*Sydney Update*

I am truly living the life right now. I've now been in Sydney, Australia for exactly 1 month, with another 2 months here before I return back to the states. 2 days after I arrived in Sydney, I found and settled into the apartment of my dreams in a nice busy suburb of Sydney called Milsons Point. It is very close to the city, just across the harbor. In fact, I go running across the bridge every now and then to enjoy the gorgeous view of the water and the Opera House, as well as downtown. Milsons has the most spectacular views of the harbor and the Harbour Bridge and is close to all nice fooding places. My apartment is a 1 bed loft-style with an elevated "room" for the bed, and comes fully furnished; everything is included.

Being here and living on my own has really made me independent, with finding my own apartment, setting up all the associated stuff with it (including a 2 week wait for crucial internet haha), getting food. It feels like I really am an inhabitant of Sydney haha, since I've memorized most of the important train stops, different suburbs, city layout, etc. It's pretty cool learning a new city. I've made a bunch of friends here, mostly through my cousins, and so I don't get too bored. However, it is funny for me to walk around during the day in Milsons Point, since most of the people who are here (or who live here) are businessmen/women all dressed up in professional attire, while I walk around in jeans/t-shirt most of the time.

My daily routine, and I really mean routine, is getting up bright and early at 7am, playing online for 6-7 hours until lunch time at 2pm or so, then getting something to eat or making it myself. Then it's just relaxing the afternoon away, sometimes with a nice run into the city or northwards towards the northern suburbs where my family lives. I don't know how much longer it will be before this lifestyle becomes boring for me, but for now, I am truly loving every second of it. The independence and freedom to do whatever I want is simply awesome.

I am flying to Hong Kong in late April, stopping over for 3 days to visit my grandma and some friends there (and eat sweet HK fooood) before flying onwards to Nice, France via Paris. From there, a taxi ride to Monaco, Monte Carlo for the EPT Monte Carlo tournament. I hope for the best but have realisitic expectations for that tournament (i.e., busting the first day). Perhaps I will play some of the side events as well. One of my good friends from high school/college is actually going to meet up with me there and stay for a bit in the hotel, so that will be pretty exciting. After the week or so there, I'll be flying back to HK for another stopover of 3 days before heading back to Sydney. From there, 3 more weeks till the beginning of June when I return to the States and head to Vegas for a month and the WSOP!

For now though, I'm just enjoying every minute of my life as much as I can. I appreciate it so much. Poker has really given me such an opportunity and I'm trying to take full advantage of my position as much as possible. I feel so lucky and blessed to be where I am. Speaking of poker, that is going as well as ever as well :) The first 3 months of this year have been awesomely good to me and I can only hope for continued fortune...

Life Update Yay!

So I guess it has been a while since my initial blog on this thing, and I can't say I didn't expect this hahaha. It was just pointed out to me by a couple friends, the lame-sauce of this blog and it's updates or lack thereof.

Since my last blog, November 18, I've been to a few more places, only to return to where I am now, at home on my bed. Firstly, we flew out to San Francisco via a Virgin America night flight. Sweet airline with live TV feed in each seat. We went out there to hang out with his old friend from Roanoke and whom I also know a bit. We basically crashed at his apartment on Jackson St, riiight up the hill from Chinatown (Powell and Jackson intersection), did some sightseeing stuff while he ditched us to go to a poker tournament in Vancouver. We rented a couple bikes and rode all around the city for 2 days but actually didn't ride across the Golden Gate grr. We did however ride up (and of course down) Lombard St which was awesome. Played some online pokers, but nothing too serious.

After our stay in San Fran for a bit, me and Paresh took a train to Sacramento! We were there to meet up with a couple friends from highschool/UVA. We spent a night in that hip-hoppin' city, met some of my friends' friends, then got up early to drive to... San Jose for a Washington Capitals hockey game!, but not before stopping back off in SF to eat some Chinese dim sum. Wasn't all that great. We stopped off in Stanford, California to visit the gorgeous university as well as visit yet another friend out there. Unfortunately he wasn't there, but we still had a fun time monkeying around on the campus. Finally made it to SJ at night, saw the caps get destroyed by the sharks which was lame. Night drive back to San Fran.

I didn't actually buy my ticket to leave SF back home until 2 days beforehand, just cause I didn't know if I'd stay a bit longer with my friend in SF. Decided to leave the same day as Paresh, but I couldn't get on his flight, so took my own back. United Airlines.......haha.

After chilling at home for a couple weeks, it was off to Sydney, Australia (again!) in late November. I went to visit my family again, as well as a couple friends I had met from my trip before. Also, the APPT (Asia-Pacific Poker Tournament) Sydney was going on, so I thought I'd hit that up. I was also meeting my friend Brandon, fellow poker player and international traveler, who I had that amazing trip in New Zealand a few months before. We both busted from the tournament in short order, with my KK running into AA once again (preceded by my TT into JJ, and proceded by my QQ into KK). Sort of unlucky!!!!!111

We explored the city of Sydney together, and then decided to take a trip up to Cairns to see the Great Barrier Reef. It was a short 3-day trip, and we got to go ~1 hour out into the ocean to snorkel. The water temp was amazing, and the reefs were equally as spectacular. The colors were ultra vibrant and any evidence of the reefs getting eroded/destroyed was nowhere to be noticed. We also rented a car and drove a couple hours up and down the northern coastline of Australia, eventually getting a place called Port Douglas, where apparently there were "stingers" in the water, so swimming was confined to a cordoned off area.

After Brandon left Syd, I hung around Sydney for an extra week before getting back home. No less than 2 weeks, I was off to the Bahamas for the Pokerstars Caribbean Adventure tournament. Everything about the Atlantis Resort just rings riches. Just unbridled, pure, opulence. I met up with 6 other friends from UVA, including Paresh... so the entire experience was unreal awesome! 7 nights in paradise. I ended up playing and running pretty well in the tournament, getting to Day 3 with a nice stack, but once again, running into AA. I had run my QQ into AA on day 1 (story of my life, I thought to myself, before I spiked a Q on the flop). No miracles on Day 3 though. No matter, I finished in 56th place out of 1,250ish, and put myself in a position to get really really deep. Awesome trip.

After getting back from the Bahamas, I started grinding online pretty much for all of Jan, and now February. I had the sickest heater of my career in January, and extending in to February, so that's really really nice. And I'm putting in the heaviest volume that I've ever done, looking forward to every session and accruing all the various points that come along the way. By playing/grinding this hard, I feel like I'm not wasting my time at all, and the $ is good as well. 5 hour days/6 days a week, just perfect.

Me

Here's my first blog for this site, it's going to be neat starting one up finally. Since poker is such a large part of my life currently, I won't be able to help but talk about some poker-related aspects of my life, but rest assured, this blog is not about poker. It will contain little to no poker specific topics. To see poker related topics (like hand analysis, tournament reports, how I'm running, etc.), it'd be better to go to my Rebels of Poker blog (http://rebelsofpoker.com/forums/index.php?autocom=blog&blogid=11&). This blog will be about my musings, sometimes planned, but oftentimes random. Let's see if this works.

So for those of you who don't know me, I'm 22 (about to turn 23 in 1.5 weeks), and I just graduated from the University of Virginia with a B.S. in Biology and minor in Psychology this past May. I intended to pursue medical studies right after college, but now those plans have been put on hold indefinitely. Although I was really studious in high school, I found out in college that studying for life was not something I was prepared to get into, no matter what the perks eventually may be. Plus, my successful involvement in poker just slowly swayed me away; it was simply inevitable. I consider myself fantastically lucky that I have been able to find this niche for myself at this age; traveling the world and not worrying about income is something that I never, ever take for granted. It is astounding how much I love traveling- in less than 2 years, I have taken 63 flights, flown over 155,000 miles, and visited 15 different countries on 5 continents (yes I log this, it's how much I love flying), with roundtrip flights to San Francisco and Sydney still to come before the year is out. Along the way, I have made some potential lifelong friends, those who really share my interests and the sort of lifestyle I am living right now.

With all that said, I think the traveling and pokering part of my life will extend indefinitely in the short-term, I'd say for the next 1-3 years. I'll have my sights set on trying to build on the capital I have now while enjoying the amazing wonders of the world at my age, without being strapped down in a family setting (although this is what I crave for a later point in my life). When that time comes, then I won't have the freedom to, say, fly to San Francisco 3 days from now for a week, which is exactly what I'm doing. I don't even know when I'm coming back before flying to Sydney for a tournament in December. And I love it.

Since I copied-pasted the text I just wrote for my other poker blog, but decided to write all-new stuff instead (all the stuff above), I won't waste what I wrote and I'll talk about the last couple months of my traveling, which were simply sick. So I went to a tournament in New Zealand in October and promptly busted that. Afterwards, my friend and I went to town all over New Zealand. We rented a car and just drove south away from Auckland and basically explored half of the North Island of NZ. It was the most amazing trip I have taken, with the amazing scenery and adrenaline rush activities they have there. To name a few- rolling around in a water ball James Bond-esque down a hill, reverse bungy launch at night, abseiling down into a cave 100m below a platform and making way up-current against a raging river in 100% darkness (helmet lights included), walking around the outer ring of the tallest structure in the Southern Hemisphere (Auckland’s SkyTower) and then jumping off of it.. twice. Oh, and we saw Mount “Doom” too, the raging volcano in the Lord of the Rings movies. Too bad it didn’t erupt while we were there.

After NZ, I flew back to Hong Kong and spent a week there with family before flying back to Virginia for about a week to spend some time at home. Then it was off to Costa Rica for another tournament and meeting up with friends. I only made it through about 4 levels before busting, nothing I could have done in the hand I went out on. After the tournament was over, I was able to meet a bunch of people, including people I play with all the time online, which was really cool. I'll say over and over again that one of the main perks of these trips is that you really meet a lot of cool people and poker contacts. My really good friend and her husband, who works for the poker site I play at, took me out to her beach house in Guanacaste, Costa Rica. There we went ziplining, whitewater rafting nearby, and jetskiing, the 2nd love of my life (poker is my 1st love, obv). Along the way, I accumulated mega mosquito bites, but it was all worth it. Thanks Mel and T!

So now I’ve just gotten back to my house in VA for a few days. I've just been playing some poker at home, since there's nothing much to do here. I had the biggest online win of my career in a tournament, and I was just randomly playing it for more experience, so that was awesome. A few more days in VA, and I will be flying (again) to San Francisco with Paresh where we will spend a week at least. From there, I'm not sure if I'll fly back to VA before flying to Sydney in early December, or if I will just book a ticket from SF.

Guess that's it for now, this post will probably be the longest one I make ever just cause it was a first post and I wanted to get a lot in. Till next time, whenever that may be.