Poker House

I have finally figured out (after two weeks living here) that Poker House is in downtown Prairieton.  Here is the Prairieton post office, which is twenty yards from our front door...and considering that we have no mail box ...

(although we can apparently receive the paper...what a relief), this is a very, very good thing. 

Across the street is the Prairieton School...

The sign says it.  The playground proves it.  But...

Maybe a memorial to the Prairieton School District?  I've been running through the neighborhood for two weeks and have yet to see anything that resembles a building that could be called a school.  And, no kids.  Sorry, I digest.  Anyway, where were we...

Welcome to the War Room...

... in all its glorious, middle-of-the-weekend, must-keep-playing clutter. 

We have plans to buy a large world map to put on the wall in here to spitefully keep track of the players whose souls we own.  Whatever country gets the most pins (outside of the U.S.) gets some serious consideration for our hopeful move out of the states. 

When not working...

...this is generally where you can find us.  Meet Superchimp, Baccy, and the house mascot, Greta.  Everything you could want or need in a living room, except we're a bit scared to try the fireplace considering the general mayhem that is the structure of this house.  Maybe some luxuries are better not tested.

Then there's the Music Room where we go to release tilt and get in touch with our sensitive sides...

Or not so senstive.  Threads' stack of death.

Then we have the dungeon...

...where bad poker players go when they die.

And while we're on the subject of sinister...

...try peeing with this staring you down.  *shudder*

On that note, I leave you with your moment of zen...

How I got started... (Part I)

In my last post, I promised that I would explain why I decided to pursue poker. There were a few precipitating factors, but one major theme stands out among all others. I'll try to explain this as succinctly as I can, but it could take a few posts.
As a relatively intelligent, academically-inclined and scientifically-minded individual, the most obvious career path for me involved heavy institutional training. My first choice, which was influenced mostly by my father's advice, was to pursue a science degree with an ROTC scholarship (and subsequently 4 years of service as an officer in the military). By the time the 9/11 attacks occured, I was a junior in the Army ROTC program at a state school in East Texas. I was confused by our whole approach to finding this "Bin Laden" character, apparently involving a large and inordinately delayed troop deployment. Did capturing a terrorist leader in a technologically underdeveloped country really require opening a full-blown war theatre with troops that are trained to conduct conventional warfare (meaning, shooting and blowing shit up, which is the only thing that the military was designed to do at the time, and rightly so)? This was a legitimate question that most of the active duty commissioned officers running the ROTC program at my school could never answer sufficiently (either because they were aggravated by my inquisitive temperament, and/or because they honestly didn't know), and suprisingly, an issue that seemed of little consequence to my fellow cadets. Eventually, I attempted to break my commissioning contract during the Spring following 9/11, but one of the officers convinced me that I was merely having problems with the bureaucratic elements of the military, and that I just needed to get into ranger school and think about moving into special forces, where this would be less of an issue. But over a year later, after we were well into the Iraq invasion, I found myself unable to cope with the military decisions that were being made by our government. I broke my contract assuming that I would most likely have to serve 4 years in the Army anyway as an enlisted soldier (that meant starting out as a private as far as I knew). Most of my family members and a few of my friends thought this was idiotic; since I would have to serve anyway, why not just "honor" my contract and serve as an officer instead of going through the military as a lowly enlisted soldier? Wouldn't that be easier as a lieutenant? And the answer for me was, no, because personally I felt I would share more responsibility as an officer than as a private for the ill-conceived and ill-motivated plans of the American government and the financial powers-that-be. At least as a private, I could say, "Hey, I tried my best to get out, and at least now I don't have to lead people towards a goal that I don't believe in."
Well, fortunatelyfor me, my battalion commander decided that he wanted me to write a letter to the regional commander explaining why I was choosing to break my commissioning contract. From my perspective, this was an attempt by our newly-appointed battalion commander, Col. Pike, to cover his ass, since, in his first 6 months of command at our unit, he had already removed several cadets from the program for relatively insignificant indiscretions (ironically, one cadet I knew was kicked out for getting caught "drinking underage"; responsible enough to carry gun-powered weaponry and receive training for managing military personnel, but apparently not responsible enough to have a drink at a party...). So he's kicked out several cadets, some of which were removed before ROTC training resumed in the Fall (he arrived at the unit around June or so), and now he's got this soon-to-be butter bar (this is just a less than endearing term for a second-lieutenant) who's trying to break his contract. By this point, I was still in the process of finishing up my physics curriculum, but had effectively completed the ROTC program, pending my college graduation; my first two years of college, I was a computer science major, so when I changed degree plans, I fell a bit behind on the 4-year college graduation thing. This Col. Pike guy told me that not only would they most likely force me to serve as enlisted, given the fact that I "obviously" waited to quit until I had taken advantage of all the scholarship and monthly stipend funding available under my contract, but that he would also personally request that I be involuntarily enlisted AND be held responsible for paying back all of my scholarship tuition in full. He assured me that I was going to spend the next several years of my life paying for my mistake. So I wrote a letter to the ROTC regional commander for this fucker at the end of November. By March of the next year, I recieved a letter stating that I wouldn't be required to serve an enlisted contract (whew! especially since Jesper and I had just met, and I had a new reason to stick around in Nacogdoches), and that I would only need to pay back my tuition to DFAS. Thank god for imperceptive sociopaths who can't think through their malevolent prick-headed deeds. Being asked to write that letter pretty much saved my ass.
I'll try to post again tomorrow and hopefully I can wrap up this topic.

Burn Out! Hitting the Reset Button

Well, the struggles of this month have continued for me. I just had about a 14BI downswing over about 10k hands. It was a pretty steep fall and I can tell you that it hurt like hell.

Of course, I've been there before. Every poker player has. There really isn't anything special about stuff like that happening. If having this bad ass thumb that is hitting my space bar makes you a human, then downswinging makes you a poker player. However, there is a sense of entitlement that I've developed. I feel that I deserve to win. I've worked really hard to get good at the game and I feel like automatic winning should be my reward moving forward. Obviously, this is not right thinking.

The problem now is that I have let things spiral out of control to where I have to take some serious time off from playing in order for the reset button to be pushed.

I allowed myself to have thoughts that I knew would eventually lead to me having issues with tilt.

I allowed myself to say things that I knew would lead to me having issues with tilt.

I allowed myself to stop proactively doing things that would decrease my tilt issues.

I allowed myself to play when I wasn't on my A-game, which is, in and of itself, tilt.

(Now, let's be clear, my tilt generally isn't crazy-monkey-I'm gonna spew a stack into this pot-FML sort of tilt. I just tend to be focusing on results and thus not playing my A-game.)

So I've decided to take a hiatus from playing poker. I'm not sure at this point in time whether I will extend that hiatus to coaching and doing videos or not. My first impulse was to not touch poker with a 10-foot rod, but now I think it may be fine to just focus on other areas like blogging, coaching, and doing videos for a little bit. I think I just need to get to the point where I feel like playing poker again. I honestly don't feel like playing at this point in time. I will play it by ear and see if I feel like coaching/doing videos. If I don't feel like doing it then I am going to clear some time out to just hit that reset button.

I wish like hell I had not ignored all the warning signs and just taken some time off and refocused. It would have been much easier to do that then than to do it now. Poker is a tough game and your mind can only take so much. You can condition your mind and be able to play more and more as time goes by, but you have to recognize when enough is enough and to then let it rest.

The Crunchy Cheeto Theorem

As tankers mentioned, this week has been slightly less than stellar...

...

HA! Good one!

Let's be frank. It sucked hairy man-balls. Personally I hit a -13BI-ish downswing in the range of like...6k hands. It was a rather steep fall from grace.

"Pleased to meet you. Hope you guess my name (woo hoo)".

I find that when you are upswinging or downswings you usually aren't playing your best. Sure, both often have a large influence from Lady Luck, but often the mere fact that they are happening causes you to not play your best(and subsequently affects your win-rate, which affects your swings, which affects your play, which affects your win-rate, which..... you get the point).

Let's say you are on an upswing. It's pretty human nature to get a bit of an ego about it.

"I rule. I can just beat these games without an troubles at all"

"I can do this crazy move. I'm threads13 dammit!"

Of course, being human is no excuse to act like one. :) The ultimate result is you change your strategy for the worse.

On the flip side of the coin is the downswing.

"I fail. I fail at life. I fail at everything I try. Please hand me my beer."

"Any move I choose at the poker table will be wrong. I'll just do this random thing differently without any thought whatsoever as to why I'm changing it."

Is there anything good that can come from this? I think so. A downswing always makes me reevaluate and reset my mind. I have a tendency, and most people probably do this, to ebb and flow with doing the right thing. Let's use diet as an obvious example. You star the diet off on Day 1 strong. You eat only great food and you are feeling like a sexy beast. This usually goes on for some random period of time that varies from person to person and then you add in a little bad. Maybe you eat some ice cream. Then the next day you add in some pizza. Then the next thing you know you are sitting with a beer in one hand and a bag of Crunchy Cheetos in another. Once you have the Cheetos in your hand you realize that you've gradually taken a turn for the worse and you need to reset. I dub thee "The Crunchy Cheeto Theorem"

We learn from our mistakes. Falling down is inevitable, Neo, and the only thing we can do is control how hard we mentally fall and far down we go. Playing bad is part of poker. Making mistakes is part of life. Learning from it all and not repeating them is the only thing we have control over.

Crunchy Cheeto Theorem

True Story.

Flushed down the river...

After my nemesis drew to, and hit, the third most unlikely flush in a row on me, taking my stack along with it, I had to admit that this week had not been a good one in Poker House.  Threads started the tumble at the beginning of the week, through no fault of his own that any of us could find.  Then came Superchimp with a hiccupping sort of spiral that looked about to turn around on Thursday but then plummeted forcefully down the other side.  I didn't think that I could do much damage at my stakes and was, in fact, doing quite well before today.  Then the cards and the "chasers" (players who will draw to anything no matter what you tell them you have) conspired to throw me down in the muck as well.  Only one of us escaped the mayhem, and he is thankfully crushing it.  Now, it's bad enough when you are watching your stack populating and repopulating everyone else's while playing alone, but having three out of four poker players living and playing together going through poker hell at the same time...I'm just happy that the war room even survived.  Nothing broken.  Only bits of clutter starting to collect as the general apathy and despondency set in the last couple days.  But that is what Mondays are for right?  Cleaning.  Purging.  Certainly not playing poker.  Just soundly abusing all the losers that raped and pillaged our hard-earned bankrolls.

This brings up an interesting issue: how does one cope with losing in spite of good play?  Poker players refer to the nearly universal resulting rampant rage as "tilt".  Cursing the poker gods.  Fate.  Hating life.  Poker is a lifestyle that will necessarily include the statistical plunges when the large percentages of equity on the first three cards turn into zero by the fifth.  As such, there are countless videos, books, and postings on every poker website out there about how to become "tiltless".  I cannot add much to such a wealth, but I can say how I am learning and striving to deal with it.  First and foremost is pre-emption.  The more in shape your mind and body are, the easier it is to deal with all the crap that is beyond your control.  You remember to stay detached from the cards and just roll with the situation as it unfolds.  And when it unfolds badly, you are hopefully able to look at the series of actions and the information available and judge the quality of your play.  Of course, when you finally get the "mark" (a generally stupendously bad player that has been dying to give you his money) to put all his stack in with you before the community cards even come out and you're sitting on an 80% chance of taking it all and he hits his miracle(s)...well, let's just say that pre-emption is often not enough in and of itself.  So, you're sitting there trying to figure out if there's any way you can hack the poker site to find out just who this fool is and go to his house and let him know exactly what you think of what he just did...and then you force yourself to draw in one, long ragged breath and slowly let it out.  This hopefully stops the red rage from clouding everything and you hopefully make the decision to take another long, slow breath.  Now, if you're me, you find that you still want to break something even after all this lovely breathing in and out.  When this happens, you have to stop.  You sit out all your tables, and you go for a run.  Or do some pushups.  Or play a videogame where you get to smash everything you want.  Maybe all of the above.  You grab one or all of your housemates and show them how badly these idiot poker players abused you.  And then, you start working on the pre-emptive process all over again. 

There is no end to this process obviously.  It is like any practice of the mind and body: every day is a new opportunity to approach perfection.  It won't ever be quite there, and it certainly has not been even close the last couple days.  So, tomorrow the practice continues and tonight the steam is finally and thankfully dissipating. 

Cheers,
Jess (aka hopefleur; aaka tankers)

The nature of the beast.

Wow, a flurry of posts here. Ok, so I was thinking about posting some specific hands. There are, however, plenty of well-read forums for that sort of thing. I don't know what the others are planning but later on I probably will post some hands here. For the moment I think it would be more illuminating to talk a little bit about online poker in general.

If you've ever played poker at a live casino you probably played $1/$2 no-limit hold'em ($200 NL). That means the big blind is 2 bucks, small blind is a dollar, and the maximum buy-in is usually between $200 and $300. A fairly typical hand looks like this:

The first player limps for $2 and a couple guys fold. Somebody raises the pot to $12 and another player, along with one of the blinds and the original limper, call the bet to see the flop. The flop is dealt (we'll not worry about what cards it brings). It's checked to the original raiser who bets $15 into the roughly $45 pot (a few bucks have been dropped for rake at this point). Two players folds and the other calls to see the turn. Again it's checked to the original raiser, who again bets $15, this time into a pot of $70. His opponent calls again. On the river the original raiser yet again bets $15 and his opponent calls. The original raiser flips over his hand and his opponent looks twice at his cards before throwing them in the muck. The final pot is about $100.

Now let's look at a fairly typical $0.25/$0.50 ($50 NL) online hand:

Everyone folds to the button (the last player to act before the blinds) who raises to $1.50. Both blinds fold and the button picks up the blinds worth a total of $0.75.

In short, online games are much tighter and more aggressive than your typical casino or home game. Even at so-called micro stakes like $25 or $50 NL the player pool consists of relatively skilled and experienced players - even some professionals. Blind stealing, re-stealing, bluffing and semi-bluffing -among other things -are important parts of any winning player's strategy. If somebody sits down and starts playing like a typical live player (limping in to see flops, betting much less than the pot, calling a lot of bets, etc.), well she sticks out like a sore thumb. At one point in the movie Rounders Matt Damon's character says something to the effect of, "If you can't spot the sucker during your first half-hour at the table, you are the sucker." The truth is, in an online game, if a sucker sits down everyone else knows it after two or three hands.

So why, you might ask, would poker professionals choose to play online instead of live? Well there are a lot of reasons. (I'm a gonna make a list 'cause I'm a too lazy to write this into a coherent paragraph).

1. Convenience. Most parts of the country do not have live card rooms within driving distance.
2. The rake. Live card rooms typically rake 10% of the pot and you usually tip the dealer when you win one. Online poker rooms have less overhead and more tables, so they can afford to rake the pot much less (typically about 5%). And of course here is no dealer to tip. Therefore to have the same win-rate online, you don't need to outplay your opponents by the same margin.
3. Multi-tabling. This is the big one. More tables mean more hands, and more hands mean more profit. Most if not all online pros play several tables at the same time. In this household, I'd guess that most of us average 8-12. I know of several players who do 24 at the same time. In a typical hour I play over 300 hands. Contrast that with a typical live game where I would guess 30 hands an hour is normal.

So I think that pretty much sums up my thoughts on the subject. Peace and goodwill to you and yours.

eeeeeeeeeee

Coming down off a rocket

Well, I finally did it guys. Here's my first post. The month's been better to me than it will normally be, as I am running well ahead of my expected earnings for the amount I've played thus far, which is a wopping.... wait for it, wait for it.... 30 hours this month. I mean, I didn't have time to play through most of the first week, but I was hoping to have a good 40-50 hours by now. Anyway, it's not really about the hours, it's more about the hands. In order for us to be super comfortable (as in less risk of losing all of our bankroll than being inside a house and getting struck directly by lightning during a storm), I need to get in 60k hands a month. I have 13k so far. That's not gonna cut it. At least not until Jesper starts beating the 50NL (which is the .25/.50 blinds game where the max buy-in is 50 dollars). Right now she is beating the 25NL, which is good because it's pretty hard for a beginning serious player to beat on a regular basis. And to be honest I thought she'd have a few more problems than what she is having now.
The swings in NL are brutal, particularly when you have to survive on your winnings. Most of the time when you get allin for your whole buyin against another player, you're hoping to be between a 65% and 75% favorite. Those aren't the only times I get my money in either, and what's worse is sometimes against some of the better players, I have to stick 75 dollars in to exploit an edge worth only a junior bacon cheeseburger. That's where a good chunk of the variance comes in. Still, even without those moments, all the times that your opponent wins after getting in with a 30% chance to scoop the pot, those can start running back to back pretty easily.
This month is the first time we have had to depend on our bankroll to live on, and I thought it would be fucking with Jesper more. I personally know that we're practically never busting out. I've used Kelly's formula on my winrate, bankroll and monthly expenditures several times by now and know how to apply it to Risk-of-Ruin investment scenarios. But she's not that familiar with it, at least not right now. Apparently she trusts my mathematical understanding though, because she's developing steadily and learning to really exploit players and use adaptive, player-tailored strategies. She's not complaining much about the bad hands. And she knows when she's right, even when the results end up being not in her favor.
I had been planning to devote most of my efforts to trying to move myself up from the 100NL to the 200, but at this point it seems pretty obvious that spending more time helping her move up to the 100NL will be a lot more fruitful. For one, I think it can be done a little more quickly. Even if it took the same amount of time, her winnings at the 100NL will nearly double our earnings. There is absolutely no way that can be true of my earnings if I move to the 200NL. Best case scenario, I'll win maybe 50% more up at the 200NL. The play is tougher and I'll be basically paying tuition (tuition is just a portion of your potential winrate which you lose as you learn to beat tougher players) pretty heavily for months. On the other hand, heavy tuition for Jesper, I can honestly say, will probably only take maybe 2 months tops to pay for at the 100NL. I think she'll be taking some shots for us by May. That is a bit faster than I envisioned being comfortably moved up to the 200NL. So for now I'll just keep us cruising by crushing the 100NL and let us grow at a bit slower but much more stable rate for the next 3 months or so. In the long run, this is definitely the play to maximize profits; besides, I really wouldn't expect to make a whole lot more by playing a lot of 200NL tables before May. Who knows, we could both be at the 200NL by December. Then we wave bye-bye to my student loans, and our wallets will belong mostly to us again.

Despite the fact that I'm running amazingly hot with the cards this month, I'm experiencing a short-term deficit in my playing ability: I quit caffeine. Again. No seriously this time. I'm still having some irritability issues ("This guy just tried to bluff me!") since I quit last tuesday (strange how the withdrawal effects seem to last longer and longer every time I quit). Also, I can't play as many tables as I'm used to. I can usually deal with 12-16 tables up for an hour or so, but lately I've only felt comfortable with 10. This is okay, but it means that I'll either have to learn how to play more tables again, without caffeine, and/or I'll have to play more hours. Right now I'll just have to put in 6-8 hours everyday until I can get the multi-tasking skills back. I don't mind working the same hours as the rest of the world for a month or two. However, I'm not gonna put up with 8 hour grinds 5 days a week for the rest of my life. Six hours at the tables is plenty, and when you're playing 10-15 tables it's actually a little tougher than most mentally-taxing jobs that you work for 8 or more hours. The bottom line is, when I spend 1-2 hours away from the table everyday taking notes on opponents and working on my game, that's gotta be enough altogether. I do NOT want poker to be my whole world, otherwise it defeats it's own purpose in my life.
More on that in the next post.

The Struggles of Working Together

It isn't necessarily all peas and carrots when four people are all playing a high stress game in the same room.

Dude 1: "This motherfucker just tried to bluff me!"

Dude 2: "Did you call?"

Dude 1: "Fuck yeah I did!"

There are a ton of perks to all us living and working in the same area. Of course, nothing is ever perfect. There are also distractions and it is easy to allow yourself to create distractions yourself.

Me: "Oh look at what this dude just called down with!!!"

At this point in time not only have I distracted everyone else in the room, but I've also distracted myself. There are more hands coming and going and each one of them is not getting my undivided attention. I'm on tilt. I'm certainly missing a few (at least a few) plays. I'm not accurately assigning ranges as well as I could be if I were totally focused thus my win-rate has temporarily dropped.

The first week in the house was definitely a feeling out period. We all had to figure out exactly what we have to do to make things fly. It's not as simple as "Oh, let's just get in the room and grind". I know that I personally have new skills I have to develop. I have to learn to shut my mouth. I have to learn to focus more intensely and use my refocus routine more religiously. I can't go banging shit around because that is going to affect everyone else's earn. I can't get overly excited about a hand. It's easier to get more excited when in a group because you want to show your friends what neat thing you did. That can wait. There will be time for that later. All there is now is this hand... this moment.

I do believe that the end result of figuring this out will lead to a higher overall win. There's not a doubt in my mind about that. I do have to work on some new skills now, but I will be a stronger player for it in the end.

Defending your hand...

We may only be a few days into this venture, but it seems pretty clear already that this is going to be a great situation for all of us.  We are all getting along fabulously (besides the minor expected disputes over the superbowl yesterday of course).  The house is so large that we are certain to lose some percentage of our belongings in the countless cubbie holes everywhere in the intricacies that used to be standard in homes.  Every day, we spend upwards of an hour or two studying each other's hands or doing sweat sessions (one person in the "hot seat" and the other three watching and critiquing and offering advice).  It is probably easiest to tell the advantage of all this in a game such as mine that has only room to improve, but it seems like all of us are thriving on the healthy peer pressure.  The hours are full but extremely rewarding.

Perhaps these next thoughts are also telling of someone new to the game, but I imagine that anyone who approaches poker as a career must (or at least should) wrestle with the implications of the lifestyle and career.  Probably the easiest concern for me to deal with personally, but which has proven extremely difficult to explain to friends and family, is the idea that poker is just gambling.  The details of game theory are certainly too cumbersome for this venue, but there is overwhelming anecdotal and mathematical proof that this is a game that can be beaten.  It requires constant vigilance in studying the mistakes of opponents and the equity of each situation, but it definitely can be done. 

Beyond this, there is the general discomfort with the idea of trying to exploit the weaknesses of other human beings.  From the perspective of my computer screen, I see this represented as a series of statistics detailing the mathematical weaknesses of opponents who I know nothing more about than their screen name and whatever picture they choose to represent themselves.  It is terribly easy to forget that there is a human behind each digital profile, with only sporadic and generally unhelpful rants that pop up in the chat box between two players in dispute (this is almost universally true of the chat in online poker by the way).  Most online poker players have the exacerbating quality of being in a socially isolated setting as they play and perhaps even when they are away from their computers.  Online poker players are traditionally a fairly antisocial group, either by choice, habit, or necessity.  For all of these reasons, I find myself comforted and thrilled to be in a poker community of sorts in which I am constantly reminded of the "human factor". 

Furthermore, I am coming from several institutional situations that give me a different perspective about the general exploitive nature of poker.  First of all, there is no confusion among the people who come to the table and put their money on the line.  The one and only purpose of the game is to attempt to take each other's money and that is known by absolutely every player, regardless of skill level.  On the other hand, nearly every economic experience I have had in this society has been carefully shrouded to give the appearance of fairness and equity when it is always attempts to get maximum profit.  This is true whether you are buying a car, renting an apartment, getting an education, or laboring for an institution.  The transparency of poker is simply refreshing.  There is no product or consumer.  There are only rivals competing in a virtually unbiased system.  The rules are simple and the tools are available to anyone that cares to reach for them.  Now, I understand that there is a small portion of this population plagued by addiction, and though this is troublesome, it is rare as far as I can tell.  The majority of people that I encounter play for the enjoyment of the game and could care less if they lose the fifty dollars they put online for a weekend of play.  Perhaps I will find the need to return to this concern as I reach higher stakes, but I am content for now to hone my competetive edge knowing that each of my opponents has the same opportunity and perogative. 

Finally, it seems to me that all of us would take the opportunity to claim personal freedom if it was presented as a possibility.  It is pretty universally true that people only work so that they may afford a certain way of life and support the basic necessities of self and family.  At the end of a lifetime of this, a lucky portion of the workforce is finally able to retire and perhaps pursue personal interests that have been on the backburner for decades (if health and means allow).  There is often nothing noble about the work itself (though anything may be done nobly of course), but choosing not to participate in this normal way of life is seen as highly suspect.  Generally, the jobless by choice are degenerates and possibly even criminals.  As such, I will not take offense to the general response I have received of suspicion when I say what we are choosing to do for a living.  That said, I also find no need to apologize for choosing to take the opportunity to live now as I use intellectual skills to earn money in a non-traditional way.  I have given more than enough of my time and energy to a system that has given so very little in return, and I have no guilt in walking away from that system.  In this lifestyle, I am allowed to explore creative pursuits with the flexibility it affords.  I may also choose the best ways I may give back to my community as I will no longer be seeking anything in return for time or investment.  These are the ideals that are very real and that make the stigma I find attached to poker easy to accept. 

Hopefully, these thoughts might find use for someone other than just my own clarification.  I have presented probably an oversimplified rendition of the complexity that is self-employment and the fantastically challenging game of poker, but have tried to address the most common problems I have encountered as we have begun this career.

Cheers,
Jess

I'm not the first guy to drop out of law school to pursue a poker career. Matt Damon did it. So did a relatively well-known blogger called LSD (law-school-dropout). I might, however, be the most foolhardy. I'd say I've been a slightly more than marginal winner at small stakes games like 25 and 50NL for several years. Good, but hardly enough for most folks to justify such a move. Well I was pretty much hating life in law school - and steadily putting in more hands each month as my interest in the law waned. When the chance to be a "hammered quad" came up over winter break - well, there was just no way I was going back for more hell. So there, I done justified it.

In any case we've all been in the house now for a few days and finally getting some grinding done. It's a great setup and we're all feeling pretty good about our respective games taking off in the coming months. It already seems clear that having a house-full of poker players is extremely beneficial - of course that is especially true for the relative novices like myself. Here's hoping this is the starting point of lifelong poker adventures.

The first day of the lease

Today was the first day of the lease on the new place. I began the day by meeting with the lady from the real estate company to get the keys, hand her two months worth of rent (because since we are just(nested parenthesis: welcome to the Midwest!) online poker players, and thus can't prove our incomes in conventional ways, landlords are always skeptical about our ability to pay the rent), and meet up with the people who are going to turn on our water, electricity, gas, and cable. Also, once I got the water turned on the real estate company was gong to send out people to de-winterize the place. After that the plan was to spend the rest of the day cleaning the place up a little. Carpet cleaning... sweep and mop... the usual. Sounds easy? Think again.

The idea was just to schedule them all for today and get them all set up. Unfortunately, the house has been winterized so the pipes are all cold and what have you. So, since the heat wasn't turned on, the water couldn't be turned on... and since the water couldn't be turned on the place couldn't be de-winterized. Now that has all been pushed back to tomorrow when I'm going to be running all over the heartland of America to get my stuff that is stored in random spots in one truck and unload said truck. So, it's going to be an obstacle to make sure that somebody is at the place to let people in for me tomorrow. Also, the cable dude comes out and says he has to drill holes to install the cable and since I didn't have written consent from my landlord that he could do that we had to reschedule that for a few days down the road. We all are planning on moving in over this time so hopefully we will be occupied enough with moving in that our lack of cable won't become an issue. During this time Tom and Jess call to let me know that A) they are bringing a dog (yay puppy) and B) their car is having issues(nay troubles). Woo! Eventful!

Moving right along...

My mom and I brought some water over from her place and used that to put in the carpet cleaner. So the carpets did get cleaned!

Good guys: 2

Bad guys: 3

While cleaning the house I did happen to come a cross a random playing card just chilling out in a cabinet. Only one card was there. The card? The deuce of hearts. I'm a coach at DeucesCracked.com. I figure it's a sign that there was a deuce, and only a deuce, just chillin' in the house. Here's to hoping our deuces don't get cracked!