Cannot believe how bad I ran today. set over set. lost aces to kings and kings to aces. Lost kings to AK twice.

Didn't win a single all in against a 100bb stack. Felt like the entire day was me outplaying people then losing it all back to a preflop cooler. (although the aces vs kings the guy flatted his kings and spiked the king otf so who knows maybe he was going to soul read me and fold) Did get lucky in several spots postflop though. Turned 3 gutshots that I floated on the flop although all 2 of the 3 check folded like I expected them to.

+162 somehow


Was planning to grind my Chinese site, but **** that, no longer in the mood.

Finally finished a book, which is way later into the year than I'd hoped. Doesn't help me feel good that I skimmed over most of the second to last chapter. Who needs to know how to collaborate anyways? Whole chapter seemed like a bunch of filler and pretty unnecessary. Overall felt like Foundations of Screenwriting was very good though and hopefully will help me finish my damn script.

So infuriating. Lost set over set twice. Lost top two to bottom set twice, one in a 3bet pot. Lost two pair to a straight flush to a guy who 3bet 23s. Chopped twice when I had players dominated and all in. Lost JQs to AJo to a guy who min 4bet me then double barreled qxx/k board. Well played guy.

I did cooler one guy though, flopped a set vs his two pair on 9/j/q monotone, turn 10 so I got one bet in.

stupid ****ing game.

- 477

I really loathe this game. So many aggrotards on bovada who are just absolutely ****ing clueless, like once I catch you bluffing why not just fold? Just fold.

Told I 3bet aces otb and get cold 4bet from the sb and then the guy snap calls my ship with 108s. GG well played, my bad luck bails you out.

I 4bets QQ from co to button 3bet and he flats, flop is 1010x I bet he ships and I snap him off, he had 102o.

I ship ak over a 4bet and he snaps me off with kjo.

Like who are these people? How do they know what the board will be?

Somehow managed to make 95 dollars since my last entry, should have easily been a 1k+ upswing. So frustrating. The level of play is just so abysmally bad and I can't win a pot when I have the best hand which is always.

edit: almost forgot I lost my biggest pot of the year. 550bbs at 1/2 aces vs queens ugh.

Do you ever think poker keeps you from doing more "productive" things? And, is it worth it? I only ask this because I do but I keep playing for some reason. I'm never going to get rich playing poker so why spend so much time when I could be writing.

2p2 holds me back more imo. I spend way too much time on this site when I could be doing other stuff.

I need to make money somehow and poker is a good way to do that while being able to do other stuff. I used to be incredibly productive while playing poker... I'd listen to books on tape, meditate etc, but because I've ran so poorly live these past two years I've been playing more online which requires more attention and also playing more tables which requires even more attention so instead of doing the other stuff I just browse 2p2 during any lulls.

Having said that, I blame 2p2, but if I wasn't procrastinating on 2p2 maybe I'd be reading reddit.

How many tables do you play usually? I feel like I can safely 2 table zone and do other stuff. Whenever 200 zone or 50 zone are running and I'm 4 tabling it requires too much attention.

Oh wow, I didn't realize you relied on it for income. I'm purely recreational. I did harbor thoughts of using it as supplemental income when I retire but I went on a megahorribad downswing and it sort of sucked that idea out of me.

I only play live and I'm still stuck at 1/2 because my roll got clobbered.

Well if you need coaching or anything let me know. I've heard that Florida games are the best in the world and from what I've seen on the forums thats probably true. A ton of the pros who play there and make a lot of money have huge leaks.

Depending on the structure of the game and rake 1/2 might be unbeatable, at least for any meaningful amount of money.

Live swings are ridiculous due to the number of hands. I have posted 2 years of losses playing live now.

Goodbye

Hello

OK so the snow pic was taken two weeks ago, but it was pretty cold when I left! And yeah that other pic is from my old apartment, and I now have a view of the casinos instead of the bay, but in a few hours when the sun sets it'll look something like that.

Pretty excited to be back in Manila, I love being home but it does exhaust me. All my discipline just goes to absolute ****. Already went to the gym today and I'm 99kg. In lbs that means super fat. Heres some nevernude porn for the female viewer:




And here I am before going back to the states:



good lawd! So I've got my work cut out for me. Pretty motivating though as I'll be too shamed to attempt to get laid until I'm in better shape and I also have friends coming into town soon.

I blame my mother (fitting for a House of Blogs post I know) and her damn cooking. She cooks so well. I looked for a Marge Simpson gif to explain what my mom is like but there's a surprising amount of Simpsons porn out there, even with my safesearch settings on moderate, so if my three readers could please imagine that there is a gif of that time when someone tells Bart "If we were in my house my mom would be walking through the door with rice krispies and kool aid right now!" and then Marge walks in the door with a tray of rice krispies and kool aid. That gif would go right:

Here

As an aside every time I walk into the locker room at my gym I do one of these:



There is just always something really homoerotic (NTTAWWT) going on in there. Today it was some dude dancing super effeminately. Before I left there was this guy, completely naked, with one foot on a counter as he blowdryed his balls and ass. WTF?

Anyways it's nice to be back.





Poker nonsense:

I made $1428 on Bovada in the first 2 weeks of the year despite running like ****. So kind of happy and kind of angry about that.

Also had a ****ty thing happen with my Chinese site right before leaving. So the way this site works is that people run games and they invite you to play in them, the rake goes to the game runner not the site. The site makes money in other ways. Anyways I sit down to play and the game runner is on my direct left. I get dealt in in the small blind (the software is such ****) and first hand I get aces yay! Except if you've read my blog you'll know that's a bad thing. Anyways I get it in vs the owner who has 150bbs and he spikes a set on the turn. If I want to buy back in I need to wire him money or call my contact in China to do it for me. It's 6am their time so I decide against it. I grind my 50bb stack back up to 350 bbs then the game ends.

So the owner tries to start another game and I sit with him and play him heads up. Naturally I destroy him and then two fish jump in the game and all of a sudden it's 9 handed. So awhile later I get flush over flushed against the owner (sun runner) and I drop down to 100bbs. Now I'm thinking that I have 350bbs in my account so I top off the extra 150 bbs (required to start 200bbs deep on his table). He starts yelling at me in Chinese so I get off the table. I message my friend and try to wake him up but it's like 8am now and he doesn't wake up for awhile. Eventually he does and he contacts the owner. He says the owner is pissed because I was playing with money I didn't have in my account. I explain I had 350 bbs and that's what I bought in for. He says no, this owner settles after every game so I only had 200bbs. I had no idea.

My friend says "You're lucky. He's just taking 10% of your buy in". WTF? So I get coolered by this asshat twice, I then start playing heads up WHILE HES RAKING ME, and start a game for him WHERE HE RAKES MORE PEOPLE and I then have to leave him alone with the two fish and he is charging me money. Bull****. /rant


Anyways back in Asia. Just to garner a few more nerd points, here's the funnest thing I did while back in USA#1:



Close up in case you can't see what the painting is:

Those are clearly pics of two different people.. one guy has darker hair and better eyebrows than the other guy..

Weird poker ish dunno how you've been putting up with that type of stuff for so long

Still reading that book and I skimmed over a lot of stuff that seems obvious. But I really like the discussion on the mental challenges (time, focus, frustration, etc.). It's nice to know that "real" writers have the same issues I'm experiencing.

SB: The fat goes straight to my face, so my jowls are eyebrows get the worst of it. Back to darker hair and better eyebrows pic though!

Biggerboat: Glad it was of some help at least. A lot of the book is common sense, but for me at least, it was nice to have it put in that format for me.




Taking a vacation from all my vacations now. Vacations are stressful... too stressful. These did not go particularly smoothly either. Started off with a girl I used to live with and her Russian friend visiting me in Manila.



Still have my jowls and bad eyebrows at this point, but looking better than the other pic. Also first use of a selfie stick ever, and I think I did an ok job. Manila was fun, just did a few bars and Intramuros which is the only historic thing I know about here. Then we flew to Cebu. We hung out for 2 days before they went to an island and I was by myself. By myself I met this awesome girl on Badoo. OMG I'm in love. We hung out for two days then I went back to Manila to meet my other friend. We did some heavy drinking and had a good time, then we headed to Palawan where the troubles began.

To begin with, my Chinese friend who I was meeting up with got into a fight with the Russian and they were no longer on speaking terms. They still have 3 weeks of traveling together at this point and didin't talk to each other the entire time we were there. Quick side rant: it's a beach. They're pretty much all the same, I'm not sure why we flew an hour to this place then took a 6 hour bus. There's a similar quality beach an hour and a half drive from my house, or another an hour flight away. Ugh.

Anyways Palawan was beautiful:









but there were no hotels over the weekend. Why didn't you book a hotel BGP? Well because when I mentioned it both my friends laughed in my face "omg who books ahead of time, just go there and find one." Great idea!

There was a huge fiasco finding the hotel which I won't go into. But it involved my taking an hour long + walk in pitch black and up to my knees in water at times to get to it at night. It was awful.

Things really started to get ****ty after the weekend. My friends decided to go a motorbike ride around the island. I politely declined "Are you ****ing kidding me? It's a ****ty island with ****ty roads and nothing to see. There's no way in hell I'm going." They decided to go, and did not have a good time. When they came back I noticed my Chinese friend was bleeding like crazy from her leg. When I asked about it they said that they lost control of the motorbike and crashed. The boy managed to stay up, but the girl hit it hard. Well how was the trip though? "Are you ****ing kidding me? It's a ****ty island with ****ty roads and nothing to see." Oh that's too bad, I had a great day sipping on mango shakes and reading. She was livid for the entire day, until she tuckered herself out awwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww

The next day my guy friend and I take off back to the city with the airport to find that our flight has been moved up and we weren't told. Why weren't we told? Well I booked our return flight for March not February. Small mistake for me, but my friend missed his flights back to China. Oops sorry.




And then the third and final leg of the trip. My guy friend's wife and her sister flew in to visit (long story) and then I went with them to Puerto Galera. Hour and a half drive and then a ferry ride to the island, much better. Also we had booked hotels beforehand yay!

First night was Chinese New Year so we spent it with the sister's diving instructor (she was there to learn how to dive) and the other Chinese students. I hadn't spoken that much Chinese in a long time, but I held my own imo. The diving instructor's house was on a large hill with a pretty awesome view:

so we enjoyed that, had some tea:



and hot pot. The next day my friend's wife and I were walking around and we ran into three of the Chinese students we'd met the night before. One of them was ****ed. He had also had a motorbike accident and landed on his face. Poor guy. My friend's wife and I had a great time though, we spent a few days on the beach together while the sister learned to dive.





Nice and relaxing, but I didn't swim much at all due to people coming out of the water with awful looking rashes from jellyfish. The sister did well with her classes, but her fragile 80 pound Cantonese body did not deal well with the cold. The first day she threw up in the water, caught a fever and was coughing all night. She still loved it though. I was also not the best roommate for these two. I was only planning to stay a few days but ended up staying most of the week with them. I ran out of clean underwear and there's no real stores there so I just bought a swimming suit. That night the sister was doing her first night dive, and the wife and I went onto the boat with them. I thought I heard a rip in my pants getting onto the boat but checked out my pants and everything was fine.

The next morning I woke up to a very Chinese sounding scream and wondered wtf was wrong. Apparently the rip was not in my pants, it was my new swimming suit, and my testicles were just flapping around in the air conditioning breeze. The sister's bed faced mine so she woke up to that nice view. Ooops.

Overall great trip and had a lot of fun, but I'm very happy to be back at my apartment and have some downtime. Oh also finally sucked out on someone: QQ vs KK all in on an 883 board. Nice.

Managed to finish 3 books on my vacation.

How Not to be Wrong: I think Enrique wrote the review which made me buy this book, so thanks. Started off as what I thought was going to be very similar to Thinking Fast and Slow (and another book on fallacies I read recently which I can't remember the title of) but quickly went much deeper into mathematics. A few parts I had to gloss over without fully understanding the math because it was getting a bit too abstract for me but overall it was a great read.

Fortune Smiles is the first book of short stories I've read in a loooooooooong time. I don't really know why because I love them. It was fantastic. I enjoyed every short story (which is usually not the case) and thought they were all unique. I agree with vhawk that some of the short stories ended very abruptly but others ended perfectly imo. This guy's mastery of the English language is phenomenal. Interesting Facts especially blew me away. I have The Orphan Master's Son and am planning to move it up my reading list because of how amazing this was.

I also finished some book called Never Let Me Go. It's my second Ishiguro novel, the first being The Buried Giant and I found them to be very similar. The plot is kind of similar, the themes are very similar and the ending is almost identical. I think this caused me to not be hit as hard emotionally as if I hadn't read The Buried Giant first. It was still a wonderful book though, and I enjoyed every page. Would recommend. Also as an aside when I was younger I had a more sci fi idea for a novel with the same background story re donators. Never could have made it anything with this much impact though.

Great tr!

You are encouraging me to read more. Thks.

Just realized that I've seen the film adaptation of never let me go. There are few books/movies with similar themes.. the island, cloud atlas (seen any?), and prob some other ones that i can't remember but they are more sci fi than never let me go

Nice pics n gl on the eyebrows

Glad to heat it bb. You're encouraging me to write more. Wish I would write even more, but it's huge progress



Haven't seen the Island but I watched Cloud Atlas last year and watched Never Let Me Go after finishing the book. I thought Cloud Atlas was ambitious but overall pretty awful. I was ready for the movie to end 4 hours in, and still had 5 hours to go. The fact that every storyline could be dumbed down into such a wait that they all fit into nice increments like that made it seem... trite? Probably a pretty word for that but can't think of if at the moment. The South Korea storyline was the my favorite though (which is the part which I think you were mentioning) so that is a big

Never Let Me Go was a decent movie, but not great. Always hard to compare books with the movie, and almost always the movie falls way short imo. Definitely the case here. I like Garland a lot (Ex Machina best film of 2015 by a mile), but he didn't do the best job of adapting the screenplay imo. The title is pretty much meaningless in the movie, yet the Never Let Me Go scene was kept in the movie (although changed) with absolutely no explanation, further analysis and thus none of the meaning coming through. This was true for a lot of the scenes. They are there, but with no context or any emotion coming out of them.

The movie is decent, but in the end it's just a very conservative outline of the book and misses out on so much. Some liberties needed to be taken to try to get some of the emotion across, which is really what the book is about. The story about donors and stuff is just a the backdrop for the love story and the theme of having a time constraint set to the amount of time you can love someone.

edit: Also it's kind of hard for me to watch Andrew Garfield. I've been told by multiple people that I look like him. In China several people said I looked like "the spiderman" and I was thinking wtf I look nothing like Tobey Maguire, then learned spiderman had be rebooted already and thats what they were talking about. I don't really see the resemblance but a lot of people have said it so who knows? It's always in the back of my head when watching him now.

Upswong engaged: up about 7k usd since the last week of Feb. Yay. Biggest pot I've won is 1k USD and the largest I've lost are now 4k, 3k and 3k. Got my money in good all 3 times.

Stupid game.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand it's over.

get AK vs AQ all in heads up and window card is Q.

Lose AA vs KK then KK to AA

and just to top things off I 4bet AA get 2 callers and the client crashes. After a minute or so it awards me the pot without even dealing the flop, obviously I'll have to give that money back. FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU UUU

[QUOTE=Bluegrassplayer;48995335]So I give this blog about 2 weeks before I forget about it and stop posting in it, but might as well try.

Goals for 2016:

Play more poker, run better at poker, focus more on poker. This thread will probably have a lot of poker content and I could probably post it in PG&C, but well that's lame.

Japan. Ugh, I'm 30 and still haven't been. I have a ton of excuses but they are all pretty poor to be honest. Was planning to go two years ago, and then my travel partner decided to get his wife knocked up and then married her (idiot) and we had to cancel. I've been telling myself that when I go to Japan I'd do a month and see as much as possible. That's stupid and holding me back. I'm in Southeast Asia already and might not be in the future, if all I can do is a weekend or a week then that's fine, but it needs to happen this year.

Get swole. I'll probably get laid more in Japan if I'm swole.

Read a lot. I have so many books that I haven't finished yet. Currently I'm reading four books, which is two books too many but there's just so much out there now. I have about 15 books which I'm bringing back to Philippines with me to read, might be time to invest in a kindle or something along those lines.

Write more. I've been writing a movie script for some time. I want to finish it even though I don't expect I'll attempt to sell it. I love tv and film and it's a fun thing to practice.

Focus. I don't focus on things nearly enough. I'm constantly doing four things at once and it makes all four things suffer in quality (just look at some of my posts). So I'm trying to focus on just one thing at a time for a given amount of time and then move on.

Meditation and yoga. Why not?

Cooking. I love to cook, but it's so hard when I'm living in a studio apartment. I've set some goals on trying recipes and also prepping food for the week.

Sleep. Inevitably I get into a great poker game and stay up until 10am then my sleep schedule is ruined for a week or two. Not sure how to combat this, but going to try.

If anyone has some defined goals and wants an accountabilibuddy let me know.[/QUO
Ive been reading 2plus2 for a while but never post...For whatever its worth...i stayed one night in japan early this year and it was almost life changing.Its the most beautiful,peaceful,and serene place ive ever been.In the next year or so im going to stay for a month or 2.And i paid 43 bucks a night,with airport shuttle no charge in an old"ramada style motel"..Older,huge,about 20 stories,very well maintained...About 10 or 15 minutes from airport(free shuttle who cares)....cab fare would be 22 bucks....anyways,good luck in your adventures and dont forget to go to japan!

Your not losing much on your badbeat for someone who sometimes play up to 10/20

I assume you mostly play 1/2?

I saw hateful 8 on a plane, I was also very disappointed

You really have a baller life in philippine, what's your monthly budget out of curiosity?

After reading the whole thread I think you might play higher than 1/2.

What's that Chinese site? You ever cashed out of that place?

Thanks for the bump, haven't looked at this in a long time. I missed staci's post as well. Thankfully for the encouragement and the info, I won't make it to Japan this year but I will next year!



Solonely: I quit playing on stars completely. My monthly budget in Philippines is currently under 1k usd except for when I am going out. Bars can get a bit pricy here.

It's not actually a Chinese site, there's several apps for Android or ios. The way it works is you send your money to a guy who then gives you play chips and after the game he cashes you it, so technically I get cashed out every few hours.