Anita and I arrived in Monte Carlo at night and quickly found our hotel after a quick dinner at a restaurant near the train station. I was very content with the hotel room Anita booked us….EXCEPT HOW BAD I RAN THERE!!!@ AHHHHHH!!!! When I arrived at the hotel I turned on my computer and pulled up multiple 25/50 NL and PLO games and ended up quickly starting down about $20,000 to $25,000. Fortunately by the end of the sessions I rebounded slightly for a small loss of $10,000. I haven’t been used to losing lately, but a $10,000 loss still wasn’t a big deal.

The next day we were planning on roaming the streets of Monte Carlo and heading over to the famous Monte Carlo Casino where multiple movies have been filmed, including the latest James Bond Movie: Casino Royale. Before leaving the house, I saw one of my favorite PLO fish multi tabling 25/50 and 50/100 PLO, so of course I had to join in! I end up playing about a 4 hour session that had me losing about $40,000. I decided to quit because it was impossible to win a hand. We ordered room service and sat on our beautiful balcony overlooking the Mediterranean Sea with the mountains to the left and right. It was absolutely, stunningly beautiful. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a panoramic view like that before, especially from the leisure of my own hotel balcony with chairs, a table, delicious sandwiches and fruit with my wonderful wife. Anyway, we hung out there for a little while and I decided it was time to redeem myself and start up another session as the games were just incredibly good and deeply irresistible. I played a rather short session of 10 tabling or so and got $10,000 back and quit, as we had to go out and buy train tickets for the following day from Nice to Barcelona and Barcelona to Madrid before the train station closed. We wandered aimlessly around for a couple hours, snapping some nice photos, visiting the shopping center underground in the middle of the city, scoping out expensive cars parked along the street, and walked through the surprisingly non-busy Monte Carlo Casino. On a whim, I decided to ask if they had any poker, but they said they don’t have any. They must only have it during the EPT Final. We returned to our room and without going into too much detail, I ended up punting off another $60,000 or so in 25/50 No Limit Hold Em, while winning $18,000 in 50/100 PLO. I was actually staging a comeback at one point and had myself down about $25,000 I believe, but within a window of 15 minutes of time, I lost $30,000 straight and decided to shut it down for the night as I had an early train to catch the next morning. Net loss was somewhere in the $80,000 range, as nowadays I don’t like to count my losses too much as I think it may depress me a little more than it should if I know the exact outcome.

We caught the train as scheduled and arrived in Barcelona where we spent the night. The next morning, we were supposed to have a simple itinerary composed of one train about four or five hours long straight to Madrid. When we arrived at the Barcelona train station for departure, we found out something was wrong with the tracks or something, and we needed to take a bus to another train station to catch a different train going to Madrid. Okay, surprise, no problem, we can handle that. We take a twenty minute bus ride to a bus station where we end up having to switch buses and get on yet another bus for TWO HOURS! Now, remember, Anita and I have been traveling all over Europe for three months now, we have quite a lot of luggage, seven bags in total; therefore, making switching the luggage beneath the buses in the compartments not very fun at all. We finally arrive to a train station in the middle of nowhere where we board with our first class Eurail passes and rail another four hours until we arrive in Madrid. We quickly check into our hotel and set off for the second best museum in all of Europe (second best to the Louvre in Paris). They had some great paintings by Velaquez, Goya, El Greco, and a few Rembrandts in the mix. That night we had reservations to see a native Spanish Flamenco dance to the midnight show where we also ate tapas and had some wine. The show was quite entertaining and the guitarists and dancers definitely knew how to have some fun.

Right now, we’re on the airplane going non-stop from Madrid, Spain to Miami, Florida where my father is picking us up and driving us home to Orlando. I have a lot of matters to attend to when I get home with some logistical stuff and I also look forward to relaxing with good old American food on my couch while playing online poker and seeing a few buddies! Hopefully the remainder of my trip is safe (about halfway through), and I’ll be home in a few hours.

This is the 2nd of Justin’s blogs that got lost in email. Enjoy.

So here I am writing multiple blogs on the train again, lol. I swear the train works out so perfectly. Unfortunately, the trains don’t have internet, but that works out well for my blogs giving me plenty of time to write and exclusively concentrate on them. Otherwise, I’d just be playing poker the whole time! The last couple days in Rome included a lot of sightseeing, and not a lot of playing poker, but that’s okay. After all those long and extremely intense sessions, maybe a couple day breather isn’t such a bad thing. The third day in Rome, Anita and I went to the infamous Vatican museum which is where the masterpiece of the Sistine Chapel by Michelangelo is. We also headed next door to wander through St. Peter’s Basilica (the very famous building that the Pope appears in the window of to give Sunday prayer).

The day before yesterday, we were busy throughout the day visiting sites fairly close to each other including the Colosseum stadium, Palatine Hill, the ruins and temples of the Roman Forum, and the historic Pantheon building. We tried some more flavors of gelato ice cream while sitting outside of the Pantheon as well….Love me some gelato!

Yesterday, we had to wake up at 6:30 a.m…which is 12:30 a.m. eastern time! AHHHHHh! It was for a good reason though, to see Pope Benedict. The Pope holds an “Audience” every Wednesday outside of St. Peter’s Basilica. The only way we could get tickets to attend was through a special tour. They picked us up in a shuttle bus outside of our hotel and arrived there two and a half hours early. I didn’t know the Audience didn’t start until 10:30 a.m. and wasn’t very happy to be waiting in the very early morning after three hours of sleep, with no food, and no restroom nearby for two and a half hours. I guess they just get you there early so you have good seats, and to their credit, I’m very happy we got there early to get near FRONT ROW SEATS. The pope came within 15 feet of us and I was very excited. With tens of thousands of people fit into the square in front of St. Peter’s Basilica cheering, screaming, and singing, it’s definitely a once in a lifetime experience. The pope maintains such an amazing aura and presence that is unparalleled by any other human in the world. He is not only the most holy living figure in the world in a lot of people’s eyes, but also probably the most well known and famous person worldwide. The late Pope John Paul is being fast tracked to sainthood, although usually the people who decide this like to wait a number of years to make sure no scandals or pretenses were made. By seeing Pope Benedict in person and hearing him say prayers in seven different languages, I was surprised to see him as a little more laid back than I had expected. I expected the Pope to be very reserved and strict. Now, the Pope is old of course, and is still very reserved, but you could see in his eyes that he was actually having TONS of fun and he was loving every minute of the ceremony. Groups of nuns had their chances to sing for twenty seconds or so for him and people from different countries would start chanting and yelling while waving their flags. While all this was happening, the Pope would wave his hand in a blessing matter with a nodding head in the direction of attention he was presently being given and would smile brightly. There’s some things in life you can’t explain, and for me, this was one of them. It wasn’t quite what I expected, but it was in a very positive and good-feeling way. For those curious, I was baptized Catholic while I was a baby. However, I’m somewhat of a bad Catholic and only attend Church for Christmas, Easter, and Ash Wednesday usually. Although, I have attended lots of very famous and historic cathedrals lately throughout my trip to Europe, and have lit many prayer candles for my family, friends, and myself.

I decided to skip WPT Niagra. A lot of people I know and friends are going. I also heard there’s going to be very juicy side action cash games. It’s just not going to fit quite right in my schedule though. Right now I’m on my way to Monte Carlo, Monaco to hang out on the way to Madrid, Spain to catch my non-stop flight home to Florida. I haven’t played poker the last three days or so because of waking up so early for various things including my early train this morning. I just haven’t been getting enough hours of great sleep the past few nights and therefore I feel like playing poker would not be a great decision. I’m switching trains in Genoa in about an hour, and maybe on my next train towards Monte Carlo, I’ll be able to put in a good nap that might let me play later tonight.

As Justin was traveling through Europe it was just more efficient for him to email me his blogs. This is one of 2 that got lost.

Lately I’ve been playing a lot of the 25/50 CAP on PLO. Let’s first start by saying these games are extremely bad or extremely good in my opinion. If the game has 3 or 4 tighties, I don’t bother playing because the game is dead. Usually if the average pot is $1,000 to $2,000, it’s a good game to be in. Two nights ago, 6 tables of it were going, and I was on all of them. The line up on a couple of the tables was the following: Andrew Black, Brad Booth, Thomas Wahlroos, along with Dan Dock spewing around some. I’ll let you guess if that was a high pot average/good game. Ha ha! It was absolutely insane and I put in about a 6 hour session of playing those 6 tables of 25/50 CAP PLO, 3 tables of 25/50 NL Heads Up, and 3 tables of 25/50 NL 4-6 handed…ALL AT THE SAME TIME - lol. When it comes to multi-tabling, I’ve always been a total animal! I love it! Sometimes it feels like while I’m playing so many games, I forget to breathe, because my brain is so busy thinking about all of the constant decisions I’m making every second. I’ve 12 tabled No Limit Hold ‘Em for about 2 years now, but throwing in the combination of heads up tables AND PLO CAP games is just nuts. Another tricky thing about multi-tabling is when you’re playing different sites at the same time; this slows you down a little bit and while playing 10 or more tables on more than one site, I tend to get nauseous after a couple hours of play.

Anyways, during the session where I 6 tabled NL and 6 tabled PLO, I ended up getting crushed in PLO for around $32,000 while winning $84,000 in NL after starting the session off for the first three hours by losing $30,000. If I was one of “those guys“ I have talked about recently who quit after they lose just a few buy-ins, I would‘ve never been able to book that sweet win and get all my money back from the day before + profit. One of my recent blog entries go over all my thoughts on that if you missed it. That session was following a $45,000 downswing from the previous night while 10 or 11 tabling both NL and PLO. I won $15,000 or so in PLO, but lost about $60,000 in NL. That session was about 7 ½ hours long. Now, while in my poker career I have had much larger average swings per day, these swings for playing 25/50 NL and PLO CAP are pretty crazy. Lots of buy-ins being thrown around left and right, especially in the CAP games where Andrew Black min raises EVERY HAND that he’s not in the blinds for, and calls 3-bets with weak hands like Q966 out of position after min-raising under the gun! LOL.

The first day Anita and I arrived in Rome, it was already late in the afternoon, so we headed over to Piazza di Spagna quickly and saw the Spanish Steps. There is this one street attached to the plaza that has every designer store you can think of! Needless to say, lots of people were there shopping. There’s quite a few very good looking jacket and shoe window shops in Rome. I actually never went into one and bought anything, but I did have a few looks in the windows. From Piazza di Spagna, we walked about ¾ of a mile over to the famous Trevi Fountain, took some pictures, and had some great gelato.

On the second day, Anita and I ended up meeting my cousin Remy at the train station around mid day. Remy is my only first cousin and lives in Connecticut. However, for his senior year of high school, he chose to do an abroad program in Italy. We used to argue a lot every summer when we saw each other, but over the past few years we’ve both gotten older and more accustomed to each other’s ways. I have two older sisters, so I never had anyone in my immediately family younger than me; so I guess it’s kind of cool that my little cousin Remy is on his way to being grown up and living in Italy without his family. I’m happy that we now get along and appreciate each other’s positive traits. Enough with the sappy stuff! We went to visit the Castel Saint Angelo and Piazza Navona. I took some great shots from the roof of the castle overlooking all of Rome. Hopefully Beanie can find a way to let me include some pictures into my blog since I’ve been taking so many good ones and I don’t mind sharing them.

The day after I busted out of EPT Baden, I started off playing 25/50 PLO and NL on Stars and ended up losing about $25,000 to start the day. I went out to a spa to get a massage. If you know me, you know I love me some massages! Lol. Baden is well known as a “Spa Town” so they have very good massages for very competitive rates. Massages usually cost anywhere from $100-150/hour back home, but here it cost me 45 Euros which was only about $65!

Later that night, Ansky, Hevad “Rainkhan” Khan, Anita, and I went out to “El Greco”, a nice Greek restaurant right around the corner from Casino Baden. We did the usual, which was talking about a lot of poker stuff and joking around. After dinner, we decided to go check out the live cash games. I decided to start off playing 20/40 No-Limit Hold ‘em while I was waiting for a seat in a juicier 20/40 Pot-Limit Omaha game. I started off the session stuck in NL, but when a seat opened over in the PLO game, I was able to make a comeback and book a win. The next afternoon, I went down to the casino again and was on the waiting list for hours for the 20/40 PLO and 20/40 NL games. Waiting such a long time for a seat didn’t make me feel quite as good about playing, and I probably should have gone home and taken a nap or just played online. When I don’t feel like playing, even if I get my money in with the nuts, it just doesn’t seem like I do very well, and I‘m not sure why. I’ve been focusing a lot lately in the past month or so on fixing this as much as possible, because I used to put in 12 hour average long sessions day after day after day, every day of the month almost, unless I had something important to do. Thomas Wahlroos was on my left, and the guy I busted out of the EPT with my AK to his JT was sitting across from me and to the right. Thomas Wahlroos was doing a little bit of straddling as well as some other people at the table, making the game play a little extra aggressive, and larger. I had about $8k in front of me; Thomas had the same, and the guy I busted out of the tournament that we’ll call “Euro John Doe” had about $15-20k when the following hand happened:

Two people limped in early position, and I decided to limp in middle position with As6s9c9d. A decent pair with a nut flush and weird straight possibility is a good hand to limp with after a couple of limps. Thomas limped in behind me; another guy limped behind him, Euro John Doe completed in the SB, and the Big Blind checked. Flop was complete gin for me…it almost doesn’t get any better than this flop. The flop was 5s 7s 8c, giving me the nut straight, with a redraw to the nut flush draw. I sensed at least one of the other six people in this pot besides me had to have hit this sort of flop texture. It checks to the guy on my right, who bets 400Euro, I casually throw in a 500Euro bill, as I’m not scared of slow playing this as long as the board doesn’t pair which will be fairly easy to get away from if it does. I want to try and let a worse flush draw peel and let us both hit. I have two nines in my hand, so I have blockers to the bigger straights. I also believe that by me casually smooth calling a flop bet, it will encourage some action from Thomas or the other guy behind him, or even better if one of the guys that already checked, sense weakness and check-raise. In my opinion, I played this hand absolutely perfect and thought it out extremely well and clear. Thomas seemed like he was going to raise, but ended up just calling 400Euro as well. Euro John Doe in the small blind stutters for a few seconds and decides to raise to 2500Euro. At this point, I’m pretty sure he’s not going to fold for another 4000Euro, so I’m glad that I’m probably going to end up raking in a huge pot while extracting max value from everybody. Everybody folds to me and I obviously re-pot it and put all my money in. Thomas is a little visually upset but folds after a few seconds, Euro John Doe takes five seconds and calls. At this point, I’m basically just worried about the board pairing, as I don’t think Euro John Doe has my same straight which is the current nuts, since he took an extra 5 seconds to call, as well that I have two of the four 9’s in the deck, making it less likely he has one of the remaining two. The turn bricks off some low red card like the 3d, and the river comes out the 9h. Euro John Doe says something to the effect “Oh, look, the nuts“, and throws over a red JT88 for top set and a gutshot which spiked on the river. Thomas shares with the table that he had the case-fourth 9 in the deck, as well as middle set of 77. With the hand that Thomas told the table he folded, the percentages of this guy winning the pot from me obviously decreased a substantial amount giving Euro John Doe One 7, One 8, One 9, and Three 5’s left in the deck to catch. Of course he has a redraw to pair the turn card on the river also. Generally, getting a set without even a flush draw all-in on a straight board in an unraised pot with seven players to the flop usually isn’t a good play. With all that said, that’s just PLO for you, flop the nuts, have a nut re-draw, and you can STILL easily get beat, it’s a sick, sick, sick game.

The last full day that we were in Baden, we decided to go to the Mauthausen Concentration Camp near Linz and Gusen, which we had to change trains three times to get there. Although it was a 2 hour trip each way, I felt it was very important to see one of the Concentration Camps that is such a big part of history and especially World War II. I don’t know when I’m going to be in Europe again after this long trip is over, but I felt like I should see one of Nazi camps where many people were murdered and tortured that played such a large role in history. Although it was a large concentration camp, not many people were visiting that day. Standing in the gas chamber and next to the very same ovens which tortured and murdered so many innocent people 65 years ago was definitely an experience. The gas chamber resembled a locker room shower with tile floor and walls. The ovens were long and narrow, and you can see how they were just large enough to slide a person into them while lying down. These rooms were underground and dark, and with only Anita there with me, it was awfully creepy to be there. The U.S. Army ended up liberating the Mauthausen concentration camp a little bit before World War II ended.

I just finished writing the last two blogs as well as this one all in the past two hours. Today, Anita and I are on a train heading to Venice, Italy. We’re going to Venice, Pisa, Florence, and Rome to hang out and do some touristy stuff while vacationing. Everybody that I have talked to who has been to Italy loves it and says I’ll have a wonderful time, and I have no reason not to believe that. So far it’s been a pretty uneventful and long train ride. Let me note that the scenery today has been extraordinarily beautiful passing through the high mountains of Austria with all the trees and plants changing colors since we’re in Fall season now. I can’t wait to get my Italian food grub on!

Day 2 of EPT Baden:

I ended up drawing a pretty sweet first table on Day 2. There was a girl in the 8 seat (Day 2 was 8 handed or less the entire day) who didn’t even know how to really play poker, I’m pretty sure. She was giggling and just being a loose monkey pre-flop who was maybe the easiest opponent ever to read I’ve encountered in my life. There was one guy from Spain on my immediate left that came into Day 2 with a top 5 chip count stack who tried to string bet twice and didn’t know what was wrong with it and ended up making some other brutally bad plays. My goal was going to be to mooch off of his stack the entire day. There were three other guys at the table who looked like they had a semi-clue, but were probably easily exploitable. The blinds were 200/400 with a 50 ante and my stack was only 9200, so I knew I was going to have to be aggressive as I didn’t want my stack to dwindle down too much. My table was perfect for this and I really outmaneuvered and outplayed them. I raised J3o, Q8o, JJ, K5s, and ATo in the first two rounds of the day and won every single pot without a showdown putting me up to about 14k or so. The blinds went up to 300/600 with a 75 ante when the following hand came along about an hour and a half into the day. I casually raised to 1700 from middle position with the good ol’ AK of clubs, and a guy who had been losing pots left and right shoved over the top for about 11k, I of course insta-called and his JTs didn’t fare well after I flopped trip Aces. What I didn’t know at this time, was how he was going to get me back for busting him from the tournament (read my next blog about a 20/40/80 PLO cash game hand against him). I was excited to bust somebody and almost double up, but unfortunately, that was the final straw for the table as one of the tournament directors had the table break as I collected the chips from that pot.

I drew a seat at a table where there was a bunch of younger, European guys with huge stacks. Almost every single hand on this table was raised, and re-raised. They were acting like total animals, but unfortunately, I just never hit a flop when I saw one, and with their pure aggression and being the calling stations that they were, I had no choice but to fold a lot. I finally got TT all-in preflop with a stack enough for only 7 more rounds at 500/1k-100 ante blinds, and I failed to improve against KK. The play at this table was truly horrible, as one time two guys got KT and K8s all-in pre-flop after going 5 bets and raises! I was very disheartened to bust as I felt if I just had a few more chips, I could’ve really taken this table for a ride if received the slightest bit of help. That was that though, and I was very disappointed and out of the tournament in 88th place.

I ran into Timex and Ansky who both busted out on Day 1 before I got my taxi. We chatted a bit, and Ansky and I decided to make plans for the next day to hang out. I played a little bit online when I got back to the hotel and managed to put down a $32,000 winning session after being stuck about $30,000. That made my night’s sleep just a little bit better. I know a few high stakes players who quit after losing two or three buy-ins. They think that some sort of stop-loss is going to help their results in the long run. I feel like this is some of the most foolish thinking out there. As long as you are sure you are playing your best and still have an edge against your opponent(s), not tilting or spewing, and not tired or hungry, there’s no reason why you should ever quit a game. I’ve heard these guys talk about stopping after they lose a couple buy-ins all the time. There’s really no point in this. All the variance in poker is random and probability based. Just because you received three bad beats in a row, DOES NOT make it’s more likely you’re going to receive a fourth bad beat in a row any more than the next day. If you’re tilting and angry, that’s one thing, but just because for the simple fact that you lose a couple buy-ins doesn’t mean you should quit. It’s amazing how some seemingly intelligent people do this and think it’s right, when they aren’t thinking logically at all. They might as well call up Ms. Cleo and try to get some psychic powers so they can find out which days they won’t get any bad beats.

The WCOOP Main Event was scheduled for the night that we were traveling to Amsterdam. We jumped off the train in Amsterdam, ran to a taxi, told the taxi to speed through the city for an extra tip, took my laptop out in the taxi, ran into the hotel with my laptop that we were checking into, and frantically tried to get connected to the internet to register for the WCOOP Main Event. Our train was running a little late, so it was nip and tuck to be able to register in time for it. With exactly three minutes to spare, I was registered, hah. All that basically was for nothing. I made it semi-deep, but not quite to the money and busted about 600’th when a guy slowrolled me for a good 50 seconds or so going into his time bank with KK preflop when I only had about 20xbbs lol. I was yelling at the computer for him to call, because I swore I was good since he was taking so long, then he called and it showed his hand, and I’m like “oh, that sucks, what an asshole”.

Anyways, while Anita and I were in Amsterdam, we saw Anne Frank’s house, Van Gogh museum (awesome), the Rijksmuseum, strolled through the infamous “Red Light District“ with all the window hookers and coffee shops, and took a canal cruise. The Red Light District is probably just as you picture it. A long street going both ways on each side of a river with tons of windows with red neon lights on them with scantily clad dressed women with bars and Amsterdam’s “special” coffee shops in between. All the days we were there, we walked down the street from our hotel to this bar with the most awesome pancakes ever that you can put fruit and sugar on. They were delicious and are cooked a certain way that they aren’t anything like American pancakes.

We didn’t have much time to linger around, we were on a schedule on the way to Austria so I could make EPT Baden. After spending a few days in Amsterdam, we took a train to Prague in Czech Republic. I have to say that Prague is sort of a creepy city at night time in some parts. I know muggings and theft are higher in Czech Republic than a lot of the Western European cities. Also, some of the people are just a little weird and sketchy to be honest, in my opinion. We were fortunate to find a taxi at about midnight outside of the train station to take us to the hotel, although it was a pretty decent rip-off. Czech taxi drivers are notorious rip-off artists. However, without any other taxis in sight, and it being late, we had no other choice except to be ripped off for an extra $10 to get to the hotel with all our luggage. We stayed in Prague for a couple days and saw Prague Castle, Charles Bridge, Old Town Square, and saw a fantastic Classical Concert playing hometown pieces from various musicians who played in Prague such as Beethoven and Bach.

Anita and I arrived in Baden, Austria the day before the EPT Tournament there and just relaxed for a while.

Day 1 of EPT Baden:

I had lunch with “Timex”, “Choppy”, and “Ansky” right before the EPT started. My starting table was not the best, but was not quite as bad as my EPT London starting table….meaning more than three people were raising pre-flop. The notable players at the table were Jeff Lisandro (who I’ve played multiple times live in cash games and two different tournaments), Ram Vaswani (who I’ve played some 100/200NL with), and some alleged euro pro named Pascal Perraut or something like that directly to my right. The entire tournament including Day 1, I was getting absolutely nothing, I had KK one time and only picked up 2k in chips or so from Lisandro. I was so focused in this tournament, and I felt like if I wasn’t so “honed in” to the table, I would’ve made a couple missteps and bluffed in wrong spots or tried to value bet when they had nothing instead check-calling and picking off their bluffs. I only flopped top pair one time and lost with it when I had to fold on the turn and never really had any other hands. Times like this call for the art of finesse to focus on timing certain plays for the right spots at the right time in order to stay alive. I worked my 10k starting stack up to 14k at two points during the day, and was down to 5500 twice, but ended up finishing the day with less than my original starting stack at a disappointing 9200.

Me and a couple of guys I know decided to hit up a very nice dinner the night before last. I met up with “ActionJeff“, 2007 WSOP Main Event Final Tablist “RainKhan“, 2007 Aussie Millions runner-up “gobboboy”, #1 UltimateBet blackjack leader board better Shaun *censored* Deeb, and Skier5. We went to some upscale Michelin star rated or whatever restaurant called “The Capital”. It was sort of funny going there because we had three waiters for our one table and we were by far the youngest and most underdressed people there. It wasn’t awkward at all, we just pretended we owned the place, lol! Shaun speaks rather loud and tells a lot of funny jokes followed up by a hilarious laugh that I can’t get enough of. RainKhan also threw in tons of fun and humor with one of the waitresses. Overall, all of those guys are great and we had loads of fun with tons of champagne, wine, and like 6 or 7 courses. Afterwards we hit a bar and I called it an early night and went home to the new wife.

Well, I honestly thought I had a shot at going real deep last night in WCOOP Event #19: The $530 PLO. I got like 130’th or somewhere around there out of a little over 1,000 players. I was absolutely card dead for the last 2 ½ hours I was in the tournament. I got really shortstacked and doubled up when I hit a set of aces. Five minutes after that I took a horrendous beat unfortunately to triple up my stack which would put me in excellent position to go very deep. Here’s the hand of death: http://www.pokerhand.org/?1530598 . So that was that and I look forward to the WCOOP Main Event tomorrow.

I decided to skip the $5k HORSE and the $1k LHE WCOOP Events tonight because Game 1 of the NHL Season kicked off today right here in London. The 2006-2007 Stanley Cup Champions, the Anaheim Ducks faced off against the L.A. Kings in a premier game to kick off the 2007-2008 Season. Depending on how long you have been following my blog, I became a very big NHL fan last year and is the only sport I bet on besides a rare NFL game. I absolutely love the action in ice hockey games and frequently go to Tampa Bay Lightning games which is about a 1 hour drive from Orlando. The tickets were sold out more than a few days in advance, so I had to look on Craigslist to find some for me and Anita. I arranged to meet a guy to buy the tickets right before the game. He wasn’t at our meeting place and when I called him he said he had already sold the tickets!?!?!? WTF!!! I was pissed so we had to find a scalper. Well, we go over to a couple scalpers and then this undercover agent guy pulls out a badge and makes the scalper that we were about to buy from to give them to us for free because he wasn’t allowed to sell them! SWEET! So we got seats to the sold out hockey game for free! LOL.

We leave London tomorrow afternoon on the train to Amsterdam tomorrow for three days. After that, we will be in Prague for three days. Then it will be time for EPT Baden in Austria. We plan on doing a lot of sightseeing in Amsterdam. I’ve heard it’s great there and we should definitely have a good time.

Every year I get very excited for the World Championship of Online Poker at Pokerstars. It feels just like the WSOP, but for online players. One of the first few events, I managed to get 8’th place. I was chip leader with 40 people left all the way down to about 12 people left. To be quite honest with you, with about 15 people left, I started playing very antsy. I wasn’t patient at all, and aborted the initial general game plan that had got me that far. That said, I didn’t necessarily play bad, I just got blind steal crazy and was playing much higher variance, hence with 12 people left, I was chip leader and did a coin flip on the flop for a 1.2 million chip pot against the second chip leader. Shortly thereafter, I got knocked out of the tournament on a bad beat.

Anita and I have done a lot of things in London so far, as London has a lot of stuff to do. We went to Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum, St. Paul’s Cathedral, Regents Park and rented a romantic row boat, took a day trip by train to the royal residence of the Windsor Castle, Westminster Abbey, took an informative tour of the Houses of Parliament, saw the mighty clock - Big Ben, and took a tour of the Tower of London where King Henry VIII murdered his wives. We still have to see Buckingham Palace which we will do the day after tomorrow.

The day before Day 1A, Anita, Action Jeff, and myself headed to the Pokerstars Pre-Party for the EPT Event. It was a cruise down the river with a free bar and all the players, so of course we’re in! lol. As soon as I got on the boat, Daniel Negreanu spotted me and we sparked up a conversation. We ended up talking almost the entire time. After the party, Action Jeff, Daniel Negreanu, Anita, and I caught a cab back to the hotel. We decided to hit up the bar and lounge in the lobby of the hotel for drinks and ended up hanging out most of the rest of the night while engaged in very deep level/deep thought poker talk. Daniel, Jeff, and I all have very different ways of playing and I’m sure all of us learned a lot from each other throughout the conversation.

I busted out of EPT London yesterday. I just can’t seem to even make Day 2 of these large buy-in live tournaments. I don’t believe it’s my fault either really. Yesterday I played six out of the eight levels in the day, and each level was an hour. I had AA once, KK twice, JJ twice, AK three times, AQ two times, and TT once. I won with KK and JJ once each stealing the blinds, every other premium hand found some way for me to lose the pot. The final blow came with my KK vs. 77 all in preflop and he hit the flop with 997 board.

I’m playing the 6 max No Limit WCOOP Event as I’m writing this and hopefully I can win one of the WCOOPs by the end of the series. Something just as good as that would be to get deep in EPT Baden in three weeks. Other than all these tournaments, I’ve been putting in about 2,000 hands a day and definitely putting down some strong results.

Man, I’ve been so busy it’s been unreal. I’m honestly not sure where we left off with the last blog, but I went to Barcelona for the EPT and busted out about an hour in with AK vs. AA in a late position battle for about 70xbbs which is okay IMO, especially since I thought I had him “on tilt” from the hand before when I raised him on the river and he had to fold. Anyways, Anita and I take the night train first class back to Paris, France. Once we arrive, we get there and buy tickets for the Eurostar Train going through the English Channel. We go through passport control/immigration and we get pulled aside for further questioning. We didn’t have a hotel reserved yet, because we were just going to go to the tourist information desk when we arrived and have them help us find a good hotel. For some reason to enter the U.K., you need to have hotel reservations before you get into their country for some idiotic reason. We got detained, and questioned on and off for a couple of hours, causing us to miss our original train….no problem, I’ll answer all their questions, I’m no criminal, I’m no terrorist, neither is Anita obviously, we’ll catch the next train or the one after that….WRONG! They ended up not believing I was a Professional Poker Player, or that Anita and I were also on our honeymoon for 3 months traveling across Europe. The British immigration authorities turned us over to the French police with automatic weapons and escorted us away from British territory. We couldn’t believe what happened. In the midst of all of it, the two immigration officers who were handling our case were the most disrespectful and belittling assholes I’ve ever encountered in my life. I’ve been around a wide variety of people in my days, but these guys trump anybody else.

We decided to take the train to Brussels, Belgium two days later to take the Eurostar from Brussels to London so we wouldn’t have to deal with the same authorities again. The immigration officers in Brussels were the exact opposite of the people in the Paris train station. They were more than willing to figure out our situation as quickly as possible and get us on our way. Obviously we were in the system as “access denied” and had to answer all the questions over again, but this time they figured out we were telling the truth, which shouldn’t have been unreasonable in the first place.

We get to London and find our hotel and basically just chill out. Over the past couple days; I’ve been hanging out with my good friend Tom Dwan a.k.a. “durrrr” on FTP and “Hold_emNL” on Stars. We played a few sessions and exchanged strategy a couple times together over the past few days. I went down on Day 2B to rail Tom at the featured table for a couple of hours. I happened to run into Daniel Negreanu while I was there and chatted it up a little bit about some of the Stars high stakes NL regulars and also to thank him for making positive changes to the tables on Pokerstars, such as increasing the minimum buyin to 50xbbs on the 100/200 tables instead of the measly 20xbbs which allows short stackers to effectively “rathole”. Tom was playing the $20k WSOP-Europe Main Event and had made it to Day 3 today with an average chip stack. He then busted a few people up and got all the way to a Top 10 chipstack. Then all of a sudden he missed an open ended straight draw, loses QQ vs. AQ, loses TT vs. AA, and for the second time in the tournament for a large pot, runs KK against AA, and before he knows it, the chips left him as quickly as he got them and was out of the tournament. That’s too bad because durrrr is a great guy and always does the right thing. Of course he was one of the favorites to win the tournament when it got this deep as well since he’s a fantastic player.

I’m fairly excited because today was the beginning of the 2007 World Championship of Online Poker hosted by Pokerstars. I’ll be playing almost every event and plan on taking them very seriously. I had a pretty good finish in last year’s WCOOP PLO Rebuy tournament and hopefully I can have more success this year. I entered in a sidebet with a couple other professional online tournament players with a $1,000 buyin for who has the best results throughout the series, based on a system similar to the Tournament Leaderboard.

Unfortunately, there hasn’t really been any high stakes cash games here in London yet as far as I am aware. However, in about a week when the European Poker Tour comes to town, I hear there will be bigger games and it’ll be time to play live. I’ve been really concentrating on my PLO game recently and I have a feeling you might possibly see a large run up by me in the near future to the ultra-high stakes PLO games.

I apologize that this blog most likely poorly written but I’ve been playing over 4,000 hands a day for the past week and I’m just dead tired. Not to mention it’s already pretty late over here. I might’ve missed some stuff but will write another blog soon.

I know I know….it’s been about a week and a half since my last blog, and I apologize for that. I’ve been quite busy traveling. All of my days so far have been jam-packed. I think this blog is better served as a two-part blog instead of a regular one-part blog. There has been so much to tell, it might get rather long, but eventually I’ll catch it all up. I believe where we last left off was right after my wedding. As per the relationship I have with Anita, becoming married doesn’t really change us any. Our vows obviously bind us to a lifelong commitment, but other than officially doing that, nothing has changed basically besides introducing one another as each other’s husband or wife.

Two days after our wedding, we went to Brooklyn, NYC to get on the Cunard cruise liner: Queen Mary II to cross the Atlantic Ocean to London, England. Lots of people told me how amazing and great the Queen Mary II was once I told them about my plans to travel to Europe and how I was doing everything. I figured traveling on a “Titanicesque” cruise ship would be sort of unique and cool. Both the original Queen Mary and the Queen Mary II have carried many famous and powerful people in its past. I was told the Cunard cruise liners are supposed to be the most prestigious and famous in the world. For the most part, I believe the ship is one of the best in the world. There are a few things that could definitely be better for the price we paid, though. The food was overall “good”. I’d give it about an 8 or 8.5 on a 1-10 scale. I expected at least a 9 rating for this, though, on “one of the best cruise ships in the world”.

Last June I took Anita and my grandma on a cruise to Alaska on the Princess cruise line, and their food was just as good, if not, better. The entertainment was also probably about an 8 out of 10. It was good and it was entertainment, but it just wasn’t that, “Wow, that was AMAZING!” kind of entertainment. At least Anita and I didn’t think so. That being said, our standards might be a tad high considering we have been to some of the best shows in the world in Las Vegas. The service was about a 9-9.5/10 so nothing was really lacking. The amenities amongst the ship were a 9/10. The ship had a golf course simulator, daily ping pong tournaments, a top rated Spa (10/10) on board–Yes I obviously got a massage– and 24 hour room service. I wish the internet had been good enough to play poker on, but it wasn’t. I guess because for most of the time you’re in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean where apparently it’s really hard to get high speed internet, unfortunately. Generally speaking, there were far more older folks than I would have preferred, and hardly any young adults our age. For the most part, that is just because only very successful people can afford to spend six days lounging on an expensive intercontinental cruise ship. Overall I was pleased with the cruise. It was just a tad below what my expectations were, but it was worth it.

On the 6th day we arrived in Southampton, England and took a motor coach over to the London Waterloo Station to catch the Eurostar high Speed train to Paris, France. I’d heard that this train goes fast and smooth, but WOW. This thing is super fast and very efficient for traveling between London, Paris, and Brussels. It only took 2 hours and 45 minutes from London to Paris. I believe it was going as fast as 170 mph at some points. I think the regular Amtrak trains in the U.S. top out at around 100 mph. It was a weird feeling going backwards at such high speeds. To our surprise, the seats we were sitting in were faced backwards from the way the train was moving, which was a little awkward at first. We arrived in Paris and found a nice hotel to stay at near the Louvre museum and the Notre Dame Cathedral. On the first night we ate dinner at a fresh outside café, a block away from our hotel in the middle of the city.

The next day we spent at the massive Palace of Versailles. It took a little while to figure out the Metro system, but we eventually found our way. Versailles is about a thirty minute Metro ride from Notre Dame, although the C-Train at the Notre Dame station was under construction as we had already made a mistake getting on the wrong Metro. We had to re-route and make a few switches. Versailles maintains an elegant essence with its ages-old statues lining the paths of the Palace’s majestic garden. Inside the palace just about every ceiling and every wall is coated with amazing paintings, bordered with statuettes hanging in the corners and framed in gold. The floors in every room are uniquely designed marble. From the room with portraits of all the queens to the hallway of mirrors, and where the Treaty of Versailles was signed, the entire Palace is absolutely amazing. Anita says it was her favorite part of our trip so far.

I’m going to stop here with Part I of this particular blog. I think I can have Part II completed by later tonight. As of right now, I am on what I think is the fastest train in the world which is the TGV France Train. I am on my way to Barcelona, Spain. I think this goes about 200 mph or maybe even slightly more. Like the Eurostar, this train is FAST. Along with being extraordinarily fast for land travel, it is extremely smooth. Unlike the Amtrak trains in the U.S., this train has virtually no bumps or jerks whatsoever. Not to get distracted with trying to complete Part I of this blog, but I just wanted to wrap up with just mentioning I’ve been getting killed lately at virtually every NLHE game I play. Fortunately, PLO has been a little nicer to me, but it has hardly mattered. My downswing as of late in NLHE has been moderately depressing, but nothing even remotely close to me having to worry about anything. I’m roughly down $50,000 in the past 3 or 4 days. I’m almost to Barcelona now, where I will be seeing the sights for two days before playing a lot of live, hopefully fast-paced poker. I haven’t decided whether I will play the EPT event in Barcelona yet this week. That decision is almost totally dictated by how the action is in the 25/50 and 50/100 NL cash games. I look forward to posting a couple of exciting high stakes live cash game hands as I will be playing a lot live within the next two months.

Well, I didn’t write this the day after my blog about the Bachelor Party Part 1, but that’s okay. Anita and seven of her other friends went out in a limo to a restaurant on Thursday night. I went out with five of my friends in a limo to Del Frisco’s Steak and Lobster House. I can’t speak for Anita’s party, but Del Frisco’s was excellent as always. Del Frisco’s is definitely one of my favorite restaurants in the United States. After both of our groups had finished dinner, we met up at the entrance of Club Roxy in Orlando. We actually got there about thirty minutes or so before the place really started getting slammed. We went through the V.I.P. line and hung out at the downstairs bar for that period of time until the V.I.P. Manager showed us the way upstairs to our couches and table in the V.I.P. Lounge. We ordered the regular Magnum Bottle of Don Perignon and another bottle of Grey Goose, along with various other shots. After about an hour or so, the place was really getting crazy and most of us headed to the dance floor to bust some grooves. I think the D.J. was the best I had ever heard. He was keeping the party alive and kicking switching and spinning the songs every minute and a half or so. After the club, we took both of our limos back to the hotel where my wedding was taking place.

Friday afternoon, my best man Neutrality arrived to the hotel. I called up jcmoussa/thegrumpyone (on stars) and the three of us had a nice lunch pool-side. That night, we had the rehearsal and rehearsal dinner. Both of those went pretty smoothly and Anita and I called it an early night to bed.

Saturday was the big day. Myself and the groomsmen changed into our tuxedos in one of the “holding rooms” near the ballroom. Anita and her bridesmaids went to their holding room and did their hair and make-up and changed into their dresses. We did a lot of pictures right before the ceremony with the

photographer we hired. He’s straight from Italy and is one of the most artistic people I’ve ever met. He does the most amazing shots and poses and I am really looking forward to seeing the finished product. The ceremony room was beautiful as the altar was heavily decorated with flowers. We did the standard

Marriage thing and said “I Do” and there we were: Mr. and Mrs. Smith. We hired a saxophonist for the cocktail hour in between the ceremony and the grand reception. He was as good as anybody could possibly be. He played the perfect type of music, and he played it well. We had lots of appetizers along with the open bar. Everybody went inside the reception ball room and we did the first dances. Anita and I had some dancing lessons and did a choreographed first dance that went perfect even though we only had 7 lessons in 1 week to prepare when I returned from my Connecticut and NYC trip. Next, the prime rib and salmon was served. We also had a chocolate fountain. People could dip strawberries and pound cake into the fountain. We cut the cake and danced the night away after that! What happened in our honeymoon suite is obviously nobody’s business

Sunday night, Tom (durrrr), Tom’s Cousin Jimmy, Dave (Raptor), Dave’s girlfriend Haley, and I went to Capital Grille on International Drive. I took my Dad there for Father’s day and it was even better this time. We made good conversation and then parted. This morning Anita and I did a lot of work packing and jumped on the train to New York City to catch the Queen Mary II Cunard Cruise ship. I’m on the train now and just put in a very short 25/50 NL session in which I won about $2k after being stuck $5k in the first round. Anita and I have never been on a train before and that’s why we decided to do something different to start off our Europe Trip. In ten minutes, I’ll be playing my first FTOPS event of this series, which is the $1k 6 max event which is right up my alley. As most of you know, I chopped the Main event of FTOPS III 1’st and 2′nd prize money evenly with traheho and I final tabled the O8 limit event that series too. Therefore, the FTOPS always has a special place in my heart and gives me some good hope, haha.

I’m in the limo right now on the way to Miami to go party it up for Day 1 of my Bachelor Party. We have reservations at Café Martorano. I hear from two individual sources that this place is straight up OFF THE CHAIN! Supposedly a lot of hip hop artists such as 50 cent, Jay-Z, and others go there as well as professional Miami Heat players. It’s supposedly ½ Night Club - ½ Restaurant. The food, the music from the DJ, and the atmosphere is all top notch. I’m excited to go there and see what it’s like. It should be lots of fun. Afterwards, Stu Paterson, my friend Alex from L.A., my friend Randy from Indiana, one of Anita’s friends, Anita, and myself are going to Solid Gold / Pure Platinum which as always, should be a blast. I’m in real good with the head bouncer there and he always gives us V.I.P. treatment with high class.

The night before last, my Mercedes got a smash and grab done on it in front of the house I was staying at. I was playing in a 10/25/50 - unlimited straddling (sometimes for as much as $1400) game in Tampa and decided to come home immediately after the game. I parked my car at 12:30 a.m. and by 6 a.m. the theft had already happened. I have over $10,000 worth of audio and video equipment in my car so it wasn’t a very good time, along with them stealing my laptop that I had left in my front seat. My passenger window was completely broken and my rear seats were cut so they could get into the trunk. It was in a very nice neighborhood where the average house is roughly $350,000, so I was quite surprised to say the least.

My dad started teaching me how to play golf when I was 7 years old. I would cry on the course a lot when I would shoot bad because I always wanted to play really well. My dad always worked with me and helped me with my game. He’s a very consistent golfer almost always breaking 100, even though he’s in his mid 60’s now. He has been playing the game recreationally for many, many years. On Friday of last week, I FINALLY beat him on the 9 holes we played. I beat him by 4 strokes. I made par on three out of the nine holes we played which was my personal best. He didn’t play bad either but I didn’t chuck one shot. I could’ve cut off three or four strokes on putting, but I was playing with the new PING putter I bought in Las Vegas during the WSOP for the very first time.

As some of you avid internet readers know, the High Stakes TwoPlusTwo community is hosting a $5,000 buy-in Heads Up Tournament with a 32-player bracket. You play three Heads Up tables against your opponent, with each starting with 300xbbs. Whoever wins two out of three tables, moves onto the next round. I played iRockHoes the first round and beat him 2-1 after a six hour match. I played my second round match last night. I played HEK aka HoldEmKillah and beat him 2-0 within the first two hours. HEK played better than I thought he would, but going into the match I was quite confident so I bet about $2,500 with various betters. I laid 1.3-1 on myself, so I was putting up $3,250 to win $2,500 in total for you novice odds betters =) . I don’t know who I will play in the next round, but if I win that I will be in the semi-finals and in the money for a $20,000 cash. The winner of the match comes out with about $80,000 which would not be a shabby pay day.

I’ve been on quite a roll lately, consistently rolling in money. I’ll be hanging out with friends in town over the next few days through the weekend of my wedding, so I probably won’t have time to put in anymore hours playing poker for the rest of the week with so much other things I need to take care of and stuff on my mind.

Day 2 of Bachelor Party and Results of Day 1 of Bachelor Party to come soon.

As most of you know, I have a wedding coming up in the very near future. I am anticipating it so much… I just can’t wait! We now have more people attending than we originally expected, and by a fair margin. We were originally planning on about 60 people or so, and now we have over 90! The guests are going to consist of: Both of our families, Anita’s friends from high school, a few of my friends from my childhood, some of my Poker friends (durrrr, Raptor, Mike Matusow, jcmoussa, etc), other friends of mine I’ve met throughout my life, and a lot of our guests’ guests, because a lot are traveling from far away and won’t know anybody, so a lot of them are allowed a guest. I’m pretty much going all out in this wedding as much as possible within my immediate means. We’re getting top of the line everything for the most part, photography, cake, flowers, DJ, musicians, etc. This is a once in a lifetime thing for us, and I can’t see myself holding back on such an important and memorable event. I’m actually in the car right now riding home from the Flower/Table set up place to look at a “mock” table with all of our decorations, flowers, candles, and cloths set up on it. It looked great, just like how I thought it would.

For the wedding, Anita and I decided to take some dance lessons and learn some choreography for our first dances when the reception begins. We’ve been taking lessons every day with our instructor and so far we have the first two minutes out of the five minute routine finished. It’s not perfect quite yet, but we’re going to practice as much as possible to make it really smooth between now and the wedding. I have to say, I am very impressed at the skill our dance instructor possesses. Sometimes she’s not absolutely clear coming across with how she wants us to do a move, but her ideas and flow of the choreography so far has been top notch, it goes great with the first song we picked out.

Recently, as documented through my blogs, poker has been giving me a rough time, even further, while I was supposed to be relaxing on vacation! Yesterday, I got stuck about $30-35,000 and then made about a $50,000 turn around and dropped a little back at the end, but booked about a $5-6k winning session which I felt relieved about. I’ve also won $10k here and there the past couple days as well. It’d be nice if I could have one month where this would keep going, and I think this honestly might be the time. I’ve tinkered with my game some lately and made some adjustments, and so far the results have been positive.

While going through the poker swings, I have this wedding to keep together and make decisions on. Lots and lots of decisions is what weddings are all about I’ve found out through this process. Fortunately, I have Anita who has been working very hard despite the fact we have a good wedding planner; that just shows how much work there is to really be done. After this wedding, I’ll be off on a Cunard Cruise Ship to Europe for a while in hopes of knocking down an EPT tournament or making big $ over in the live cash games there which I hear are pretty soft.

After being at my beach house in Connecticut for almost two weeks and a couple day stopovers in New York, I’m finally heading back to Florida for my wedding.  At the beach house Anita and I went sailing, played tennis, went wakeboarding, played online poker and hung out at the beach.  I had a nice time visiting my aunt, uncle, cousin and grandmother. After that, we left the beach cottage and went over to NYC. My intent was to play the cash games there in the private clubs but they ended up being too crowded with locals who get first priority because everyone is amped up to play poker since returning from the World Series.  So instead, I played some online poker and gaucho2121 showed me around the city.  We got a massage from this hidden Asian massage place that was pretty good and went shopping in a couple stores.  One of the nights whitelime, Ezra, ansky, krantz, a lady friend of krantz’s and I went out to a nice Italian restaurant in the city. It was one of the best Italian dishes I’ve ever had, but the service was sub par to average.  I’ve met ansky and whitelime before, but this was my first time meeting the other two.  Maybe now that I’ve had dinner with the two sickos who are up more than $3M over the past month and a half they can pass some run-good to me.

Lately Anita and I have been picking out wedding songs and finalizing the guest list, as well as planning for our bachelor/bachelorette parties and other miscellaneous wedding stuff.  That’s been keeping us very occupied.  The wedding will obviously have a good number of poker people at it. I am very excited and looking forward to it.

Poker has been a hassle lately.  My main problem has been getting all in on the turn with a set against an overpair, and each time they seem to spike their 2 outer on the river.  It seems like every time I’m in that situation and the river card appears, I end up blinking repeatedly in disbelief that the same thing could happen so many times in a row.  I also just can’t seem to find hands to extract quality value from, even though the games seem to have been good lately.  I do plan to be playing in some very big live games in the near future in Miami and Europe.  More details to come.

So, I haven’t blogged for a while, mostly due to waiting so my blogs will be posted on the new site that has decided they wanted me as a blogger. It seems as if there will be some very good things happening with this site. I’m not sure exactly what I can say yet about it, but as soon as it can be public knowledge, I’m sure they will post up the great news, so stay tuned to the site!

My last blog on my site - BoostedJ.com, was quite a while ago. I believe it was right before I took a road trip from Orlando, FL all the way to Las Vegas with my fiancee Anita. We made a few stops along the way. The first stop was New Orleans to scope out the scene there and listen to a little Jazz music for a few hours. We stayed in Baton Rouge the first night. We then continued all the way to Ft. Worth, Texas where we stayed at Durrrr and Raptor’s “poker pad”. They have a very nice house which includes a full 15 person seating home theatre, state of the art computers and monitors, pool table, pool, and it seems like groups of sorority girls just like to spontaneously come over and hang out too! The third night we stayed in Albuquerque, New Mexico, which didn’t seem like much at all. On our last day of traveling, we stopped at the Grand Canyon for some scenic view and there was a two hour backup at the Hoover Dam which you must cross over to get into Las Vegas, so we saw that plenty as well.

The first few nights I arrived in Las Vegas, I stayed with a few friends of mine: Dustin “neverwin” Woolf, Mike “MadCaddy” McKenna, Mark “newhizzle” Newhouse, and Mike’s friend Steve-O at Dustin’s Las Vegas home. As soon as the house Anita and I set up to rent was ready and furnished, we moved over there, since we had our dog shipped out here so she could be with us for the three weeks we were going to be out here for.

One of the first days I was here we really got into a full blown animal degenerate golfing match that included: Neverwin, Joe Cassidy (Nizot Skared on FTP), Newhizzle, and high stakes limit professional and the 2006 Aruba Classic champion Devon “Savagegamble” Miller. Of course there were bets made with a few guys winning and losing thousands of dollars but what else is new, at least I was a winner

Along with golfing numerous times out here, I’ve had a few medical problems that have still persisted that I’ve done my best to take care of. We have also gone to see a lot of the shows out here. I decided with this trip that moving to Las Vegas over Miami would probably be the best choice so that is what we are planning to do following our wedding. Cheaper schooling for Anita, cheaper real estate, more entertainment, more people I know, and of course the yummy restaurants!

My plans for today will probably include dinner, a show on the strip, and possibly golf in an hour or two. The golf courses out here are absolutely amazing; their scenery as well as the shape they are kept in.

I’ll start writing frequently again now so be sure to check in regularly.