Golf Update

Welp it has been a month since my last update and I really have nothing to say. My second trip to the WSOP was an utter fucking debacle. Cash games were painfully bad and I probably ran $5k+ under EV in about 40 hours of play most of it at $1/$2/$5 Big O and $5/$5 PLO and PLO8. Was really crazy and I think this hand illustrates it about as well as any:

I limp UTG with AK4T5

Probably 5 to flop of K72. I lead $25 and get 2 callers.

Turn is bingo 5. I bet pot and get 2 callers. At this point I have to put them on low with perhaps some piece for high. (Pot $400).

River K. So now we have K full of 5 with 2nd low. I value bet $400 trying to get full value out of lows assuming my A4 is no good. MP folds and Villain now shoves for $670ish more. I end up calling after 2 or 3 minutes to see A3K7x and am relieved of ~$1200. Oh well the good thing is that play was so bad that I actually squeaked out a small loss for the trip in cash games. Tournaments were equally frustrating with my only cash winnings coming in a chopped $325 single table SNG.

On to The Golf

For those who only know this blog as a poker blog I actually played pretty high level competitive golf as recently as 2009. In the 2000's I played 2 USGA Mid-Am's:

One British Mid-AM:

Made the quarters of the MD AM and won a bunch of club championships.

For whatever reason I became burned out by the grind of golf about 2 years ago and basically shelved playing competitively and just played casually for the most part. But with on-line poker basically gone for me I have started to get the itch to get my game back on the course. Not sure why but I woke about 2 weeks ago while on vacation and just decided I wanted to find my game and play some competitively for the balance of the year. I was a bit inspired reading Dusty Schmidt's blog (aka Leatherass9 in the poker world) about his attempts to get back into competitive golf (Dusty was an accomplished junior golfer on the west coast who became a successful cash game player on-line) http://dustyschmidt.net/2011/06/i-guess-i-didnt-forget-how-to-play/ and by watching a local club pro, David Hutsell, win the PGA Club Pro National Championship in late June. I don't know David all that well but have played with him a few times and remember a short 12-15 years ago when he was struggling to break 80 consistently. He worked his ass off and will be going to the PGA Championship next week. Nice win David!

So I have been practicing a good bit and saw an instructor so I could get my swing on tape and analyze it. Remarkably after 2 years of being virtually a recreational golfer my swing has held up and with a little tweaking is pretty much back. We'll see how it goes when i peg it for real on the 15th and 16th in the MSGA Mid-Am. I finished 2nd in this event 2 years ago and had a bunch of top 5 finishes dating back to 2005 when I first became eligible for the event (it used to be you had to be 35 to play but they have since rolled the age back to 25 to be consistent with the USGA).

Not sure where this will lead me but will write up any interesting results/progress/etc.