Been a while...
Sorry for the lack of updates...Been a long time since I've made an update and sure enough there's a lot that's been going on...
Right now I'm sitting in the Milwaukee airport waiting on my delayed flight to Madison to visit my uncle for a few days. I probably won't be getting too many hands in until Sunday or Monday, but thankfully I've had a decent second week of January that has helped erase some of the bad runs I've been on over the previous 6 weeks, so I don't mind taking some time "off" from poker.
I'm over half way through my first month of being a "poker pro." I'm not sure how long I'll stay on this path but for the time being I'm just trying to get the money while I can. There have been some developments that appear to have hasten the exit of the largest online e-wallet, Neteller, from the US online gambling market. More on that later...
So as for being a poker pro, the lifestyle has been nice, although I really haven't settled into a routine yet. I've done a fair bit of travelling and there have been a lot of things to take care of with our new house that I haven't been able to settle into any sort of set schedule, which I think I'll need to do soon. After Missy and I got back from Mobile from the GMAC Bowl (Southern Miss won btw, 28-7 domination) I tried to start settling into the poker pro lifestyle. It wasn't hard to get used to wearing pajama pants, t-shirt, slippers all day instead of the classic khaki, button-up shirt, brown shoes I've been used to for the last 5-6 years of my professional life. Ever since interning back in Springfield, IL at a consulting firm (LRS, where I'd later work), "business casual" has been the dress code. When playing cards for a living, it's been nice to put the emphasis on the casual so I can get down to business :-)
So as the days have passed since we got back from Mobile, my nights have gotten later and later... At the time of this writing, my daily routine goes about like this: Wake up at about 10:30am, stumble into the office to check my email and take a quick glance at cardrunners and 2+2. Then I'll head downstairs for some breakfast, usually cereal and maybe some yogurt and head back upstairs to get back on the computer and check out 2+2 or analyze hands in pokertracker from the night before. Usually looking at the big pots won and lost to see if I could maximize or minimize anything in those hands. While doing that I finish breakfast and chat with some friends on AIM.
After an hour or so of that I'll fire up some tables and see what the games look like. Usually there are fewer games and they aren't quite as juicy as at night, but between the 3 sites I'm regularly playing, I can usually find 4-6 good tables. I'll play for a couple hours and then take a break around 3:00 for lunch. Lunch usually consists of a sandwich or some leftovers from dinner the night before. While I eat I'll usually watch a cardrunners video. After that's done I'll usually either clean up around the house, play some WoW, run any errands, or just hang out until Missy gets home around 5.
From there I hang out with her and eat dinner until she goes to bed around midnight, which is when the real work begins. Typically the games are the best late at night so thats when I'll put in the bulk of my hands and usually play a solid 3-4+ hours of 4-8 tables before I go to bed between 3 and 4am. After I get in bed I'll check out the DVR for any recorded shows such as High Stakes Poker (on GSN, new season started on Monday) or Poker After Dark (on NBC, a surprisingly good show).
So that's it. As I expected, I really "work" as much if not more as I would at a job, but in the case of poker it's something that doesn't come as easy as programming. Poker is definitely more "fun" but also more stressful. I felt like at my last few contracts I could stay up late into the night playing cards and drag my ass into work and still perform at a high level. Poker definitely takes more study, more drive, more discipline...but that's the part I like, and if you're good and determined, you'll reap the rewards. The same cannot necessarily be said in the business world, or at minimum, the time it takes to achieve the rewards is much longer term.
Ok so now for the big news in online poker. It looks like neteller is going to pull out of the US market sooner than we expected. Apparently two of their primary shareholders are being arrested by the US government because the government says they make a business out of "laundering" money from US consumers to online gambling sites. I guess it's technically true but no one views it as "laundering" in the Al Capone sense of the word. We're just poker players that want an extra level of abstraction from our bank accounts to the poker sites...ugh. Stupid fucking US Government at it again....So you can read about the arrests and the resulting Neteller statement. Basically the gist of it all is that neteller is no longer providing the service of transferring US player funds from their accounts to gambling sites. Your money is safe to withdraw, but it wont be sent from Neteller to the sites. Thankfully since I'm not stuck in a cube listening to managers drone on about task codes, I was able to make some timely deposits and withdraws from the sites I play to keep myself in a good position before the Neteller collapse.
So now that Neteller is out of the picture, that puts a severe cramp in the style of your typical online gambler...which spells trouble for the pros and regulars as it becomes harder for joe blow to get their money into the poker sites. As with all the legislation and now this neteller news, the problem obviously won't be my ability to play, it's the ability of the low, mid, and high stakes fish that deposit a few hundred or thousand to blow... all that money eventually filters up the poker food chain, eventually to the highest stakes and the best players. While I'm not at the highest point right now, 5/10nl being my normal game is in the upper middle and many of the top players do play these stakes when running bad in their normal 25/50 or 10/20 game... so it's easy to see how the games can (and will) likely get worse as a result of this change.
So the moral of the story is I'm not ready to toss away my life as a programmer for the long haul, but I am happy that I'm in a position where I can quite my job to take advantage of online poker while I can without much worry of getting another programming position.
I'll try to update again soon.
Good luck,
Aaron
posted by WiltOnTilt at 2:36 PM
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