I took last week very slowly in the end. I barely played any poker, what I did play I was well-rested and ready for..I ended up winning a fair bit at HUNL but bricked out all my MTTs except for bagging another ANZPT Melbourne seat. I did some coaching sessions, and did a little hunting around for rentals as we are considering moving to a three bedroom place.

For the rest of the time my mind was mush; I was just really anxious about Dad and his upcoming test results and it felt like I was on stand-by as a person for the week. I slept in a lot and was pretty distant. I have felt pretty flat and have been pondering lots about my life, particularly those in my inner circle and trying to be honest with myself about how I interact with them and how I interact with life generally. And like most honest questions, I didn’t always like the answers I heard

I think it is hard to feel upbeat when you’re having introspective downtime, but I don’t think that makes it a bad thing at all. Thankfully Dad’s test results were good and provided he makes a few lifestyle changes he should be okay. It was a good wake-up call for me I think, and I suspect the effort I have put in to dealing with my own emotions about it honestly will be very beneficial going forward.

Let’s get back to playing some poker eh? Got lots of coaching lined up this week but should get a few sessions in, then the next six weeks are going to be a heap of fun. I have a mate from Perth coming over for ANZPT next week, loads of super soft games in June with everyone away for WSOP, a four-class whiskey tasting series with the distiller at Bakery Hill, a birthday party and a couple of great concerts (Something For Kate and A$AP Rocky) lined up. Might even have a new place to live in too. Good times!

I’ll finish this post with SFK’s cover of Sweet Nothing on Triple J this week, so good.

sup guys, had a kinda miserable weekend which wasn’t the best. My dad went to the dentist last week and it turns out he has a bunch of mouth cancers which he’s had to go and get a biopsy for. He has had a pretty shitty run with various health problems over the last couple years. He had prostate cancer which I guess is semi-standard for guys as they get older, successfully had surgery for that then he put his forearm through a saw in his factory and nearly cut it clean off. He had lengthy microsurgery which was not successful; he was suffering from strong shooting pains and his hand wasn’t really responding to the exercises he was given so he could barely use it at all. He got sick of taking a bunch of pain killers so he tried some additional microsurgery which involved taking tendons from his leg to insert into his forearm, unfortunately that didn’t succeed so now he has a troublesome leg as well as a hand that doesn’t work too well. He is 57, runs a construction business and is always building/growing/tinkering with stuff so that has slowed him down a fair bit. It made me think that if I lost the use of some of my limbs, so long as my mind was working 100% I could still keep myself occupied and enjoy life, but I think for someone like him it’s the exact opposite; he really values being able to get busy with his hands so it kinda sucks to see him battle with that.

I am not sure what’s to come of that yet but my mind has been occupied with it and I didn’t really feel in great shape to work so I skipped majors and haven’t bothered with SCOOP (or poker) much at all. Before when I’ve had any kind of problem on my mind I’ve thrown myself into poker because it’s such an easy distraction for your time and you can falsely convince yourself that you’re being productive blowing off sleep and grinding around the clock, but I’ve realised that at times like this my deferred feelings will play themselves out through poker, and that even if I don’t play worse (which there is definitely the potential for) I enjoy the game less and am more prone to tilt.

So while I have played some small HU sessions and some ANZPT sats when I’ve been bored, I have mostly just been sitting around the house watching documentaries, listening to podcasts, fixing up my deplorable attempt at AFL DreamTeam, buying stuff online and just trying to relax a bit and check in with dad to see what’s up. As for documentaries I have watched The Interrupters (anti-violence volunteers in Chicago), The Imposter (a Spanish man pretends to be the child of a Texas family that lost their son three years prior), and Senna (the Formula 1 driver). All were good; the first was a little bit long and I have seen a lot of similar stuff, but the second was nothing short of bewildering, a truly bizarre, headfuck of a tale. Senna might even have been better, I am not into F1 at all but I remember as a kid watching Senna and Prost duke it out and the story is very watchable regardless. I have a bunch more I expect I will get through soon, especially since I gave up on Game of Thrones in season three and ditched Suits after four or five episodes.

The podcast list on my iPhone has jumped from three (Joe Rogan, Bulletproof Executive and London Real) to eight, and I have played Flume’s Boiler Room set on Soundcloud a billion times – still enjoying it. Also spent a bunch of time emailing mates in the markets and getting up to speed with what is going on. Clearly I am still distracting myself but doing so in fairly relaxing ways that won’t lose me money rather than pressuring myself to grind.

As soon as I feel up to it I will punch out a few big sessions. Unfortunately I overslept this morning and missed the HU SCOOPs which were the only ones I was really excited about, and the rest of the week I am just going to continue to take it pretty easy. Probably going to the Pies v Cats game on the weekend which should be huge.

sup guys! I just got back from a surprise long weekend out to a farm property in Daylesford. Mell is very adept at picking the best times to plan these sorts of things, and I really enjoyed three days away from everything. The property was about ten kilometres out of the Daylesford township; a two storey townhouse perched on a hill in the bush, surrounded by nothing except rabbits, kangaroos and stars. We stocked up on red wine, meat and firewood and spent the majority of the time huddled up watching TV, perfectly relaxing. It is starting to get really cold in Melbourne, but it was nice and sunny through the day and I ventured out a little on Saturday to do some local shopping and take some photos.

I have been mixing up playing MTTs and HUNL through the week, mostly playing MTTs on the softest/best days and then HUNL the rest of the time, with coaching sessions thrown in on the HUNL days and off days. I have bricked out pretty hard with MTTs lately except for winning ANZPT Melbourne seats, but HUNL is going well and I’m not feeling rusty anymore. I have been doing loads more coaching than usual, I had so much overflow the last couple weeks I’ve had to get up early on the weekend to fit everyone in, but it has been going well and almost everyone is punching out scores which is great. I’ve also started to get into recording some of my HUNL sessions and reviewing those with some friends which has been really instructive.

I have been catching up a bit with mates, unfortunately I didn’t get to go to Meatmother as planned since it was closed, but we are supposed to be going tomorrow and I am really looking forward to it. I also went to the shisha bar at Maha last week to have a few scotches, and was really impressed by the local single malts from Bakery Hill. Sometimes I like to drink the peaty Islay malts (Caol Ila, Lagavulin, Oban, Laphroiag, Ardberg – probably in that order) and was pretty skeptical about anything decent coming from Victoria but the peated malt was amazing and I was pretty disappointed (but undeterred!) to find out it sells for more than its Islay counterparts.

Not too much else to report; the month is going to be really busy poker-wise with SCOOP and ANZPT Melbourne and I will be trying to play as many of the good events as possible while trying to fade the reggiest parts of the daily schedule on the off-days. I might have a mate over from Perth for some of it which will be really awesome.

sup Man it sure took a while for me to knock the flu. I am just contemplating going to the gym for the first time this month, feels really hard to get back into it too as I know it’s going to be tough going for a few weeks. Had a quiet weekend; worked Saturday, went to the Pies game with Berky and crew, had some friends over for Sunday roast, that was about it. I have reluctantly been watching GoT Season 3; I knew the onslaught of fantasy-driven script was going to happen sooner or later but I am kind of at the point where I’ve invested time into it this long that I may as well finish it off. #wherearemydragons

One thing it hasn’t been hard to get back into is the online grind. My new 27 inch monitor arrived shortly after getting back home, I have adorned it with Katy Perry in all her High Definition glory and reveled in the ability to tile twenty MTTs across the one screen. Thanks to @therealfreddo for finding me a really sweet deal on Kogan; it cost me four hundred bucks and I will probably be in the market for another one soon I think. Other than Monday brickage, tourneys have been going well; I have won four tourneys for the month already and I’m up about 10k. I have been playing HU a little but feel pretty rusty…I won a little but my game wasn’t sharp and I was playing tired too often. I think I will grind the rest of the month out just playing MTTs given iPoker and Party both have series events on and then catch up on HU next month. Oh I lost Supernova status on PokerStars as well zzz; pretty much a combination of travelling in March, focusing more of my MTT volume on Euro sites and not getting as many HU hands in as I expected. Feels a bit weird to see gold stars when you feel like you’re grinding more than ever!

I have also been dabbling in improving my nutrition a little bit more; I mentioned a while back that the Joe Rogan podcast with Dave Asprey really struck a chord with me, as a result I went on the hunt for some farm-direct grass-fed meats as opposed to the grain-fed stuff you typically get at the shops. So the last few weeks I have been getting bulk meat/bacon/egg deliveries from Koallah Farm and I cannot stress how much better the meat tastes; I usually buy good cuts from the butcher at our village but this stuff is way better, and everything is separately vacuum packed so it’s easy to store for the week.

Got all my seasonal vegies planted as well; peas, broadbeans and carrots all in for the winter, and had the first batch of chilis ready which were promptly oven-dried and turned into powder.

A third of the first batch, ready for drying

powderised

The rest of the week I am working and coaching, couple good footy matches coming up which I am going to, and hopefully a trip to Meatmother for some carnivore action.

Oh yeah – here’s a track from the first album I ever owned. I remember bringing it into Year 5 music class and having to explain to the teacher that the scratching sounds weren’t a problem with the cassette

sup guys! I had completely forgotten that it’s WSOP time, so at the last minute I decided to play the Accumulator event. I am still not over the flu, which has mucked around with my sleeping patterns and left me feeling pretty weak and miserable; I still haven’t been to the gym since I landed in Melbourne on Monday. But yeah, the triple buyin structure was just too attractive to pass up, as I expected that there would be loads of dead money in the prizepool and the structure was brilliant; easily the best 1k that Crown has run and I really think they should consider emulating the structure in their own events in future.

I played Flight One (Thursday) after squeezing a one hour nap in following the online grind. I had reasonable tables but just really didn’t make enough hands and spent most of the night between 18-25bb, only to lose a flip vs Alex (krasark) with 25 minutes to go in the last level (almost 3am). As most of you have probably experienced, a late bustout early in a series is always the worst as effectively you get no reward for your efforts, and get the minimum sleep before the next day (which has to be another 8-9 hours of playing if you make it through). I felt like I was getting really tired toward the end and misplayed some small pots, but for the most part I just didn’t really get anything going.

Flight Two was during the day on Friday which meant that it was always going to be the harder day of the three. My table started out pretty bad (bennybunny18, czar19, Octavian, Esfandiari and another online guy), but I managed to get in some good pots vs the fish. I had one spot where I opened AKo at 25/25 to 50, an older Asian guy threebets me to 150 and I call. Flop is 662r, I check call. Turn is a 3, check check, river is the Ace. I check, he bets 300 into 650, I tank and make it 1050, 3k effective. He tanks for a bit, says “I don’t think you would make that raise with just the Ace” and folds. I felt like he has AK so often in that spot so I might be able to fold out a chop (I considered making it even bigger), but yeh maybe he has AQ (or worse?) sometimes and I should be going smaller for value..either way I think raising is the right play there. I got most of my chips threebetting good broadway vs some European guy who was calling threebets with weak hands OOP, and left that table with about 6500 at the end of the 50/100 level. I also played a little ‘Lodden Thinks’ vs Antonio and lost some money prop betting over how much some old bloke thought I would shave my head for. Antonio is a good ambassador for poker; I am a verrrry reluctant participant in live poker, I do not enjoy it at all, but you can see guys like him have a really good effect on the table and it’s certainly much more bearable playing with that atmosphere.

I then get moved to what (at the time) was easily the hardest live table I’ve been on! To my immediate left are (local HSNLer) Luke Edwards and a bunch of good online guys/girls – random_chu, neverscaredb, Melanie Weisner and monster_dong. I manage to chip up slightly through the bb150 level, then I open KK in MP, Eddy flats, and dong squeezes from the SB about 45bb effective. I flat, Eddy flats, and the flop is 643r. Dong tank checks, I bet a bit over one-quarter pot, Eddy folds and dong rips it in. I call, he has 53o and turns the 7, gg for a ~95bb pot.

Flight Three was today (Saturday), and I was keen to make it count and pretty sure it would be really soft. Unfortunately there were a lot less recreational players firing one bullet than I expected. That said, the first half of the tourney I had quite good table draws and managed to chip up to 10k at the bb150 level. At that point I got moved to what was even a harder table than yesterday, and our table was last on the list to be broken which meant it would be a tough five hours of play to make it through. To my immediate left were WhiteRabbito and czar19, and Melanie Weisner, djk and Andy Hin were also on the table. Sometimes through the day we were seven and eight-handed which is just not really the spot you want to be in during a 1k event.

I managed to pick my spots really nicely and kept my stack between 50bb and 100bb for the most part. There are a bunch of significant hands. The first was a nitty older guy opens UTG+1 50bb eff, I flat AQs MP and czar19 (Bryan) threebets CO small with about 35-40bb. The nitty guy calls; if he folded I would snap 4b/c here but I get the advantage of having position on the deeper stacked older guy as well as his presence making it a bit harder for Bryan to just bluff it off. The flop is AA2r and it goes check, check, Bryan bets a tiny amount, old guy calls, I call. The turn is a 3; check, check, Bryan bets about a quarter pot, the older guy calls. Bryan has left himself with maybe a 30% pot bet on the river if I call which I think is highly suspicious; the nitty guy can easily have a bunch of really strong hands, it is clear at least one of us has an Ace and he really has no fold equity on a river bet. I go into the tank for a couple minutes, decide that something isn’t right and muck. Like I completely acknowledge the absurdity of folding the top of my range in this spot but given the old guys range and how I think Bryan will play the turn with weak aces or air vs two villains I just feel like it is a dumb spot where I can be in bad shape often. The turn is a K, Bryan lobs the rest in and the guy tanks forever and check/folds. I am obviously puking when the older guy folds, but I find out later Bryan had AK (older guy had JJ) and feel a little less nitty about giving it up; just one of those spots where my spidey senses were up I guess.

Later on Bryan opens EP, I flat JTcc in the BB 60bb eff and the flop is K94 with two spades and a club. The flop goes check check. The turn is the 8s and I make a big checkraise, Bryan calls. The river is an offsuit ten, I think about it for a bit and decide to check and end up calling a big river bet (thinking that most of Bryan’s value range should be checking here). Bryan has T9o and left me wondering whether following through small might be better than checking since he probably has more 9x than turned draws after a flop check. That one cost me a bit.

I win a flip vs Melanie squeezing AJo multiway and am back to 45bb with about 45 minutes left in the day. Against a table full of aggressive opponents it is tough to strike the balance between just nitting up and waiting to get a better table draw tomorrow, and finding spots to get it in good for lots of chips rather than sit on the sidelines. djk has loads and is opening almost every pot, and pots he doesn’t open are hotly contested between the rest of us, so I decide to mostly start opening hands that can call threebets or 4b/c. With less than 20 minutes left I open the BTN with ATo, Dylan (whiterabbito) threebets the SB (as he had done a couple times already)…I debate 4b/c but decide calling has merit if Dylan decides to barrel off. I get a reallllly marginal QJxcc flop, peel a cbet, then shove over a check on a 9c turn. I am drawing pretty thin when Dylan rolls over AxQc and end up again just shy of a Day Two berth.

The fact that I am pretty run down physically and played two super long days made me feel pretty flat by the time I got home. I will probably try and recover a bit for the rest of the weekend, might go to the Pies game tomorrow, then just stick with playing online for the rest of the month.

Sup guys, well it feels like forever since I’ve been nestled into the comfort of my office chair and I feel very happy to be doing it! I have spent almost the last three weeks travelling around Bali and Lombok, with some downtime in Perth. I have a nice brown tan and even though the landlord promised (and failed) to get our airconditioner working while we were away, the heat of the Melbourne summer seems to be long gone now..I have had to pull a hoodie out of my winter stash for the first time in months. I got home yesterday afternoon just in time to hit the pub and see the Pies win their first round game, good times

The Indo leg of the trip was a Christmas present from my dad, so we did a lot of stuff together as a family and less touristy stuff than you would typically do on your first trip to Bali. Dad has a pretty long history in Bali; he owns property and vehicles there and has some close relationships with a couple of families which meant we got to do some unique stuff (like cook up a dinner in one of the villages) as well as get around easily with minimal hassles. I wasn’t overly impressed with the hustle of Kuta (not really into market shopping, don’t like bodysurfing through wastebin rubbish in the ocean or trudging through shin high stormwater during the rains) but I did enjoy conversing with the locals and the trips out to Sanur, Kintamani and the Jimbaran Bay fish markets were highlights.

Jimbaran Bay fish market

View of Jimbaran Bay

Lombok (a couple hours boat ride away) was much quieter and prettier, and we stayed at some small villas with a private freshwater pool attached to each one. The ocean swimming was remarkable and we went snorkeling and stand-up paddleboarding (sadly no swells for surfing), and the whole vibe was much more laidback which made sitting in a beanbag drinking two dollar Bintangs and fresh fruit juice a real treat.

Gili Trawangan, Lombok

View from the breakfast table, Gili Trawangan

Sadly I was a little slack with hygenie – Dad’s partner swears by those personal antiseptic handwash tubes and uses them at every occasion, and I think I was just a bit careless in realising that every hawker wants to shake your hand, then you’re handling money, the next minute you’re eating a burger or whatever, and they’re not the ‘local’ germs you get exposed to every day so it’s not like you’re readily equipped to handle them. So boom, I pick up some random bug that just completely laid me out for three days. I had fever on and off, my whole body was aching and it was a real struggle some days to even get up and walk to the bathroom. I didn’t eat any food and just sat there in the bed, reading when my fever went down.

On that note, I actually smashed through a bunch of books – Russell Brand’s autobiography My Booky Wook (quite sad but I was struck by how well-read he is), Noam Chomsky’s How The World Works (very lefty but his stuff about the politics behind US intervention in Third World Countries, Government being a puppet of big business, and the media/fundamentalist religion as tools to distract/encourage social passivity are very on point), Salman Khan’s The One World Schoolhouse (founder of khanacademy.org breaking down everything that is wrong with the education system, I loved it), Why I Left Goldman Sachs (a fairly predictable missive but reads ok), and Ben Mezrich’s Breaking Vegas (less interesting than 21/Bringing Down The House). I also listened to a few Joe Rogan podcasts, and if you haven’t heard his one with Dave Asprey (founder of Bulletproof Executive) or political commentator Dan Carlin (@dccommonsense on twitter) they are really worth the time.

We hung out in Kuta for a few more days after getting back from Lombok, which mostly consisted of me crawling out to the pool lounges to get some sun, then crawling back into bed. I was pretty tempted to just go straight from Denpasar back to Melbourne, but in the hopes I would recover and wanting to catch up with mates and cousins around Easter, I flew back to Perth for a week.

I got over my random bug but since my immune system was completely squashed I ran straight into the flu and spent the week trying to muster up the energy to catch up with mates. I played a couple of really small HUNL and tourney sessions at my best mate’s house, shot some pool in the city with a few guys and did a bunch of crosswords with my nana then headed up to my Dad’s rural property for Easter.

Visiting his place with the cousins is a real highlight as he has built this completely blokey paradise in the middle of nowhere about two hours north along the coast from Perth. He has a seven car garage for all of his imported hot rods (aptly named Monday through Sunday), which are all in various stages of completion, a huge outdoor bar and spa area, a bunch of quad bikes you can scoot down to the banks of Moore River on, crossbows to shoot things with, plenty of things to occupy yourself with while nursing a beer and trying to forget the flu.

Ford Mercury aka Thursday

Bundy cooling off along the banks of Moore River

Anyway I am back home now, taking a couple days off (watching House of Cards which has been amazing) until I’m absolutely sure I’m feeling ok. Got a few coaching sessions so I can ease into the week slowly and then hopefully hit full pace by Wednesday or Thursday.

sup, wasn’t really sure where to start this one, just feels like there is a bit to blog about that mostly falls under the category of random jibber-jabber. It is fucking hot in this house. I am not an airconditioning expert, but I am fairly sure our airconditioning pipes are freezing over and/or the thermostat is busted; last time I ran it we had no cold air then the airconditioner made these loud cracking noises and started shooting ice out of the vents like a snow machine. Nothing in rental properties gets fixed without an email baton relay (which I am currently a few laps in on), so we really copped this recent heatwave in Melbourne.

Mell has been in Perth last week attending a family funeral, so I have been left to my own devices since Thursday. Tourneys were played, weights were lifted, beers were sunk. More tourneys were played. Bodyclock fuckery ensued. I woke up at 10pm every night, reg’ed MTTs until 8am, hit the gym, ate lunch and went to bed about 5pm. For a city with no seabreeze this was the peak heat of the day, so five hours lying next to a desk fan was enough sleep until I could get back into it. I think I have played almost 60 hours of poker in the last four days and probably won about 4k; shipped one of the FTP 26fo’s, 3rd in an ipoker 55fo and then some random FTs on Stars (yeh ok it was probably the five quad).

I also ran out of coffee pods for the Nespresso, couldn’t be fucked travelling around to buy more, and I knew an online order wouldn’t make it in time for majors on Monday. So I bought a bottle of No-Doz and drank all the decaf pods that were left over from the ‘welcome pack’. How fucking sad is that :/

Gym stuff. If you have ever met me it is not hard to tell that I am far from a gymbrooooo but since I got back from Europe I have really tried to step it up a lot. Eight weeks of holiday eating and drinking was somewhat motivating, but also at 33 I have just started to realise that I can’t get away with as much as I could in my 20s as regards partying and showing little regard for my health (I feel like I have blogged this before, if so apologies). My dad is now in his late 50s and is starting to have a few physical niggles here and there, and it just made me realise that the effort I put in now is going to be very influential in terms of how my body holds up through middle age (this kind of thinking must be so foreign to the average reader of this blog, middle age watttt lol).

I assume most people going to the gym in their 20s are primarily focused on how good they look; it would be great to look in shape but more than anything I just want to be strong, have strong bones and joints and make sure I am building a good foundation for older age when shit tends to start breaking down. So I have been doing squats, bench, deadlift, and standing press almost exclusively for the last six months and after a bit of plateauing I have bumped it up a notch and put up new PBs for squats, bench and deadlift over the last week. My numbers will be REAL pitiful to any regular gym guys but there is something to be said for realising that at no other time in your life have you been as strong as you are today. Really love those compound exercises too, they are genuinely challenging in a full body-and-mind way and there is something that lights up the caveman genes in me when I start picking heavy shit up then putting it down again until I canna do it no mo’. Hmmm maybe there is a bit of bro in me..

A bit of grinding, a bit of coaching and then off to Bali on Friday.