So lots has happened in the last month for me. The biggest thing was the arrival of my new niece Rebbecca. I'm happy to report that she has had a very healthy and quiet (not alot of crying YAY!!) 1st month of her life. It's amazing how big she has gotten in only a month. I'm also happy to report that the almost 3-month old experiment of living with my sister and her 3 kids is also going well.

As for poker, well thats going pretty good too. In fact, tonight I made 3 final tables online getting 8th, 3rd and 2nd. I was pretty disapointed that I didn't win at least one, but the tournament I got heads up in I should have won and was robbed =/. I'm really happy with how I'm playing right now and can't wait to play live soon. Friday I leave for Vegas to play the 1st ever NAPT tournament @ the Venetian this weekend. From there I will be heading to L.A. to hopefully cause some damage at the LAPC before heading home to play a couple events in the Chicago Poker Classic in Hammond, Indiana. My hopes are high to make a very big splash live soon, as long as I can stay patient which is my biggest weakness live. I just need to slow everything down and let things come to me.

Last week I experienced something new... my first ever earthquake!! It was the weirdest 30 seconds I've ever experienced. It was 4 in the morning and my entire house just started shaking. Being a huge fan of 24, my initial reaction was that there was some kind of terrorist attack going on. It sounds funny, but I was legitimately scared.  I can't even imagine what it would be like to be in a larger earthquake. Thankfully nothing in my house or around us was damaged.

Wish me luck on the road, I'll be tweeting updates...

Kevin Saul

I bet you all thought I forgot my log-in to communicate to the pokerroad peeps. Well, not so and I'm back. My new year's resolution is to blog more this year, and to blog more consistently. I'm just finishing up my stay in the bahamas, waiting for my flight in a few hours and figured what better time then now to start? Alot has gone on the last 6 months, but I guess I will start from the most recent and work backwards?

So I played the PCA main event, had heaps and heaps of chips ending day 1 (like top 5 overall) going into day 2. Day 2 was a disaster though. Nothing went right after the 1st 2 levels and if it wasn't for the stack I brought into the day I wouldnt have even made it to the last level of the day before busting out. After the main I played the 1k NL, the 5k NL and a 3k sattie to the 25k high rollers event. Nothing went well in any of those tournies!

Even though I didn't win my seat into the high rollers tourney, I felt the field was relatively soft and it had a good turn out of like 86 players so I decided to play it. Things started slow and I incresed my chips during the 1st 2 levels when I decided to bluff all of my chips off to some euro kid's AA....sorry but euros aren't supposed to get AA ever! That left me 8k from the 50k starting stack, and I proceeded to grind my ass off. Right before the last level of the day I found a key double up vs Benny Spindler to get all the way back to 70k. I then card racked my way to 125k right b4 plays was supposed to end, then proceeded to bluff off 45k to another euro and finished the day with 80k.

Day 2 didn't go so well. I hero'd off 1/2 my stack to Justin "BoostedJ" Smith on a AQ8Q3 board with a missed flush draw with AJ...he tabled QJ and I was back on the grind with my 35k. I grinded for a bit when I found a good spot to double with AK vs A1o all in before the flop, but a 10 flopped and I failed to improve and here I am waiting for my flight home.

And when I say home, I mean home...as in MY HOME!! Right before Thanksgiving I closed on my 1st ever house. Pretty exciting/stressful stuff being a home owner. I moved to the western suburbs of Chicago with in 5 minutes of both my Mom and Step-Dad and my oldest Sister. I then moved my other sister and her 2 kids in with me. It's only been about 7 weeks in the living situation but I love how its working out for the most part and can't tell you guys how great it is to see my niece and nephew every day when I'm in town. Oh ya, and when I get back tomorrow, well my sister is having a baby Thursday so I will have a brand new baby niece in the house too!! I will let you all how that works out too!!

Back in August I fracture my left radial bone, and have been doing therapy for 10 weeks trying to get my arm back in shape. Things haven't worked out so well and when I get home I will be getting a second opinion on whether I need to have surgery to clean out my elbow. Hopefully I won't need it but I think that will probably be the outcome since therapy hasn't helped much lately.

Hmmmm..what else is new?? Not much in poker, went on a lil heater online in November so that was nice. I haven't played much since I bought the house, but another resolution of mine is to start waking up and grinding tournies during the day online. I need to figure out a new schedule, and likely won't be playing alot of nights during the week since I have a new girlfriend (who is amaxing) and she works during the day so deserves my nights IMO. Not much else to say, leaving for the airport in about an hour...here's to a safe flight home for me with 2 nice naps ;)

Kevin Saul

 What a difference a day makes...and in general what a difference one tournament can make. Thats the life of a tournament grinder. So much disappointment can come from bricking off tournament after tournament. Yet all that disappointment turns to excitement and electricity with one deep run. I haven't done anything yet, but I'm off to a good start in this years WSOP main event. 

I ended day 1 with just under 88,000 chips, where the average going into day 2 will be roughly 40,000. To make things better, the blinds are still really tiny, when we start back Wednesday we will be playing 250-500 50a, which means I have almost 200 big blinds!! The structure of this tournament is awesome, deep stacks the entire time and I plan on using the structure to my benefit. Going into day 1, I had 2 goals. Goal #1 was simple, make day 2. Goal #2 was to gain a modest chip stack of 50,000 going into day 2 up from our 30,000 chip start. I achieved both goals, blowing my chip goal out of the water and putting myself in good shape to try and make a run in the main event. 

My table was pretty good, a mix of good players who know how to fold and bad players who didn't have much of a chance. My seat at the table was also pretty good, tho the guy on my immediate left played pretty well and I lost a lot of chips to him thru out the day with him basically card racking me when ever we played a pot together. I think we lost 5 players total all day, with 1 busting on the last hand of the night, so the fact that I was still able to triple my starting stack without alot of chips on the table is pretty good. I tried to play patient most of the day, I even folded queens pre-flop in a really awkward spot and I think I was right. Eventually I amped up the aggression and played a lot more hands once the antes kicked in. That lead to me getting all-in pre-flop with QQ vs David Singer's A5o for 100 BBs each lol. Only time I was all-in pre-flop all day and hopefully I won't be all in again in this poker tournament for a while.

Today was an off day and so is tomorrow before we come back to play on Wednesday. The plan is to just relax and take it easy and think about playing good online poker when we get backl to work. Thanks everyone for the GL's and well wishes, lets do this one time!!

 Ugly...thats one word that can describe my WSOP so far. Well thats pretty much the only word to describe it. Played the 3k triple chance today and as usual I got up to 16k from the 9k starting stack by the 1st break. Then I kinda got coolered when I raised 78ss and lost about 7k in chips on a 5677Q board to the small blind who flopped a straight with 89dd. I still had 9k which should have been plenty but then I just played poorly and got all the way down to 2800 before the blinds hit 100-200. I didnt give up tho and fought on the short stack for over 2 hours before finally busting out. This makes me officially 0-22 @ the WSOP this year (including 2 venetian events). I think I was like 1-23 @ the WSOP last year with my 1 cash coming in a H.O.R.S.E event. 3 years ago I was like 0-25 @ the WSOP. And I'm supposed to be a NLH specialist? I'm trying to stay positive but these results are making it hard for me. I think I'm gonna look into hiring a coach before next years WSOP...or just wait until the WSOP moves out of the RIO bc I just cant win a hand there. :(

Its not all over yet tho, I still have 2 more events to play. Tuesday is the 5k 6-max and of course the main event starts this weekend. I still haven't decided what day I'm gonna play. My goal is to make day 2 of the main event...never done that before. I wish I was more excited for it, since its the biggest tournament of the year, but unfortunately I'm not. There is no better  feeling in poker like going deep in a big live poker tournament, and unfortunately no worse feeling in poker than consistent early bustouts. Unfortunately for me I've just been experiencing the latter.

Sorry for the depressing tone in my blog. But the truth is I don't know if there is a more depressing city in the world than vegas.... and it has me depressed. Hopefully a deep run in the 2 tournaments I have left may change my feelings.

So I guess alot has been going the last month or so. A little poker, some big sports playoffs, and of course the usual time spent with my family. The last week or so I've just been taking a complete break from poker in preperation for the WSOP that starts next week. As far as my schedule this summer, I plan on playing pretty much all NLH, PLH and PLO tournies w/ a buy-in under 5k, and possibly playing the 10k heads up and 10k PLH depending how my series is going, and possibly a few caesers or venetian events when there isn't anything going on at the Rio. I'll be renting a house a few other internet players who plan on playing just as much as myself, so I'm sure there will be all sorts of sidebets with in the house on who will do better. I also won't be playing the 40k NL tourney that kicks off the series. I think the field overall is gonna be really tough, and I really don't like the idea of starting the summer off 40k in the whole if I don't cash. There's just so many more +EV spots this summer, plus I don't know if I'll be able to get up for playing the 1ks-2ks after busting from the 40k, so I think it's best to just skip it all together.

As far as poker news for me in the last month, well there's been the good, the bad and the ugly.  As for the ugly...I went out to vegas to play a 5k pre-lim @ Bellagio and the 25k WPT championship. We started with 20k chips in the 5k and I think I my stack peaked somewhere around 115k during the 5th level and I spewed all the chips away and was butsted by the 400-800 level, not even sniffing the money. The 25k wasn't much better...we started with 100k chips and I couldn't even survive level 4 on day 1....oh well.

As for the bad...well it's not that bad. Before my break that started Monday we recently completed another FTOPS series that had me playing alot online poker. I had a few deep runs in some tournies and am happy with how I'm playing, tho I missed out on any good final table scores or wins. My best finish was 10th in the FTOPS 1k 6-max tourney, which doesnt sound so bad but was pretty disapointing since I'm pretty sure I held the chip lead with about 13 or 14 people left. From there nothing went well for me unfortunately :(

And then there was the good...right after the bellagio series I came home for a few days then headed over to Indiana to play a 5 tournament series there. There were 2 500's, a 1500, a 1k (which I decided to skip), and then the 3k main event. I ended up chopping the $1,500 with 6 people left, but it was one of those fun chops. I had about 500k in chips and the other 5 guys had about 250k combined, so they gave me 1st place and the trophy and chopped 2nd-6th place evenly. I also went deep in the main event, finishing 17th or 18th when they paid 14 spots. I lost a big race all in pre-flop with JJ vs AK, the flop came QJT and I failed to pair the board to scoop the pot. Instead I was left with about 5 BBs and hung around for a little while before eventually busting with AQ vs 66...Oh well was a fun overall trip.

The last week or so I've been doing everything but play poker. I just want my mind to rest before the 2 month long grind I have ahead of me at the WSOP. Monday night I went to dinner with my Dad and Step Mom, which is pretty rare for us to be able to get together given their ever changing work schedules. Tuesday night some friends and I went to the bar to watch the Hawks lose a heart breaker in OT to the Red Wings. Luckily we captured game 3 last night and still have a chance in the series.

Thursday night I got to see my nephew Tyler play t-ball. It sure was different from what I was used to growing up. They don't keep score, they don't track the outs, and they play 3 innings where each kid gets to hit one time. After every hit each kid only advances 1 base unless they make an out, and when the last batter hits they all run around the bases. It was quite fun to watch and I had a great time taking all sorts of pictures with my new phone. Unfortunately it's a new phone and I had no idea I wasn't even saving the pictures to my phone...GRRRRRR. After the game I grabbed a bite to eat with my Mom and Step-Dad then headed home.

Monday is my birthday, my last year in my 20's. Kinda scary to think I'll be 30 in 367 days! Were gonna have a cook out at my Mom's place to celebrate my b-day/memorial/ me going away to Vegas for 7 weeks. Hopefully the series goes better for me than it has the last 3 years. I'll be sending updates on twitter so you can follow me there. The updates will be coming thru to pokerroad to, and I have no idea what my actual twitter ID is but I think you can find me if you just search BeL0WaB0Ve (zero's for O's). I don't get it right now but hopefully I become an accomplished tweeter.

Kevin