Double Eliteness

So I made it to 2 million VPP for the year yesterday.  I guess it's kind of nice to reach that milestone, but more importantly I had a nice winning day at the tables after running so badly during WCOOP and taking some time off the last few weeks.

So what have I been up to since WCOOP ended?  Well the day after it ended, Deb (the wife) and I went up to a cabin in northern Arizona where it was beautiful, and more importantly relaxing.  It definitely felt good to get away from things for a few days as playing 10+ hours of poker every day for 3 weeks straight can really wear on you.  We didn't really do a whole lot except visit the Grand Canyon one day, which reminds me, for some reason we visited the Grand Canyon about 5 different times when I was a kid and while it's pretty cool and amazing, it's really one of those things you see and just say "yep, it's a big hole in the ground", and no matter how many perspectives you see it from or how many times you go visit it, it's still a just big hole in the ground.  This scene from National Lampoon's Vacation pretty much sums it up for me. Sorry it's in German, I couldn't find an English version, but what they say doesn't really matter for the scene anyway.  If anyone can find an English version of that clip I'll switch it out.  Hah, anyway, sorry for that tangent.

The next week Deb and I went to Ohio for a few days to visit her family and go to an Ohio State football game. It's really hard for me to root for Ohio State because I'm a big ASU fan and have been since I can remember, and really before I met my wife there were 3 football teams I disliked, Ohio St, USC, and Arizona, probably in that order.  The biggest reason an ASU fan has to hate Ohio St is because in 1997 we had our one and only realistic chance at a national championship in the history of our school, and they beat us in the last minute of the game in heartbreaking fashion to ruin our chance.  It almost feels like I'm worshiping a false god or something when I root for them now (if I actually believed in such things).  I mean saying I root for them isn't really accurate but I guess I don't hate them as much as I used to.  Marrying a Buckeye fan has a way of easing that and I now realize they aren't all evil demonic creatures.  Besides, by marriage law I think I'm required to root for her team, unless they're playing my team.

And yes before anyone comments on it, I do realize that all this "hating" teams is really dumb and illogical, but that's how sports is.

So besides that, we've been looking for a new house in the same area.  We probably won't move more than like 5-10 miles away but we just want to upgrade our house in preparation for the baby coming, and with the housing market crashing there are some great deals on really nice houses out there.  It's quite frustrating because we really want to find that perfect house and we've been looking for a little while now and found a few that we like, but there's always something little things (or big things on some of them) about every house that we don't like.  There's some chance we'll build but I'd rather avoid that if we can find something we like that's already built, because building, while kind of fun at exciting at times, can be really stressful and time consuming, and would be kind of hard to fit into the schedule with a newborn at home.

I don't think I announced it yet on here, but we found out a few weeks ago that the baby is a boy and he's due February 9th.  We're pretty excited about it.  I'm still a little nervous just because it's a big change but I think it'll be a good change overall.  I just hope I have a quiet baby.  :)

On the poker agenda, I have NAPT Los Angeles coming up in a few weeks, and PCA in Bahamas in January.  Other than that I'll probably play some or all of the RCOOP events which take place during Thanksgiving week.  It's an interesting concept in that each region of the world has it's own tournament series.  I just enjoy these tournament series because I get to bring out my competitive side.  When I'm playing sit-n-goes throughout the year it's nice to make money at them but it's hard to be competitive about it because there's not really a sense of exhilaration in grinding out money.  I mean I like money as much as the next person and it's always fun to win more, but it's not really a competitive thing.  There's just no feeling like winning a big tournament, not that I'd know really since I've never won anything that I'd consider "big", but I hear it's a nice feeling.  :)  I just could never play them all year though because it's so emotionally draining to play them since you're never really happy unless you win the tournament, so except for a few days a year you're going to end up being frustrated.  Besides you have to commit a lot of time to seriously play tournaments all year.  Like if I want to play for only an hour or 2, that's easy to do because most of the games I play last 15 minutes at the most and they go whenever people sign up, so it's easy to start and quit when I want to.  While with tournaments you have to wait until the time the scheduled tournaments start and you really never know how long you're going to be playing so it's hard to play on days where you actually want to do anything besides play poker.  Also the monetary swings in tournaments are brutal because most of your money comes from making the final 3 spots in a tourney, and with fields of hundreds or thousands of people it's really easy to go long lengths of time without making money.  So that's why I just play a few tournament series a year, and just go all out during those, then I get it out of my system and I think tournaments are silly until the next tournament series starts, then by that time I'm ready to do it all over again.

Oh and speaking of tournament series, I got my SCOOP Player of the Year trophy in the mail the other day, I'll post a picture of it in my next blog entry.  I'd do it now but my wife's asleep and she's the camera person in the family.