16th June Wed $1,500 NLHE #30
23rd June Wed $1,500 NLHE #42
26th June Sat $1,000 NLHE #47
28th June Mon $1,500 NLHE #49
2nd July Fri $2,500 NLHE #56

And whichever Day 1 I end up on for the ME. I might add the 3k triple chance to my schedule as I sold a bit more action in myself than I originally planned.

Wifi allowing I’ll be tweeting live from http://twitter.com/FDSaussure and blogging/posting pics here as much as I can.

Vegas gonna get hugged so bad!!

Also he final tabled SCOOP 1 and SCOOP 28 for $350k in cashes.

And he won a watch, probably this one:

Payouts here.

Poker & gambling
poker stars piece of shit
sit and gos are shit
pokerstars gave me $2
leaving pokerstars have had enough
i made a killing on pokerstars
why is rakeback bad
fuck this god damned fucking game poker
if you get tensed up like when playing poker can it feel weird when you swallow?
mercedes s550 makes millions with online poker
how the fuck do you get value in full ring poker?
im eating so many bad beats at poker table what the hell
why am i so shit at poker
stop giving me so many fucking bad beats
why are there so many bad beats in new orleans
how to cheat ridiculously bad at blackjack

Sex
is getting a boner while grinding with a girl bad
semen bad
semen tree
free gay spanking videos
hiro nakamura porn version
rear video of african zulu tribe members fucking
tree seman
couples.bad.fucking
old gay spanking
carradine had string on his balls
have you ever sucked a penis
iron on sex positions silhouette

Food
celery coupons
i found sum pillz and eated em
bad effect of eating too much almonds
are almonds bad if you eat too many?
what’s a good amount of almonds to eat
32 almonds a day

Bad Beats Crew members
is derk hurt
what was the ’80’s video game derk
bbc is it true stefan prodan is the worst human being
derk.history.gov
stefan prodan is so gay and he don’t even know it

Computer problems
my keylogging is really boring
mylife.com registration is having a prolem woops
my computer is freezing running slow and closing like a roller blind
gofuck.comthat

What?
move trachea makes crunching sound
my cousin vinny ethical issue
pictures of shit awesome hearts
if we do not get money we beat the crew badly
awesome shittttt
shit cake
a job that starts with t and ends with k and only 5 letters
circulatory system of tilapia

A week ago I got to tag along with Leo (Superfluous Man) to the NBC HU championship draw party where Gavin Smith about took my arm off barreling up to the stage when his matchup was drawn.  After that was over, apparently Jason (JCarver) was in town on his way to LAPC or something and dropped in to sweat Leo and Negreanu so we went to go get food.  This is always fun because you get to watch Jason sweat and worry about what’s on the menu.

Of course I have the worst sleep schedule ever so I missed the actual games which started at noon the next day.  No spoilers, but while the winner of the whole tournament is disliked by a number of poker players, the result will probably be good from a pr/publicity standpoint.

Jason, Leo, and a bunch of other people came over to my place to watch WEC and eat chicken (obv) on Saturday which was fun.  WSOP is gonna be sick when everyone is in town for a solid month.

I also just ordered a new desktop which I’m pretty excited about.  Basically in the past 10 years I’ve had two desktops, both of which I built myself.  I had a ton of problems with bad hardware on my latest one, and it tends to reboot at random times usually every 1-2 days, though sometimes it might do it 30 minutes after a reboot.  It makes it really annoying to play poker or record a video on.  I have a laptop and even mobile broadband, so if my desktop crashes or if the power or internet goes down I’ll be OK.  If you play cash games and things go wrong, no big deal.  Miss a few orbits of a MTT? Usually no biggie.  If I’m playing a decent number of SNGs and everything dies then I can lose $1500.

Anyway I configured a bunch of stuff on the Dell and HP sites.  Does anyone even do configurable desktops aside from them anymore?  Gateway got bought by Acer, so they don’t.  Sony sort of does but it’s all-in-one stuff I think.  After building a couple of models I really liked I parted it out on newegg/pricewatch to see how much I’d save if I built it myself.  Surprisingly, it was within $100, and that’s with a service plan.  So the new box should be here before the end of the month.  It’s an i7-930 (yeah I know i5 is the sweet spot, but I’m drooling over triple channel and 6 DIMMs, and it was only around $150 more), 12GB DDR3-1066 (6×2GB DIMMs — the board supports 1333 but the manufacturer doesn’t offer it and the speed difference would be negligible), 2×500GB HDD in a RAID 1 configuration, and a Radeon HD 4850 (I don’t play any games really).  Thanks to Eric, nachos, and ultimatemike for letting me bounce ideas off them.

When I watched this episode two Mondays ago, I almost felt like it spoke to me.  Why?  Because the major takeaway is directly applicable to poker.  Some background first.  The episode is titled “Wilson” because it centers on House’s pushover oncologist buddy Dr. James Wilson.  At the beginning of the episode, we learn that Wilson had gotten his patient-turned-not-so-close-friend’s leukemia into remission for 5 years.  Not-so-shockingly, the patient suffers mysterious arm paralysis and various other ailments, so Wilson, too damn proud to see the obvious,  stumbles and bumbles his way through a diagnosis.  Eventually, the extra-powerful chemo Wilson administers fucks up the patient’s liver, necessitating that Wilson donate a chunk of his own liver to save the dude’s life.

But wait, isn’t House the brilliant diagnostician on this show?  God damn right he is.  Not only does he diagnose what’s wrong with this patient (surprise, it’s cancer!), he pinpoints what makes Wilson a shitty diagnostician.  Specifically, Wilson gets way too attached to his patients.  He makes the medical process personal.  This may make him a great oncologist; after all, there’s a fairly discrete set of treatment options for cancer. And, when a cancer diagnosis becomes a death sentence, compassion and the ability to connect with a dying patient are just as important as medical skill.  They make him a bad diagnostician, because a certain level of detachment is essential to an objective analysis of some group of symptoms.

House is always detached.  Patients aren’t people to him, they’re puzzles.  Walking, talking, fleshy, lying sets of symptoms.  Some crazy treatment might kill the patient?  Fuck it!  He’s going to die anyway, right?  Need to do something that is undoubtedly some sort of tort?  Fuck it!  People have standing to sue, puzzles don’t.  Wrong with the initial, or second, or nth diagnosis (like House and his team are every single episode)?  Fuck it!  Dwelling on those past missteps only hinders progress.  In fact, they aren’t missteps at all, they’re just more data that will eventually culminate in a correct diagnosis.

It should be kind of obvious how this applies to poker via tortured analogy.  Your chip stack is an ailing patient.  What’s going to give it the best chance at getting “healthy?”  Being attached to the money in front of you certainly won’t.  It’ll make you a lil’ bitch, always pining for what once was, beating yourself up for not making the “right play,” wasting precious neurons on regret instead of using them to plot your next move.  Instead, you have to see those chips as House sees a patient.  You have to be willing to do whatever it takes to maximize them.  Sometimes that means putting all of them at risk when you think it’s the right play, then not living with regret when it doesn’t work out.  Sometimes it means making a non-standard play with a higher-than-normal chance of failing.  Being afraid of failure won’t help you or your stack; you just have to pull the trigger and see what happens.  Those little voices warning you that bad shit could happen when you make a risky play at the table?  Be like House and tell them to fuck off.  They’re evolutionary relics meant to protect us from playing here-kitty-kitty with a saber-toothed tiger, not from losing a few bucks.  It’s just money, and the worst that can happen is you might end up with a little less of it.

So, it all boils down to this question: who do I want to be on the poker table?  A bitch-made risk-averse pussy like Wilson, for whom success is merely prolonging his patient’s miserable lives?  Or a balls-out psycho like House who simply does. not. give. a. fuck. but manages to figure out the puzzle every single week?  The answer is obvious, and the key is detachment.

The truth is, after six years of playing this game, I’m still Wilson.  But I’m tryin’, Ringo.  I’m tryin’ real hard to be House.

Today was my first pill-free day in 5 years.  It’s a very odd feeling not to have to take anything.  I’m going to have to stow all the pills I have strewn around the house because I keep compulsively reaching for them out of habit, haha.  Finally being free of the pills has put me in a pretty good mood, certainly buoyed by the great week for me online, a series of wins like which I haven’t had in some time.  I felt I played pretty good throughout on sunday (I mean, 60% of what I won was in a turbo.  I ran hot as hell, obviously) and am feeling pretty good about my game.  Hopefully the results (read:heater) will continue (and maybe spill over into PLO).

I sent my latest video series over to PokerVT the other day.  I’ve been told they’ll be released next week.  It’s some of my best stuff yet in my opinion, a review of a $.5-$1 NL cash game played by one of my students.  It’ll be my first cash video for PVT and I hope it’ll be well-received.  Make sure to watch it and send me all your comments/questions, I love getting feedback from members on videos…don’t be shy.  I’ve been trying to post more on the forums so be sure to fire away anything you want to ask me over there.

In addition to all of this cool stuff going on, I’ve got a project under way this week that should make things work smoother around here if it’s successful.  I have a lot of faith right now that it’ll work out, but it’s kind of taking my attentions away from poker for a couple of days.  It’s a secret for now   I really want to play poker though, and I’ll be getting back to it asap.  Will be back to grinding this weekend if not before then.

Speaking of grinding, I finished Oz the other day.  God what a disaster that show turned into as the seasons went on.  After season 3 the plotlines were just consistently riddled with unfathomable logic.  Anyone who has seen the show knows what I mean, it’s not really something you can argue.  It was a good show, but by the end, I was so glad to be done with it.  Not sure what’s next but I’ve been meaning to get around to Big Love for only about 6 months now so probably that.

There’s a good chance I’ll be blogging more because of a prop bet I was offered by Leo/Pechorin.  He offered some sort of blogging-last longer thing that I think will be a good motivator for us to keep our blogs current.  I for one want to hear the thoughts of the world champion of HUNL and I’m pretty sure the internet does too. 

• Didn’t fail or drop out of law school after two semesters.
• Helped defend people’s First and Fourteenth Amendment rights with the wonderful folks at the ACLU of Nevada.
• Lived with a great group of friends in the best Vegas poker house yet.
• Developed a slightly-greater-than-cursory interest in watching (obviously not participating in) MMA.
• Played three live donkaments.
• Won one of them.
• Lost ~$26k in about 209k hands of online cash.
• Won ~$10k in about 209 hands of live cash.
• Went through the motions of interviewing for 2010 summer jobs with big law firms.
• Failed to land such a summer job for 2010, perhaps due to being an awkward, inarticulate interviewee (for proof of this, you need only type my name into YouTube).
• Enjoyed most of the third semester of law school (exams pending…c’mon B-minus average!).
• Read at least one novel.
• Watched several dozen movies.
• Listened to 50 Cent’s “I Get Money” a few hundred times.
• Had needles jammed into my upper back on two occasions.
• Whined uncountably many times (insert diagonalization joke for Derk) to JCarver about poker despite being up way more on the year than I anticipated or deserved.  If there were justice in poker, one could posit that his most recent heater is a karmic reward for patiently absorbing all those whines without once threatening to beat the shit out of me.  You’re welcome, buddy!

I suppose I’ve done other stuff too; perhaps that stuff will merit mention in future blog posts.  And yes, there will be future blog posts, once I get the proper motivation to write ‘em up.  I guess I’ve always been a pretty private perfectionist, which obviously hampers my blogging abilities.  After all, if I’m unwilling to share my innermost thoughts with the world, and unwilling to churn out posts that consist merely of uninteresting poker whines and brags,  then obviously this blog’s output will suffer.  But for the love of money, I’ll shower you all in blog posts.  Until then, I’ll do my normal cop-out and list things I plan to write about.  Maybe, just maybe, I’ll get around to doing so this time.

So, dear reader(s), what would you like me to write about next?  The 10k WSOP Heads-up tournament (what little I can recall of it; I was very “in the moment” throughout much of that tournament, which I guess contributed to my success)?  Breaking even over 350k hands of internet cash games?  Books?  Movies (I’m definitely going to write about District 9 at some point, which, despite its flaws, is one of the better films I can recall seeing in recent memory)?  Law school and the law generally?  Politics?  Salacious details of my personal life?

I guess this is a call for some input in the comments.  I see those comments as proof that people actually read this; while it might be a nice personal exercise to write out my thoughts once in a while, it seems a bit pointless to do it on the internet if there’s no audience out there.  I hope at least some of you are interested in the fucked up things that bounce around my dome.  If you are, let me hear it, fuckers!  If you’re not, well, that’s just like, your opinion, man.