neilzelkin

As Bob Dylan once sung before anyone of us (except for Bug) were alive, “The times. The times they are a changing.” I can feel it in the air. I can see it with my eyes. I can’t wait for the future. I don’t know about you but for me these have been three long years to be a online poker player in the states. In the blink of an eye the vibrant and profitable poker Nirvanas were gone. Poof (not Pooffy)!!! PokerStars and Full Tilt the places that I had come to take for granted, the places where I had spent years working on my game, the game that grabbed me in 2008 and would not let go was now suddenly gone. Their homepages erased and replaced with the seal of the United States and an ominous sounding message from the Justice Department. Known as Black Friday it was the day that online poker in America died. RIP Online Poker 2001-2011 It was a good run and a lot of fun but now your done God Bless It was the beginning of a new age in online poker. A shitty, dark and depressing period that is about to enter its fourth year, online poker for Americans does not exist inside the nation’s borders. It doesn’t exist!!! Hear Me? Sure, we have Merge and BCP and all the other fly by night schlock operations that I would not trust with taking care of a dead person let alone entrust with running an honest poker site, to chose from if we want to play for “real” money. But in my book, the only sites taking our action now are run by criminals with zero fear of the US government, because who else would be dumb enough to do so after Black Friday? It’s not legitimate businesses run by professionals, that I can tell you for sure. I go to bed each night and have dreams of the day when Carbon, Aced, BCP, Juicy, PDC, RPM, FeltStars the list goes on forever, are collected in a virtual dumpster and torched. Burned to a fucking crisp. And from those ashes rises a site that has no name but is pure and the poker is awesome. Players gather by the thousands, many of them with little or no experience, to play poker of all varieties, in all stakes with a RNG that is built to be random not dramatic (Yeah, I am talking to you Merge!!), and instant withdrawls. Then I open my eyes and reality hits me in the face like a frying pan, it was only a dream and the most I can hope for is another day of fake poker in another Freeroll. Yuck. When I stumbled upon Freerolls not that long after Black Friday I was still in a state of shock over the ramifications. I started playing online in 2008 with zero poker knowledge, experience because I was bored and had money to burn. Straight out of college in 1993 I went to work on the trading floors of Chicago and instantly fell in love with the action and energy of the trading floor as well as the analytical side of financial markets. It was like gambling but not. BlackJack is gambling. A slot machine is gambling. A person can make a lot of money on a slot machine or at the blackjack table every once in a while if they are lucky. But if you have to rely soley on luck to make your money then you better ex[ect to lose your money or you are a fool.