Today was my last day grinding online poker before I leave for a 12-night stay in the U.S. on Friday. There have been a lot of really great positives for me in Playa, but financial success has not been one of them. I have about half of the liquid net worth that I did when I arrived here over two months ago. I’ve been running decently badly, or to put it a better way, I haven’t been running really hot. Unfortunately, the approach I have to online poker requires that I run really hot in order to show any type of short-term success. It’s not like I’m dutifully grinding cash games 12 hours a day a la Kristen Bickell. I’m playing multi-table tournaments with an average field-size of 4,500 just two days a week. I estimate I’ve played around 400 tournaments in the time that I’ve been here. That might seem like a lot, but as any multi-table tournament player can tell you, it’s nothing. It’s perfectly within the range of expected outcomes that I could have failed to show a profit playing online thus far in Mexico. And unfortunately, that’s been the case.

So as I’m walking Scout on the beach feeling dejected from another disappointing Sunday grind (and it was perhaps the most disappointing one since I’ve been here), I start feeling a little tension in my chest. It wasn’t like a heart attack or anything, more like a sensation of resistance. I take a few more steps, and the feeling gets even stronger. It’s was like someone was pulling on my shirt from behind. But everywhere I looked, there was nothing to see. A couple more steps and I figured it out: I had walked into a fisherman’s line. About twenty feet behind me and positioned further away from the shoreline was a guy fishing. I was so caught up in breaking down the day of poker in my mind that I hadn’t noticed him.

I reversed course to untangle myself from the line and apologize to the man for not seeing him. As seems typical of the Mexican people, he was perfectly polite about it and smiled to let me know it was all good.

As I walked away, I noticed his fishing apparatus was a bit out of the ordinary. He was using just an empty plastic bottle with fishing line wrapped around it. To reel in the line, he was just repeatedly wrapping it around the bottle with his hand. No turn crank. No heavy action spinning reel. Just a plastic bottle and a piece of string.

It’s funny how life will sometimes whack you upside the head with a sense of perspective. Here I am walking along feeling sorry for myself because I lost more money playing a game on my computer from the comfort of my furnished beach condo and this guy is out at midnight with a bottle and a piece of string just hoping to catch some food.

Outside of feeling bad about having disrupted his fishing session, I’m glad I walked into his line. It was just what I needed at that moment. I spent the rest of the walk thinking about how good my life is and how absurdly lucky I am. My biggest problem in life is a dwindling bankroll for an online game I play that has enabled me to live on a tropical beach. Please don’t spare any tears for me.

I’ll be heading back to the U.S. in a few days with quite a bit less money than I had when I got into this country. And yet, the ten-week stint here feels basically like a success. The absence of good fortune in the online poker games can’t take away from the refreshing focus and balance I have cultivated in this beach village.

The nice thing about having very few possessions is that it’s really not a big deal at all for me to move to another furnished vacation rental here. It’s really just a matter of packing up a couple of suitcases, grabbing my dog, and getting in a taxi. I have decided I’ll be doing just that. Things have been going fairly well for me here. It’s kind of ironic that I had to come to a Mexican beach vacation destination to find some stability and discipline in life. But after two months in Playa, I feel that the move has basically been a successful one thus far.

There are ways in which it could be easy for me to say that things haven’t gone well here. Financially, I’m only barely staying afloat. I have had a couple of decent scores in MTTs in the past few weeks to keep my head above water a while longer. My goal here is not to “just” be getting by, I would very much like to have some real, legitimate monetary success here and establish a much greater amount of financial security than I currently have. But accumulating money can be a slow process. Given the relative turmoil I felt like my life was in when I moved here, I can accept that the first couple of months have been “just okay” and not “great” from a financial standpoint.

I feel really good about some adjustments I’ve made to my poker game here and am confident that with a little luck and more work, there are financial breakthroughs that lie ahead for me. Then again, there is also the very real possibility of finding myself stuck in Mexico completely broke. Strangely enough, this daunting possibility does not keep me up at night as much as one might think it would. I almost have a zen-like peace with my situation here and a sense of faith that it will just work itself out somehow. Maybe that disposition is warranted, or maybe it’s just a defense mechanism to shield me from the terrifying prospect of being a broke, late-20s guy isolated in Mexico with no great answers about what to do with his life next.

I attribute my stable disposition amid the unstable nature of my life right now to a couple of things. First, I am doing a really good job of controlling the things I can actually control. I’ve been thinking a lot about how much of our lives are completely out of our control. As a poker player, this is hard to ignore. I can’t control Michael Carroll hitting a 3-outter against me for $500,000 in equity or any other of a number of brutal financial swings delivered by the turn of a playing card. All you can do as a poker player is to make the best decisions possible and accept that the outcome might not always be favorable.

There is so much about everyone’s lives, not just poker players, that are completely out of our control. You can’t control for natural disasters, freak accidents, the economy, or a great number of other things that determine the quality of your life. People don’t even really think about the fact that every single day you and your loved ones go to sleep in one piece is a tiny miracle. Every day, there are hundreds of people around the world who wake up thinking it will be just another day but never live to see the end of it. I’m not trying to be gratuitously morbid or dramatic here, I’m just pointing out the importance of realizing that so much of our highs and lows in life can be attributed to things outside of our abilities to control. The human life span is absurdly high-variance. I think it’s important to feel a sense of humility and gratitude for however good we have things and not fall into the trap of crediting oneself too much from an egotistical standpoint. So much of who we are was determined by random things we had very little control over.

There are really only a couple of things in life that we have more or less complete control over. One is our bodies. Assuming you are an able-bodied person to begin with, you basically have complete control over your weight and fitness level. I have been embracing this power of control and have been on a great diet and exercise routine in the two months since I’ve been here. It has really helped a lot with staying sane at a point in my life where it could be rather easy to “lose it”. I feel like no matter how chaotic or unsavory aspects of my life that are somewhat out of my control are, at the very least I should be able to manage looking good.

I’ve cut back on drinking immensely. I won’t lie, like basically anyone who has ever attended a four-year university, I like to drink. But outside of the temporary highs of imbibing are a lot of horrible downsides. Drinking is just downright terrible for mental and physical health. I think it should be viewed as something to do on a very rare occasion, like a treat to one’s self every once in a while as a reward for working hard and staying disciplined. Unfortunately, for a lot of people, myself included for several years, it gets used far more than this. It’s sort of amazing how much better one can feel when they stop putting bad things into their body and exercise rigorously on a daily basis. I feel like I’m just getting started and am both excited and curious to see how far I can push the machine that is my body. We all have one and it’s exciting to test its capabilities.

Another thing we have some degree of control over is the money we spend. I’ve been living somewhat like a pauper since arriving in Playa. Bad spending habits are almost a cornerstone to the poker player lifestyle. But I’m tired of splurging on an excessive lifestyle. It can be fun for a while, but at the end of the day I would like to eventually find my way to a place of financial stability and security before I get so old that my money-making potential has declined significantly. I think there’s a lot of truth to the saying, “youth is wasted on the young.” I feel like I’ve reached an important stage of my life where I am both old enough to understand that I’m not going to live forever and that energy is a finite resource yet young enough to still have plenty of energy and capability for seeking abundant wealth. I don’t feel like I need tens of millions to be satisfied. That just seems kind of extreme. But a few hundred thousand to take off the pressure of feeling like I must constantly be generating some type of a cash flow would be pretty awesome. Ironically, I think people are much more capable of generating great wealth when they are not burdened with the pressures of needing money.

In the interest of living more frugally, the rent for my next apartment will be about 30% less than my current dwelling. Thankfully, I’m not really giving up a whole lot to make this cut; I’m just getting ripped off a little in my current pad. Since moving here and learning a few things about Playa rent prices, I’ve realized that I’m being charged the premium, retail price for my current unit. I could probably be paying 15-20% less for living in this exact place, and even less when you factor in all of the money I lose on transactions and currency conversions to settle with my landlord. Getting nickel and dimed every time you want to move a dollar in one account to a peso in another is definitely one of the major lackluster aspects of the poker exile lifestyle, but this entry is getting long so I’ll save that whining for another day.

In conclusion, I’ve decided to stay in Playa a while longer, at least into the early part of 2012. I’m not certain what the future holds, but things are going well enough for me here at the present time that I want to stick around until no longer doing so makes more sense.

——

If you’re stuck in the U.S. wishing you could still grind online, pay a visit to DraftDay, a daily fantasy sports website started by the CardRunners people. I might make a buck if you click that link and become a customer of their site, so if you don’t want that to happen, just enter DraftDay.com directly in your browser.

1. Fewer tables

I started registering for fewer events on Sundays. Since I’m also trying to give a pittance of attention to what’s happening with NFL action on Sundays, I have to be careful about registering for too many events. I noticed that when I have 12+ tables running, I start to feel overwhelmed and frustrated. I feel like the action happens so quickly that I have to make really hasty decisions. So what happens is I start folding like a maniac and passing up on marginal +EV situations just so I don’t have to deal with making more complicated decisions while I have a bunch of tables running. Basically, I feel much better off overall just playing 8-10 tables and playing them well than trying to play every tournament under the sun. I stopped registering for the least interesting ~20% or so of tournaments that I had been registering for previously. The adjustment has made the experience of grinding a lot more pleasurable overall, and I don’t think I had to give up much EV to do it. If anything, I might have gained a little EV.

2. Less urgency with 15 bb stack

I used to treat a 15 big blind stack about like I’d treat a 10 big blind stack. In other words, if it would fold to me in the cut-off and I had Queen-Ten offsuit, it didn’t matter if I had 10 or 15 big blinds, I was just going to shove that hand. Now, I’m starting to treat the two stacks a bit differently. I have a greater willingness to raise-fold with a stack of 15 big blinds. Most of the structures in online tournaments are so good these days that you really don’t need the huge sense of urgency with a 15 big blind stack like you used to back in 2005 or whatever. Over the years, open-shoving a 15 big blind stack has gradually become less and less of a +EV move due to players understanding that they can call with more than just the top 5% of hands. I’m adjusting by being a little more patient with this stack and realizing that I don’t need to be jamming it in there with Ace-Six suited in middle position. I can just fold and hope for a better spot. Hopefully this increasing willingness to be patient will lead to more frequent deep runs.

3. Three-betting more

Three-betting is really awesome when the stacks are deep. I feel like I missed out on a lot of EV over the years by being too much of a nit when it comes to three-betting. I now three-bet all the time in the early stages of the tournament with hands where I have that, “uhh… what should I do?!” moment with. Now, my answer is just, “three-bet!” Of course, I’m three-betting the premium hands too for value. A good example would be during like 15/30 in an event where the stacks are 3,000. Say someone in middle position opens to 90 and I have King-Queen suited in the cut-off. Years ago, I would have just flat-called here almost always, but now I’d probably re-raise to something like 240. I’ve been three-betting just as frequently in the later stages of the tournament provided the stacks are like 40 big blinds or higher. I think you need to narrow your three-betting range a lot when the stacks are smaller than this.

4. More patience at final tables

I think I’ve spewed a lot of EV over the years by playing too impatiently at final tables. I used to get this mentality at the final table where I felt like there was some huge urgency to win and that I need to do it rightnow. This lead to trying to do too much and spewing off chips in certain spots. Now, I’m playing much more relaxed at final tables and picking spots more wisely. Again, the structure is so good in most online tournaments now that when you reach the final table you can expect the event to still be another couple of hours away from completion. There’s really no rush. I’ve found that if I just take my time and let the action unfold at its natural pace that I’ll be just fine. There’s no sense in trying to rush things.

5. Fewer cash games

When I moved to Mexico, I envisioned that I would grind cash games for ~20 hours or so per week. In the past three weeks, I think I’ve played a total of about 2 hours of cash games. Basically, I hate cash games. They’re boring and a total grind. I don’t like sitting down for a session without there being a possibility that I can win at least $5k on the day. I’m the first to admit that I’m an action junkie. I can’t handle the boredom of grinding cash games. They’re not for me. I get too impatient and try to force the action which leads to spewing EV. I think the only way I could really be a cash-game grinder is if I had some sick dual-monitor set-up where I could play 16 tables at once and just be a total rakeback whore folding mostly at every table. At least with that many tables going, there’s enough action at all times to cut down on the cash game boredom factor. Another issue here is that I’m just not that good at cash games (read: poker). I think I play as well as anyone on the 95% of decisions that are the easiest, but for those 5% of decisions that are the hardest, I think really strong, experienced players have a pretty big edge over me in a deep-stacked cash game setting. Most online cash games are stacked with experienced grinders nowadays. I guess between feeling like I don’t have a huge edge and generally being bored with them, I’d rather just do something else with my time.

I spent the first few days in Playa del Carmen exploring the area and going through the requirements needed to once again access the game my government took away in April. That mostly involved setting up an account with a Mexican bank and faxing documentation to online poker rooms that proves I have indeed relocated out of the U.S. It wasn’t a completely smooth process, but I got it done and have been back playing online poker for about three weeks now.

My results thus far haven’t done much in the way of reassuring me that I made the right decision in moving to Mexicio. I feel that I’ve been playing okay (not great) and haven’t had enough good fortune to get away with some of the subpar decisions I’ve made.

There’s really very little room for error when trying to succeed as a professional poker player. You have to play great and you have to play great all the time. Those who manage to do this can earn a fantastic income playing a game online from the comfort of their own homes. But for everyone who succeeds, there are dozens who try and fail. Every bad decision you make cancels out one of the good decisions you made. In order to get ahead, you really can’t afford to make a bad decision terribly often. It’s about accumulating the fruits of all of the good decisions without tainting them with poor ones.

Something I need to work on harder is being able to re-evaluate my hand and not being too attached to the thought that I have a good hand. I’ll share a story of how I gave away all of my chips in a $55 buy-in tournament the other day that perfectly captures what I’m talking about.

With a stack of around 5k and blinds at 75/150, I made a standard raise in late position to 375 with Ace-Queen. The player in the big blind, who barely had me covered, called. The flop was Queen-Seven-Three. I love my hand, obviously. He checked and I bet 450. He called. The turn was an Eight. He checked again. This time I bet 950. I was met with a raise to 2,000. Giving the situation little thought, I drug the bar all the way to “all-in” and clicked the button. He immediately called and I was drawing dead versus pocket Eights.

One way in which I need to improve is to realize that when he raises me on the turn there, it’s usually almost never with a hand that I am beating. My bet on the turn showed a lot of strength. He’s almost never committing ~40% of his stack on a pure bluff in the face of apparent strength. When I shoved, I knew he would call, and when he called, I knew he’d show me a set. I need to be more aware of these intuitions and sometimes lay down a hand that I was in love with at a previous point in the hand. You won’t make it very far as a poker player if you can’t allow yourself to change your mind about a hand.

Thankfully, I’ve been having quite a bit of success playing the daily fantasy sports games at DraftDay and also benefitted from running hotter than the sun on a series of sports bets with a friend, so the bleeding I’ve experienced at the poker tables has been somewhat mitigated in other areas. It’s not too late for me to turn things around before being faced with the unsavory task of finding an additional income stream. Becoming a beach bum is not even an option for me as I’d need about $30 a day in sunscreen just to avoid getting skin cancer.

In case losing my girlfriend and a nice chunk of my liquid net worth in 3 weeks wasn’t enough, mother nature decided to send a hurricane towards Playa. As I write this, Scout and I are on a bus to Merida, about a 5 hour drive across the Yucatan, in order to escape the possible carnage that Rina may inflict on the Riveria Maya area.

A few poker players I know made the decision to stay in Playa and ride out the storm even going so far as to cite that it “sounds cool”. Having been through Ike in 2008 while living in Houston, I know that there is little “cool” about a hurricane. Sure, the storm is thrilling for a little while, but when you realize all of the damage the high winds cause and that your first-world ameninties have been striped for as long as it takes the powers that be to repair them, it made more sense to me to get out of dodge for a few days. This is easy to do when you own no property or possessions that need safeguarded. Hopefully the storm turns out to be nothing and I’m just out a few hundred dollars in expenses for checking out a new city for a couple of days.

The news of a hurricane coming to Playa seemed to fit perfectly with the present state of my emotions and finances. But I’m working hard at staying positive and avoiding any self-destructive behavior. I’ve learned that it’s important to have hope and faith that you’ll come out on the other side in tact and better off than you were before. Sometimes hope is all you’ve got.

I spent most of the afternoon in the waiting room of an cargo company in Cancun that I hired to process the importation of my dog, Scout, who rode in the undercarriage on the same flight as myself. Once the dog was put on the plane, he was considered a piece of cargo as far as the Mexican government is concerned. With that being the case, I needed a broker to handle the importation of the cargo. I was paying them extra (about $300 extra to be precise) for expedited service so that I could get Scout back from customs the same day I arrived. I was unsettled at the notion of him being stored in a non-air conditioned warehouse in his crate overnight presumably without food or water. Unfortunately, that possibility turned to reality when an error with the custom’s computer network prohibited them from processing Scout’s same-day release.

Discouraged, and feeling generally upset at the uncertainty of the dog’s fate and situation, I took the 45 minute cab ride to Playa and met with my realtor and landlord who gave me the keys to the condo I’m staying in here. There’s an issue with one of the air conditioner units here, so it’s been rather hot in the living room and kitchen area, but otherwise I like the place a lot. There’s a huge, spacious balcony and the location seems great.

I crashed pretty hard last night after having been awake for 36 hours; I was unable to sleep after a long day of clearing out my apartment in Austin and had to leave ridiculously early to catch a flight from Houston to Cancun.

I slept like I was dead for 11 hours. After waking up, I made the 5 minute walk to the beach. It’ll be hard, but somehow I feel like I’ll figure out a way to survive living a stone’s throw from this:

I took a taxi back to Cancun where I was told to arrive around noon when hopefully Scout would be processed through customs and released to me. I was pretty nervous to start the day; another long day of waiting and being told they’re unable to release the dog would have been exponentially worse than it was on the day I arrived. I could accept one night of him being stored in a Mexican warehouse if I had to, but multiple nights and I probably would have been panicking and trying to figure out a way to get him out of there even if it meant having to fly back to the U.S.

Upon arriving at the customs broker’s office, I was told that the dog was being delivered within the next five minutes. I can’t even describe how relieved and happy I was for that to be the first thing I heard when I walked into the office.

Sure enough, Scout was delivered in a cargo truck about five minutes later. He had been in his crate for 30 hours (as evidenced by the plastic ties still being in place that were put on in Houston to hold the door locked). When I let him out, he ran back and forth on the sidewalk in front of the broker’s office about 5-6 times smiling from ear to ear. I think he was just so happy to be out of that crate that all he wanted to do was run. I was so happy for him and relieved to get him back; having him fly here with me and processing him through customs has been the most stressful part of this move. When I offered him some water, he drank about 20 ounces without pause. That was by far the most water I’ve ever seen him drink which leads me to believe he went without through the night. Not an ideal situation, but he seems no worse for the wear and is settling in to the new place nicely.

I spent the remainder of the afternoon napping and picking up some necessities from a nearby store called “Mega”. It’s somewhat similar to a Wal-Mart only with lots of peculiar differences. For example, chicken is just stored on ice out in the open rather than being encased in packaging behind a meat counter. I already miss my nice, yuppy organic grocery stores in the U.S., but I’ll learn to make do here.

This evening, I went with my realtor to a really good Venezuelan restaurant just three blocks from my place. One pleasant surprise of Playa so far has been the restaurant selection. I guess I had assumed it’d be mostly just Mexican cuisine, but Playa is a very international city. Many people from all over the world have relocated here which is evident from the dining choices; in what little time I’ve spent walking around the city, I’ve seen a steak and lobster place, a Mediterranean place, the Venezuelan place I ate at tonight, and a Spanish tapas place. A lot of the restaurants and cafes are open-air with outdoor seating. In this way, it reminds me a little of Paris.

I think I’m really going to enjoy living here. So far, I have almost no complaints and, like most poker players, I’m usually pretty good at finding things to complain about.

Tomorrow, I am going to start the process of getting back up-and-running online by opening a bank account. I’m hoping to be back on Stars by a week from this Sunday, but I’m also not too panicked about it; I’ll get back on in due time I’m sure. In the meantime, I want to enjoy the area and maybe soak in some sun. But not too much. Sun is ginger kryptonite.

——

If you haven’t heard by now, CardRunners founders Taylor Caby and Andrew Wiggins recently launched a new, legal daily fantasy sports website called DraftDay where you can test your fantasy sports skills for real-money prizes. I was excited when Taylor asked me to contribute to the site as a blogger since real-money fantasy sports is pretty much right up my alley. I had a good weekend last weekend taking 3rd and 4th in their multi-entry $5 NFL league that had ~100 entrants. I’m looking forward to sweating more short-term fantasy sports line-ups as the site’s player volume continues to grow. Here is the first blog I wrote for Draft Day, A Poker Player’s Take on Daily Fantasy Sports. If you have even the slightest interest in fantasy sports, check out that blog and read the part about the ‘Perfect Lineup’ promotion they’re doing which is a really cool, free way to take a shot at winning $1,000,000 by predicting the highest scoring players at every position in any given week during the NFL season.

After Black Friday, the day on which the U.S. Department of Justice effectively shut down online poker, I told WSJ reporter Alexandra Berzon that I would not relocate to another country for the sake of playing online poker. At the time, I meant it. I just didn’t see a scenario in which I would actually pick up my life and move it to another country just for poker.

But life has a funny way of not always going exactly how you predict it will. After a few months, I realized I missed poker more than I thought I would. In July, I made my second deep run at the WSOP Main Event. That served as an invigorating reminder that I love the game of poker and am pretty damn good at it.

Around this same time, my girlfriend made the tough decision of relocating back to New York to continue her career as an attorney after mostly failing to establish herself in Texas. Faced with one of the toughest decisions of my life, I decided not to relocate there at this time with her. It was a very hard decision because, emotionally, I am still very much invested in her and our relationship. But logically, I see problems with my financial and lifestyle picture in New York and don’t feel ready to take that much of a plunge into an overall situation that doesn’t seem to make sense for me.

When she moved back to New York, I figured I would just live in Austin for a while and even claimed I would on this blog less than a month ago. I’ve been living here on a month-to-month arrangement with my apartment complex. Just a day after committing to stay here through September, I received an email stating that my unit was leased out to someone effective on the first of October. This totally threw a wrench into my plans. At the time, I was very annoyed. But looking back, it almost seems like a stroke of fate to trigger the inertia for me to make a big change in life.

I began exploring possibilities for where I might live. Around this time, Pocket 5’s released a great guide for helping American online pros relocate outside of the country, and my friend Shane, with plans to move to Canada, suggested that I go to Mexico. Both the Pocket 5s service and Shane’s suggestion motivated me to give casual thought to relocating, so I started tentatively exploring the possibility of moving to Playa del Carmen, Mexico, where I had heard of a couple of other American poker refugees were going, Jon Aguiar, BlueFirePoker.com instructor Chip Ferguson, and Shaun Deeb.

At first, I put little seriousness into what seemed like a longshot idea. The slightest con such as a complicated visa system or reports that the area is less than very safe would have put an abrupt halt to the notion. But every question I had was met with an acceptable answer. It’s easy as pie for Americans to effectively relocate to Mexico; you can stay for 6 months on a visa that can be renewed automatically just by leaving the country and coming back in. The Playa del Carmen area, known for it’s large influx of tourism, is reportedly as safe as it gets in Mexico.

Some other positives that stand out to me include:

• The chance to live somewhere outside of American society for a while.
• Transporting my dog there is safe and not too big of a deal (it will cost about $900 overall, and the dog will be fine).
• Low overall expenses (I’ll pay $900/month for a one bedroom condo and won’t need a car as taxi rides from one end of the city to the other are $4).
• There’s a studio for the type of yoga I enjoy practicing in Playa del Carmen.
• Proximity to beach (I’ll be a 500 yard walk away).

A key business liquidation was the final thing I needed to say, alright, let’s do this. How many times in life will I get a chance to just pick up and move to another country to make money playing a game on the Internet? I feel like if I don’t take this shot, I’ll always regret it. And so I’m doing it.

I’m moving to Playa del Carmen, Mexico at the end of this month.

To get around this conundrum, many American players are simply relocating. In fact, the number of players relocating to Canada or Mexico has been rather startling to me. You can follow Poker Exiles on Twitter to hear some of these stories.

After Black Friday, I told a WSJ reporter that I had no intention whatsoever of relocating to be able to play online poker. In the time that has transpired since that interview, I’ve realized I miss online poker more than I anticipated I would. I actually miss the hell out of it. There have been so many nights where I’ve been bored and aimless and thought to myself, “man, what I wouldn’t give to be able to fire up a few tournaments right now.” I’ve never leaned on poker as a sole source of income, but I have leaned on it as a money-making activity to fill my spare time with and I miss it. Badly.

However, I’m just not quite ready to commit to something extravagant like a move to Canada or Mexico. There are a few reasons for this. One reason is that I’m not so convinced that the hassles and costs of such a move are something I can greatly offset by the expected value of being able to play online. Despite only playing a casual volume far lower than that of some of my contemporaries, I’ve been a loser online over the course of about the past two and a half years. I mostly attribute this to variance. I mean, I would like to think that I am a winning player; it’s not hard for a good, winning player to actually be down money over the course of ~1,000 tournaments. If I had grinded harder and played more like ~5,000 tournaments over the course of that span, I tend to think there’s a decent likelihood I’d have a profit to show for it. But maybe not. There are plenty of full-time players who have lost money over the course of their last 5,000 events.

So I have a couple of options when it comes to keeping poker in my life:

• Relocate to out of the country to play online.
• Relocate within the country to an area nearby casinos (Vegas, Florida, and California would be the most logical options).
• Stay in Austin for a while and travel to play major tournaments and grind cash games after busting out.

For now, I’m sticking with the latter option. While the idea of picking up my life and moving it somewhere else for poker is on the table for me, I’m just not overly enthused about any of my options. Also, I’m enjoying living in Austin a lot; it’s the closest I’ve come to feeling like I’ve found a home as an adult.

So the plan is to ride it out here for at least another few months while seeing what unfolds on a couple of other fronts. But since I’m doing that, I need a travel schedule for poker. I loathe the idea of leaving this hippie oasis on a regular basis to go rot away in casinos around the country, but it’s a compromise I’m willing to make to keep myself in the game.

For now, the following appears to be on my horizon:

• WPT Legends of Poker in Los Angeles on August 25-30 ($3,500 buy-in)
• The River at Winstar Casino in Durant, OK on Sept 2-6 ($2,000 buy-in, $3 million guaranteed)
• WSOP Circuit Event in Shreveport, LA on Sept 17-19 ($1,600 buy-in) OR WPT Borgata Poker Open in Atlantic City on Sept 18-23 ($3,500 buy-in, $3 million guaranteed)

That’s all I have penciled in on the calendar for now, but I anticipate taking a few more trips in addition to those between now and the end of the year.

I’m pretty excited for the L.A. trip. It will be my first time in L.A., first WPT event, and first hand of live poker since busting out of the WSOP Main Event in 133rd place (excluding a home game I had a nice time at last week). Poker pro shaniac has been gracious enough to agree to let me crash on his couch in Santa Monica making that trip a viable one. Thanks, Shane!

There are a lot of good players out there nowadays, but I believe I’m one of them and I’m ready to take down something big.

Follow me on Twitter to watch it all unfold!

Today was WSOP Event #28, a $1500 no-limit event. I got to the Rio an hour late and stood in a long line to late register. By the time I took my seat, blinds were at 50/100, starting stacks of 4.5k.

I’m going to spare you a lot of banal commentary on how I got chips (except to say that I did get QQ all-in preflop against KK and bink a Q on the flop to stay alive) because there’s more interesting stuff to report:

With one hour remaining in the day, I took my seat after a color-up break to find Joe Sebok, a guy who has made several hundred thousand aggressively promoting and defending UB, an online poker room that has twice scammed the poker community out of millions, sitting on my immediate right. I’ve monitored and written a little about Joe Sebok and UB so having the chance to be seated less than a foot away from him felt fateful.

I had no intention of engaging Sebok in some impromptu debate about UB. I’m here to play poker, not listen to the defense mechanisms of some delusional, spoiled manchild. But while I wasn’t about to try to engage Sebok in a debate, I was certainly game for some slowrolling, trolling, and other childish antics. And believe me, those things are childish. I have never slowrolled anyone in my life. I have never celebrated in an obnoxious manner after winning a pot, nothing. Anyone who has played any poker with me can vouch for my having pristine etiquette at the table. But tonight, I saw no need to apply that same level of decency to a guy buying into tournaments with the blood money from a poker community fleecing/cashgrab. My personal opinion is that he should be unwelcome at poker tournaments until he returns UB money to affected players and I was happy at having a chance to create that atmosphere for him.

A half hour into Sebok’s addition to our table, I got my chance to troll. Keep in mind a lot of the back and forth is me recalling from memory and paraphrasing. I’m sure Sebok has his side of the story and I’m sure that it differs from mine in it’s perspective.

With a stack of somewhere in the neighborhood of 27,000, he raised to 1900 during 300/600/75. With around the same stack, I called (in the seat immediately after him) with Ace-Queen offsuit. Everyone else folded. Sebok bet 2400 on a flop of Ace-King-Six. I called. He bet 4100 on the Ace turn. I called. He bet 7200 on the King river. I took a few seconds to count out chips and put in a call (I’ll explain later why there was zero reason to raise). Sebok insta-mucked his hand. I waited as long as I could to show mine, the table had to insist that I show (and I do have to, so I did after waiting a few seconds). I turned over my hand and clapped/fist-pumped right in Sebok’s face while saying “that felt nice!”

He said, “wow, way to be a dick.”

I said, “yea, I’m the dick here.”

Him: “Oh, you’re one of those guys huh?”

Me: “Yup, one of those guys who doesn’t like you.”

(Now, while this convo was happening, I was counting out my chips after winning the pot and crossing way over into his space. Like basically counting his chips in as obnoxious and obvious of a manner as I could).

Him: “Ahh… yup. Another internet forum tough guy. You guys know absolutely nothing about anything. You just read some stuff online and believed it.”

Me: “So why don’t you tell us what happened?”

Him: “Every time I try to, I get shoved out.” (whatever that means) “You guys know nothing.”

Me: “I know you blackmailed someone to protect your UB allowance.”

Him: “You don’t know anything about anything. That was completely made up. Aguiar’s friends even all come up to me apologizing for it and saying it was wrong.”

Me: “Oh WOW… really? Like who? Name one of his friends who has said that.”

Him: “All of them! All of them have said it!”

Me: “Okay, so if all of them have said it, it should be easy for you to name one of them so I can go ask him.”

Him: “All of them, all of his friends.”

Me: “Okay, so just name one of them.”

Him: “I don’t have to, it’s all of his friends.”

Me: “I just don’t see why you can say that but then not give one name of someone who has said that to you.”

Him: “I don’t have to, just go ask anyone.”

Me: “LOL… okay. I can see you’re in a deep state of denial, there’s no point in talking to you.”

Him: “Okay, tough guy.”

Me: “To be honest, I have to give you a lot of credit. It takes a huge pair of balls to not only show up and play these events, but to actually run your mouth at the table too! I honestly am impressed in a way.”

Him: “Good, I’m glad I could impress you.”

Some other guy: “Are you two friends or something.”

Me: “No… NO… He is not my friend.”

Him: [more stuff about internet tough guys who know nothing]

French-Canadian guy (to Sebok): “Man, it is so bad how you handle this stuff. You put yourself into a deeper hole because you just handle it so bad. I laughed so hard when you were telling a guy to confront you… on Twitter. Twitter is not a confrontation!”

Sebok gets real defensive and starts explaining to the guy that he was trying to move the confrontation away from Twitter to real life, but French-Canadian guy just kept repeating, “it’s so funny though, you challenge people to dual… ON TWITTER!”

Sebok was getting more steamed and defensive with the French-Canadian dude. By this time the banter between he and I had calmed down. I did notice however that he kept staring at me as if to intimidate me which is just so LOL. I’m 6′4″ 230. He’s probably something like 5′8″ (very short guy, lots of little man syndrome) and probably 165. I mean, it would require a whole new degree of stupidity on his part to do something physical. And we’re talking about a guy who has done lots of stupid stuff!

Once play was done for the day, he seemed to sit and wait for me to finish bagging my chips. Then he got up from the table at the same time I did. I thought he was going to follow me out into the parking lot. I wasn’t sure how I would have handled that other than just to be sure I wasn’t the one who initiated any physical contact (I obv have like less than zero interest in going to jail for trolling Joe Sebok). But a cooler Sebok-head prevailed and I never saw him again after walking away from the table.

Okay, for why I never raised that hand. I think first of all, now knowing he had air, you’ll see that never raising got max value out of him. Secondly, there is simply zero value in raising him on the river. PokerNews reported on the hand and acted like I was some fish for raising on the river, but PokerNews is painfully retarded and bad at what they do. There is just no value in raising on that river. He never calls with anything I beat because he knows I have an Ace there 100% of the time when I shove (getting no fold equity). And with the non-zero possibility that he had quad Kings, I gain literally nothing from raising. Okay, end of that rant. I was just annoyed that PokerNews and people at my table were acting like I was dumb for not raising. Not raising was 100% standard.

A final note to Joe Sebok: if you decide you’d like to make a real apology and return all UB money you earned to players affected, I’d be proud. I’m also happy to help in any way. We can advertise to our U.S. readers on how they can file a claim to get some of their lost UB money back. Would be easy to give like a year for all players with UB to verify how much they have on there, then you (and any other UB shills/affiliates) return all money you made to an account that is distributed to affected players based on proportion of how much they lost to UB. It’s doable and you should consider spending a few thousand on the right lawyer to help you with it if you value your reputation in poker at all.

Anyway, I made day two with 51,400 in chips which is quite good. I think average is more like 35,000 or so. We should be in the money within a couple of levels. You can follow me and my chip count updating account on Twitter if you care to follow along with live updates from the WSOP (pending phone battery life).

Last week was a rough one for any U.S. poker players holding out hope that they might one day be reunited with their money on UB or Absolute Poker (”UB”). On Wednesday, MSNBC article reported that a UB debt holder is filing for bankruptcy in Norway after being informed by Blanca Games, owners of UB, that they have, “no cash on hand and no prospects for any cash flow for the foreseeable future.”

In other words, UB is broke. Or at least that’s what they want their debt-holders to think.

A day later, in an attempt to squash the panic that arose from news that they laid off 95% of their staff and told a debt-holder they have no cash, Blanca Games issued a press release confirming that they terminated their relationship with the Norwegian debt-holder but claiming that the news has no negative impact on the company. Additionally, they announced an increase in maximum weekly withdraw limits for non-U.S. players to $500, or $1,000 for Visa withdraws, from the previous level of $250.

What appears to be happening at UB is this (note that this is merely speculation, it’s impossible to know exactly what’s going on inside the company): they have some cash, but not much. Whatever cash they have is quite possibly less than the amount they owe to their U.S. customers and/or debt holders. And its certainly not enough to battle the DOJ and pay any subsequent fines. They are trying to use what little cash they have to raise more cash.

Their plan?

Use the money salvaged from purging their obligation to a major debt-holder to increase cashout limits for their non-U.S. customers to establish some pittance of reassurance that maybe, just maybe, money really is safe at UB. Use this reassurance to continue grabbing cash from the non-U.S. customers still foolish enough to play at their site. And if there is a god, maybe, just maybe, they will work their way out of this by one day by raising enough funds to reimburse U.S. customers while continuing to service non-U.S. clients.

This plan will not work. UB is a house of cards and the only people who believe otherwise are paid shills. Taking a look at the long, slow train-wreck that is UB, there are some lessons to be learned. How is it that a few years after a widely publicized scandal that the company is still in business and able to continue lying to and scamming online poker players? How has UB survived to continue giving poker a bad name?

The answer? Greed.

There are plenty of people with blood on their hands for having helped keep UB afloat in the wake of a massive cheating scandal. Rather than doing their part to ensure the company was cast into oblivion, many people exchanged their values for dollars by shilling and apologizing for a company that should have died a swift death in 2008.

Let’s put a spotlight on some of these people.

Poker Media (Affiliates/Advertisers)

Countless poker media outlets, many of which reported extensively on the superuser scandal, have generated handsome revenue by running ads for UB. These media outlets have a responsibility to their readers and the game of poker. They do, after all, profit handsomely by producing poker content. It’s in their best interests to do what they can to create a positive, lasting image of poker in the minds of their readers.

When poker media platforms do things like run a UB ad next to a sentence in which they state it’s a “gloomy outlook at best” that U.S. players get their money back from UB, it makes the game look like a joke. And almost all major poker news organizations are guilty of this crime. PokerNews.com, Bluff Magazine, PokerNewsDaily.com, CardPlayer.com, and dozens more have all generated fantastic revenue from sending their readers to a poker room that any active observer would be forced to conclude is not trustworthy.

None of these media outlets chose to say “no thanks” to the money UB was waving at them by instead choosing to advertise exclusively for honest poker organizations. They could have even made this decision public and thereby increased the value of their reputation and integrity.

Sponsored Pros

Every single one of UB’s current sponsored pros signed with the site after the company scammed their peers out of millions of dollars by using an unauthorized software code that allowed insiders to see all of their opponents’ hole cards. These people didn’t care. Dollar signs and a chance at having their picture on the side of a bus blinded their sense of decency or loyalty to a game that enriched their lives immensely.

Prahlad Friedman’s willingness to represent UB is laughable. The man should write a book titled, “How to Crater Your Public Image in Extraordinary Fashion”. Friedman was one of the principal victims of the cheating scandal at UB from 2005-2007. He was scammed out of millions at high stakes tables and eventually turned around and agreed to endorse the same organization that cheated him.

He was a loyal spokesperson, too, vigorously taking up the cause of returning UB to its good old days. He explained his willingness to endorse UB by telling anyone who would listen that cheating was a normal and natural part of poker. He was so blinded by the money that he sold out his principles and lovingly tried to convince people to support the same company that had robbed him.

Eric Baldwin, on the heels of an extraordinary 2009 in which he won Card Player Magazine Player of the Year honors, also decided to sign with UB. Evidently, Baldwin did not stop to think how his new-found success and fame in the poker world made him a role model for hundreds, if not thousands of aspiring players hoping to duplicate his success. More than $1.5 million in tournament cashes in 2009 was not enough for Baldwin. He needed more. And so he agreed to become a UB sponsored pro and bear their logo at all tournament and TV appearances.

There’s also Phil Hellmuth and Annie Duke. The fact that they parted ways with UB in December does not take them off the hook. As two of the most visible poker pros in the world, each of them remained totally mum after the superuser scandal while continuing to cash their UB shill checks. Either one of them could have dealt UB a massive blow by saying that they could not in good conscience continue to represent an illegitimate criminal organization. Each of them have more than enough wealth to absorb the costs of any lawsuit they might have encountered from publicly turning their backs on their sponsor. Make no mistake about it: Phil Hellmuth and Annie Duke each have countless hundreds of thousands of dollars in their bank accounts for dawning their UB patches on television appearances after the superuser scandal.

Finally, there is Joe Sebok who used his status as the step-son of Barry Greenstein as a springboard to poker notoriety. Sebok carefully constructed for himself an image as a voice of the game. He helped build PokerRoad.com from the ground up. He parlayed that exposure into a gig as cohost of the television program Poker2Nite. Then, in a controversial September 2009 move, Sebok announced he signed with UB and in doing so promised to, “work vigilantly to make sure that all of the facts continue to come out regarding the past scandal.” Unlike Hellmuth or Duke or anyone else, Sebok publicly positioned himself to be a watchdog and make changes within UB.

Nearly two years after that promise, Sebok has done nothing in the way of helping the company repair the damage they created from the cheating scandal. He has accomplished the opposite of what he claimed he would do. He has created more lies, displaced blame, made it impossible to get accurate info, and has even resorted to blackmailing to defend the criminals giving him his handsome allowance. He is either willfully ignorant or extremely dumb. Take your pick.

Sebok parlayed his high-profile status in the poker world and one million followers on Twitter to drive countless aspiring new players to UB. As a direct result of putting their faith in Sebok, many of these players have money on UB that they will never see again. Sebok would do well to offer an apology for throwing these players and their money under the bus in the pursuit of greed. He could go a long way in repairing his image by offering up the sum of the money he’s acquired through his loathsome shilling for UB, rumored by some to be $30,000 every month, to reimburse players he led to a criminal organization.

Conclusion

The bad guys won. UB got caught with their pants down in front of the whole poker world but persevered on the backs of others’ greed. They blatantly cheated players out of millions, lied to the poker world about having restructured management, and somehow, absurdly, survived. They lived to scam and victimize another day because the poker world was willing to champion them for one simple reason: greed.

Hundreds of people consisting of sponsored pros and advertisers threw the poker world under the bus in exchange for more money, a nicer house, more cars, more vacations, a bigger bank account, etc. These luxuries were paid for with money stolen from online poker players by an illegitimate criminal organization. Each and every person who earned a dime advertising for UB since 2008 has done the poker world a great disservice. Sebok turned the value of his reputation into the value of his deal with UB. Friedman turned his hippie values into the value of his deal with UB. Card Player Magazine, Bluff Magazine, PokerNews.com, PokerNewsDaily.com, and countless other media outlets sold out the integrity of the poker industry for the value of ad dollars.

The dump trucks of money blinded these people.

Poker has to fight for every shred of legitimate status it enjoys. All over the world, the game is battling to be recognized and treated as the great, skill-based activity that it is. The people who helped keep UB afloat have lent considerable credibility to the perception that poker is shady and illegitimate. They have sold out the betterment of the poker world for their own personal gain.

A special thanks to Shane Schleger for his help in editing this piece.

CardRunners is, no doubt, worth a few million. It’s hard for me to say exactly how much it’s worth, but it’s definitely well into the several million I would think. Before I continue, I should say that I do not know Caby personally. I sat next to him once in a WSOP event and got his email so I could run a business idea past him (an idea he was fond of enough to pass along to a colleague who could run with it but I never heard anything back from that person), but that’s the extent of how much I know the guy.

Caby’s business idea and subsequent rise to riches is an inspirational one because it seems so attainable. We’re not talking about a multi-billionaire like Mark Zuckerberg here whose wealth just seems laughably impossible to try to duplicate. We’re just talking about a guy who crushed high stakes online poker for a while and then invested some of that money in what now kind of seems like a no-brainer idea and got even more rich off of it. There are two things that come to mind regarding the success Caby has found through CardRunners that I think can be learned from.

1. Do the math. Life is about goals, hard work, and probability (<-- Credit to my poker buddy Mike S. for that line). Before launching CardRunners, Caby probably did some basic math. I can imagine the conversation in his head went something like this: "If I can get to 10,000 subscribers to pay $30 a month for access to training videos, that's $300,000 in revenues a month which is enough to justify paying top pros a very handsome salary for producing strategy videos." And for Caby, getting something like 5,000 or 10,000 monthly subscribers probably seemed fairly attainable. Hundreds of thousands of people play online poker all over the world. All it takes is convincing around 1-3% of them that they'll win lots of money if they invest in a subscription to your training site and viola, you're able to justify paying the premium commanded by the pros producing the videos people want to see.

Caby has taken some criticism for effectively expediting the speed in which poker games grow in difficulty. While CardRunners and other similar sites certainly have made the poker economy tougher to profit from, there's really no sense in whining about it. As Caby will point out to you, if he hadn't started CardRunners, someone else probably would have. And I would be writing about that person today instead. The fact is, Caby saw a market for bringing training videos produced by top players into the living rooms of novice players and he's made quite a lot of money for doing it. Which brings us to the second lesson...

2. Do the work. To me, this is the hardest part about getting wealthy. Having a good idea is really not that tough. Even not-very-smart people come up with a pretty good business idea every once in a while. Smart people come up with them on a daily basis. But 98% of the good business ideas people have never actually result in them starting a business. To get make money from an idea, you really have to break through into that 2% of people who actually follow through with it. Caby’s founding of CardRunners is a shining example of this.

The concept behind CardRunners, producing online poker training videos for people eager to improve at the game, was not Caby’s idea alone. It’s not even really that novel of a concept. We were publishing free poker strategy videos at PokerTips as early as January 2006 after noticing they were being produced by our forum members with considerable popularity for a year prior to that. All of this was happening while CardRunners was just a fetus.

What made CardRunners excel as an industry leader was work. First (as we’ve seen), Caby did some math and figured out there’s money to be made from the niche. Then he did the work to make that money. Even though PokerTips was basically doing the same thing at first, the money-making potential of the idea never really occurred to us so we just produced a few in-house beginner strategy videos and left it at that. Caby brilliance was realizing you could take the concept so much further and then actually taking it there.

His reward is a net-worth well into the seven-figures and quite probably the eight-figures at the age of 27. And while that’s not a Mark Z. amount of money, or anywhere close, it is enough to allow him to do basically anything he wants for the rest of his life. That’s a degree of freedom I think 99% of us would be content with.

I would love to one day have a business idea and subsequent successful follow-through like Taylor Caby has enjoyed with CardRunners. I’m perfectly okay with accepting the fact that I will probably never be the next Mark Zuckerberg. Aside from how statistically improbable it is for any human to ever make or be worth more than a billion dollars, I’m probably too lazy and I’m definitely not smart enough to build a billion-dollar business. I’ll keep my goals more modest and hope for a Taylor Caby level of success instead.

If I’m ever worth $10 million, I’m sure I’ll manage to figure out a way to sleep at night despite not being worth a billion.

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Follow Taylor Caby on Twitter. And follow me while you’re at it.