Long break was much needed...

I had been having a great month, but I got very sloppy, cocky, and careless and it came unraveled rather quickly. I set a goal for 35 days since that was how long it was going to be until I had my next scheduled that would be taking any significant time away from poker. I made some very lofty goals in terms of the amount of time and hands I wanted to put in during those 35 days, but a somewhat modest goal to make $20,000 (considering how much I planned on playing). About 20 days into the 35 days I was right on pace for the amount that I wanted to play, but I had already made over the $20,000 that I intended to make! Reaching my monetary goal so quickly caused me to get over-confident and I let my guard down a little bit. I had been winning nearly every session that I played live and I was avoiding playing ANY bigs pots in doing so. Then one day at the Bellagio I made 2 very marginal plays, and got coolered once in another hand for a total of 3 buy-ins of $3,000. It is no fun losing $9,000 in about an hour and a half and it is certainly no fun when you do it playing live and you have to suffer the personal aspect of it on top of the money lost. Even though I know better, I thought I could just go on unaffected by my fairly substantial loss and I decided to play online the next day and played very poorly on subtle tilt the entire day. I have even blogged about how live losses affect my confidence/quality of poker for much longer than online losses do I still didn't take heed. I ended up compounding my $9k loss by losing another $7,300 the next day online. I did get very unlucky to lose so much that next day online by running about $5,000 below expectation, but I can be honest enough with myself to admit that I didn't play well at all. Thankfully, I had enough discipline to do what I should have done earlier and I took a break from poker. This time I was so sure I needed a break I had Josh change the passwords to my poker accounts and I didn't play any poker for about 8 days.

During my break I played some golf, had some friends come in town, and I even went skydiving...yes skydiving :) I always knew that at some point I was going to go skydiving I had just never gotten around to it up until now. I went with my friend Anne who was in from out of town and it was a pretty cool experience overall. I think poker has made me into sort of an emotional robot. I never get very excited, sad, or even nervous about anything anymore. It seems like something must be wrong with me, because I didn't get nervous for even one second throughout the whole skydiving trip.

We jumped from 15,000 feet and that means we got to free fall for about 2 miles (about 60 seconds) before he pulled the parachute about a mile from the ground. The free fall portion of the jump was pretty awesome, but the parachuting part was pretty uncomfortable on by inner thighs where all of my weight was supported on the harness for the 3 or 4 minutes it took us to get down...yowsers!

For your viewing pleasure:
Walking to the plane.

On the ride up.

Getting closer to go time and Anne getting mounted by the skydiving nazi before she goes out the hatch.

It’s too late now!

Freefalling…weeeee.

Being a good student and keeping my head back.

I don’t think we’d be able to survive from this high up if our chute malfunctions…do you?

That says skydivelasvegas.com in case you can’t read their shameless advertising.

The chute just after he pulled the chord.

Right about now is when my inner thighs are getting owned pretty good.

Me steering the parachute.

Safe and sound on the ground.

Justin congratulating me on a good jump and helping me up.

Sorry for posting so many pictures, but I paid $70 for them and I'll probably never look at them again so I gotta do something with them.

Anne and I also went to the David Copperfield show and she got randomly chosen to be a participant. He made tissue paper float in the air above her hand, but I could see the string for a brief second from where I was sitting. Then he folded the tissue paper into a paper rose and lit it on fire and it "magically" turned into a real rose. However, the crowd camera only showed Anne's torso and Anne was the only person that saw the girl laying on the steps hand David the real rose while everyone else was distracted from the flash of fire from the burning tissue paper. He also did some pretty amazing tricks that I have absolutely no explanation for...like making a some old school car appear suspended on top of two support beams that wasn't there only a few seconds earlier.

So, since my break I have played 3 days and things are going much better. I lost about $500 online the first day after starting off pretty rusty and being down $2500 about half way through the session. Then, I won about $2,000 that night playing live. The second day I won $1600 online and then won $600 more goofing off with friends while playing .5/$1 PLO digital poker at the Excaliber. Today I ran really well and never really lost a pot, but I didn't feel like I was giving it my best effort and was lacking focus and motivation. I quit after only an hour and a half or so, but I ended up winning about $2500. So a little over $6,000 in my first 3 days back is a very nice boost to my confidence level and I look forward to making lots more money before I head home for the Kentucky Derby and Derek's graduation from Med School at the beginning of May.

I need to keep making lots of money, because I finally got approved for a home loan! Eric is co-signing for me and we are going to split a house. The banks weren't to excited about the whole poker/self employment thingy and my credit wasn't very good due to some stuff from when I was in college that had nothing to do with anything other than me being a lazy bum and not taking care of silly bills that I had plenty of money to pay. Let that be a lesson to you kids out there....just be a go-getter and pay that kind of stuff off and you'll be in much better shape later. Oh well, we still got approved and we are going house shopping this weekend. I am pretty excited about being a first time homeowner and apparently the government is too because we qualified for an FHA loan which means I get an $8,000 tax credit :)

Sorry for this being so long, but I had lots of stuff happen since my last blog post.