Upcoming Road Trip- I have changed the dates around a lot for my road trip but I think I finally have it- I am leaving on May 27th and will be traveling for two weeks. Unfortunately we are not going to be able to go to California this trip due to a lack of time, but we will be going as far south as Las Vegas.

I have nearly all of my equipment in (for the most part) and need to test some of it out. Most notable is the Jet Boil. I bought one of these:

The idea is that you just have freeze dried food pouches and pour hot water in it. In two minutes, the food is done and everything is ready to eat.

I’m quite excited and this should be really fun.

Bachelor Party and Other Trips- A week after I get back home from my road trip, I’ll be heading BACK to Las Vegas for a weekend bachelor party. I think this probably makes it about the past 6 or so years that I have been to Vegas in a row. I don’t really enjoy the city that much but I suppose it’s more about the friends/experiences.

A week after the bachelor party, I’ll be going to Colorado (Fort Collins) to go to one of my best friend’s wedding. After the wedding, I am planning on going backpacking somewhere close. I’m excited to do a short backpacking trip and don’t have a ton of experience doing so.

That’s pretty much it as far as trips go. I’m not sure if I’ll be able to make my Cousin’s wedding in San Francisco in late August. We’ll see.

Poker- Staking/backing is still going very strongly for me. I’m happy with where I’m at and I have a terrific group of guys who are all working on getting better.

I think that I will continue to concentrate on staking. I would still definitely like to get more into affiliate work as well.

I really just need to sack up and commit to one of my sites and pull the trigger. I already paid money for new servers, so I really should just pay someone for my site design.

I’m thinking that once I get back from my trip and everything else I will do this and really commit. I may offer some free rolls as well to force myself to do this.

Anyways, this is all for now. I’m sure I will blog about this trip a ton. Be sure to look back here in a few weeks and I’m sure you’ll see a good amount of write ups!

Poker-
The time is finally here! I’ll be playing in the WSOP circuit coming into Council Bluffs, Iowa. I’m happy that my package sold and it will be fun to play some poker again. I’m excited and anxious to start playing.

I’ll definitely update this blog more with a TR for each tournament I play in. Hopefully I can be successful and win some money for both myself and my backers.

Other than tourney stuff, staking has been going fairly well. It’s a constant process of getting new stakees, setting them up, etc. I really enjoy it and I’m glad to still be a part of the poker industry, even if I don’t exclusively play all that much anymore.

I’m still interested in getting into affiliate work. I know that I’ve said this a lot, but my site is very close to being completed. I need to finish the last few touches on it (front page) and then we are going to launch. I’m also slowly developing some content for my other site right now and am probably going to pay a developer to help me with it.

Life and Poker

I have decided that I am going to go on another West coast road trip in about a month. I’m planning on leaving around May 12th (or a few days later). My path will be pretty much the same as the one I took in 2011- Colorado, Utah, Nevada, California. I plan on making it much shorter this time though (only going for 2 or 2.5 weeks max).

I’ve been buying more and more gear lately for this trip. One thing I didn’t do as much last time was backpacking. I plan on doing more of that this trip as I’ll have a partner to rely on. We’re probably going to backpack in Kings Canyon or Yosemite (both in California). My plan is to start off fairly easy (10 miles round trip or less on a 2 day/1 night hike) and then build from there.

Some of the gear I bought:

http://www.rei.com/product/851835/asolo-astro-2-tent-2012-overstock

Bought some climbing gear as well that I won’t take any pictures of.

Some gear I still need to buy:

Jetboil Sumo. I was deciding between this or the MSR-Reactor (a similar stove product). I think that I’ll probably go with the Jetboil Sumo due to it being slightly cheaper. Both systems look fairly similar though in terms of set up and size of the stove.

I’m going to get this stove system to heat hot water fairly quickly. There are many dried food packs that I’ve heard taste pretty good, so we’ll see how that goes.

Water filter pump- I still need to get one of these. I’m looking at something similar to this:

http://www.rei.com/product/695265/msr-miniworks-ex-water-filter

I’m also looking to buy a new rope. On past climbing trips, I always just used my friends’ ropes to climb on. But now that I’ll be going on my own, I’ll need to get my own rope.

All in all, I’m very excited for this trip. It should be a lot of fun and I will be sure to update this blog a ton in the next two months or so (with the poker + road trip).

Updates to come soon!

Results: We ended up getting 3rd in the advanced for teams. I got like 5th for individuals or something. Meh…
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I’m debating going on a climbing trip this coming March. We’re thinking maybe Colorado or Arkansas again. We’ll see if it actually happens though.

Things have been going pretty well all around. Staking has been up and down (story of that business) and I’m still trying to find new stakees/players. Definitely working that base up though.

I’ll update this when we make a decision on climbing.

This particular competition was called ‘Flock to the Rock’ and was a red point top rope competition in the dark. We all brought our head lamps and the scoring was based off total points during the 6 hour time period. This is different from other competitions, where they will take your 5-10 best climbs and score them that way. This was also a team format, where they combined your points and such.

So there were some climbers who were literally climbing like 70+ routes during this time. Each route could be counted twice for points, so people were flying up and down easier routes.

The climbing competition was okay. There were some serious gripes I had with it though:

1) They had some routes up before the competition, meaning that the regular climbers at the gym had a massively unfair advantage (since they were able to climb the routes beforehand). The fact that this competition was in the dark meant that it was much more difficult to see the holds and learn the moves.

2) The scoring was confusing and unorganized. It was a bit of a cluster at times.

3) The raffle sucked. I’m not sure what’s standard at these competitions, but the last one I went to, University of Nebraska-Omaha’s comp, had much better prizes. This is sad given that the university climbing wall had a much smaller budget to work with.

All in all, I had a fun time, but there were a lot of things that could have been improved. I didn’t really climb all that well and burned out. One cool thing was that my climbing partner, Amanda, won her individual points and was division champ. That was pretty cool. I drove back that night (competition started at 6pm and lasted till 12:15am) and was tired as hell. I probably won’t go back to another one of their competitions for a while.

I did another climbing competition maybe 1.5 years ago at my regular gym. I wasn’t really very good back then and mainly did it for fun. While this past weekend was primarily for fun as well, I thought that I’d at least be able to do some of the advanced climbs unlike the first time.

So this competition was a top rope/bouldering competition. Climbing competitions vary in terms of structure and ratings. This competition was fairly standard (I think)- different climbs offered different point totals. The harder the climb, the higher the points offered. The officials took your 5 best scores and then added them up. If you fell, you had 25 points docked, with a 75 point max deduction for each climb. You could re climb it as many times as you want.

There were probably 60+ people at the competition. It was broken up into 3 groups: Recreational (5.8 and below ratings), Intermediate (5.8-5.10), and Advanced (5.11+, V4+). More can be read about climbing grades here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climbing_grades

Unfortunately most of the routes in the advanced group were bouldering problems. Confession: I have never done one full bouldering session before. Actually, I might have done one years ago when I was too scared to ask for a belay in another gym out of state…but nonetheless, I haven’t really done much bouldering at all. There WERE 3 top rope climbs in advanced, but all of them were probably hard 5.11s+.

I had a blast all around. I was only able to complete 3 of the advanced bouldering problems (which started at V4). I have no idea on the bouldering grades, but I was able to do some of the harder ones. I also fell at the top of a top rope climb, which was immensely frustrating (it was probably a 5.11cish).

There were maybe 10 people in advanced and I finished 4th. The top 3 were all quite good, 2 of them were from out of state and familiar with the competition scene. The 3rd place was my friend and climbing partner. The rest of those in the advanced group were much farther behind the rest of us.

Our gym did really well. We brought 6 climbers and we had 4 people place. In advanced, we got 3rd (I got 4th and didn’t place unfortunately). Both of our girls won 1st and 2nd in intermediate (there were no girl climbers in advanced). We also had one of our guys take 2nd in the intermediate (the guy who won intermediate actually used to work and climb at my current gym, he just left for personal reasons).

I was happy all around with the climbing. I learned a lot as well. Not placing was a bit disheartening, but I was comforted by the fact that a) I haven’t really ever bouldered before and b) this was my first true competition. I had a ton of fun and would definitely do another.

Now, would I ever really try to train for competitions? Probably not. Doing hang board and specific climbing exercises purely for competition training isn’t really too appealing to me. I enjoy climbing as is, and if I start doing some of that other stuff, it might take some of the fun out of it.

Our climbing group: