Lover of trading, tacos, 3D/AR/VR, cryptos, and most things Japanese

“Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes… the ones who see things differently — they’re not fond of rules… You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things… they push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.” ~ Steve Jobs

It’s been a challenging week. I’ve had to deal with the disappointing court news and I also began my climb up the new chip stack mountain at FullTiltPoker.NET.

After spending some time at the Limit tables, I decided to do something I’ve generally been against: spending real money for virtual items. The madness of the low stakes tables was removing all the fun and challenge of playing, so I spent ten dollars and bought 1.5 million play chips so I could play in better games. This gave me a big enough bankroll to comfortably play 100/200 No Limit stakes, where the max buy in for the table is 20k. Stepping up in stakes meant stepping up my game, as I quickly learned when I started losing – I started out overplaying some idiot range hands and was down about 80k after a few sessions. Time for a break and some studying.

I started out by watching all of Daniel Negraneau’s Poker Academy videos.
This is a great series of lessons from one of the world’s top players. It had been a while since I’d read a poker book or watched lessons, and my game needed help. Sometimes just a basic refresher is good. After the Poker Academy lessons, I started looking for more specific training on the math and probabilities involved in hands and I found an excellent teacher in James “SplitSuit” Sweeney’s Poker Bank series. SplitSuit delves deep into the math and other topics like, “Should I fear the flush?”, “Can I fold getting sick pot odds?”, “Value betting postflop” and the like.

After spending several hours studying the vids I returned to playing the 100/200 tables with much better results. I tightened up my range, listened to my instincts better, and put in hours at the tables grinding away. I didn’t go for big wins, generally opting to avoid getting involved in big pots, and did my best to take and maintain the lead (control) when I got involved in a pot. I stopped playing a lot of OOP (Out Of Position) hands and opened up my range when I had position. Over the course of the week I worked my way up from 1.42m to 1.68m chips, making back all that I lost initially and turning a net profit of about 160k. Not bad for a week’s worth of work. 🙂

So yesterday I received not great news. The courts waited the full 35 days to file an objection and now my team of doctors and I have to make a court date to go plead my case. Naturally, I’m disappointed in this turn of events, but I’ve come to expect such things to happen so it’s not really a surprise. It just sucks that now I have to continue to wait in limbo for an unknown length of time.

Details are scarce at this point, all we know is that there was an objection and we have to go to court. We don’t know the nature of the objection, who lodged it, when I’ll be able to resolve it, or really anything other than our next step. I’ll be meeting with the team to discuss strategies and to get more specifics as they become available.

Thank you to everyone who’s been so supportive of me, I know you’re disappointed too. All we can do at this point is plan and prepare for court. I’d like to say that I’m hopeful that it will be resolved soon, but I really have no idea, and have learned not to get my hopes up lest they be dashed at the eleventh hour. Let’s just keep our fingers crossed the situation can be resolved relatively quickly.