Enroute: Paris, France

“How was your day baby?” I ask Natasha as she comes through our hotel door.

“Great, everybody was really nice to me today.”

“Oh, huh, why?” I wonder aloud.

“Because you weren't there,” she quips cheerfully, before going to pack our things.

**

I'm on a flight to Paris. Theres $38,000 in my Stars account that wasn't there two days ago.

Sometimes I do love my job.

I obviously got bills to pay and a backing empire that was collectively running bad for three months, but I bounce back fast. The swings make me sick from time to time, but I just have to roll with it, I have no choice. And yeah, I think we're about to swing up.

I haven't put in any work over my whole trip to Europe other than the solid three hours I got before I got set-over-set in EPT Copenhagen. I was feeling excited to play. I'm in great shape right now mentally and physically and have felt ready to destroy every time I've sat down.

Hyped up I just crushed. I was on my game again, and it feels great. I'm into it. This puts my total cashes above $100,000 over the last month with almost no real volume played. Of course, it gets separated between my investors and myself, and I have a bunch of other expenses, but that's just how it goes. God, taxes are going to be a mess.

I must look like a millionaire if you just look at total cashes. I'm getting a nice cut from this but EPTs, flights, hotels, and meals aren't free.

It was kind of a weird Sunday, the set-up and all. I wanted to play up till the $500 FTOPs and the huuuuge Sunday Million. Obviously, I would've rather won one of those, but it was nice to get moving in some tournament.

Naty went out and tried to buy some things while I set up. She came back and told me the Danish people were way nicer to her without me. I think its more they respect its my girlfriend when I'm around but I know it doesn't help us when I have the thickest American accent. She said men went outside to get taxis for here and things. So different then some of the barking answers we've gotten over the last few days. Then again, its not too hard to get tons of preferential treatment when you're a hot girl.

She taught me some painful-as-hell pilates in the morning, re-arranging the whole room to give us a work area. It really fixed some pains I always get in my knees and hips and was just a great start to my work out. Once I put on some gloves and went jogging along the harbors in total white snowfall, at night, with the streetlights glinting orange and neon green...I just felt real. I love that feeling. Cold air in your lungs. My legs felt so good because of the stretches, I just had to run. I was like a kid with a new toy. I just did lap after lap around the harbors.

Naty brought me my dinner in the form of kebab and fries. I wolfed it down with a Coke and just got to work. I was just on. I didn't push my spots but I 3bet three times in a row when I thought it was right.

The weird thing was Naty watched me for like eight hours. We have this little thing in the Best Western room that allows me to play songs on my iPhone. Since the computer I travel with is typically the media computer back at Shugyo house its a complete piece of shit when doing anything else. It's good for emergencies, say, when Tilt can't figure out how to use its 2 billion dollars of rake money to make functional fucking software. But yeah, I left HEM off and iTunes off because I needed smooth sailing when I was 12-tabling, and I got it. I steadily built, and I got lucky in a few spots, in the early $100.00 MTT.

It was a really up-and-down tournament that really tested my patience. Every time I would get some leverage, some momentum, I'd get snapped back. I'd get caught in a bluff or I'd lose a huge flip. With the final two tables left, after going through 2,200+ people, I lost the most basic flip in the world for 90% of my chips. My mind clicked automatically to, “yey, here comes final table bubble 54 for Shugyo house.”

I had HEM on then, and Viro playing. I was on and studying. I wasn't giving up, 14 BBs or not.

Naty was watching, and I wanted to be professional in front of her, and show her I'm not some punk ass kid who plays cards, that this is what I do and I am good at it. So I kept my cool, and I played some of the best poker of my life. I used every stat, every read, played one third of the hands, got lucky quite a few times, and eventually shipped the 38k. Oh, and I managed to lose my chat again. Here's hoping it's not a month.

The final table was just fun. I had to change gears so many times. I came in with the chip lead and we were fairly deep. I did a light 4bet like the third hand in. I love bitch slapping idiots who think they can outplay me.

All my friends were there and that's always fun, just that huge noisy ass rail. I also got to shout out my boy 99 by two-outtering a set on the river versus K-5 (all in preflop because I run so goot) on a K-x-x board.

I was kind of freaked out by how fast Naty got many key concepts. These are things I've seen people watch 20 WPT episodes and not get.

Every time I went all-in she looked like she wanted to vomit, but when I won she cheered crazily. It was way more fun for me than its been in a long time. Obviously, me running so well and winning the damn thing made it way better, but still...we were prepared to finish 9th. I told her how poker tournaments were, and it was just cool having my girl cheering me on, working from a desk overlooking the snow drenched streets of Copenhagen.

We listened to a lot of Zion I and Viro The Virus. She hated hip hop before but seemed to actually dig the underground stuff. She said I'm a different person when I play poker. I joked about it but then she looked at me all serious and said, “yeah, it's true.” It was nice her finally getting to see me work my craft successfully and listen to my music. I could tell she just wanted to share a time with me and understand me more. That's so incredibly open and cool to me, how she wants to learn about me, and not try and turn me into something I'm not.

I can't lie, I got really lucky in a number of spots.

It's cool, Mcmatto and I do a lot of business together, and we played a lot in the same district of Seattle for years, and he's just crushing too. He got 80k+ or something insane from chopping that turbo FTOPs. The sicko.

Now if I could just get my own horses out of makeup, get Tilt to actually release my money in a horse's account, and find this check that got lost in the mail I will be ballin insane.

It all comes at a price. I gotta remember how far I am from where I started from. I take this all for granted. Average salary where I live is $5,000. I earned last night what most people make in seven and a half years of hard work. Yes, it gets chopped down, by expenses and investors taking their cut, but that fact remains, a lot of money moves around here. Not as much money as people think we have but at least we're making moves. We're trying to break out, make that first million, and move into other businesses.

I kind of have my heart set on music and actually going to college. I don't think I'll ever be good at studying anything “useful” but according to everyone else when I wasn't studying “useful” I was supposed to die. Right now I'm on a flight, laying my head in my girlfriend's lap while she massages my shoulders and I write another blog post on one of my laptops while we go to Paris. I booked the flights last night, the hotel this morning, the world is my playground, and the negative dolts aren't allowed past the gates. I create my reality, so I'll do what I want.

I want to produce music. I want to make metal albums and hip hop albums. I want to make something as hard as Dillinger Escape Plan's “Calculating Infinity” and something as smooth as a Perfecto Chills album. I love all music. All I do all day is listen to music.

I want to study everything, I want to write books, I want to start companies. I want to do what I want to do, study what I'm interested in, and help the people around me. I want to bring my friends and family into my business-related creative ventures.

And it all takes money. So my goal is to treat my body as a temple, my mind as a weapon, and keep both clean and firing. I have a couple more years of going hard in this business and then its adios. I want to make my mark before then. No regrets.

I'm feeling it.