What I’ve been up to lately
I sit now on a plane coming back to Las Vegas from London, finally with a few minutes to update my blog. I guess I’m proud to say that this is my first “sorry I haven’t updated my blog in awhile” post as I promised myself I’d keep up with my blog on a regular basis, and have just been entirely too busy to sit down and write about what I’ve been up to. Luckily, I’m not really apologizing for this, so I guess it’s not one of those posts.
I don’t even know how long it’s been since I posted, but until a couple of weeks ago, I’ve been grinding out daily tournaments at the Bellagio for about 4 days of the week, keeping the remaining days of the week to regain my sanity and explore other opportunities outside of poker for the day I wake up and get sick of playing for a living. I had a few weeks where I ran surprisingly well, winning two Bellagio dailies and chopping one. Since that streak, I’ve been running bad and seem to keep bubbling. The more I play, though, the more I begin to see the big picture of poker and can take a bad beat or some bad luck in stride, which is something I’ve been working on for the last year. Actually, I guess I’ve been working on that for my entire poker career.
For the last ten days I’ve been in London returning to my seat in front of a computer running stats for Poker Productions, the company that produces such poker television shows as High Stakes Poker and Poker After Dark. This time they brought me on to do the World Series of Poker Europe, which was a grueling seven day in a row shoot. The tournaments were typically 13 hour days, with most of the 20 minute breaks being used to confirm chip counts on the feature table. The final day ran about 17 hours, and then I only got 4 hours of sleep before getting on a plane for the journey home.
I was able to bring along my girlfriend, though, and somehow we found a few minutes here and there to do some touristy stuff in London. We checked out Buckingham Palace and tried a few restaurants in the area surrounding the Casino at the Empire. I wish I had planned a few days after the shoot to vacation there, but I guess hindsight is 20/20 — I didn’t really realize the days would be so long.
This is the second “open” tournament I have covered, the last one being the USPC in 2006. Now that I am playing poker professionally, I was really able to use my time covering the table to watch how other players play. I discussed a few key hands each day with my colleague Bill, and I have gained a little insight on how good players AND bad players think. I wasn’t planning on this trip to be so educational, but it was, and now I find myself itching to get home and play some tournament poker. That’s good as I was lamenting returning to my “chosen” profession. And in the process, I picked up a few tells on Daniel Negreanu and feel like I have a good line on how Barry Shulman play. Too bad I don’t play the same stakes as them and won’t be seeing them at the table anytime soon. But you never know.
OK, the intercom is telling me to turn off my PC, so I guess I’ll write more later. Hopefully I’ll have a blog post about a Bellagio win shortly. 
