Archive for September 1st, 2010

It was one year ago today that my girlfriend and I left our apartment in Boston and became officially homeless. For the past year we’ve been without permanent residence, living out of a Subaru Forester, camping, renting garages and spare rooms when we can, and staying in hotels when there’s poker to be played or coached.

It’s been an exciting and eye-opening experience. We’ve visited a lot of cool places including about a dozen national parks, visited some old friends in new places and met two new babies- guess I’m at that age where my peers are starting to pop them out, and gotten a better feel for parts of the country that we barely knew before. I’d never been to the American South or the Pacific Northwest, and I ended up liking the former a lot better than I expected and the latter somewhat less (though I’m just getting to know it).

There are a lot of things that I miss. Living out of a car gets old, and I miss having a reliable bed, a comfortable desk and chair with two big monitors (multi-tabling on a laptop sucks), and having friends around and being involved in a local community. Oh and a reliable internet connection, of course! I’ve been able to keep up pretty well with coaching, though not quite as well as I like, despite the fact that I rarely know more than a week in advance where I’ll be and when.  Read the complete post...

The second installment of my trip report from the main event of the 2010 World Series of Poker, covering Days 3 and 4, has just been published in the September issue of 2+2 Magazine. Here’s an excerpt:

I came into Day 4 with a monster stack relative to the field. I had over 500,000 chips, when the average was about 180,000, ranking me 27th among the more than 1,200 players who remained. Day 4 was a particularly good day for this, as it was also the day that would separate the players who would win nothing from those who would take home at least $19,000. With 747 players to be paid, no one wanted to be eliminated in 748th place (or 762nd, for that matter), which meant that most people were playing more conservatively than usual.

I had the biggest stack at my table, and the only person who even came close was a guy two seats to my right whom I’d never heard of. He was sitting on about 400,000 chips. It looked like all the stars were aligned for me to steamroll the table and steal steal steal, but it didn’t go quite as flawlessly as I’d imagined it.

Please let me know what you think!