This past week I have been playing mostly tournaments which is something I haven’t done in a long time. Given that I have been working here and there on my tournament game all year and the World championship of Online Poker is running virtually all of September, I thought well I might as well try and win me a bracelet.

So far the WCOOP has gone very so so. For tournaments this week it has gone fine with me winning about $19,000 on the week. About $10,000 in tourneys and the other $9,000 at the cash game tables. I have been a small loser in the WCOOP tournaments, but had a couple of final tables in non WCOOP events on Poker Stars so overall if has been pretty good. I am really enjoying trying to learn MTT’s. Even though I am not a big fan of them normally, it is hard to pass up the incredible structures Poker Stars has in their WCOOP events. Today I placed 126th in the 4 max event and towards the end I had 20 blinds in my stack and was 80 blinds below the average! How sick is that? The average person with 126 left had what amounts to a full buy in in the cash games that I usually play. Very awesome. Great work Poker Stars!

I am starting to feel a little bit better now. I have had a cold since Wednesday and am starting to get over it now. That’s great timing because I am playing golf with some folks for a charity event on Wednesday and on Thursday I will be a keynote speaker for a company’s annual retreat. Apparently there are a lot of poker players at this particular business and my aim is to speak in front of them and relate business techniques to poker, much like I did in my book, Treat Your Poker Like A Business. It’s pretty cool to see how well my book has caught on not only in poker, but in business as well. When I was writing it, I could have never foreseen it taking off the way it did. It was kind of one of those things where I thought I had something decent to share with the world, but surely didn’t expect what has transpired overall with the book. It’s quite an honor, that’s for sure.

Now this is obviously a shameless plug, but I am going to do it because I think most will be happy to hear about this. Anyway, here goes. Poker Stars just began carrying my book once again after selling out so quickly last time. If you go into the lobby and click on VIP store and then onto books, you will find my book, Treat Your Poker Like A Business, on sale for only 1,900 FPP’s which is a pretty nominal point cost. So there it is, a shameless plug, but I heave heard so many people ask for the book to be in the Poker Stars store that I am sure many of you will be glad to know that you don’t have to spend $40 to get it anymore, but rather just 1,900 FPP’s.

Today I had a great time giving my dog a full sized hamburger for his birthday. He turned 5 today. I laid the burger on the ground in its entirety and my dog just looked up at me and sniffed. He looked up at me again and kind of sniffed around it and gave it a few licks before looking back up at me. He then kind of walked around it for about 2-3 minutes and kept looking at me. I think if he could talk he was trying to say, “WTF is going on here. This has to be a trick of some kind.” It was almost like the dog version of someone being told they won the lottery while they were just lounging around at the house. You would probably need to tell them a few times before they actually believed it. Anyway, my dog finally took a few nibbles to make sure I wasn’t going to get mad at him and then once he realized it was OK it took him all of about 4 seconds to finish his burger lol. I guess giving that to him on his birthday was as much for me as it was for him, I really enjoyed watching him eat that.