As I type this entry I'm sitting on my balcony at Celtic Manor Resort in Newport, Wales overlooking the golf course on which the Ryder Cup is played. I traveled 17.5 hours to get here, arrived yesterday at 10 am local time, and promptly slept 8 hours. Later tonight I'll play a $20,000 6 player winner take all sit-n-go tournament 40 minutes down the road in Cardiff. I'm actually still unsure with whom I'll be playing. I've been told that as the online qualifier I'll be playing with 3 Full Tilt red pros and 2 other people who will buy in. The structure won't be great, and I fully anticipate having to flip it all off at some point. The tournament will be filmed and shown on British television's channel 4. I'll also make the youtube link available when it comes out in a couple months.

Truth be told, I won this satellite on Full Tilt quite accidentally. I bought into the $600 satellite a couple months ago thinking it was their standard WSOP satellite, and realized an hour into the tournament that it was a package to this sit-n-go. Hopefully I can win tonight and be $120,000 richer. Last night I had a great seafood dinner consisting of Fish Soup and a Swordfish entree at a place called Priory here in town. I did a little walking around then headed down to the more "posh" (as the Brits call it) Cardiff Bay area for some drinks.

Some observations:

Where to begin? As I type this I'm 3 hours removed from day 5 of the World Series of Poker Main Event. I had high hopes as I entered day 5 with 1.25x the average and was feeling great, but it wasn't to be as I got two tens in against two kings on KT33 for a 2.5x average pot.

 In total I played 34 WSOP events this summer. In 2009 I played 29 events, so needless to say I shattered that figure. This is a product of me becoming more adept at the mixed games, so I played a few more of those. I can say with confidence that I'm gonna be a long term winner in all 34 of those events because there is just so much dead money at the World Series of Poker. The reality is that one summer of live tournaments is such a small sample size. I'll play like 25 tournaments on a single Sunday online. Also, there is such high variance in these things due to the often big buy-ins. These things said, I'm completely at peace with how things went on the summer albeit very frustrated. Even with the miserable series, I'm still a decent overall winner in 2010 thanks almost entirely to my FTOPS win in May.

I managed to cash a career best 5 times on the Series. If you told me I was gonna cash 5 times in 35 events, I would've asked, "Where do I sign?" and written home to Mom about it as I expect to cash at right around that clip. Alas, in tournament poker you need to make very deep runs to cover buy-ins though, and none of my 5 cashes was for more than 4 times that tournament's buy-in. My deepest finish was 17th in the $2000 Limit Hold em event. 

Well, the time has come once again for the World Series of Poker. It's hard to believe, but this will be my fifth consecutive summer in Vegas playing the slate of events. Earlier this week, my roommates and I checked into our summer rental house. It is, in a word, breathtaking. The inevitable pain that comes from busting event after event will be eased by just how wonderful it'll be relaxing at this place.

I'm really geared up for the series this year. I feel like I'm playing really well right now and I can really focus on poker now that I got school out of the way. Maybe this will be the year that I capture the bracelet that has to this point eluded me. As usual, I'll be playing 25+ events. In fact, there's only a handful of events on the schedule that I won't consider playing at all. Most days there are events that start at Noon PDT and also at 5 p.m., so I'll play at 5 on any days where I bust the afternoon event. I expect to be playing 70 hour weeks for the next 6 weeks or so, but I know what I'm getting myself into, and I love it. It's pretty draining, but I like the idea of really grinding it out and pressing value for a couple months then hopefully not having to work very hard for the rest of the year. 

I'm at a point where I just don't really have the drive to post tournament recaps of every tournament I play this summer as I've done in every year past. I will however be updating my twitter page, twitter.com/shannonshorr each break of every tournament that I play. It's just much easier that way. I'll still blog every now and then, I guess.