December update (warning: golf content + tl; dr)
I don’t update this blog enough, and I’m going to do it more often now. Do or do not, there is no try. I haven’t even mentioned anything about Phoenix and I’ve been here for about a month and a half. Our place is great, 2 bedroom condo, 1300 sq ft, and everything is new, and cheap! I can see the 10th hole from my door, and the golf course is about a 5 minute walk. When we first got here at the beginning of November it was so hot I almost couldn’t handle it, it was definitely hotter than the heat of the Victoria summer. Things have cooled down a bit, but I can count on one hand the amount of times I’ve had to wear a jacket. Moving here for the winter was definitely one of the best decisions I have made and I’ll probably just do it every winter from now on. It’s been nice living with Kevin for the month and a half, it sucks that he’s going to stay home when he goes back, but in January I have a couple friends coming down to play some golf for the month so I won’t be too lonely :).
After we got back from Vegas I had realized I had once again fallen off the wagon and fattened up to somewhere in the 220-225 zone. It’s frustrating to aspire to be a professional athlete yet be a lazy fat piece of garbage. John Daly is 185 lbs for goodness sake! We started doing P90X 6 days a week and we have stuck with it and are on week 5. It’s a 15 week program, and when I’m finished I assume I’ll be in nice shape, and I’ll just stop doing it and go back into doing TPI (golf specific core workouts) 3 days a week. We’ve also been eating well and I’ve been out to the golf course to at least practice for a few hours just about every day. I don’t have a scale here but I reckon I’ve lost close to 20 pounds in the last month based on how I look and how my clothes fit. I’m also gaining a bit of muscle for the first time in my life so that’s fun. By spring I will be lean and fit, I’m excited for that. I’m a bit nervous for Christmas and the fattening affect it’s going to have on me. Somehow I have this idea that I am going to be able to get some sort of exercise in but I have a feeling that plan will fail miserably, oh well.
Golf has been going well, I haven’t played as many rounds as I would like, the first couple weeks here I had a hard time sorting out a daily schedule/routine and just sorta wandered around like a lost little puppy without any direction, but I’ve got it sorted out now. A typical day now will be wake up, play a couple sets, get to the course for 18 holes, have something to eat and practice for a couple hours, then home for dinner, workout, stretch, and then play a bit more poker. My practice sessions are always productive and it’s nice that the course has a good practice facility. I’ll usually hit about 100 balls, half working on a swing improvement and half with my head shut off like I do on the course, then I’ll go to the pitching area and hole 5 shots with my L wedge (today I did it quickly so I bumped it to 10, oo-ah oo-ah). After that I’ll head to the putting green and put 6 tees down in a hexagon each 6 feet away from the hole and hole 10 putts from each too, followed by holing 5 bumps with an 8i-PW. If anyone has some good drills or practice tips they use feel free to pass them on. As for my actual rounds, I shot a couple 68’s, and had a couple pretty bad rounds in the mid-high 70s, and lately have played pretty dull rounds that I’ve kept close to even par. Now that I am playing more combined with practicing every day I feel like my scoring is going to improve quite a bit, and I will start a) hitting it closer, and b) getting more value from my rounds and then things will get niiiiiice. I went to a place called Hotstix on Friday, they follow tours around and do high tech fancy fitting, so I got analyzed and fitted for a new driver, 3 wood, hybrid, and iron shafts. It’s going to run me somewhere around $2k so I am going to get on that grind ferr sherr. They also have a small pro tour here called the Pepsi Tour that runs tournaments on the weekends and I’m going to start playing in that in January. Each event usually only has 15-20 guys, and costs a couple hundred bucks to enter, so the winner will get something like 2-3k. I may not play the first couple in January so I can get comfortable with my new clubs, and start shooting some legit competitive scores as well. Assuming things go well on the Pepsi Tour I’ll probably end up buying into a couple Gateway Tour events as well. They cost a bit over $1k/event but the prize pools are obviously a lot bigger as well, and getting a chance to play with guys who are doing this for a living is a good way to get an idea of where I’m at and where I need to be with my own game.
This is my graph of $16s since I got to Phoenix:
GAHHHHH!!! These are some of the worst swongs/breakeven I’ve had in a super long time, and it’s all my fault too. I was running at close to $100/hr for the first while, I seemed to never have a losing set, then I guess I got a little cocky and assumed I’d just always win and started being a bit lazy, losing focus, chatting on IM/browsing facebook while 25 tabling (so dumb, if you do this and you play seriously, stop it). So I get my focus back at about game 1500, and then for the first time in almost the entire history of my HEM db my green line comes crashing down through my red line :O. So Sick. As you can see I emailed Stars support today to let them know someone accidentally rigged my account for a couple hundred games and they were right on top of it, and I ended up booking a nice winner today. I was lucky that through these rough stretches I was able to keep it a bit over 9%, which I’m not at all happy with but it’s still money. It’s really important for me to have minor setbacks like this in poker or any other aspect of my life because I find it makes me step back and realize what I have been doing wrong, and makes me a lot less likely to make the same mistakes in the future. I’d say that over this stretch, having my discipline and focus slip for as long as it did probably cost me close to $1k, a lot for the $16s, and also says a lot about the importance of the mental aspect of poker.
Kevin and I have a few buddies coming down on Wed/Thurs so we’re going to have some fun before we leave for the holidays. I can’t wait to get back to Canada and see my friends and family, it’s going to be an awesome time. 2 weeks of freezing cold weather will be a bit more than I need so I’ll be happy to get back to the desert and get on my life grind. Hopefully I can find something worth blogging about soon, there’s something about “I played poker and golf today” that seems like it would get dull quickly. Thanks for reading!
December 15th, 2009 at 9:34 pm
SWINGS?? FN SWINGS???? jeebus I should get you to play on my account then you’d find out what a swing was…from the frickin rafters! <3
December 15th, 2009 at 9:36 pm
Hehe, Ragz? Plz don’t look at my graph edit you will get mad at me.
December 17th, 2009 at 4:12 am
Who is gonna caddy for you in these events?
December 17th, 2009 at 9:42 am
Haha, was just talking a few days ago about how back in highschool how many people would always say “I’m gonna caddy for you when you’re pro” now there is like nobody in my group of friends who could do it what with real life and all, so to answer your question, probably some rando kid who the event provides :S You looking for some work?