My contest will be to guess what my lifetime VPP total will be at the end of the day on October 24th.  For reference, I got to 15 million lifetime VPP in January of this year:

You can guess any number you want, but I suggest guessing something higher than 15 million

Simply follow me on twitter and tweet @GeorgeLindIII your guess and your PokerStars screen name, along with the hashtag #JorjVPPs.  The winner will be the person who guesses the closest without going over the total.  You have until Friday October 24th to get your guesses in.

Thanks everyone!

Meet Kaylee, the older sister (by 2 minutes):

And here’s Kelsie:

Together:

Some pics of big brother Cooper with the twins:

Coop preparing our thanksgiving feast 

The whole happy/sleeping family:

Videos of many of the Team Online players have already been released.  So, back in July, we met with a film crew from PokerStars who flew to Vancouver for a week to shoot George’s video. They spent a couple of those days with us shooting one-on-one interviews and also various parts of our day in order to give an idea of a “A Day in the Life of Jorj95.”

I understand it is being released at the end of the week.  Like what I have seen so far – looking forward to the final product!

Anyway, our last port stop of our journey before sailing into Vancouver – Ketchikan, Alaska.

We boarded a catamaran to sail through Misty Fjords.  Some of the most beautiful scenery yet.  Bit difficult keeping Cooper occupied on this excursion.  Plus I think we were both just getting tired.  In fact, I fell asleep for over an hour on the ride back.

Some random dinner pics.

“Come board Crystal Cruises,” the staff says, “and you will be part of our family.”   It sure felt that way with many of them.

I didn’t expect to get nearly this many vpps.  Last year for SCOOP I played pretty much the same number of hours and only got 870k vpp.  The $3502s ran way more this year than last year; I played 389 of them during SCOOP last year and 1,373 this year.  A big reason I wanted to do this promotion was to help promote the games I play and to get them to run more, and that was definitely a success.  So in a way the 1 million VPP goal was a self-fulfilling prophecy once I made it public.

I ended up at $43k pre-rakeback profit for the month.  This goal looked in jeopardy at the beginning of the month when I was stuck $90k but then luckily I ran good for most of the rest of the month.  The bad part is that if I had just run reasonably in the $3502s (I lost over $150k in them) I could have easily had a pre-rakeback profit of $200-$300k or more.

I estimated my SupernovaElite benefits to be the equivalent of 70% rakeback, and when adding that in, my post-rakeback profits are around $230k for the month.  No matter how badly I may have ran in the big games, I definitely can’t complain about that.

Lost 13 pounds on the month, which I definitely didn’t expect to happen.  The weight just flew off at the beginning of the month and then steadily kept coming off at the end.  I’m really happy with how I stuck with my diet but like I said in the first post about this challenge, when I’m playing all day I barely even think about food so it is quite easy to not eat much during something like this.

Overall I’m really happy with how this challenge went.  The one thing I would definitely change if I do something like this for SCOOP next year is that I would play less of the SCOOP events.  There were times when I would have 8 tournament tables going plus 10 or more hypers and it got to be hectic and probably cost me money from not being able to think long enough about a decision.  I will probably just stick to tournaments that I really want to play and I will definitely look to skip a lot of the lower buyin events.  It’s kind of sad because I do enjoy playing every event and going for leaderboard prizes but financially it’s just not a smart decision for me.

Thanks everyone for following my challenge!  I may do something similar during WCOOP in september so stay tuned!

Had another decent day today, won about 10k, now up $41k on the month pre-rakeback.  Tomorrow may be the last day I play this month, I’m not sure yet.  I’m pretty tired.  

Month graph:

good day today, won about 40k, now up around 30k for the month with 2 days left in scoop!

Unfortunately i got crushed today, losing like $50k, now I’m only up $2k pre-rakeback on the month.  Gonna be a sweat for this last goal!

Month graph:

Unfortunately I just can’t seem to catch a break in the $3502 hypers.  Here is my graph for just the $3502s:

And here is my graph for every other game this month:

Pretty frustrating to think that if I had just run as good in the 3502s as i have in my other games this month, I would be up about $300k on the month instead of $2k.  But those are the fun swings you get when you play ridiculously big games with small edges.  

When we weren’t in port, we spent most of our mornings in the kids play area.  All these drawers had toys in them – puzzles, trucks, blocks, dinosaurs.  Crayons and markers were usually left out for us to use.   Coop even got some play-doh one morning.  Not many kids on the boat – two other toddlers who rarely came to the play room, two teenagers and a 10 year old.  The teenagers quickly became our favorite and I think they enjoyed us as well.  George played Mario Kart with them quite a bit.

 Here is Coop making himself at home.

 But what Cooper really wanted to do was run across the hall into the Palm Court. We were not allowed to close the doors to the kids area so it was virtually impossible to keep him contained.   The Palm Court was a large U-shaped room with occasional live jazz music.  At the far end was a dance floor.  

Cooper would basically start on one side, run to the dance floor, dance and then run out the other side of the “U.”  One of us would have to follow.  Somewhat out of fear of him bothering other people reading or relaxing in the room.  But also out of fear of losing him on the stairs or elevators that were right outside the room.  Exhausting, let me tell you.

By this time of the trip, we have experienced 5 of our 8 or 9 time changes.  Remember we left from Japan and Vancouver is 8 hours ahead.  We had 18 days on the boat and half of those days were “one hour forward” nights.  Four of which were in a row. And because we crossed the international date line, we even repeated one day.  We thought it would be funny if they played “I Got You Babe” from Groundhog Day on the ship news show that morning.  Course 75% of the ship was over 65. so doubtful anyone would get it.  But still, we thought it would be funny.  Anyway, it seems that this method of time change would be easier than losing all 9 hours at once, but after experiencing both, I am not so sure.  It has a way of creeping up on you.  Several mornings, none of us woke up until 10 or 11am.  And several nights, Cooper would not fall asleep until close to midnight.  OY!  Given the atypical sleeping habits of poker players, this probably doesn’t seem too disturbing.  But take a kid off his schedule and you unleash the monster within.  A cute little monster, but a monster nonetheless.

Our next port stop was Seward, Alaska.  Our excursion involved a bus ride to Anchorage, stopping along the way at a wildlife preserve.  Beautiful scenery!

A wild baby moose ran across the road to wake us all up.

I LOVED this preserve.  The habitats were intentionally made as naturalistic and close to the wild as possible.   The majority of the animals had been injured and, therefore, unable to survive on their own.  Some favorite photos from the preserve…

After all that excitement, George and Cooper fell asleep for the rest of the ride to Anchorage.

   Since much of Alaska is only accessible by water, many residents become pilots and own prop planes.  This is a lot outside the airport where many store their planes.

We also saw them parked on the water next to houses.  No garage with a car inside.  Just a plane.  Next to the house.

We had a couple hours free time to walk around downtown before getting back on the bus to go back to Seward.  We ate lunch, bought some souvenirs, took goofy pictures and took Cooper to a kids museum.

On our way to Ketchikan, the boat sailed through Glacier Bay National Park.  This was a surprise for us.  Meaning we knew nothing of this when we boarded the ship.  We would hear a crew member mention something here and there.  And the mentions grew in number the closer we got to the area.  Turns out, we were spending a whole day cruising through this park.  It was beautiful and really ended up being a fun day.

Early in the morning, as we entered the park, the ship boarded two park rangers for the day.  They were explaining over the intercom what we were looking at from time to time.  Hey, that tiny speck over there is a mountain goat.  Or explaining the difference between glacial ice and regular ice.  Which is to say that glacial ice is blue.  So the object of the day was to point out the blue ice to all around you.  LOL

In the meantime we finished the second goal of getting a million vpps for the month:

Breakeven day today, now up $58k on the month.  Someone pointed out that I was including fpp hypers in my results which obviously shouldn’t really count since it’s not really pre-rakeback profit, so those are taken out of the graph now.  I actually thought I was filtering them out because normally I do, but for some reason I forgot to do it when I was setting up my sharkscope filter for the month.  Anyway, graph of the month:

I will do my next weigh in after scoop is over but I’m pretty sure I won’t be gaining any weight this week anyway.

Also you can expect the 3rd installment in our “trip of a lifetime” trip report in the next couple days.