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

This past week has been somewhat eventful. I met with my new case manager with Arapahoe/Douglas County FCBS since my original one has been reassigned. She is a doctor of psychology and we had a good discussion, going over what’s going to happen with me when I get Community Placement (CP). I’ll meet with her once a week, meet with a therapist once a week, still have to do random UAs, and go to a recovery group once a week too. All on top of finding and keeping a job.

Speaking of jobs, I’m still looking. I received good news from the pastor at Littleton United Methodist Church, where I have applied for a position as a sort of Media Director. This is my sister and brother-in-law’s church that I’ve been to a bunch of times, and have started going regularly after I applied for the position to meet the pastor and get some extra blessings for my job hunt. The position is accepting applications until the 18th and the pastor said she’ll be giving me a call this week, so that’s a good sign. The job listing reads like my resume: web design and development, print, marketing, design, video, and social media skills are required – all of which are my fortes. In the meantime, I’m pursuing other opportunities mainly via LinkedIn. If you know of any openings that I’d be a good fit for, please don’t hesitate to contact me! 🙂

On the poker front, I haven’t been playing as much this week. I was starting to get burned out by all my time at the tables, so I opted to spend much of this week studying instead of playing. I’ve watched dozens of videos on poker math and strategies, as well as a bunch of interviews with top pros to learn what I can from their experience. The poker boom of the mid 2000s is over, due primarily to the economic downturn, and the games are getting tougher. More and more people are doing exactly what I’m doing – taking the time and learning the math, reading the books, doing the work off the tables to improve their games on the tables. I’m still winning, despite not putting in as many hours at the tables. I’m up 300k over the past two weeks, which I’m pleased with. My game has definitely improved and I’m learning how to better deal with the various types of players. Player types will be the subject of a future post.

On the fitness front, I’ve been a total slacker since getting the news my CP had been delayed. It really took the wind out of my sails emotionally and physically, and I know I need to get back to being active more to get back to some sort of better balance in my days. Lately I’ve just been spending my days at Starbucks and I really need to get back to at least doing my regular walks again. My weight loss has stalled and I’ve been stuck around 217 for the last two weeks. My buddy Greg is down to 211, so he’s got the lead on our competition (we made a bet on whether he’d get to 191 or I’d get to 195 first). I’m still down 50 pounds on the year, so I feel good about that, but I need to get my game back in shape and get back to work on that front.

My mom’s 70th birthday party was the other night at Deb and Kevin’s house. It was a very nice get together with most of the whole famn damily and a bunch of mom’s friends. Mom had a good time. She was a bit curious about how people would react to my dad being there too – I have a very untraditional family structure. My mom and dad divorced when I was little, each remarried, and then my mom ultimately ended up marrying one of my dad’s best friends. So I had my birth mom, birth dad, and stepdad who is best buds with my dad, my sister, my brother-in-law, my niece, and even my son and ex-wife Liz put in an appearance.

Speaking of Tom, he only put in an appearance at mom’s because it was homecoming day for him. Unfortunately, his team lost their football game earlier in the day, but he came to the party all dressed up for his date for homecoming that night. They got together, took pictures (coming), went to dinner, and then went to a party at a friend’s house. He ended up coming down with a cold that night and left for home early. 🙁

I’ve been playing a lot of poker lately. Over the past months I’ve rediscovered my passion for the game and have been playing A LOT. I’ve taken the initial 1,000 chips given to players by the Pokerist app and turned it into over 1,000,000,000 in six months. That’s a billion with a big “B”, or a one million percent return on my initial investment. Sure it’s just play money, but I started at 2/4 games and have only played as big as 250/500k, so it’s not like I went big and got lucky – I earned every chip I made the hard way, by playing as if the chips were real and at levels that I was comfortable playing.

Not satisfied with playing just cash games, I started looking to get more tournament experience. When I started playing poker in 2003 I became a student of the game. I read every book I could get my hands on about the game and how to play it, the different strategies employed by players, and had gotten pretty good at the game. I was playing online tournaments and even winning them occasionally, with my best victory coming from defeating 54 other players. Now I was looking for tournament sites that weren’t the gambling sites, without much luck. I tried the WSOP app on Facebook, thinking it’d be the perfect solution, but alas, the app is not geared for tournaments. It only offers one-table sit-and-go tournaments, not the bigger ones I was looking for.

I had seen the ads during the World Poker Tour shows for ClubWPT and went looking for an app in Apple’s App Store, to no avail. They only have a web presence, built on java, and looking like it was designed by coders rather than designers. Booo WPT. As a public company, you should definitely invest in making apps and hire a good designer to rework your interface. I’m available, btw.

Despite it’s lackluster interface, ClubWPT does offer free, multi-table tournaments, so I started playing there. After a day or two of getting used to the interface and the intricacies of playing on my laptop, where the table background image barely fits, I started getting serious about the tourneys. I played my first satellite tournament. For those that don’t know, a satellite tournament is a lower cost way to win your way into a more expensive tournament. The top eight finishers in the satellite win a free entry into the Daily Double, and I made the cut from 42 players. Not a bad start, and I was looking forward to playing in the Daily Double for hopefully there would be a much bigger field. Sure enough, there were 152 people who had either won their way in or put up the 1,000 chip entry fee. This was more like it! I battled against the pack for almost two hours and ended up finishing eighth, taking home a nice 4,650 chip prize pool for my efforts.

Last night I made my daily sojourn to Starbucks to use their wifi, drink coffee, and play poker. I was hoping to get in some bigger tournaments again, and was happy to see another satellite was available. It was for entry into the big WPT Alpha8 tournament on Sunday. Surely there will be a ton of players vying for that prize pool! I entered the satellite and settled in to do battle again. After about an hour and a half, and making another final table, I realized that I was the chip leader and all I had to do was fold my hands and I’d win entry into the Alpha8, but I kept getting good cards. I wrestled briefly with playing it safe and just folding my way into the finals, but decided that I’d need the experience of continuing to play the final table when I was playing the big one. Plus, I was getting great cards, so I kept the pressure on my opponents. And, not only did I win my way into Sunday’s Alpha8, but I finished first, besting 41 other players on the way.

As of the time of this writing, Sunday is four days away, and I look forward to hopefully competing against a much bigger field. I think Sunday’s turn out for the tournament will be a good indicator of the overall popularity of ClubWPT, but given the number of players playing there and their painful interface, I shan’t be surprised to find myself back looking for bigger and better sites to play. Wish me luck! 🙂