Vegas

My trip to Vegas started pretty badly as I had to wait for 3h after boarding until they informed us that 15 passengers have to leave the plane for safety reasons because one emergency door wasn't working. They offered 500£ cash and a free hotel room for those who take another flight the next morning, but I felt like it's not worth the hassle and waiting time, plus I kinda wanted to spend friday night in Vegas. Luckily many other passengers viewed things differently and after they all got their luggage back I was finally on my way to LAS VEGAS. Not taking the next flight also meant that I could keep my word and be at the Bellagio to rail my London roommate Marvin at the final table of the WPT Championship. After 9 hours of play he won the tournament and $1.2 million, not too shabby.

Even though I'm lacking updates (sorry) I'm still doing really well in the health challenge. Slightly ahead of pace for the weightgaining-goal and since I'm eating extremely healthy I'd guess that I'm getting close to that 8.5% bodyfat too.

There was only one day where I didn't care about the challenge at all and that was at a party at Vanessa Rousso's new place hosted by her, Maria Ho, Liv Boeree, Tiffany Michelle and Vanessa Selbst. It was an absolutely sick, sick party, check out this Cardplayer Video to get some impressions.

The night resulted in at least four injured people (broken arm, broken ankle, chopped finger, bloody face) which is not too surprising considering the amount of alcohol and outside activities.

Wrote some other stuff already but don't want the entries to be too long and will rather try to update more frequently. Will also post new body stats, meal plan and workout plan soon.

New pics will be linked on the right.

Manig

Day 7

So it's been one week since I've started the challenge and with one exception (saturday) I did a really good job in eating healthy and working out a ton despite having to operate on extremely little sleep due to SCOOP deepruns.

I flew to Germany for my sister's wedding last weekend and it was a really cool. After the wedding party in itself a small group of us decided to go to a club in Cologne and after I got back to the appartement at around 8am I pretty much went straight to the airport to fly back to London and play the early SCOOP Event.

It is obviously not good to fail with the not drinking / eating healthy resolution on the 3rd day of the challenge, but I knew in advance that nights like this are going to happen (I'm going to spend 7.5 weeks in Vegas after all) and I just have to keep them to a minimum and work out even harder after going out.
I didn't skip a single workout with my trainer this week even though it was super tough as I had to play really long hours and got only around 2-3h sleep per night. I ran above expectation in those tournaments so I will have much shorter days on average except I decide to pull a lot of cashgame all-nighters in Vegas.

I booked 5 training sessions per week with my trainer until Vegas in which we focus on one muscle group per day. On my 2 off-days I will do cardio (kickboxing / sparring, swimming, running). In addition I will try to get in at least three 40 mins Insanity Workouts per week. If you've never tried it, that shit cray, seriously.

Foodwise I managed to get close to the right amount of calories in every day and I had a meal ready pretty much all the time. The awesome thing about London is that you can get whatever food you want because you got so many choices, so I just ordered delivery food (tons of sushi, chicken, salmon, salads etc) multiple times a day and ate while playing. If I played until the morning I often went to my favorite breakfast place to get omelettes and since there's a Nando's right next to the gym I enjoyed the world's best chicken quite a bit after workouts. I don't take any food supplements except of protein shakes so far.

Today I will get tested again since 4 good friends from Germany fly in to visit me. They know about the challenge and that I take it kinda seriously though, so they won't expect me to get wasted every night. Still looking forward to a great time and I planned on taking 1-2 days off from SCOOP anyways to not be burned out for the 10k Main Event on sunday which I'm planning on winning.

Here are the new pics from today, obviously not much difference to be seen in one week but I'm fairly certain that it'll be a cool slideshow after 12 weeks.

05/17/2012

Manig

Day 1

Today is May 10th which is the deadline to start the challenge. I already went to the gym on saturday to get all exact stats but this week was pretty crazy as I was having deepruns in almost all H-SCOOP Events and therefore had to play 14-18h per day, so I figured it would be smarter to officially start on the 10th.

Here are the starting stats:

Shockingly I lost 2.7kg since January 3rd when my main goal was to gain weight. Then again it's not all that surprising because I went on long runs almost every day (especially when I stayed in Melbourne for 4 weeks) and then often skipped breakfast/lunch to make it to the casino in time. Also it was impossible to cook my own stuff most of the time so I just didn't have enough proper meals to get the right amount of calories.

Bodyfat is at 9.95% which is pretty low already. I'll try to get that maybe 1-1.5% lower while getting my bodyweight up to 85-87kg (74.3kg atm).

I'm not a huge fan of taking pictures of myself doing weird poses in underwear but since it's part of the challenge I guess I have to. Hopefully it won't cost me too many readers.

05/10/2012

My flight to Germany leaves in 3h, the next SCOOP Event that I'll play will be on sunday when I get back to London.
That's all for now, will try to update once a week.

Manig

Hey everyone,

my name is Manig Loeser and I'm a 23-year-old professional Poker Player from Germany currently living in London.

Big part of the reason why I'm starting this blog is Sorel Mizzi's Health Challenge which I'll be participating in.

For most professional Poker Player that are playing a lot of live tournaments it is pretty much impossible to maintain a healthy lifestyle and I'm no exception.


When I'm in London I eat healthy, work out with a Personal Trainer around 3-4 times a week and drink very little alcohol. But as soon as I fly out to play live tournaments (which is more than 2/3 of the year) I get on an awful sleeping schedule, eat roomservice burgers, drink tons of alcohol and work out maybe once or twice a week if at all.

The problem is that there always is a reason to drink. Either you take a horrendous bad beat or missplay a hand on the bubble of a tournament and want to take your mind off the "what-ifs", or you win a tournament and a big chunk of pricemoney and want to celebrate.

Even on the rare occasions that you win an amount of money that you think is "fair" (=close to your true ROI, which we can all  just estimate), and that means that you're not unhappy nor overly excited, chances are that one of your friends just had a 6 or 7 figure score and wants to throw a huge party. I sometimes hate having such successful friends.

And when there's nothing to celebrate at all I still have the problem that I just like beer too much, which is obviously a terrible thing to have in your diet, especially if you try to cut down carbs. But that's mostly because I'm german I guess.


I just got back to London from an exhausting 6 week long trip from Cyprus - Italy - Ireland - Austria - Germany - Monaco and totally destroyed all progress that I made while working with my Trainer and eating 5 healthy meals a day. The only stop where I lived decently healthy and worked out regularly was in Cyprus and the reason for that is that not many of my friends were there and the nightlife over there absolutely sucks.
Even in Berlin where I stayed at the Hyatt, which has probably one of the nicest hotel gyms / spas on the tour, I ended up going there just twice I think because we went out partying way too much. I even packed 3 bags of whey proteins which I estimated would be enough for the whole trip and now that I got back I still have around 70% left. Not a good sign.
Also in retrospect it probably wasn't the smartest idea to travel with transparent bags full of white powder and a big amount of cash in my pocket. Luckily I run good at airport security.


On May 24th I'll move out to Las Vegas for 7.5 weeks to play the World Series of Poker. Last year during that time I lived really unhealthy but not so this year. As most of you know, the healthy food options at the Rio are very limited so this year a bunch of other Poker Players and I will have a Personal Cook/Chef that brings the healthy fresh meals right to the table. To win the Health Challenge I also need to finish a 12 week fitness program and then convince the jury consisting of Sorel, Julie Powers, All American Dave & Christina Lindley with my transformation, blogging and stats.

The good news is that I don't have any trips planned before Vegas (except a short one to Germany for my sister's wedding), so I'll just stay in London, grind the SCOOP and get on a healthy schedule that I can hopefully keep up for the whole duration of the WSOP. This will not just get me in an overall better shape but also increase my ROI in the tournaments and give me a better shot at one of those bracelets, so I'm pretty excited.


Updates on my progress with before / after pictures and the program that I'm using will be made on my bodybuilding.com account which I'll be linking as soon as I set it up and started the challenge.

So long, thanks for reading and stay tuned for the next entry.

Manig