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. 🙁

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.