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.