My first stop in 2014 was another trip to the Bahamas but this time a poker related one for PCA (one of the biggest annual events in poker). Although there are over 50 events throughout the 10 day festival I only managed to play two of them, the $10k main event and the $25k high roller. The main event started off strong for me despite an incredibly solid starting table where 7 of the 9 players were top pros. I ended day 1 with an above average stack and started day 2 strong, quickly doubling once more. Unfortunately the next few levels didn’t go so well and my stack dwindled as a result before I ended up busting around 100 spots before the money.
In the high roller I had the eventual winner Jacob Schindler on my left on day 1 and got into a couple of tough spots versus him and on my final hand my KK couldn’t beat his AK all in pre flop and just like that I was out early on day 1 for a very disappointing tournament. The trip as a whole was awesome, though, with one of the highlights as always being a group lazy river ride. I also managed to get out of the hole for the trip with a big Sunday which included a win in the Super Size Sunday on FTP and a 5th place finish in the Whale on 888 for $50k combined.
After PCA I headed back to La for a week. Rather than rest up before embarking on the online grind I convinced Katie to go skydiving with me. I’m scared of heights so this was actually a pretty big deal for me and up until the last minute I wasn’t sure that I was going to go through with it. I’m so glad that I did though, as it turned out to be an amazing experience. I’m not sure I’ve ever been happier in life than when I was gliding through the air at high speed. That happiness ended abruptly though when my parachute opened and the harness began to crush my groin.
After braving skydiving I hopped on a short flight upto Vancouver to grind TCOOP with some good friends of mine, Maddison Bergeron, Noah Vaillancourt and Maria Ho. The TCOOP festival was actually a disaster for me as I only cashed 1 tournament out of close to 40 events. Luckily I ran super hot in other stuff and have been on a permanent heater since I arrived. In the past 25 sessions I’ve only had 1 or 2 losing sessions. Throughout everything else I’ve had 10 tourney wins on 4 different sites including the Party Major. Also I final tabled both the Stars 1k and Ftp 1k buyin tourneys last week which shows the work I’ve put in on my game is really paying off right now. Obviously the past few weeks have been a pretty absurd run for mtt’s and completely unsustainable but I feel like I’m playing the best poker of my life at the moment which is really encouraging for the rest of the year and particularly the WSOP which has already given me goosebumps thinking about this year after the recent schedule announcement.
Whilst here in Vancouver I managed to drag myself away from the computer for a few days and headed upto Whistler. I didn’t realise how incredibly beautiful the place was actually going to be as I’d never been to a ski town before let alone ski! We were really lucky to get snow the week we went as well because apparently there hadn’t been fresh snow for at least a month before that. I did a 3 hour private skiing lesson with Maria and amazingly I managed to stay on my feet for the whole time.
My time in Vancouver is nearly up and I’m hoping to take some of that online run good into the live arena as I’m going to be playing LAPC and Bay101 as a shooting star in early March. In addition to a trip to the Napa Valley for wine tasting and Maria’s birthday.
Lastly I’m super excited to announce that I will have a poker strategy book being released by the end of the year. I’m putting a ton of work into this and I really hope it will help aspiring poker players to reach the next level. This is the first time I’ve done anything strategy related so I’m thrilled to have my first venture be a poker book.
PokerNews Announcement:
The Exclusive Pre-release of my “Moorman’s Book of Poker” Poker Strategy Book