I've been back in Birmingham the last couple of weeks. It's been a really nice time as I've gotten to spend some time with my family and friends. Christmas was excellent for my family and me, and I hope it was great for all you guys too. The past 3 years I've recapped my year in a blog post, so I figured I'd continue the trend and recap 2009 below:

Pretty tough day. I battled uphill the whole time. I quickly got down to around 55,000 at the end of the first level. I climbed back to like 65,000 at the end of level 2, and 80k at the end of level 3 before getting moved to a new table and taking 60k into the final level. In the 30 minutes I was still in the tournament in the final level I doubled up Amnon Filippi for  his 11bb in a spot where I opened AJo from MP with the BB out of his seat, and somehow AF actually had AQo. Then I got my last 28500 in the middle against Vivek Rajkumar with AKo vs KQo but unfortunately for me the board came QT8xx to bust me around the middle of the field's pack. Pretty happy with how I played for the 14 hours I was involved in this tournament.

This will pretty much conclude the year pokerwise for me. Maybe I'll play another Sunday online, but I'd really rather spend time with family around Christmas time. It was a damn good year for me considering how little poker I played.  It's not up there with 2006 and 2008 numbers wise, but I'm still obviously very happy. I'll follow with an end of the year recap sometime before the calendar year is over. 

In other news, my final grades are in and I posted a very satisfying 3.53 GPA for the semester at The University of Alabama.

I'm on to day 2 of the $15,000 WPT Five Diamond with 84,075 in chips. The average is in the neighborhood of 80k.

The day was just kind of whatever. I was at a table with John Monnette, Kathy Liebert, Tyler "tnetter" Netters, Cornell Cimpan, Steven Fung, Justin Young and Dani "ansky" Stern (whom I thought played spectacularly). I took what was given to me and didn't really play too big of a pot all day. 

There was this guy in the 2 seat who literally put money in the pot less than 5 times in the 7.5 hours of poker we played today. In all the live tournaments I've played, I've never, ever played with a tighter player. It was almost painful to watch. I can remember one other time at the 2006 WSOP ME on day 1 playing with a woman who was similarly inactive.