Man I dunno what was wrong with me as a kid but at some point recently someone linked me this best of Arnie compilation:

http://youtu.be/pDxn0Xfqkgw

I realised that I had somehow hardly even seen any of the movies other than Terminator and Terminator 2, so decided to go on an 80s binge recently.

I watched Total Recall for the first time - soooooooooo fucking epic, and Conan The Barbarian, which was just at a wtf level of absurdly retarded genius, I'm pretty sure everyone but me has seen these movies but if you somehow haven't, do yourself a favour - in Conan Arnie punches a camel when he's drunk ffs, doubt anything could be more epic than that movie.

Predator as well, hadn't seen that, I dunno what I was doing as a kid, probably reading books and trying to actually do well at school or something, but man just so good catching up on this stuff.

Most epic battle at the end of Predator, omg. Rewatched The Terminator also, forgot how epic the music was in it, just great!

I've been recommended Commando and Last Action Hero, I am gonna watch Rocky soon (have never seen any of them), what else can you guys recommend?

Feels like I might never find a cultural leak this vast again at any point in my life...

Other stuff is going well, we played a couple shows this weekend so I couldn't go to Sydney for the live poker series there which got 300k overlay somehow, High Roller didn't get up either, sad times for Australian live poker though Aussie Millions is going to be epic, especially since I'll have like 10 horses with me grinding in the trenches.

I've been pretty lazy this month though I've been doing well when I have played, gotta admit it's pretty damn sweet having horses grinding to facilitate guilt-free laziness though I still feel like a bit of a sloth spending all my time watching 80s movies and grinding video games instead of being more 'productive' as per this thread:

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/19...-rich-1132946/

January is gonna be pretty intense what with PCA and Aussie Millions, plus there's Xmas and NYE before then so I guess I should feel fine not doing much atm, guaranteed stressors looming on the horizon so for now pretty happy to just chill.

More 80s and early 90s recommendations plz!

It was probably inevitable but after that 4 day stint grinding MTTs while mrs seabeast was away I've been wanting to grind them again whenever it's convenient, though lately that hasn't been very often.

I couldn't pass up playing Sunday Majors while actually wanting to play them so despite having removalists booked for 2pm Monday, I regged all the early stuff up until Sunday Million at 6:30 so that if I was still left in anything by the time they arrived it would be deep enough to be worth the embarassment of awkwardly monotabling on laptop like a degenerate while they started packing away all my stuff.

Happily when they arrived I was deep in something, 1/11 in the Party Major which was $56k for 1st, but I wound up losing a fairly massive CL flip with 7 left and busting for $7xxx.

Normally it would have been more disappointing but I felt like I got away with something even playing majors at all so making some profit before I spent the next however many hours lifting stuff was an ok outcome.

The move went well, didn't break anything, and the new house is great. Really good vibe on the street, no more slow elevators, having to buzz people in, 5 minute round trip to take out the trash, etc etc.

I set up my record player in the lounge room, got my old huge couch set up again (didn't fit into apartment) and the whole house has a really good feel.

I had my last exam for uni, it didn't go very well but I think I should pass - one of the few written answer questions was "explain the main difference between Expected Value and Expected Utility, giving appropriate examples"...

Was hard not to write about raise/folding +cEV hands at the WSOP main event FT but I wussed out and just wrote about coinflips instead

I played a bit of PLO this week on the iPhone tethering grind while the internet connection gets set up and it didn't really seem to disconnect at all, so this morning I played an MTT sesh and won the Stars $320 6-max for $9xxx plus an Ongame turbo for 3xxx and had a few other FTs as well.

It's nice to run hot, and I think my MTT game is super sharp atm and I'm definitely gonna grind here and there over the next few months being on holiday and all, gonna keep my game sharp and win something big at Aussie Millions

So I’ve been in the staking game for a while now, maybe 18 months but only really taking it seriously this past 6 months since Black Friday.

Aside from the fact the games got a lot better after BF a lot of people moved overseas and needed new backing, plus Bax/Sheets stopped staking online afaik which opened up the market a lot when it came to quality horses, so for the first time I started staking people I didn’t know irl.

It’s been an interesting experience so far, different in some ways than I would have expected.

In some ways it suits me perfectly, my dad was a teacher and I have definitely inherited his love for teaching, I really enjoy mentoring horses and trying to help them optimise their schedules and strategies.

Plus I’m getting a little older and can’t do the 60 hours a week grinding anymore, sometimes I wake up and the thought of 15 tabling for the next 8 hours actually makes me feel sick - this never happened when I was in my early 20’s but definitely does as I get older.

Cash games, sure, and I can play Sunday majors and get excited about SCOOPs and WCOOPs, but full-on MTT grinding, week after week, with 3am starts, just feels like punishment at my old age.

So I’ve got about 15 horses now, living all over the world – Romania, Finland, Spain, Canada, Costa Rica, UK, Australia…

I got off to a pretty terrible start but it’s definitely a very long-term thing - far more than I realised, although I suppose compared to other forms of investment during non-boom times it’s not that slow, just more volatile.

In the short to mid term it’s a massive money sink, with your downswings automatically twice as big as your upswings, and with guys needing fairly large rolls to play with even if they are winning.

This can make it very stressful, it can be a weird feeling having objectively large amounts of money essentially tied up in your faith in a small group of people, and your risk of ruin is exacerbated by the fact that you can't really ask your guys to move down in stakes.

For a control freak like me who naturally tends towards cynicism and distrust, it can be very uncomfortable being at the mercy of external forces so much, but I try and stay as involved as I can.

I haven’t had anything really bad happen yet scam-wise but I’ve had personality clashes, especially since I tend to be a very opinionated person with a strong sense of conviction when it comes to things that I believe I know a lot about, with MTTs being one of those things – not just strategically but also in terms of game selection and so on.

I doubt many people have spent more time looking at MTT lobbies the past 3 years, assessing and getting a feel for which tourneys are the best, how different sites play, what styles are best where, etc etc.

I also have the Australian thing where I am very blunt too, and quite lacking in sympathy – everything is ripe for a joke, I’m pretty sure if an Australian reg FT bubbled the WSOP main event the rest of us would give him shit about it for the rest of his life, there would be very little genuine heartfelt sympathy, that is just not the Australian way...

So when guys are getting all upset losing standard flips with 25 people left in random tourneys I can probably seem harsh in my indifference.

Overall it's been bleak at times and sometimes I feel like an epic degenerate - poker wise I always felt like I had control over what happened to me, but this feels pretty much the same as betting on sports, my guys just happen to be the athletes.

One of the main things I've learnt is that you can’t groom everyone the same way.

I had this vision of taking half-decent grinders and turning them into guys who can beat 100rs and 1ks but it isn’t really like that, each person has their own strengths and weaknesses – it’s not just about a ceiling of skill level or intelligence, it’s also personal – some guys play better with more money at stake, some guys play worse, some guys should play 20 tables all the time, other guys would do better dropping all their turbos and actually thinking about the game.

Some guys are really intelligent but find it hard to accept how dumb and predictable MTTers are, other guys play tourneys like they are video games and their opponents are the computer just playing a fixed strategy they just have to learn how to exploit and then repeat that in the same way over and over and over.

That in itself is a skill and can be profitable, and trying to shape that sort of guy into a nuanced, expert player is not only going to be fruitless (because he just isn’t that sort of a thinker) but also a waste of his genuine talent, which is grinding.

I’m sure we’ve all had friends that weren’t that smart but were sick good at video games, it’s a lot like that, it’s not just mindless volume, it’s a genuine skill unto itself to be able to become ruthlessly efficient at the one thing and then just do that over and over, with genuine focus and no mercy at all.

For MTTs where 90% of the best regs “graduate” from the online grind (because it is so absurdly exhausting) and only bother playing special series and Sunday majors, that style of merciless, ruthless, repetitive robotic exploitation can actually be very profitable during the dailies when most of the field are either fish or nitty regs.

So if you have a guy with that kind of talent, screw trying to turn him into a genius, just let him make you money.

He will often turn out to be more profitable than your very intelligent poker-natural type who just can’t be bothered playing that often, and who gets disheartened when he has say 4 losing sessions in a row.

The ruthless grinder is always gonna be in touch with the overall flow of “the games” and he’s going to play through variance much faster, and be less reliant on big scores.

That said, it can frustrating when guys are so resistant to expanding their horizons and just want to play, rather than improve.

I feel really good about my stable now though, I think a lot of guys have moved in the right direction and I have been lucky enough to get some premium horses because of Black Friday.

Anyway it feels like bad etiquette to go into too much detail too often about staking, for a number of reasons, but it's been such a huge part of my life for the last 6 months that I felt like I had to address it if I was going to start blogging again.

Ultimately I hope that in 5 years time I can look back a this period as when I demonstrated my investment nous by seizing on a good opportunity, rather than the dark period where I degenned off all my money into guys I had never even met before

Well, WCOOP didn't go so great for me as a backer, though that wasn't exactly a shock to me as my stable is full of spewy lags who destroy weak fields, but can sometimes tend to lack the nuance necessary to go coast to coast in well-structured marathons containing many more genuinely good opponents than the daily tournaments ever will.

While the best poker players are obviously/ideally able to adapt their play to whatever type of game they are in, realistically most guys who play 40 hours a week of poorly structured MTTs vs weak opposition are just going to habitually and naturally (even unconsciously) be too aggressive too often in well structured tournaments containing a wider range of opponents; just as guys who only ever play deep structured tournaments or cash-games have all sorts of terrible habits to start off with in turbo flipaments.

I was cringing the whole time to be honest, but as soon as it ended and all the good regs flew off to Europe to play live, or back to the US to see family after a month on whatever island paradise, or went back to grinding cash and lolling at donkaments, I was excited again and it seems like my guys win a couple of tourneys every day at the moment which is pretty sweet to wake up to every morning.

I've been playing live a lot in the big game here which has been going quite well too - it's been a great month so far.

I'm jealous of everyone over in Cannes at the moment though. I want to do a run of EPTs so bad, I have for years, definitely have to do it next year I think.

I've also been grinding some small headsup PLO to practice it and enjoying it a bunch.

I busted my opponents account yesterday for the first time, $687.50 at .5/1 I think it was, good times

It's pretty insane how huge your edge is vs fish in headsup PLO, makes you feel like such a boss; I'm dead money vs tight and trappy regs though - I spew it off sooo hard.

Have enjoyed the first couple episodes of that new show 'Homeland', starring Damian Lewis (Dick Winters from Band of Brothers) as an American marine who was held captive in Iraq and may have been turned, and Claire Danes as the obsessive CIA agent running secret surveillance on him and trying to unearth the truth.

Hopefully it doesn't go to shit like The Killing did, as I do enjoy watching some of these well-made non-HBO shows for a change - less visceral, intense, and demanding of the viewer, but still intelligent TV.

That's not any kind of knock on HBO at all as their brand of TV pretty much single-handedly shifted my attitude towards television from complete indifference to borderline obsession, but it's nice to see intelligent TV writing start to flow outward towards the slightly more mainstream (kind of like how with a movie like Inception, whether or not you thought it was mind-blowing, you can surely agree that it is a great thing to see massive, big-business blockbusters made with that kind of ambition and respect for the viewer's intelligence).

But seriously, how good were Breaking Bad and CYE this season, and after a lacklustre first episode Dexter looks like it is going to be decent now too. & Community & Parks and Rec #showsweareallwatchingnowsurely

Hey guys, think I'm going to start blogging a little bit more.

The main reason I stopped was I felt like the whole self-promotional, thinly veiled brag aspect of blogging was a bad influence on my life, and poker was a little too much a part of my ego, but I feel like I'm over that now and I miss writing, reflecting, and being a little bit more a part of the poker community.

I've started staking and coaching quite a few people, and in the process started feeling more connected to the poker world again, which I have enjoyed.

Actually I think one of the main things that influenced me was going to the US June/July and not being able to play online poker.

I found it unbearable and was forced to re-admit to myself how much I love playing online - the stresses of all of the peripheral things that come along with the poker lifestyle can be very negative and draining, but man, when it comes to sitting down to play an online session, and forgetting that there's anything else in the world other than you and your opponents, it's just the best.

Sorry if that is insensitive to some! But wow, there's really nothing like not being allowed to do your job to make you realise how much you love it.

My life seems to change one month to the next...

Like in June I was some guy in a punk band, playing shows in Baltimore, Austin, LA, SF, and Phoenix, sleeping on floors, spending entire days in a van full of dudes, playing shows every night, eating at gas stations.

In May I was an online MTTer staying in a hotel in Toronto playing all the SCOOPs, waking up then hitting the gym and the pool, before playing 12 hours online until I busted the last tourney and passed out.

In July I was a lazy lollivepro living in a Vegas mansion doing virtually nothing all day occasionally playing day 1s of WSOP tourneys and busting them with an eye-rolling indifference.

Then in August I was getting up at 8am every morning to go to the casino to play nosebleed PLO with one of my favourite opponents after he dropped his kids at school (crucial to get him before he wanders off to baccarat, so funny all of us young bleary eyed complainers super tilt-prone because of the early hours, despite playing for significant percentages of our net worths)

Now it's September and I'm a budding empire builder waking up every morning hoping one of my horses shipped something, loading every lobby and slowwwwwly looking down the lists to give myself the best sweats.

So far staking has gone very poorly for me but I have been putting a lot more time into it recently (I've barely been playing myself) and it's become that latest of things that I am determined to beat.

I'm still at uni but I'm ridiculously slack, I'm just doing 3 units and I'm basically just phoning it in so I can look my parents in the eye, keep my girlfriend from thinking (noticing) I'm a complete degenerate and not hate myself quite as much during downswings.

Extortion is going really well, we still play quite a lot of shows, we have a new drummer who is this fucking insane 19 year old skinny faux gangsta who's name is Milky (because his skin is so white), still can't quite believe he exists - the self-proclaimed king of all kings.

I'm still seeing the same girl too, it's been almost 2 years now, she's a good one.

Sometimes the poker lifestyle (despite how hard I try not to live it) is hard for her but I have learnt to segregate the two things and it's a lot easier now that most of my own play is PLO cash-games (which I can play anytime), though overall that has gone fairly poorly for me post Black Friday - I was really determined to destroy the 25/50 shallow and cap games on FTP, and had gotten pretty competent at specifically 40bb PLO, which is now a fairly useless skill, and try as I might I just can't seem to quite get there at 100bb+.

It's not like I'm losing heaps or anything, I'm winning on some sites, losing on others; it's just a bit weird for me right now to not have one definable thing that I am *very good at*, like I would hope I'm still fairly good at MTTs (main problem right now probably being lack of desire, as much as people want to believe in the power of variance when it comes to MTTs there is a lot to be said for raw hunger) but as I'm mostly playing PLO (and still kind of sucking at it after all this time) and working with horses (who so far, have lost me a significant amount of money) sometimes I feel like a huge whale, in spite of all my past success.

In any case I am very much enjoying life and working harder than I have for quite a while, the trip to the US was really good in that way.

There's nothing like a life of drinking beers in the spa, going out to amazing restaurants every night and mindlessly grinding NBA 2k in a country where online poker is outlawed to make you want to get home and fucking grind again.

So yeah, I hope to update this fairly frequently again and I hope y'all are well, I was very sad to miss the Leggo party in Vegas but I had already booked a hotel in Portland when I found out when it was on. Next time!

Dear Blog,

Hi! It's been a while, and I feel like posting an update. Plus uni is done for the year, and I have been playing a ton of poker.

The middle half of the year was really stressful - balancing uni, poker, girlfriend, etc.

I had a sharp downswing playing live in August or so, losing 200k in the space of three sessions - we play 25/50/100 usually, sometimes 100/100/100 or 25/50/100/200.

It really stung since before that I had sorta been doing the play live once a week and every third Monday donkament session 'poker is free money when you feel like showing up' thing.

Think I forgot what it was like to lose, and it really bruised my ego.

So for a while I went a bit insane and wound up playing way more of the WCOOP than I would have otherwise (trying to get unstuck), and not putting as much effort into uni as previously.

I also took a couple of months time-out from the live game, to lick my wounds and work on PLO.

For the first time in a long time I started feeling like I was under a ton of pressure, and I was finding it hard to balance everything.

Fortunately I managed to prioritise and after WCOOP was over I realised how ridiculous I was being, and to just let go of the money and stop degrading myself chasing tournament scores, and make sure I took care of uni/gf.

Then with poker forgotten about that all came together nicely (funny how easy succeeding at life is when you aren't playing poker at all), before I was done for the semester in October.

Since then I have been playing a bunch of PLO cash, bumhunting 6-max on pretty much every site.

Have been running pretty well higher and terribly lower, which is fine with me.

Here's a graph since I am going back to WA for Xmas and thus, free from karmic punishment as I won't be playing again in 2010:



Overall, it's been a really good year.

I might start updating more since I'll be playing a lot of poker until uni starts again next March.

Hopefully I can keep running above expectation...

Happy holidays!

Well it's been 4 months and I've been playing a lot of poker lately so it seemed like a good time to write a bit of an update.

I'm settled in Melbourne and really enjoying it - uni is going really well (88% of the people doing my course are female!) and for most of the year I haven't been playing much online poker at all.

I play fairly high stakes poker live twice a week or so, Crown Casino is in the city and a short walk from my university so I walk down after class when there's a game on (usually either 25/25/50 PLO or 25/50/100 NLHE).

I've run pretty poorly overall, and have lost a lot of big pots in memorably sickening ways the last few months but I think I'm roughly breaking even for the year.

I've been buying pieces/staking more than usual too, but so far all my horses are losing.

I started really missing donkaments recently and I'm 3/4 through the semester at uni and getting good grades, so I handed in a couple of things early so as to be able to essentially take three weeks off - one week to practice for SCOOP and then two weeks for SCOOP.

The practice week went poorly but seemed to do the trick, as I got my eye in and the day before SCOOP started I finally won a tournament, a $55 cubed for $5k or so.

Since then I have gone on a huge tear, and had winning days nearly every day this week - I won the $1002R1A two days in a row, won the $40k gtd, chopped the UB 1K for 32k, got 4th in Party Highroller last week and 2nd this week (8k/18k), and got 12th in the 1500r PLO (13k).

Paid a lot in entry fees too obviously but I'm still up quite a lot, and I won a bunch live the last two times I played (though I was coming off a big live downswing).

Another whole week of SCOOP to go and though I'm exhausted my game is really sharp at the moment and I'm ready to give it a good shake.

It's gonna be hard to detach after the week is over, but I've been much happier this year spending my time going to uni and hanging out with my girlfriend... my plan for the rest of the year is to keep doing what I'm doing but also play most Sundays online and keep playing live after class as it doesn't disrupt my schedule too much.

I'll play a bit of PLO cash online too but that's more of a when I feel like it, 10k hands a month type thing.

So yeah, I'm still alive and all is going well

Gonna start off with the cliff notes here: I have decided to delete this blog and officially stop making videos.

It has obviously already been a while since I made a video, and I haven't coached for a long time, but over the last few weeks I decided for sure to officially step away from the site.

It has nothing to do with Leggo or anything like that, I have loved being a part of the site and it's something I'm extremely proud of (I still remember how incredibly nervous I was before making my first video!) plus I've come in contact with some great people and some incredible minds thanks to the experience.

It's just that, as anyone who knows me or has followed my blog at all is probably already aware, I have yearned to move away from having poker as my first priority in life for quite a long time now, and retiring from Leggo is one of the steps for me.

A big part of it, without wanting to sound pretentious, is letting go of having a public image.

It's strange how that stuff can affect you and affect your goals, and make you feel like you have to keep proving over and over 'how good you are'.

Anyone who has ever been involved in any sort of competitive gaming will realise that this is something that never really ends, no matter what goal you reach there's a new one, no matter how much you've already achieved there's the threat that you might fall behind the curve sometime soon if you don't keep working...

Even just something small like writing in a blog about results or goals affects and puts pressure on you, I think it's something a lot of people are guilty of in different ways in the internet age (like say on Facebook where people sometimes do things to some degree so they can status update them or post photos later... it's kind of the same thing).

I also took making videos pretty seriously and only ever wanted to make them if I felt I was ahead of the curve enough to justify having the right to instruct.

It's that stuff that I'm letting go of, I really just wanna feel like random civilian, go to uni play some music on the side play some poker on the side - whatever.

I am going to Aussie Millions in a couple of weeks and I'll definitely be around the place at some events in Australia and online here and there (hopefully luckboxing) but it's just a priority/pressure related thing for me.

So yeah it's been great, extra special thanks to Greg/Matt/Aaron for always being encouraging and complimentary, and honestly I have the deepest respect for every one of the video producers...

I'll see you all at the tables and stuff.

Farewell!

I have been in Sydney since last Tuesday night, the first leg of my three week holiday spanning the APPT Grand Final and then a short Extortion tour in Melbourne/Adelaide.

There has been a big PLO game running, it starts as 25/25/50 uncapped but often morphs into 25/25/50/100 or 50/100/200 (or when it gets 3 handed, 50/100/300).

I've run hot so far and am up about $170k.

It's been insanely epic, I have played through til 10am three of the nights (aka until none of the fish have any money left).

Shorthanded PLO is a beautiful game, though really I am barely competent and mostly getting paid for already having money if you get what I mean.

The tournaments went terribly, I never caught a break in any of them, meh.

Holdem sucks!

I've had a weird couple of weeks, I was offered a place on Poker Stars 'Team Online' for next year, a 30 man squad they are bringing in of pseudo red-pros.

It was obviously pretty tempting to take the deal but I am determined to change my life next year and essentially committing to getting paid to go for Supernova Elite would be a pretty massive backwards step in that regard.

Strange the way life works sometimes, sponsorship was something I wanted and hoped for most of the past year or so, and then just as I moved on from that an opportunity presented itself.

Felt a lot like the devil on my shoulder, or 'just when I thought I was out... they pull me back in."

Butnahhhhhh, it just wasn't the right decision for me at this point in my life.

I got an early offer for Psychology at RMIT which was my second preference, so I know for sure now I'll at least be able to do that next year - but hopefully I'll get in to Uni of Melb when the main round of offers go out.

Am applying to rent a house in Fitzroy North with two friends over the next few days as well, so things are moving forward nicely!

So I guess it's been a while since I updated...

Mostly things have been continuing along the same trajectory - I failed the driving test again (fourth time) and have been putting in a lot of work at PLO.

I moved down to straight 2/4, and cut out mixing in small sites, and started logging at least 1k hands every day.

This week I finally caught the upswing I felt I was starting to deserve and I won 20 buyins over the last 3 days.

Very satisfying to get some results after putting in so much work, and yeah lol variance and all of that - I'm sure I was running bad before and I'm sure I'm running good now - but I have improved hugely even just in the past two weeks.

I haven't played a donkament in the last month or so, and even though things have gone far from perfectly I'm pretty happy with the progress I've been able to make lately.

The next couple of months are gonna be pretty hectic, I'm going to Sydney on Tuesday for two weeks for the APPT, then I'm going on a small three-show tour of Melbourne/Adelaide with Extortion.

Then I'll be back home for xmas before trying to find a house in Melbourne over the new year - ideally I would like to have papers signed before Aussie Millions (I know this is a bad time to try and find a house!).

Then by the time AM is over I'll only have a couple weeks before uni starts.

So pretty much the next 2 months are mapped out, it makes me feel better about things now that I have some plans and structure in mind.

Poker wise I'd be pretty happy to be a lazy 5/10 PLO reg next year while focusing on uni, I really want to get top marks and try and study overseas in 2011.

And you know, I feel good about not playing online donkaments anymore but it'd be nice to win something at the APPT