when i grow up i wanna be a tourney pro….

Tournament poker is a never-ending test of skill, which takes years or a lifetime to master.

It’s not a gig for $15/hr reporters like Tiffany Michelle, or for women or small children. It’s a cut-throat world of high intensity strategy and steel nerves where brilliance shines and the weak perish.

Show me a winner of a large tournament, and I’ll show you a Champion who spent a lifetime mastering the skills necessary to control a 30bb stack in a full ring game. The complexities of structuring your bets so that you never have to make a turn decision as well as maintaining agressive pressure playing 11/6 for 7 days straight is not a game for the faint-hearted.

Lesser men, like myself, try and fail. Only champions succeed. You either have it or you don’t. When the camera descends on your table to film the nail-biting suspense of a 40bb pot allin pre with one gladiator holding 88 and the other fierce opponent holding KQs, the boys get separated from the real men.

Imagine multiple champions like Johnny “The Orient Express” Chan or Phil “Hellmouth” Hellmuth staring you down as you ponder a 14bb allin decision. If you can handle that kind of pressure, you belong there. The rest of us belong on the rail, dreaming, admiring and getting autographs from these walking gods in the Rio room.

Brag: I once check-folded against Chip Jett. He then let me sign his playing card. I tried not to blush with embarassment at my good fortune. I played it cool. Later, he let me pick up the drink tab.

To the winners go the spoils. One only has to admire Allen Cunningham’s g/f to see the end result of massive success:

One day, one fine day, I will walk with these icons as an equal. I will charge people for the priviledge of playing with me. I will become a legend and when this happens, I will disown all of you and go hang out with Layne Flack and engage in fascinating conversation with said Flack - I will also drink mint bourbons and give incredibly stupid interviews where I try incredibly hard to be funny and fail.

I will convince myself that the stripper I pay 2k a night to actually does love me. I will spend my free time playing baccarat alone and throwing chairs and swearing when I lose with natural 8. I will play credit card roulette for $700 dinners and love the fact that the pumpkin soup I’m eating has a $200 price tag and a fancy French-sounding name for chives.

I will flirt on camera with Amanda Leatherman, who has an IQ higher than any of the jokers she’s forced to interview, and she will politely laugh at my sleazy jokes in her professional manner - and I will hit on her with class and stylish pickup lines learned from Layne Flack. I will arm-wrestle Sebok for $100 and make a TV show out of it that 800 16 year olds watch religiously.

I will buyin mentally disturbed, dirty, suicidal skanks into tournaments and rub up against them Captain Tom style.

One day. One fine, glorious day.

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my puppy.

My little greyhound pup is growing up fast. He’s pretty adorable. He’s costing me a fortune, but when I look into his little eyes, I know it’s money well spent.

It’s pretty obvious to anyone who isn’t blind that this little fella is gonna be a winner. You can just take one look at him and know he’s gonna be a champion.

I basically just wanted to do a brag post about my puppy here, but I don’t have much more to say about him apart from that I pretty much love him - so I thought I’d also put up some boring pics of my new place, as people have emailed me requesting pics (wtf - I guess they’re expecting ballerness).

The only baller thing I own is my insanely awesome couch below. Until the little puppy came along, this couch got the majority of my love.

This room below is where I store excess bedding. When people visit, they stay here in style and luxury. I’m going to install a video camera at some point because my house guests pretty much get all the action this apartment ever sees.

This is where the magic happens. Tube8 does good work.

This TV gets used once or twice a month when F1 is on. It bears the scars of various objects thrown at it when my various F1 bets invariably go up in flames in hilarious circumstances. Betfair is the f worst.

These appliances will never be used. My fridge inventory at the moment consists of a half empty bottle of Vodka Mudshake, a Cornetto which I’m saving for a special occasion and an ice pack. Since I stopped trying to occasionally eat fruit and vegetables (about 14 months ago), I’ve been a lot healthier.

My medicinal cabinet. If the building was going up in flames, this drawer is the first thing I’d attempt to save. It’s mostly stocked with Xanax, Valium and Ambien, but I have some Vicodin (which I think is over-rated) and a few other things like Rivotril and whatnot. If I had some Adderal, I’d be good to go…

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ostriches have the best lives.

You know how when you’re a kid, and xmas is coming up, you wish you could just close your eyes and sleep through the next 19 days and wake up on xmas day? Well I want to do that right now, and wake up when the gheyness is over.

Everything has gone pear-shaped. I can’t fight the gheyness anymore - retards have taken over the world and are beating up on me as if I was a ginga.

PLDT (Philippines national net provider) is the most spasticated company in the world. There are teams of drooling retards in asylums colouring and pasting ‘novelty gifts’ together to raise money - and they’re all smarter than all PLDT’s customer support staff (who I’m almost certain moonlight for NETeller CS on evenings and weekends).

Unable to deal with any more PLDT morons today, I stormed out of the house to go watch Dark Knight, which everyone has been raving about and which I was sure would take away my tilt for 2 hours and allow me to regain my sanity. But not only did the movie basically suck (Maggie Gyllenhaal - are you serious? Who cares if she lives or dies in a movie…), but when I turned my phone back on, I find 5 messages from my maid saying PLDT servicemen had arrived and left, having done absolutely nothing to fix the ongoing issue - that issue being that I’m paying $200/month for shithouse internet which is even slower than my $80/month PLDT net at my last place (which was also shithouse). The PLDT spastics had finally put their crayons down and gotten their shit together just enough to send out a service team, and I’m sitting watching a devastatingly disappointing movie with my phone turned off purely because of PLDT-related tilt and I miss the servicemen and can’t yell at / instruct them to fix the problem.

I’m trying to teach my maid how to handle incompetent people but she appears unwilling or incapable of learning the vital skills necessary to conduct oneself effectively and with style in a world dominated by retards. After invoking many swearwords and threats as I demolished yet another PLDT moron who had the nerve to ask me “how many lights were blinking on the modem”, I slammed the phone down and said to Janine, “See, that’s how you do it - now let me see you try.”

She says, “Ok Sir!”, then picks up the phone and I could distinctly hear the Tagalog words for ‘please’, ‘thank you’ and ’sir’ in her softly spoken voice, as she was placed on hold indefinitely. She’s utterly hopeless - a lost cause.

I have about 30 messages flagged in my inbox awaiting responses from people who either have screwed up something or have not delivered on previous promises and another 10 unanswered phone and text messages from people who either want various favours or want to borrow money. Everyone wants to borrow money these days, it’s a pathetic world of begging.

No one ever approaches me saying “Hey I got an idea that’s gonna make us rich!” or “Hey I got that money you lent me in 2006 which I promised I’d pay back next Friday!” - it’s just endless jokers too lazy to work who want to borrow money. I do occasionally get some small joy out of rejecting and insulting them, but most of the time, I’m too depressed even to allow myself that small pleasure and just put the phone on silent.

The AUD has overdosed on fuken Cialis 100mg tablets and I’m a whore creaking and panting under its undying vigour. I try to make myself feel better by thinking about the Zimbabwe Dollar. Get this - in 1980, one Zimbabwe Dollar was worth more than one USD. 28 years on, and its now about 70 billion (70,000,000,000) Zimbabwe dollars to 1 (one) USD. It’s against the law to hold more than Z$100 billion (just over $1) otherwise you can be arrested for hoarding funds. lol at those stupid jokers. Vote for Mugabe. Spastics.

I’m going to sleep now, and when I wake up, I hope the Olympics are starting, the AUD is back at 60c and I have 47 messages on my phone from people who owe me money desperately trying to get ahold of me to pay me back…..

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An insanely decent proposal.

So I’ve been writing a bit on my journal on PokerCrack and my blog has suffered as a result. I’m going to start cross-posting my drunken ramblings here also so my dear Blog Friends who have not seen the light and come across to the awesomeness of PokerCrack can feel the writing love also.

—————-

So there are a lot of rumours going around about what Tiffany Michelle (the PokerNews reporter who is staring down the barrel of millions in ME prizemoney) had to do to get her 10k entry paid for. For non-poker people, Tiffany is a humble (but talented) reporter working for PokerNews who is staring down the barrel of millions of dollars in prizemoney today as one of the chip leaders in the last 27 players ($9 million first prize).

Let me make something clear - I have absolutely zero actual evidence of anything interesting, apart from a lot of second-hand (inadmissable) hearsay and anecdotal noise from my various HumanINT sources. But where there is smoke, there can sometimes be a crack addict trying to suck down that sweet smoke.

I guess what I’m trying to say is this. Yes, TonyG is a generous guy - everyone knows this. I have benefited from his generosity, and although I am a fairly pretty man, I’m not nearly as cute as Tiffany. Tony is one of the most generous people I’ve ever met. However, there are a lot of PokerNews reporters and from what I understand only Tiffany got a free 10k seat into the WSOP ME.

Now, this could be (probably is) pure and utter slander, I’m just repeating what I’ve heard - which is that TonyG paid 1/2 the buyin for Tiffany as he’s generous and its good for PokerNews promotion. What my sources unreliably inform me is that the other half of the buyin was put up by a well-known poker player in return for a little old-fashioned exchange of goods and services.

As a purely unbiased and objective bystander who has absolutely no moral or otherwise hangups regarding the oldest profession in the world, I am not passing judgement in the slightest - I am merely sharing the entertainment around. And the story I heard was quite convincing, as unsubstantiated rumours go.

If you’re wondering what point I’m trying to make or what exactly I’m getting at or what the whole point is of this rambling, here it is:

Amanda Leatherman, you have a standing offer for the same deal which you can redeem at any time.

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J Mac awesomeness and running good.

I know most of you will have already seen this story from 2006, but it’s so awesome, you can watch it again. I think it’s one of the greatest sports stories ever.

I’m not as awesome as J Mac, but I’ve been running pretty hot lately. Last night I scraped through to get my 4k pot when Nadal did his best to throw away the match but hung in in what they’re calling the greatest Grand Slam Final in history.

Also last night, I won 2200 bb in a 50c/1 live game. It was pretty awesome.

RakebackSTAT did around $250,000 MGR last month, and we launched daily rakeback payments which has been going smooth as silky silk.

StakingSTAT took some hits, but all players bounced back and we survived the month with a profit.

PokerCrack continues to grow and we’re now Australia’s busiest poker forum.

I won about 20k in live games, and getting better at teaching myself to handle the boredom to take advantage of the fact that 25/50nl live plays softer than 10nl on FTP.

I hijacked a taxi when I lost confidence in my driver to get around Makati one-way streets in traffic. The fact that he would turn left when I say right and pointing right stopped being amusing fast. I evicted him from the wheel and took over. I zipped through Makati peak-hour traffic as if I was born to drive a taxi. We only had one close call and, although the taxi driver and the other driver would dispute this, it was 90% the other driver’s fault. No serious damage, just a gentle caress when we both moved into the same lane.

3 people made partial payments against long-standing loans this month, one of which I had basically written off.

Every day, I wake up and thank Buddah that I’m not in Vegas right now. Times are good….

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update.

“When I write, its like Jesus sprinkling fuken ownage on a goddamn titty.”
- NWP’s one and only The Wiz

So my wonderful maid returned full of smiles from her holiday / “funeral” back in her province yesterday. I have a messy Irishman (Jesse Maguire) living with me and we spent some time cleaning up his mess a few days ago. I’ve had gheyer days in my life, but I can’t remember them.

Tilting from having to clean up after myself (and annoyed by the Irishman - I’ve never met an Irishman I’ve liked - they’re as bad as f Canandians), I planned to have serious words to Janine about faking deaths of relatives to get a holiday, but when I woke to give her my planned stern lecture, the entire unit was spotless, all clothes washed and ironed, the smell of rosemary and flowers was in the air and I gave her a payrise instead.

I’ve been playing a lot of live poker lately and there’s been some great shorthanded live games setup around Manila lately. A new game was launched last week about 3 blocks from where I live in Rockwell, and its pretty elohel. I finished off the month nicely with an 11k win in this new game last night, which was leet and possibly even <3.

The game is hosted by models, and two of the girls are maybe the hottest girls I have ever seen. I shyly hinted at my interest in one of them via a complicated and highly crafty strategy of asking her friend about her (primary school students have perfected this flirting technique, and I see no need to f with a winning formula).

I received a relayed reply via her friend that “she is taken”, which for silly noobs, is uncomplicated girl code for “could not be LESS interested”. I realised an important lesson today though, rejection doesn’t sting if the girl is hot enough.

Rejection notwithstanding, this particular girl is a little ridiculous, so I will try and sneak some crafty pics of her next game for you all, my dear Blog Friends.

In other news, I am sitting on a million dollar idea. Near where I live, there is a fast food place called “Pepper Lunch”. It’s probably the greatest fast food ever. Anyone who opens up a franchise of it in Australia will make millions. I’m addicted to it, and I’ve gotten the Irishman addicted to it - its pretty much all we think about these days. I don’t know if they’re putting MSG or Crack in the rice or what, but we basically just try to find things to occupy us until its Pepper Lunch time again. Which it is, now…

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