Justin (BoostedJ) Smith Blog

I’m going to jump right into things and start off right where I left off in my last blog. After I landed in Connecticut I took a limo to Foxwoods/MGM with fellow Deepstacks Pros Roothlus and “Fish”. A friend hooked me up and got me a room comped in the sold out MGM Grand on the top floor. Quite Contrary to what ever has told me about Foxwoods, the MGM Grand there is really nice. Although, I have never stayed at main Foxwoods hotel. It was the first time I’d ever been to Foxwoods and it felt very Native Americanish looking out the window and being in the clouds at night time…very serene, heh. I played Foxwoods WPT and got knocked out the last 15 minutes of Day 1. I had dinner with Mike Baxter at Alta Strada in the MGM Grand. It was pretty delicious.

The next day I went and stayed with my Aunt and Uncle at their house about an hour and a half away. We had a nice dinner with my grandmother and then went to a Charity event. There was a live band and lots of older people exhibiting some funky dance moves I’ve never seen before with absolutely no shame! It was quite entertaining to say the least. They had a 50/50 raffle going on (50% of the money goes to the charity, and 50% to the “prizepool”). I decided to make it a true 50/50 and bought up the same amount of tickets they had already sold, then I would have a 50% chance of winning! lol. As I was handed hundreds of red raffle tickets, I gave a row to each of the girls that were working the stand and wished them luck. Sure enough, one of them ended up winning the raffle, and was kind enough to not keep all of it and give some
back to the charity.

The next day I flew back to Los Angeles in time for Halloween. I went to the West Hollywood block party with my wife and her friends. The streets were packed! It was complete and utter chaos. There was some good music playing as DJ booths lined the street. There were many unique costumes. My personal favorite was an Aunt Jemima look-alike costume hahaha! After walking the block party, we got a table to the grand opening of Supperclub/Pandora. The inside of the club was sick. It was specially built for international headlining DJs. It was completely insane with crazy cool lights and great music. It was the perfect atmosphere for Halloween with everyone in their costumes too, it definitely “fit”.

My friend David Kang casted for the Kei$ha Music Video and took me on set on the roof of a skyscraper in downtown L.A. at night. I met the director, Hype Williams. Between takes, he would get the set crunked up by DJ’ing some music. It was pretty cool. I’ve always been really into music and watched music videos religiously as a kid growing up, Hype and Joseph Kahn were always my two favorites by a landslide.

With only a few days rest, it was time to drive to Vegas to film Poker After Dark $100,000 buy-in cash game at Aria. First of all, let me tell you that Aria’s poker people run that room and any other poker stuff going on in the casino RIGHT! They are really top notch there. They treat all the players extremely well and definitely promote action in various ways. I’ve always really enjoyed my stay in the hotel as well. Top clubs, top restaurants, top poker, I love staying there! Anyways, I can’t tell you what happened on the show, but it’s going to be a good one. At my table was Antonio Esfandiari, Phil Hellmuth, Andy Bloch, Annette Obrestad, and Huckleberry Seed. It is always nice to be at a table where you are friendly with everyone. After filming, I was invited to Steve Aoki’s table connected to the DJ booth at Club Surrender at Encore by Dan Fleyshman. The club was massive! Aoki did his set right next to us and definitely did his thing really well, as I wouldn’t expect anything less! Afterward, we all walked over to the Wynn and played some friendly 10/20 NL poker.

The next day I ate at my favorite Thai spot, Lotus of Siam and then booked it back to LA. I went to see Maria Ho and Tiffany Michelle sing at The Mint. They were pretty good. Afterwards we went to celebrate a mutual friends Birthday (Brandon) at Club Colony. It was my first time here and it was jam-packed!

I just got finished playing NAPT Day 1A at The Bike. It was my most solid Day 1 of tournament poker this year. I never went below the 30k starting stack and stayed in the range of 30 to 50k the entire day. Today I’m heading over to David Kang’s massive birthday party to watch the Manny Pacquiao and Margarito fight! I’ve played a lot of poker with Manny and he is very funny and overall a great good-hearted person. I always root for the good guys, not guys who cheat in a fight in a way that could do serious damage to someone and then make fun of somebody’s trainer with a disease! GOOOOOO MANNY!!!

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Once again, I am writing a blog in the air. The best, most consistent place to get blogs written seems to be on the plane. I have flown around and traveled more this year by far than any other year, which makes sense. This is my second year since I have been allowed to travel around the United States to play live poker tournaments. When I was 18, 19, and 20, I would have to fly to Europe to play tournaments, which I did less frequently than the shorter flights since I wasn’t as acclimated to flying as I am now. I almost always fly direct every time I travel somewhere, and I think I’ve now flown 26 times this year or something, with two more months of the year left.

Unfortunately, I was eliminated from the WSOP-Circuit Event in Hammond, Indiana (near Chicago) today in 19′th place, good for roughly a $22,000 cash. I started the day off fourth in chips with 24 people left, but made a mistake for 25% of my chips early on. It was wrong by a small margin, but I am still confident it was not the correct decision due to various factors. About an hour or so later, I busted to a really nice guy named Curt(Kurt?) in a funky spot where before the flop AND on the flop I could have made a case to fold, call, or raise all-in. I chose to call before the flop and raise all-in on the flop. I went from dominating before the flop to being dominated but still having eight outs on the flop. I’m still not really sure what the correct play was there on my final hand, I probably could’ve folded the flop with new information present, but that could’ve been bad as well. Anyways, I’m happy my chips went to someone pretty awesome. I will undoubtedly do some more analysis on the hand over the next few days I’m sure, without even trying to, since it puzzled me some. Oh well, onto the next one.

I am flying to Foxwoods right now for the World Poker Tour event there. I plan on checking into the hotel, getting right to sleep, and waking up to play (early) tomorrow at noon. It looks like on one of the days of the WPT event, my Aunt, Uncle, and Grandma will visit me on dinner break, since they live in Connecticut. Even though I saw them in August, I am still looking forward to it.

After this leg of the trip, I’m heading home to L.A. I plan on putting in some serious hours for the entire month of November. At this time, I’m not traveling anywhere in November, except for Las Vegas. I was recently invited to play on the $100k minimum buy-in Poker After Dark Cash Game on NBC in the first week of November. I look forward to playing my first game on PAD.

The night before I left to Chicago, I had a great group of friends over for some delicious food(thank you Mrs. Smith), and drinks. All of them were non-poker friends except Daniel Negreanu + some, who came late and crashed my party! Haha, it’s all good, we had some hilarious conversations throughout the night.

I also recently hung out with Jared Huggins, the formerly homeless guy who has a good chance of ending up playing on a TV poker show. We did a lot of different things over the course of three or four days. Both Jared and I decided it would be kind of cool to film some of it, since there is a lot of demand and interest for any videos that feature Jared. We also thought it would just be a fun thing to do. Jared ended up taking the collective footage and editing it into a short video which can be seen here: Jared Huggins and BoostedJ

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It’s great to be back home!!! Before I was able to settle in, I was invited by Maria Ho to play the Locks of Love Celebrity Charity poker tournament at Skybar. After Maria won the tournament we went over to famous Saddle Ranch. Maria and I had a little prop bet and I won. Needless to say, she must have been drinking a little bit too much to subject herself to what she would’ve had to have done had I not given mercy and let her out by riding the mechanical bull right then and there! Ted Forrest: watch out, I’m winning prop bets now, I will be back for revenge! (sorry I cannot say what Maria would’ve had to have done, but it would’ve been probably the most humiliating experience of her life)

My mental coach/good friend from Florida, Tony, flew in for the weekend. We went to eat at one of my new favorite lunch spots, Urth Caffe. It’s a healthy trendy cafe in West Hollywood. I always get some sort of panini and the pumpkin pie. Later that day Tony, my dad, Anita, and I went to the Formula Drift event in Irwindale, CA. It was the first drift event I’ve ever been to. I was really into
the import car scene when I was 13-18 years old and I had always wanted to go see Formula Drift, but since I lived in Florida, there weren’t very many events out there. There were a few small crashes and a lot of great drifting. I was surprised to see Full Tilt Poker sponsored a drift car. That was pretty cool to all of a sudden see a huge FTP logo on the side of a car. We had King Taco (another one of my L.A. favs) during a break.

This past Sunday was the final day of the Summer Sessions at XIV. We had a large great group of fun people including Maria Ho, Tiffany Michelle, David Alan Grier, Ali Eslami, Melyssa Grace from the infamous Royal Flush girls, Anita and a group of five other non-poker related friends. Things got pretty wild. It was definitely one of the best club experiences I’ve ever had in my life. The crowd was completely amped and went pretty much insane with no inhibitions of partying wildly like crazy people(I love it). I’m pretty sure everyone else had an amazing time and afterwards we went to Swingers for dinner. The following morning we went to The Griddle for some of their vast assortment of different kinds of giant pancakes.

I was also able spend a couple of days with Jared Huggins, “RelaxedPrecision” the now formerly homeless guy in the very long threads on the TwoPlusTwo forums. He is such a great guy. We dropped by the movie set for the filming of “Detention.” It was freezing that night so we only stayed for an hour or two. The next day I let Jared rail me while I played some cash games online. Right after that we went for a hike at Runyon canyon where my friend Tony and I gave him some life direction advice. Fortunately, Jared and I decided to get some video coverage of our time spent together. Jared is editing the video and he should have the video up soon, it’s good stuff. Right before I left to Vegas for the World Poker Tour Festa Al Lago tournament, Jared, my dad, Anita, and I went to dinner at Madeo. This restaurant is legit italian and well regarded as the best in West L.A. I had this unique veal ravioli dish with a walnut sauce and it was amazing like nothing I had ever had before. The desserts are just as good too.

Also don’t forget to pick up a copy of this month’s Bluff Magazine! Yours truly is on the cover!

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I’m coming home! I’m on the plane right now flying from Heathrow-London to LAX(For some reason Virgin Atlantic doesn’t have internet on international flights? Weird.). I think the duration of this trip was just about right. I am just now starting to get a little “Londoned” out should I say. I guess I should have left London right after I won the first event I played, though. The rest of the trip as far as poker went wasn’t so hot. I busted out of the three largest events on the first day, which is pretty terrible. I honestly don’t think I was on my best game for any of those tournaments except for the EPT High Roller, but I really didn’t stand a chance in that one as I was out in a little less than an hour due to an insane series of hands. All in all, this was my best experience so far in London, despite only 1 cash besides my win. I was able to do a lot of cool things this year and have a lot of fun with some friends. For some reason I wasn’t able to do much of that the past three years. At least i was able to take down my first highly anticipated win, and no less a WPT event I have come so close to getting before!

Anita and I hit up afternoon high tea at the Langham hotel. This was just dope. If you have never experienced legit tea time, do it! They have awesome little sandwiches and pastries, along with a wide selection of really good tea. Honestly, it’s just a cool thing to hang out, relax, and eat some yummy mid-afternoon snack food.

Every year, my NFL Season starts a little late. I can’t really follow it while I’m over in London this time of year every year, so I have to wait until I get home to really get into it. NFL is really the only sport I feel I can adequately follow on TV, as it’s mostly on 1 day, and two other nights a week. With every other professional sport, there are games on pretty much every night, which is way too hard to keep track of and be diligent in following. I just don’t have the time to be tuning in every night. I follow NFL like it’s a regular TV show, and I want to catch every episode(game)!

I’m really thrilled to say my cover for Bluff Magazine finally came out! As you can see on Bluff’s page, or if you subscribe, they did a really sweet cover feature on me. I feel like the interview and pictures really came out great and captivate me quite realistically. Thanks a lot Lance for making it happen, I appreciate it!

The last night I was in London, I finally was able to make it to a legit, authentic Lebanese restaurant. David Parades(aka gaucho2121) came along with Anita and I. When it comes to food, I love authentic, ethnic food. I used to be the exact opposite. I think for two years straight I ate nothing but baked chicken and broccoli. Once I branched out some, I really couldn’t get enough! I love me some hommus and baklava! Il hamdulilah for that, right Mike? haha

It looks like I have a really busy week and a half ahead of me before I jump over to Vegas for a few days for WPT Festa Al Lago. I have a few business meetings, some catching up I have to do with friends, checking back up on the final week of filming for the movie “Detention” of course, and just doing my normal thing I like to do while I’m home in L.A…..G-R-P!!! Grind-Runyon-Party! LOL!

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Sorry for missing a week of blogging guys, quite frankly I’ve just been really super busy out here in London playing tournaments and doing other “work”. I’m going to recap the past two weeks. (I love you Lance B.! No, not Lance Bass…Lance Bradley, editor of Bluff, lol)

I had some free time and decided to go to a british”football” match with Viffer, Peter Jetten and his girlfriend, and Anita. We went to the West Ham United vs. Chelsea match. I bet Peter the cost of our tickets that the game would go over 3 goals and it did…ship the pounds! Thanks for paying for a game and the face of agony as I scored two goals in the last 15 minutes of the match if I recall correctly! After that day of fun, I was back to work. I played the English Poker open and quickly got knocked out. I was very disappointed how I went out. At least the World Series of Poker Europe was right around the corner. I played Event #1, the Six-Handed 2500 Pound buy-in NLHE event, the 1k pound buy-in free-for-all tournament, then the 5k Pound Buy-in Pot Limit Omaha event. The PLO tournament is sort of special to me because it was my very first live tournament cash back in 2008 at this same tournament coming in 14′th place. I got very deep in this one again and probably made one of my biggest tournament folds ever. I folded a Aspades, Jspades, Kclubs, Khearts on a AhTs9s8s3h board getting over 6-1 on the river after betting 33,900 and getting raised aline for only 26,000 more from Jeff Madsen. I deliberated for about 7 minutes or so and decided to fold, thinking he had 67s. Fortunately, Jeff was kind enough to show his 67s immediately after I folded. This made me happy. I went on to cash in 17′th place after losing a huge 3-way pot to Erik Friberg and Jeff Lisandro. I really do love PLO tournaments. I seem to have great success in them, I’m probably just lucky. Most of all, they are pretty fun though.

I went out with a large group of poker players(Viffer, Tom, Erica, Peter, Sorel, Harry, Felipe, and Dan) to Hakkasan. This Chinese restaurant is amazing! I rarely get to eat Chinese due to my soy allergy, but they had some soy free dishes available for me. The dessert was pretty amazing too, I hope I get to go back here again before I leave London this year.

I’m glad to say my sister’s two brain surgeries seem to have went smooth and she’s recovering very well for now. She still has a lot of pain at the surgery sites, since they cut open her head and all. I think she’s already started seeing the positive effects though. Thanks to all the wonderful people sending their best wishes our way, it’s very nice and well-received.

I got knocked out of the WSOPE 5k Pound Heads Up Event quite quickly n the first round and decided to play the charity tournament over at Crockfords Casino. Even as I tried going all in every hand (trying to get to bed early to play the main event the following day), I kept doubling up!

WSOPE Main event – I had big hopes for this one, but sadly got knocked out late on the first day. I ran into top pair or better pretty much every hand, which is tough to play against. After seven back to back hands of this nature, they finally got me out.

After all these tournaments, I needed a nice night out with my wife. We went to see the comedian Russell Peters at the O2 Arena. The place was completely packed (mostly with brown people)! They probably were selling curry and naan bread at the concession stand! (haha, I doubt it, but they probably should’ve!) The show was hilarious and I could not stop laughing the entire time! I forgot the name of the opener, but he was a pretty great comedian from L.A. as well. If you’ve never heard of Russell Peters, just YouTube him, and get ready to laugh!

I caught up with my friend Adam who is an on-set photographer in L.A. working on the movie Detention. He was in London on some other business, so I’m happy we got to hang out a bit. Dude is trippy funny…always makes me laugh in good spirits!

Yesterday Rick Salomon and I walked all around London and had some lunch and dinner at various places. Rick is a pretty awesome and genuine guy and there is never a dull moment when he’s around!

I’ve heard L.A. had 113 degree weather the other day! Crazy! Summer came late I guess, and I really am starting to itch to get back home, even as much as I enjoy this city.

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I have been pretty happy lately in general after taking down a tournament finally. However, there is something lurking that may be positive but not really anything I would want anybody to endure. My sister, Tiffany, is going to have brain surgery in a few days. She has been in extreme head and face pain after many sinus surgeries for a few years now. The problem she has is very uncommon so there are not many brain surgeons who are able to do the “experimental” surgery she has figured out is best for her. She recently attended a convention for this type of stuff and found a great doctor in Michigan who has performed this surgery on 150 people with a 75% success rate, so she is going to gamble with 3-1 odds. She is in excruciating pain every day and has taken probably over a dozen different types of pills over the past few years, while somehow managing to graduate from Ohio State Law School and landing a big job at a large and prestigious white-collar international law firm in Washington D.C. To be honest, I haven’t seen her very much over the past few years, so I haven’t been able to witness some of the pain she has endured. At least she was able to visit me last month for a week in L.A. while she took medical leave from work and had the “best” (pain-wise) week in at least a year as she described it while having a care-free vacation of relaxation and cool things to do. I bought her some nice silk scarves from Hermes in Paris on the way home from my Monte Carlo trip earlier this year in anticipation for when she loses her hair from this surgery. Anyways, I would like to promote The Facial Pain Association (http://www.fpa-support.org/index.html) (formerly The Trigeminal Neuralgia Association), which is a program to serve as an advocate for patients living with neuropathic facial pain, including trigeminal neuralgia, by providing information, encouraging research and offering support. A lot of people are misdiagnosed and unaware of what is really going on with their illness, as there is a lot of conflicting symptoms and ambiguity as to what the actual diagnosis usually is. This leaves people like my sister, who had her diagnosis changed many times, in limbo, not knowing what to do, or how to fix the problem, undergoing unneccessary operations and procedures, or taking wrong medicines. I would really not like it if my head and/or face hurt 24/7 and didn’t know how to fix it because I didn’t know how to help myself. If you’d like to make a donation, that would be great. If you would like to tell people about it, that’s cool too. Sometimes it’s easy to forget about all the people that aren’t quite as fortunate as people like you and whoever is reading this as at least we are breathing and even have access to a computer and know how to write and read. I plan on undertaking a lot of charity work over the next year, more will come on that at a later time though.

A few of us went to Gaucho, the Argentinian steak restaurant for dinner about a week ago. The waiter knocked a glass over and it shattered right in front of me where my food would have been if it had been brought out yet, and glass flew all over me. If the whole thing just happened a little bit different, it could have made me blind, cut my jugular, or do something else crazy. Times like those make me think twice about how life can be so different if little things are changed. The waiter hardly apologized and didn’t really understand how close it was to being a major accident, and really his attitude just seemed very aloof and nonchalant about it. I almost never complain in restaurants….very rarely. However, when I noticed the stem of the glass was still laying on the floor right next to the booth and I almost stepped on the jagged edges facing upwards 5 minutes later when I went to the restroom, I had to say something to the manager. Other than that, the food was really good as expected.

Also this past week, I played the Full Tilt Poker Million Dollar cash game for the first time. I played two out of the three days with some of the other really top poker players and it was a great experience. I’m very excited I was able to play on the show, and can’t wait till it airs as I’m involved in some interesting pots! Sorry, I can’t say much more than that until after the show airs!

A few nights ago, Tom Dwan, Peter Jetten, Viffer, and I headed out to Nobu(my favorite location for Nobu in the world is on Berkeley Street here in London) to celebrate Viffer’s birthday with some of the girls. It was a great time and we met up with Andrew Robl, Dan Fleyshman, Keith Gipson, Tatjana the poker interviewer girl, and Mathew Parvis from Pokernews to hit up Club Jalouse which won best club in London for 2010. We made a short appearance at the Movida club and another pub as well beforehand waiting for Jalouse to open, and they actually opened thirty minutes early for us. It was a good time, and they played pretty good music as well.

GL Tiffany!(just like you tell me when I’m in a big tournament!)

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Hello from London, England! Right before I came to London, I spent the last week of August wrapping a few different things up in L.A. Also a highlight was going over to Courteney Cox’s and David Arquette’s beach house in Malibu to celebrate Michael Jackson’s birthday since Courteney is a huge fan. They hired Michael’s former private chef to bake his favorite cookies even! Some of the cast of the show “Cougar Town” were there along with a few other random people, about fifteen people total. We ended up watching the Emmy’s a bit and it was pretty comical to see how actors and producers react to watching this award show. They get so wound up it’s like their super bowl and start hooting and hollering whenever someone wins, whether they like them or not! LOL! Jennifer Aniston was also there and she asked me nicely to play poker with her and give her some tips as long as I wasn’t going to ask her to stand up and do a monologue! haha. David ended up playing a bit with us too and we had a good time staying up till about 2 a.m. and I needed to go home to get some sleep for my impending London flight. Jenn is a sweetheart and we had a great time! She also has some “card sense” too, so watch out!

I arrived here in London the day before the 15,000 POUND WPT London High Roller event began. Day 1 and Day 2 were pretty smooth. I was never all-in on either day and I don’t think I busted a player either which is kind of crazy. We began Day 3 at the WPT televised final table of the remaining 8 players. It took 8 hours to lose ONE player! INSANE! Also to note, while at dinner around 8:30 p.m. or so, Mike Sexton was sitting at the table next to me in the restaurant at the casino, and he was talking about how this was going to go all night. I thought for a few minutes and decided that I thought the tournament was going to end at 4:19 a.m., and he could lay me 20 cents (20% odds) and pick under or over! He respectfully declined. As soon as we ended up losing one player, we almost instantly lost a couple more to put us down to the final four players: Freddie Deeb, Bruno Fitoussi, Tony G, and yours truly! I had lost quite a number of pots in the first ten hours of play doubling people up and such while having pretty good hands. I felt pretty fortunate that I still had chips to compete with despite losing multiple sizeable pots, and felt that if I could start winning a few, I had a pretty good idea how I would take this final table down! Fortunately, we played for a couple hours to get in some great TV with the players remaining. I felt as time went on, my edge would increase as I could sense fatigue setting in with the players, and since I’m at least half their age, I felt like that was a good edge to press to wear those old guys down! Haha. I’m just kidding, those guys are cool and pretty entertaining, it was definitely fun playing with them, kind of like a home game. Eventually, Bruno got eliminated, and I played a few key pots with Freddie, including the final blow which was a pretty climatic sequence of events throughout the hand of an all-in preflop coinflip with great turn and river cards for television. I took on Tony G heads up with a 3-1 chiplead 1.5 million to his 500k. In the first ten hands, I lost an allin with 88 vs KK, and then had to make a huge fold on the turn after deliberating for a very intense ten minute tank. It turned out to be correct, and after that I battled right back chopping away and made a huge all-in bluff for a big pot. I then flopped top pair vs his open ended straight draw, held up, and finally grabbed my first title, a WPT one at that, along with 140k Pounds, I think probably about $225k USD. This was my third time at a WPT TV Final Table, and you know what they say about third time being the charm! Overall, I’m extremely happy with the way I played, and I was fortunate in a few key spots, which certainly helped. Thanks to my entire Twitter Rail, other friends and family following, and my wife Anita, Tom Dwan, Peter Jetten, and Tatjana for putting in the live sweat right on the rail! By the way, might I mention that as Mike Sexton and I were standing next to each other doing the champagne toast, he mentioned to me how incredible it was, that we finished at exactly 4:19 a.m.

Thankfully today is a relaxing off day so I can chill out, since for the next three days I’m playing the Full Tilt Million Dollar Cash Game. After that, there will be about a week of nothingness until WSOP-Europe, where I plan on maybe going to a “Football”(Soccer) match or two, some online poker, and partying maybe? It’s nice to get a win on my first event in London this year. I feel pretty optimistic about going deep in some of the other events this month as well! We will see!

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It has been a pretty busy week for me. I have been spending a lot of time on the set of the new movie “Detention”. I have a couple very good friends involved and I have become a part of it in a few different ways, which I am pretty proud of. I have spent a good amount of effort in getting involved in the business, and I am very excited about the future. On a less serious note, on set one day in the snack room, I was able to watch the infamous battle rapper “Dumbfounded”(who is one of the lead actors in the movie) freestyle for about 30 minutes straight. Even though I’ve met him before, I had never heard him freestyle in person, so that was pretty cool. With this movie being set in high school already, along with freestyling on set, it almost actually feels like I’m back in high school, but everyone is nicer and cooler.

A few days after I busted out of the WPT, Anita and I headed to Vegas. A lot of “Vegas” icons cameo’d in a new Rascal Flatts music video “Why Wait”, which should win some sort of music video award. Wayne Newton, CarrotTop, and Miss Nevada were featured. I was put in a scene along with Penn and Teller, David Arquette, along with Rascal Flatts. It was quite the scene on the main floor of the Palms casino with hundreds of random people shooting pictures with their camera phones, big lights, and lots of paparazzi. It was chaotic, but a really good time!

Before I shot my scene, I played a little bit of cheap poker with Phill Hellmuth, Mike Matusow, Michael Phelps, and a few of his friends. After my scene Phelps invited us out so we decided to hit up Club XS. Before we got in the club, I saw six or seven Miss USA/Miss Universe contestants as Miss Universe was being filmed that night in Vegas earlier. I decided to invite them to the table and we ended up hanging out for a few hours. After that, I was notified Rascal Flatts was having an after party in their villa penthouse, so we hit that up before bed for a bit. All of those guys are really cool and down to earth even with all of their enormous success. Even though I am not a fan of their specific genre of music, I had seen them perform last year at the American Music Awards live, and I was pretty impressed. I can appreciate really good music regardless of what genre it is. I respect people who work hard in their field and become one of the best at what they do.

Tom “durrrr” Dwan has begun his second challenge matchup against jungleman12. I am not as interested to sweat this match as I am when Patrick Antonius and Tom play, but I ended up watching for a couple hours last night. I have a decent amount of money on Tom to win the match. Nonetheless, you can definitely expect some bloodshed, and that’s always interesting. Two guys are definitely playing really big poker and are locked into a match. I expect to see a number of $1.5M swings, so it will be interesting to see who handles them better.

London is right around the corner, and my next blog should take place when WPT London High Roller is going on. It will be a busy September in London, as it is every year. I will, as always, try hard to pull out at least a deep run and maybe a win.

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I left off last week right before I went partying at XIV on Sunset Blvd, which was nothing short of amazing! This place is definitely my new favorite spot to hit up. It plays only house music, and although I am a hip hop enthusiast, I can comfortably say I don’t mind the slightest bit, as the DJ’s (EC Twins) really get it going in there! People in there are just wild…buying bottles of champagne in multiple rounds by the dozen(Red Foo from LMFAO, along with another table were doing this) just to spray and shower people! I don’t feel the need to get that far out of line like that myself, but it’s definitely pretty awesome to spectate! Unfortunately, I am sidelining myself tomorrow from the festivities because I’m trying to kick a sinus infection that flared up before I travel to Vegas and London.

I did a photo shoot at my house with two photographers a few days ago for something I’m not sure I’m allowed to talk about yet. You will see soon enough I suppose. I think I’m very happy with their work and everything should turn out really great, definitely a long anticipation waiting for this to happen. That was about a four hour endeavor, but nonetheless completely worthwhile.

I know I said I was planning on playing Day 1B of WPT Legends Tournament, and maybe I should have stuck to the original plan! I ended up playing Day 1A as I needed to figure out ASAP whether or not I was going to make a deep run in the event, in order to know if I would be able to do something else. The day started off a little rocky as I was under the impression the tournament began at noon, just like most of the other WPTs. As I was on my way there, somebody notified me it began at 1 p.m., I figured since I was already close by, I would drop by the Commerce and play the shorthanded juicy 400/800 Hold Em, Omaha 8, 2-7 Triple Draw game still running from the night before. That didn’t go so well as I lost $10k pretty quick and had to leave to get to the Bicycle. I busted out of the tournament in the second level with Q4 against A7 getting 100xbbs all-in on the turn of the A447 board. Oh yeah, after 15 minutes of negotiation with Marco Johnson, this happened to be the immediate hand after we came to settlement in him laying me 40-1 on final tabling the tournament…my $2500 to his $100k. As we got the money all-in on the turn, I nudged him as his back was directly to my back at the table next to ours, just to needle him at the spot I was in and I was the obvious big favorite to double up. I probably deserved the suckout for trying to be brutal to Marco! LOL…The other guy spiked the unavoidable 7 on the river to make the bigger full house and I was out the door.

Instead of heading home after the tournament, I decided to swing by the set of the new movie “Detention”. Joseph is directing it and Dane Cook and Josh Hutcherson are two of the main stars in the movie. This movie is so unique and creative, I don’t see how it won’t stir up quite the buzz when it comes out next year. As always, Joseph is a beast on set and is pretty amazing in action! It actually helps me as a poker player to observe people in other fields who are truly talented at what they do.

Tonight, I watched Episode 2 of the $50k Doubles Poker Championship on GSN. I was on this episode partnered up with fellow FTP Pro Gus Hansen to finish up with a respectable 2nd place for this round. I enjoyed playing with Gus quite a bit as his partner. I was able to get to know him a little bit better since I had only briefly met him once before. It’s always nice to end up talking to someone in person you often play with online. Not only do you actually have a little bit better of an idea of how they think by casual conversation, but it’s also just fun and cool. If you play against someone for years on the internet, it’s nice to finally get to know the personality behind the little avatar. Unfortunately you couldn’t tell from the conversation as it was partially edited, but when Huck was talking about grasshoppers, he was attempting to hustle me for $100k by betting me he could only eat grasshoppers for the entire WSOP! lol, Huck is a funny dude, he’s cool.

As I mentioned earlier, since I’m out of the tournament, I’m leaving to Vegas the day after tomorrow for a very short 14 hour trip to do “something” which I will talk about in my next blog. Sorry it seems like I’m keeping a few secrets from you guys, but I always try to be on the conservative side of exposing projects because some people get a little mad if you spill the beans before you’re supposed to! Soon enough!

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I had a great time at the WSOP this summer and capped it off with a sweet 2′nd place at WPT Bellagio Cup, final tabling the same event two years in a row. There were noticeable differences in the atmosphere this season at the WPT besides just the beautiful Royal Flush girls. At Bellagio WPT’s, the final table is held in the Fontana Lounge which draws quite the crowd, as opposed to a convention center room in the back of Bellagio. The atmosphere was really electric and was a ton of fun to play that final table. It should be a great episode for TV.

I came home to L.A. and played a lot of online poker and did really well for a week. I was happy to be back hiking Runyon Canyon, hitting up clubs and good restaurants as always, and just taking a nice breather and relaxing at home. I also had a small little cameo in the “I Love the Way You Lie” music video by Eminem and Rihanna. In the bar scene I have a green hat on sitting next to Dominic who plays the male lead role in the video. You can only see the side of my face a few times, but it was still cool to be a part of a music video which will undoubtedly have hundreds of millions of hits on youtube and will be up for best video of the year next year. Unfortunately, it only lasted about a week. My sister came and stayed with me for a few days. We hit up Il Sole which is a great Italian spot and also did the My Studio thing on Saturday night. We also did some shopping at Beverly Center and had lunch at Pizzeria Mozza which is some of the best pizza ever. My sister, Anita, and I went on our yearly summer vacation for a week and a half to visit family in Connecticut. While there, my 100 year old great grandmother started not feeling so great, so the paramedics came and took her to the hospital. They ran a battery of tests on her and sent her home a few hours later thankfully. The next day she was perfectly normal and you wouldn’t have even known anything happened…she is one tough lady! Besides that incident, a little bit of sailing, low key hanging out with the family, and just chillin on the beach is what it usually is, and this year was no exception. My dad came up and visited a few days and we took two sailboats out and raced him. Anita and I won of course While there, Anita and I celebrated our third year wedding anniversary too, which was really nice. We did a low key dinner and just hung out, which sounds pretty simple, but it doesn’t happen all that often, so when it does, it is in fact really nice and sort of special. The entire family went out one night for dinner and for the first time ever I had cannolli pie, which was even better than it sounds! It may seem like I talk about food a lot in my columns and blogs here at Bluff, but that’s probably because I do! I love food, good quality tasting food can only be beat by a few things! We headed over to NYC for a night and saw a few friends and flew home.

Today I’m going to XIV for the first time, which is a really good Michael Mina restaurant on Sunset Blvd. HOWEVER, on Sundays from 5 to 10 p.m. is the most insane party day-club experience ever. There are many videos on youtube of this place and it’s completely packed and insane. It only goes on in the summer time and I’m looking to get one Sunday in before I head off. I can’t wait to go and experience all the hype everyone makes this place out to be. I’m hosting a Deepstacks Live camp in San Diego on the 20′th at Pala Casino. I’ve done one there before and the people are great. I’ll be going home right after that to get a good sleep for Day 1B of the WPT Legends Main Event. I’m going to make some sort of attempt at WPT Player of the Year I guess. I won’t play all of the WPT’s, but I will be trying a little “extra” hard to do well this season I suppose. Unfortunately yet again, it’s only for a week and a half until I go to London for 7 weeks. However, I’m enthusiastic about going as I’ll be playing all the WPT, WSOP-E, and EPT tournaments…lots of events and chances for a win, including two high roller events!

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