Move Along (July Review)

Another successful month is now in the books despite a poor finish to July. Once again, I managed to cram a typical month's worth of work into two weeks after taking time off during the first half of July to relax and address some long put-off chores (car tune-up, vaca up to Penticton).

After returning from Penticton, I tried to stick to a well thought out plan of earning 4K VPP's per day in order to hit the 50K goal by the end of the month. I kind of surprised myself for a while with how diligent I was being with regards to executing my plan but during the last weekend of July things got pretty sloppy. I decided to go out Friday night, which meant that I had to play hungover as balls on Saturday. That led to a shorter session than I had originally planned and less than stellar play, although I still turned a profit because the games were quite good. I went out that Saturday night as well, which meant more of the same on Sunday. I left myself needing 6.5K VPP's on Sunday and after ending the first half of the grind at 2:30pm (having started at 10:30am) I still needed to earn 4K to hit 50K. Needing a half hour break for food, I realized that it would be mathematically impossible to reach my goal by playing 24 tables of full-ring (unless I played like all 600nl). I thought that it wouldn't be worth enduring a potential downswing of a few thousand dollars just to retain a SNE status that expires at the end of September anyways so my other option seemed to be 6-max CAP tables. With that in mind, I loaded up 24 200nl 6-max CAP tables having never played them before in my life. Considering I had no real idea what I was doing, I think that I did alright. Most of the CAP "professionals" seem to be previous losing full-ring players anyways so the competition was pretty soft. That said, the variance while playing those tables is absurd as you're all-in wayyy more than my liking and have to leave more up to luck. I played the CAP tables for 4 hours and averaged more than 2K hands per hour and managed to earn about 1K VPP's per hour as well. After the third hour I was up about 12 buy-ins but over the last hour I somehow seemed to lose every all-in that I played and finished down 2 buy-ins lol. The VPP's are great, but I don't think that I'd ever play the CAP tables for a living. I'm glad that I was kind of forced into trying them at least though because now I've discovered somewhat of an "emergency" tool for bailing myself out of my VPP deficit at the end of the month.

I ran quite good for most of the month but a few awful days near the end took away the potential for a great month. That said, I'll never be too disappointed with a 5-figure month.

July



$6,767.47 Table Winnings
$4,000.00 Cash Bonus
$2,800.00 300K Milestone Bonus
-----------------------------------
$13,567.47 USD

So I just finished moving out of my old condo and back into my parent's house for the month. It's been about 3-4 years since I last lived at home lol but with my brother back as well (after his visa expired in London) my parents have a full nest once again. I made arrangements with my parents in July to let me live at home for a month while I searched for another place. Basically what had happened was that my 1-year lease on my condo was coming to an end and while I didn't want to renew the lease, I knew that I wouldn't have the time or effort to find a new place before August since I had to play so many hours of poker so this seemed like a sensible idea. I think that this month will fly by pretty fast considering that I'm planning on going away on a few trips that will probably total 10 days anyways but I'll be doing my best to secure my own place by September 1st. Thankfully, I still have a few different couches to crash on if I want to make the journey downtown on the weekends as well. I'm currently searching for a new place to live with my good friend Mark, who I'm definitely looking forward to living with since we're both pretty laid back and like to have a good time.

The move itself was a pretty big nightmare. I didn't have time to pack anything until I finished all of the poker stuff and that didn't happen until about 8pm on Sunday. I had to have everything out of the place by noon on Monday so I started to pack up some things on Sunday night but that didn't go very far because I didn't have more than 2 garbage bags to throw my stuff into. I went to bed at 2am and after getting close to no sleep I was up by 7:30am and immediately off to the grocery store to pick up more garbage bags to pack with, along with some breakfast. Things went pretty smoothly over the next couple of hours and I managed to pack everything up and clean my room in an efficient manner. The biggest issue was that I had no easy way of transporting my mattress and box spring to a Public Storage location a few blocks away. My roommate was far more organized than I was for the move and since he was also moving far more large items he had hired some movers to do the moving for him. I asked his movers if they would move my stuff when they were done with his but they said that they'd have to call their boss and it would be a 3-hour minimum charge at $95 an hour. I asked them if they would just do a cash job for me off the record and they said that their boss had put a GPS tracker in the truck and they would get in shit for doing that. Since I only wanted to move my stuff literally 10 minutes down the road I didn't want to shell out 300 bones. My alternate plan was to drive 40 minutes to pick up my aunts pick-up truck and then drive another 40 minutes back to my condo. This is what I ultimately ended up doing and after meeting with my mom we drove both vehicles back to my place. My friend Ben also agreed to help me move out so with three of us things started to move pretty quickly.

Unfortunately, I hit a pretty big bump in the road after taking down only the first load of stuff. Before leaving my unit, I felt my back pocket to see if my keys were there. I felt the beeper that's attached to my room key so I assumed that it was all good. As it turns out, once we were were down 23 floors to the lobby what I had felt was actually the beeper for my aunt's truck and I had left my keys in my Condo on the counter. The door to my unit wasn't even locked but as with most newer buildings you can't even access the floor without someone buzzing you up. Normally this wouldn't be that big of deal because I could just phone my roommate but he had already left with the movers and had also forfeited his keys to our counter. I called the building manager and knocked on the office door but because it was a holiday he wasn't even around. I called to leave a message and was directed to an emergency number...I called that number and was directed to another emergency number...I called that number and spoke to a lady that told me that she couldn't do anything to help me, lol. It was about 11:45am and my landlord was coming to do an inspection at noon so I called him up and told him the situation and hoped that he at least had keys to our place. Somehow he didn't even have a copy so the only solution that I was left with was to ask random people coming in and out of the building if they lived on the 23rd floor (or knew anybody that did). There wasn't very many people coming in and out and those that did were of little to no help. I decided that I would just start buzzing random people until I spoke to someone on the 23rd floor that would let me in. Of course the buzzer system was set up in a way where the buzzer number had no correlation to what floor that person lived on. After buzzing 15-30 people (half of which didn't answer, 1/4 of people could barely speak a word of English and the other 1/4 simply could not help) I finally hit the jackpot with a young Asian sounding man that said he was on the 23rd floor. The conversation went like this:

"Hello?"
"Hey man, is there any chance you live on the 23rd floor?"
"Yeah..."
"Wow really? Do you think you could buzz me up to the floor I'm moving out today and managed to lock myself out of my floor."
"Uhh which unit are you in?"
"I think it's 2307...you get out of the elevator, take a right, another right, then it's the last one on the left."

He hangs up.

I call him back.

"Hello?"
"Hey man, did I just talk to you?"
"Yeah..."
"Can you buzz me to the floor..."
"Yeah fine."

Success!

I don't blame him for thinking that I was some kind of scam but at least he came around and let me in. After that things went pretty smoothly...we loaded up all of my stuff into the 3 vehicles, did some questionable rope job with the mattresses in the pick-up, drove to Public Storage and dropped off all of my things that I didn't need to bring home and then went out for lunch. Of course once I got home I realized that I left some stuff in storage that I actually needed (like my keyboard to my computer and ALL of my boxers and socks lol). I drove back out there yesterday and picked up the stuff along with a wireless USB card for my desktop. I settled in rather quickly and am now back in business.

I'm not exactly sure when I'm going to start up poker for August. I'm thinking probably sometime next week but my main priority will be finding a new place to live in September. I don't really have high expectations for August anyways since I won't be hitting any milestone bonuses and will be lucky to hit 50K VPP's with all of the distractions going on in my life right now. Aside from finding a new place there are a few other things that I need to take care of so we'll see what happens when it's all said and done.

I also got word that the "I am frosty012" video should be coming out in a couple of weeks, so it will be very cool to see how that turned out.

Anyways, hope you all are having a good summer and are keeping busy.

gl at the tables!