def won't forget this one bowel movement... wait, i know you probably didn't think that's how this was going to start, but let me finish. i woke up friday and had to "take care of my business" as i used to say to my parent's puppies when i had to walk them. so i'm sitting there, with laptop in hand reading twitter... when flashed the most disgusting tweet i'd ever seen. "big three online poker operators indicted by dept of justice." at first i wasn't sure how much of an effect it was going to have on me, but my instincts where that this was the end of the world as i knew it.

i was pretty much right, as in an instant pokerstars/FTP banned US players and the forums lit up. no single story in poker history has driven people to 2 plus 2 in the droves they were coming in... over 1 million views of the story/thread in under 24 hours, it was ridiculous. deep down i knew one day this day would come, but i never thought we would have no warning. everything looked so promising in the past 12 months for online poker to be legalized here, yet this shit storm finally came down on us. i knew the status quo would never last... full tilt/stars having checks getting confiscated left and right, payment processors opening and closing constantly, and rumors of a quick "cash grab" by FTP in an effort to sweep as many funds out of players' accounts before their impending departure from the US market made me realize this day would come... but again, i never in a million years would have picked last friday as the day it would happen.

part of me is happy but the majority of me is depressed that the government could do this to me/my job/the community. not only that, but i feel like my voice doesn't matter at all when the DOJ can do this despite the public outcry that poker is a game of skill and that this should be legal. i feel hurt, deceived, depressed, and way more emotions that i haven't felt in a long while...

but in reality, i hadn't even played online poker in 2 weeks before this happened. on april 3rd, i played my final hand on pokerstars or full tilt, unbeknown to myself at the time. i logged off from my sunday session and felt i was burnt out and not playing well, and i needed some time off. so, on april 10th, i woke up and was ready to grind yet another sunday session. i woke up late for some reason, then when i tried to login to pokerstars, my RSA token was broken. i emailed pokerstars support, but my roommate said when the same thing happened to him it took 3 days to get anyone to answer him. furious about that news, i emailed stars then tore my bedroom apart looking for the "one time password sheet" to bypass the RSA token.

i must've turned over every box in my room (i had just moved in a couple months ago and haven't unpacked a lot of stuff i know will just stay in a drawer/closet somewhere) and looked in every nook & cranny in that room... no god damn password sheet! finally after about an hour stars emailed me. i got them to take the RSA token login part off, and i was back online... but before i started to register, i noticed something in my bedroom. after an hour of looking, i had somehow bypassed this ONE BOX sitting right next to my trash can. i had ASS U Med it was an empty box that had been shipped to my house earlier in the week with an order from amazon in it... so i never opened it. right before i could sit down to reg, i noticed the box had some stuff in it. there was my password sheet, and i could have avoided all this extra stress had i just opened this "empty" box. good lord, this day was NOT starting off right.

then i noticed that full tilt had decided they would make their sunday ANOTHER multi-entry sunday with multi-entries into the $1.5m (what once was the $750k), and i'm pretty sure a few others were that way. i had just come to the conclusion that MET tournaments were HORRIBLE for not only the poker economy, but also to my game as i hate having tons and tons of tables up. if i could have picked an ideal # of tables, i would never have more than 8-10 up (basically sundays only), and optimally i'd be playing 4-6 tables (most of the rest of the week). i feel like the less tables i play, the more i focus and tend to play much better and less mechanically.

so, in the face of having to have another difficult decision of either A) playing 14-16 tables minimum at one time and avoid missing any very highly +EV tournaments, B) single-entering or something similar the $1.5m and other METs, leaving myself feeling like i'm just pissing away value by not opening more tables, or C) taking yet another day off, my 7th day in a row at that point. i decided i would just skip the day as it was already noon and i was about as furious as i had ever been without playing a single hand of poker to this point! had the $1.5m been a $750k w/ no METs that day, i would have likely logged a regular session. instead, i enjoyed a great final round of the masters, which i hadn't been able to sit down and watch in a number of years.

the next day i just wasn't feeling up to it and spent most of the week playing video games & hanging out with my roommate, his friend luke & my roommate's infant son. we talked about poker, reviewed a few hands, and drank a lotta beer. i finished the final season of OZ, and then, before i could even decide what day i was going to return to online poker... all of our lives were turned upside down!

basically, it's a blessing in disguise as i feel like online poker has made me more stressed out and less social, and i plan on changing those things this summer. i'm not going to make any major changes to my day to day life, other than having to log some time in casinos in small NL cash games and grinding more $300-$1k live tournaments than i'm used to.

don't know what else to say at this point... i'm going to go grab a bite to eat then hit up some small, less frequented poker rooms and try and grind up my roll again. good luck to everyone else who feels as upset/semi-happy it's all over, it's a weird mix of emotions right now.

so i haven't blogged in years, and when i was blogging it wasn't much but stupid lyrics and whiny stuff 18 year olds like to blog about. i guess i'll start with a somewhat abbreviated history of my poker career. it all started back in 2002 when my buddy chad introduced me to the game. through our friend jake and his buddies, we organized a regular game during college and played about every other week for the first two years or so. we found a few other venues/games to play in and kept ourselves busy online a lot too. chad actually went to class, whereas i just sat at home playing online poker. i think the 2nd year of school i went to class prob close to 1/3 of the time i was scheduled to.

this lent itself well to poker because it is hard to get really good at this game without just being totally absorbed by it for a while. very few people will sit down and figure out NLHE faster than the online player who just dives in head first and never gives up (for a while at least). college was going poorly so i dropped out at the start of my 5th semester when it became apparent i was going to fail out. i would decide to leave missouri for las vegas that spring.

i joined my buddy gank in tunica in 2004, and we brainstormed an idea we called "pokertrails.com." it wasn't anything revolutionary really, but we were among the first tournament reporters to be at final tables doing hand by hand coverage. gank owned the site and paid me out but we never really attracted any sponsorship money and we gave up about 18 months later. in 2006 i dealt briefly at the WSOP but by the 2nd or 3rd day of the main event i decided this 6 week gig was all the dealing i could handle so i quit and joined pokerpages.com. for about 5 months i did a blog there, updating mostly my own poker play but also covering some tournaments and the las vegas poker scene.

in 2007 i finally won a good amount of money, taking 2nd in a $1500 event at the commerce. i quit pokerpages, and haven't looked back. since then i've ran really cold and hot, mostly cold, and thanks to mostly a naive attitude towards poker and a lack of motivation to improve my game. from the 2007 WSOP to the 2009 WSOP, i ran up a ridiculous makeup figure for my backer and was kind of worried i wouldn't find my way out of it. shortly after i moved out of my friend devo's house that summer, my friend matt stout offered me a place to live. i took him up on it, and with his buddy dan, we all three started to chip away at our makeup. dan played for himself but wasn't life rich, so we were helping him get his feet wet in the poker world and improve his skills (which were already good but he's become great over the past 18 months).

matt and i on the other hand had some work to do. we both played a high volume of high stakes tournaments, and we both had a lot of experience online and live at this point. however, matt had a much higher understanding of the game, and it helped develop my game further. i was already just a few steps from understanding how to beat the highest buyin online tournaments, and matt was already doing so. finally, in june of 2010, about 9 months after matt, dan and i began working together in our apartment in vegas, i had my turning point.

battling a little depression thanks to the pressures of a massive makeup figure (and the fact that i am thousands of miles from "home" and rarely see my family), it took until that summer for me to finally not only "figure out" poker, but really appreciate it. to start the month, after busting a few WSOP events, i came home one monday night and logged into my regular session of online poker. my first sign of good things to come was that night when i took 2nd place in the full tilt monday $1k for ~$48k. that was my biggest online score thus far, and even though i lost headsup, i felt like i had played the best of anyone at the final table and should have taken the title that night.

the next day, i can't remember off the top of my head if i played at the WSOP or not. there's a chance i just played online that night and took the afternoon off... but either way, i started my regular tuesday session, and quickly took 2nd in the stars $100rb. pretty sure i actually got badbeated out of that one, but again, i wasn't so concerned with the lost equity headsup as i was ecstatic to have such a run in back to back days. i was already up ~$60k or so, when i made a deep run and final tabled the stars super tuesday $1k buyin. at the final table, i completely and utterly destroyed everyone and basically dominated. we got 4 handed, and i had a massive chiplead. i couldn't lose a pot, and just kept the pressure on the 3 other shortstacks the whole time.

when i finally won that tournament it was just the most vindicated i have ever felt. ~$130k or so in scores in about 30 hours time made me feel like a million bucks. but that wasn't the end of the month of fun! as many of you know i wound up at the final table at the end of june in the WSOP $3k buyin. i had the chiplead from about 14 players down until ryanwelch and i got 3handed with a french player that we both took turns pounding. i delivered the final blow, making a straight flush blind vs blind and heading into HU with a 5-3 lead. ryan completely owned me HU, and i never really stood a chance. seemed like whenever i had a good hand, he had a great hand, and whenever i finally made a bad read, he had it and i gave him the bracelet.

despite losing HU in the biggest tournament of my life, every day since then has felt 10x better than the days prior to my june 2010 run. even when poker beat me up in the past 9 months, even when i felt like i was lost and shouldn't have ever jumped into this as a career... i find a way to remind myself that i belong and i'm doing what i am supposed to do.

i was watching an episode of OZ last night, the old HBO prison drama. the oldest character on the show, rebadow, was talking about how in his day (his character was a WWII vet), no one was lost and trying to "discover" who they were. you were an army trooper, and you had your job, and you knew how to do it. it was a simpler time where people accepted who they were and were willing to "take a blow" because they knew it was what they were supposed to do with their life. it made me realize how stupid it was for me to constantly belittle myself and my poker game whenever something goes wrong or i make a bad decision. it made me want to just accept that i'm a poker player for life, and embrace the joy of it. even if it isn't always joyful.

so, i swear future blogs will be less preachy and definitely more concise, but i figured i should put all this down in my first blog to get the story of who i am out of the way. i'm assuming a lot of you know a little about me, but i hope you at least can appreciate where i've come from. no one donated a bankroll to me or paid my college tuition. no one bailed me out when i was busto (i mean, i'll admit, my father has helped when i was really seriously broke, but he isn't well off enough to do more than pay my rent once every now and then), and i really had to apply myself to get to where i am. do i have a long way to go? most certainly.

next time i'll probably post some more poker hands and discuss stuff like that. i'm currently in the middle of a challenge i'm making to myself, but given the chance i might not succeed or get unmotivated to finish it, i'll save it for another blog. thanks for reading... oh, and if your'e a p5's training member, i do have a video or two coming in the next few weeks i believe, so check that out.