PLO Diaries

We got into town two days ago. After getting settled after a few minor travel and hotel snafu’s, we wandered around the casino to practice a little gambool gambool.

First surprise: Pai Gow is not played with cards in Australia.

Second surprise: drinks are not free.

Despite these two less-than-optimal situations, we gambled it up for a bit and eventually wandered our way down to the poker room. After playing a bit of live $2/3 (on about 30 hours of very very little sleep and lots of flying), we headed back to the hotel to crash and prepare for…

We met up early yesterday morning over breakfast to discuss Aussie Million Academy plans and come up with a gameplan for the seminars. After a general group discussion about what types of topics we wanted to cover, and who we were going to target the content to, we broke up into smaller groups to plan out the first seminar in more detail. Jay, Aaron, Josh, Vanessa, and Andrew were on the first panel (with some side assistance from Brian), and they built out some pretty phenomenal content about NL tournaments and formulating a gameplan for your decisions throughout the tourney. Dyn-a-mite.

To drum up some extra interest for the Academy, we decided that a bunch of us (me, Chuck, Jay, Vanessa, Josh, Andrew, Aaron, and Joe) would enter the $1000+$100 on day 2 with bounties on our head: knock us out, and get a free entry into the academy. The tournament was fun — the games are incredible (8-way pots were not uncommon at one of my tables). Eventually half of us (including me) busted, but not until after playing some fun hands (note, I was actually the one with AQdd, but I was yelling for clubs). Aaron, Josh, Chuck and Vanessa remain — I think DJ is still in as well but he played today rather than yesterday.

The first seminar went really well. We could use some refinement to make them a bit more dynamic, but for our first-ever live seminar, I think the content was really dynamic and well-suited for the audience. Hopefully the people who attended pop in and give us some comments to let us know what we could do better, and what really worked for them.

After the seminar (warning: not poker related), we had a HORRIBLE lunch at some pseudo-Chinese restaurant Northeast of the Crown. The group of us split up at that point, and Kate and I wandered around Melbourne for the next couple of hours, covering a TON of ground. We hit up the Queen Victoria Market (very cool), a great coffeeshop in the Coventry district (awesome, awesome neighborhood), wandered downtown toward Federation Square, and eventually back to the Crown. I’ll definitely be taking side trips to Coventry as much as possible after today — there were at least a dozen restaurants I wanted to eat at and a few cool shops as well. It’s my favorite part of Melbourne, though the downtown area was pretty cool as well.

Tonight is dinner at Nobu and hopefully a chance to finally catch up on sleep. Things have been pretty hectic here, but I’m hoping for them to slow down over the next few days so we can get into more of a groove, have some founder time, and plot our journey for DeucesCracked over the next year. We have another seminar tomorrow and then a break for a few days, which will be a good time to combine exploring the city and getting some other.