This year, I decided to go to the PCA.  Partly to reward myself for completing my first semester of law school, partly because I wanted to get out of the bitter cold Mid-Atlantic weather and mostly because I am a bigtime degenerate.  This year, despite blowing all my attempts winning a package through ’stars, I was fortunate enough to have ActionJeff invite me to stay in his room in the Atlantis Cove.  This room was probably the most ballin’ hotel room I’ve ever stayed in (or likely ever will, for that matter).  Two queen beds, two decent-sized LCDs, a fold-out couch (which we saved for Adam “the illest” Junglen), TV speakers in the bathroom (which was itself huge), and a breathtaking view of the beach and pools.

Aside from the gambling (not counting gambling against Jason at trivia), this trip was great.  Of course, the gambling went horribly.  The night I arrived, in large part due to lack of sleep, I got ridiculously blackout drunk.  I played a $1k satellite while drunk and obviously lost despite people playing really badly.  My last real memory of the night is open-shipping 99 preflop for about 10 BBs and getting snapped off by A5o for the loss.  Oh, I also loaned out $3500 total to some friends while shitfaced, and had no recollection of this the next day.  Luckily, they both told me about it later, so I’ll actually get the money back.  But, I guess I should’ve known when I woke up to a pounding hangover and less than a third of the cash I started the night with that it would be seven days of me lighting money on fire and then flushing the ashes down the toilet for good measure.

The next day, against my better judgment, I played the 10k with said hangover and a good deal of tilt from thinking I had simply lost a few thousand dollars on the floor of the resort somewhere.  Nothing really went right, except for one hand where I checked behind a combo draw, hit on the river, and got a tiny bit of money out of slowplayed top set.  I made one super nitty laydown, folding AKs preflop to some old guy’s 4bet about 100 BBs deep.  If I had known how the rest of the tournament was to go, I would’ve just shipped it in his face (or into his AA/KK, whatever).  Alas, my stack dwindled down to about 8k in level 4 (200/400/50).  Noted super rich Russian Gipsy74 was directly to my right, but he was away from the table when I busted.  I was in the BB, and it folded to the button, a guy who seemed to limp a bunch from my very limited experience (2 orbits maybe) at this table.  He opened the button to 1200.  Given his propensity for open-limping, this probably should’ve set some warning claxons off in my head.  Instead, I defaulted to the flawed thinking of “he’s probably opening wider because there is no loose Russian dude to defend the SB,” and shipped my 20 BB stack with K7s.  He thought for about 15 seconds and made a truly sick hero call with QQ.

I also managed to play the 5k while I was there, which went about as expected.  I twice got the money in preflop with AK, once against AQs and once against KQo, and failed to win either time.  Hard to win donkaments when that happens, I guess.  As for other gambling, I spent a little time in the pit (hey, last time I’ll be near a casino for at least a few months) and managed to lose a little, surprise surprise.  Fuckers always seven out at exactly the wrong moment; I guess now I know how TJ Cloutier feels!

Despite losing about a semester of law school tuition, I managed to have a pretty good time in the Bahamas.  It’s always great hanging out with the people I so rarely get to see now that I’m in school.  I feel remiss for leaving out names, but it was great hanging out with all my friends from the poker community; hopefully, y’all know who you are.  Hanging out with them in a dingy place like Atlantic City or Foxwoods would’ve been a good time, but doing so at Atlantis was amazing.  I was able to ride jet skis (twice), hit up the water slides and lazy river a bunch of times, and just read/soak in the sun near the pools and on the beaches.  And I was able to do this all while drinking those sugary-sweet rum drinks, smokin’ on the shwag the jet ski guys provided, and shootin’ the shit with some of the best friends I’ve made over the last few years.  Additionmally, I think the sun’s made me a little browner than when I left, so my mission to become more like my hero Vivek Rajkumar is at least one step closer to completion.

Anyway, a few random observations and thoughts before I’m done with this entry:

1.  Why the fuck do so many hotels have nice LCDs or plasmas, but no HD service?  This isn’t just in the Bahamas; I’ve noticed this in some Vegas hotels as well.  It certainly can’t cost that much more to deliver at least a few HD channels to each room.  To all you imaginary readers out there who might suggest that I’m not in the Bahamas to watch TV, and thus that it shouldn’t matter if the room’s TV gets HD service, I offer a preemptive “fuck you.”  The beach/pools close at 5 pm (which is way too early, by the way) and there were several football games throughout the week that would’ve been much better to watch in HD.

2.  Jetskiing multiple days in a row really, really chafes your ass.  Or maybe it’s just my low-quality bathing suit.  Either way, consider yourself warned.

3.  Water slides are potentially dangerous, especially if you get turned around in your inner-tube while sliding around in the dark.  This happened to me, which resulted in me slamming both my feet into some hard plastic.  At least my toes didn’t get caught in the netting which inexpicably forms the top half of some water slide.  Though I don’t know anything about Bahamian law, that shit’s a tort waiting to happen.

4.  I actually managed to read a couple books for leisure (a rarity these days, what with my potential reading time constantly getting eaten up by poker, random bullshit on the internet, or reading for law school) while in the Bahamas!  I finished Happy Hour is for Amateurs and The Black Swan. I’ll write more on at least one of these books in later posts.

This was a different trip than most that I go on in that I actually put aside a few days before play was set to begin to actually have a vacation. Even though I spend a lot of time away, I haven’t had a pure vacation in a very long time. Coincidentally, some of my oldest, closest friends who I met when I was in preschool were also going to Atlantis for a few days, the last few days overlapping the first few days of play. They invited me along and I moved up my flight to jive with theirs. It was great relaxing with them and reconnecting with that whole group, something I have felt bad about letting ‘rust’ due to mostly my own neglect. I realize managing such a variety of friendships as well as a fairly robust travel schedule is a difficult juggling and balancing act, but that fact doesn’t really stop me from feeling somewhat bad about letting such strong relationships idle for as long as I seem to do.

The rest of the trip was fun as well. My friends from home departed soon after the 10k Main Event started and I got to focusing on poker. Well, at least I felt like I was focused. I never even made it to the 5th level of a single event! I peaked at 1.5x starting stack for the entire series and made it as deep as level 4 once. It’s overall a pretty terrible run but I don’t feel I played badly, just got unlucky in a lot of spots. I spent awhile talking about the hands I played with Vivek “Psyduck” Rajkumar and Daniel Negreanu [/namedrop] and both liked the lines I took so I’m pretty happy with it even though it didn’t turn out how I’d like. I really wanted to play the 25K as well, however it was sort of a last-minute thing and I just couldn’t get 25K from anyone. It was a pretty funny sight though – me and ActionJeff were out roaming the tournament tables and hallways of Atlantis panhandling for a total of $50,000 from pretty much anyone and everyone. Surprise surprise, no luck there. Everyone with stars money was either unreachable or playing a tournament/not near a laptop and nobody had that much cash on them, so we both had to skip it.

I had a lot of fun hanging out with a bunch of poker friends this trip too. Several of my closer friends don’t travel the tournament circuit, or at least not very much any more – most notably Leo and Alex – so it was good to see them at PCA. I had a blast with the whole extended crew as usual. Congrats to Kevin “BelowAbove” Saul for final tabling for 200k. It’s another impressive deep run, and a pretty nice score. Although I’m sure he’s disappointed with his finish, Kevin is very good at what he does and I’m sure he’ll snap off a(nother) big event in the near future.

I won the 1400-man 1pm $100 today for $24k. Pretty fun heads up match and a bunch of really cool, high-level hands went down at the final table. I’ve recorded the entire final table for PokerVT.com. I’m already not looking forward to having to record commentary for this FT because there are a ton of high-level concepts that will probably require a lengthy preparation time for proper discussion, and I hate having to prepare anything . In seriousness, it’ll be an awesome video and should really help ss-ms mtt’ers with their games, big time. The other cool thing about this is it qualifies for OPOY. This wouldn’t usually matter to me too much, but I just gave an interview based on me being a solid finisher in the past two years on OPOY. Good to start the year off right

In other PokerVT news, I also met one of the new additions to team VT, Chris Moorman, in PCA. He’s going to be traveling a lot in the upcoming month or so but he’s committed to the project and I’m really looking forward to watching his stuff when it gets made. A bunch of top-tier poker talent is getting on board, which is pretty cool. I’m still pretty excited about the project, and I’ll probably fly out to Vegas in a few weeks and record some more live stuff soon. I usually find my excitement about anything will drop off heavily after a few weeks, but that doesn’t seem to have been the case with PokerVT, which makes me (and the guys at VT, I’d think) happy.

I saw 24 tonight but will refrain from commentary for now and save it for my next big TV blog after the a few more of my shows restart. There are a few more little things I wanted to blog about and updates should be coming a little faster now that I’m not hopping around the planet too much.