Well I sat down early which ended up being a big mistake I think. I started imaging my first hand would be A/A and losing horribly. Well ironically it was my first hand, I went 3x the big blind with no callers. Phew…. still alive in this one. After making a great run up to 8200 chips I got moved tables.
Second hand the A/A is back and second from the button goes all-in. It is sort of automatic for me to call and I do. Everyone else folds and I flip over my A/A to his 10/10. The flop started with a 10 and never got much better for me. Now I sit with 2500 and unfearhered. Well I think unfearheted because I push a move I know I shouldn’t make very soon. After going back and forth on small pots I find K/9 H on the buttonand raise to 300.
I get one called who is the big blind. The flop is Q / K / 6 and I bet 300 again. He moves all-in and barely has me covered with around 4k. After saying “you should fold” in my head 10 times I call. He flips over Q/6 and after two dead cards he takes the win. Now did I make the right play or was I influenced by getting my Aces cracked..Not sure but I will think about it and report back if I shed light on the play. Right now Fiodor is at the end of hour two with 8k hanging strong. About 7 more out and he is in the money!!
After a couple hours Fiodor took home a victory marking our cashes up to two in the first two days. Not a bad average! The day of poker got cut short by us heading over to Mandalay Bay’s House of Blues for the Girl Talk x Dan Deacon x Wallpaper concert. It was totally amazing and a great way to finish up the second night of Las Vegas.
With things slowing down and people on vacation I deceided to spend my time through the New Year’s in Las Vegas to help the hurting casino industry. OK so I mosty went to win some money and have fun playing poker. My buddy Fiodor flew into LA and we made quick work of day one of our poker bash.
We grabbed the 11:00am at Sahara with around 55 entries and I was off to a strong start. I ended up making it down to the final two tables with a marginal stack and got myself in an interesing position. Three people in front of me went all-in and I had to call, with over 40,000 in the pot I had around 10k which gave me a great return on my investment of 10k into the pot with a decent hand of A/10 spades. I ended up losing the hand as the turn came A/2/2 and one of the players had a A/2 starting hand. No worries and a 17th place finish was a great start.
Then we ran over to the 4:00pm at Startosphere which is a more expensive buy in but less players. Same format which is a 4,000 chip purchase and you play until the end. This tourney had around 35 with first hour re-buys I think and I was holding strong. I won a bunch of small pots, nothing pretty and let it dwindle down to 8 left. I won a huge pot and it put me second in chips behind the leader who at this time had around 68k to my 24k out of a total 119k. With ante’s and blind’s things got crazy fast and I had money coming back and forth. We got down to four after a few rounds and the pressure was on. Only top three were getting paid and finally one more went down at my table. I was in the money and the chip inbalance was amazing, the leader had around 85k out of 119k and we split the other stacks. With blinds at 2k/4k and 500 ante I pushed all in on the small blind (another 8k) and got called by the chip leader which I counted on. I had a K/8 unsuited and he flopped a J/5. He ran a Jack on me across the river which took me out and left me for third place. All and all a great tournament and I got paid so that is always a plus in poker, I double’d my money basically from the buy-in which puts me up a little for the day.
So far I have stayed calm and collected by far playing the best poker of my life keeping myself from self-destructing. No bad beats have really been taken either so I guess that is pretty easy. The six month poker hiatius seems to be paying off and we are about to eat some quick dinner and tackle the 12am at Ceaser’s Palace, hopefully see some people I know!
I had some free time on Christmas and after reading about High School #9 on the BBC/Icecream blog myself and a buddy Jacob Agajanian wanted to go check it out. You cannot really get in, they have the place covered in fences and stuff but after driving around the school we found an overpass of the 101 and were able to snap some pictures of the side tower of the school in the background. Yes, this is a Los Angeles Unified District public school being built by the state that is going broke in like two months. On the bright side, the school looks super awesome.
Here is the first time lapse we did with it being a bit brighter outside.
Then we moved the camera once it got darker and ran another time lapse to the side of with it being much darker outside.
All in all a very fun Holiday. Finished up the night with some Indian food and NBA basketball down the street at a friends place. I should be doing more of these SLR videos when I have some free time, hoping to get some done in Las Vegas next week!
I reset my iTunes plays at the start of 2008 and here are the top 10 albums I listened to according to my iMac iTunes play count. I guess this is more of my “work” albums since my iPod plays are not counted. Here we go.
10. Nirvana - Nevermind
9. DJ Am x Travis Barker - Fix Your Face
8. Chimaira - Resurrection
7. Girl Talk - Live at Chop Suey in Seattle, Washington
6. Kayne West - Graduation
5. Girl Talk - Feed the Animals
4. E-603 - Something for Everyone
3. Cake - Prolonging the Magic
2. Neptunes - Presents the Clones
1. N.E.R.D - Seeing Sounds
This is a time lapse I shot from a second story porch in West Hollywood yesterday. It was taken my with Digital SLR Canon 30d picture camera and interlaced together in a video. It’s almost 700 photographs and then sped up to add more motion and effect. I am going to work on some longer ones in the near future. This was mostly a test with my camera to see how it would work out. I will have quite a few of these coming out so subscribe to me on Vimeo or my Youtube.
So after going back and forth with two not so “Internetie” friends for months now on the impact and influence of the Internet I finally have a bet we have agreed to and settled on. The Internet is really it’s own society and for 2009 I want to be a good citzien by contributing as much as I consume of the Internet for 2009. So with all that being said I have been given 10 tasks that must be met for me to win this bet.
The bet has a fair play doctrine as well, since the bet is about me being a good citizen I cannot just go accomplish these tasks on December 30th and declare victory. So each month I will blog a report of my progress and hopefully I can crush most of these “requirements” of the contest.
Now the huge appeal of moving to Los Angeles from Atlanta for me aside from the car industry, amazing food, and friends was by far the weather situation. Well I got shown by the weather God’s what is up by trying to live in paradise and escape the cold. Anything below about 65 degrees and I think I am going to die so not sure what is going on in Los Angeles. Plus the rain, I thought it never rained here people!? All these lies perpetuated to me from MTV reality shows! Hopefully when get back from Vegas it will have warmed up so I can get to work. I mean it’s even snowing in Malibu today!?
We finally made it to Los Angeles and Urbanracer snagged the wrap up story of our cross country mission in the Infiniti G37. This photo above I took at White Sands, New Mexico after a good 2,000 miles on the trip. She doesn’t looks so bad considering we never stopped to was her off. We swung by Phoenix and hung out with Jarod DeAnda and his family in Phoenix for the evening as well which was a super blast.
The third of my more four installments is up over at UrbanRacer. We hit the Cadillac ranch in Texas, an abandoned hotel in New Mexico, and the open road. Don’t miss some great photos and memories I typed up in this article.
Will Roegge flew out to Atlanta and came on the drive to Los Angeles and probably had no idea what he was getting himself into. Four days later we wound up in Los Angeles and I got moved into my new place already. He did a great job capturing some good memories of our travels except cut all the good stuff about aliens because he doesn’t believe in them…but Will is still good by me, he will believe one day. Check out the video and stay peeled to UrbanRacer as more of the story goes live soon.
