In late 2013, Ryan Smart’s passion for poker was flickering like a lightbulb in its final moments of usefulness. Smart had been grinding since 2007 and was starting to feel the impact of the travel necessitated by the fallout of Black Friday and he’d also discovered that the games weren’t the berry patches they once were.

“The games had gotten a little tougher at that point and I probably was a bit lazy, but I think I was actually still studying pretty hard. It’s just, the results weren’t coming and in the live cash I was still doing okay at but at that point, I hadn’t been playing live nearly as much as I used to in the past, and I had pretty much shifted to mostly online MTTs,” Smart said.

In the throes of a downswing that he didn’t see ending, Smart figured it was time to go and do something else with his life that provided him with a steady income and didn’t involve dealing with the headaches and stress of grinding.

“I’d had the worst year that I’d had up to that point and at the point, I was playing professionally,” said Smart. “I’ve always kind of split time between online and live cash and it was a rough year. I pretty much just decided to get back to doing something else that I could make consistent money at because at that point I think I had been on a downswing for 8-12 months.”

That was six years ago. Now 31, Smart works in restaurant management and has been dabbling in online poker. He’s not on a full time grind like he once was, but he’s one of the top-ranked online poker players in Pennsylvania and routinely holds down the #1 ranking in his hometown of Pittsburgh.

“(Poker) is something I’ve always enjoyed doing and I, had a bad couple of years there where my mental state wasn’t good for how I was playing and everything,” said Smart. “So, you know, trying to take it slow, getting back into it and I’ve been lucky to have some results lately.”

The drive from Pittsburgh to New Jersey is a little over five hours. Given that the Garden State already has regulated online poker, Smart has thought about making the drive a few times to get an old school Sunday grind in while he waits for Pennsylvania regulators to officially launch legal online poker.

“I have thought about it, especially because I have a couple of friends who live in New Jersey and for the most part, play online poker,” Smart said. “So, I’m sure I can have somewhere I can crash for a weekend or whatever to do it. Since I’m just getting kind of back into it, it’s not something I’ve thought about a lot about as of yet, and I was hoping this PA thing would come along a little faster.”

As for now, Smart plays exclusively on unregulated offshore sites. Having had his life turned a little bit by Black Friday, he’s always cautious about how much money he leaves on the site.

“Unfortunately, as of now, that’s about the only option. I used to play on Merge and after Black Friday I kind of moved around a bit to play but that didn’t really work out so well, so pretty much just been ACR lately,” said Smart, who had his biggest online score just weeks before Black Friday.

“I was sitting at my computer. I had just finished a session of playing sit and gos and I had closed it out and then I couldn’t pull anything back up,” Smart remembered. “At the time I had won, I think it was the Big $55. It was my biggest score. It was not long before that, maybe a few months, and I had taken some of the money off but I still had quite a few thousand sitting on Poker Stars, which was, I don’t know, half of my life roll at the time, and I was like ‘oh no’. So, I definitely learned from that feeling of that day that I do not keep much money on ACR.”

In October 2017, Pennsylvania regulators passed House Bill 27, which put the wheels in motion for players in that state to have regulated online poker. Smart noticed and that helped rekindle his interest in the game.

“That was actually one of the big motivators to start playing at least a decent amount again was once I heard that PA had passed legislation because I was hoping that eventually, I could get back into it,” Smart said.

Smart is getting married later this year and hopes to start a family in the coming years. He doesn’t foresee a full-time return to poker as his sole source of income, but he does like having the opportunity to have a decent side hustle.

Like many players in his state, he’s anxious and excited for what is coming, even if it is taking longer than some had hoped.

“I thought this would be a lot quicker of a process, especially because a lot of the licenses have gone to people who partnered with partypoker and PokerStars,” said Smart. “I’m not sure what the guarantees and everything are gonna be out of the gate for Pennsylvania. I’m assuming it’s not going to be very high, and especially, trying to play low-mid stakes.“