  So 5 hours later or so this was the scene in front of me.  A few k after this picture I had met the goal.  The highlight of the night was definitely winning a $4,300 pot with 2nd pair in PLO that went 3 way to the river and was potted on the turn.

I lost the main event in about 2 hours, so there was another $1,600 down the drain.  Fortunately, I went really deep in the penultimate $1k No Limit event and was fortunate enough to get some pictures along the way.

Here is me looking very intense at the final table

Here is me looking very calm as I jam my entire stack in with Jack high with 4 people left

Since you are likely getting tired of looking at me, here's my Tahoe roomate Dmitri

And now back to me eating some soup and then getting a massage

I had about 50% of the chips in play when we got down to 3 people, and the $50,000 first prize was in sight!

Unfortunately, the first hand of heads up play I decided to bluff away my entire stack and my opponent made a pretty ridiculous heroic call with 2nd pair on a very flushy/straighy board, and I ended up getting 2nd place for about $32,000.  Dmitri was happy as he had 10% of my action, as was my buddy Brian from high school who had swapped 5% with me.

But it was still my second biggest live score ever, and definitely got me back on track for the year which had started out rather poorly.

And we are finally done with the poker part... onward to more important things!

My good friend Chris and his girlfriend April came down for the last few days of the trip, and one night we spontaneously decided to take a limo ride down to Miami to watch the Heat play the Wizards and check out my cousins new restaurant.  You may know Chris as the legendary csfalcon18 Rush Poker extraordinaire.  You also should remember my cousin Josh from a post many months ago; you'd better because he's the famous one in the family, not me.

Anyways where was I.  Oh yes a limo ride from Palm Beach to Miami.  

I was surprised to find out that a legend of online poker lived right in between the two cities and was up for coming out with us for the night.  I'm speaking of course, of the legendary vinivici9586.  If you play online poker at Poker Stars you know vini.  Hell, you probably don't even dare speak his name for lack of 7 months of runbad.  But he's always there, taking your paper and hiding somewhere in the confines of his parents' basement.  Vini's real name turned out to be Vincent, but I had known him for way to long as the legendary vini, so henceforth he will be referred to as such.

But first, a picture of most of the crew in the limo!

If you've read this far, I assume you can figure out who is who.  As we arrived in Ft. Lauterdale to pick up Mr. Vini, we were informed that he'd be bringing a date.  Naturally as poker players, we decided to gamble on her ethnicity.  I took Asian and Blaabar took the field giving me 3:1.  I'll let you readers decide who won the bet as there was much confusion.

That's vini on the left, if there was any confusion about that part.  Yes, that is the guy taking your paper every day.  And yes, that is his 100% asian date for the night.

Moving onward!!!!

We proceeded to the Heat game which was a lot of fun.  Dwade put up 41 points and Lebron can fly which was interesting to watch.  I snapped a few pictures of the game...

The Heat won by 8 if I recall correctly, so everyone was happy.  We quickly exited the arena where the limo was waiting for us and moved on to location number 2, Josh's new restaurant.

Now, I knew the restaurant was new, I just didn't know how new.  The sign displaying the name of the place wasn't even up, and it turned out to be the second night that the restaurant was open to the public.  We got lucky that the hostess flagged us down as we passed the place for the 3rd time.  I'm not sure whether Josh let the staff know that we were coming, or it was because we all got out of a stretch limo, but they ended up clearing out the nicest table in the place for us.  It was separated from everything else and in a library-esque room which was pretty amazing.

Speaking of amazing, I should talk about the food here.  Oh first I should give the place a shout out since it's really great food.  The name is Symcha's and it's located in South Beach, FL.

But back to the food.  I had lamb with some truffle infused sweet potato mash and asparagus and everything was just about perfect.  I also tried some of everyone's plates and would definitely order everything off the menu.  I think the sea bass was my favorite though, so give that one a try if you end up at Symcha's.

Naturally, I couldn't contain myself and took a ton of pictures of food as you probably realize I do a lot by now.

What I'm getting at is if you happen to find yourself in the Miami area, check it out because I pretty much guarantee an awesome meal.  And if you happen to be lucky enough to meet the chef, mention your a fan of cousin Daniel and maybe you'll be lucky enough to have the executive chef himself choose the cards when you Credit Card Roulette for the bill.

And Dmitri finally lost and had to pay for a dinner, so all was well with the world.

Here's the whole crew from that night...

The rest of the trip was pretty relaxing and uneventful. 

 We played some Chinese Poker on the beach.

We watched a master chef make onion volcano and scream "JAPANESE KETCHUP" at a hibachi place

And Dmitri and I played golf.  It was his first time.  He shot 78... on the front.

I think that's about it for now.  The few days we've been back in Tahoe have been eventful, involving a Harry Potter lookalike, a very drunken night at Montbleu, and me buying the jacket off a guy's back.  But we'll save all these stories and more for next time.  And I promise there will be more as I'm headed to Vegas in 2 days for some festivities.

Goodbye world,

- Daniel