So, I'm actually back in the states now. While there was an incredible opportunity in Cyprus, I just had to make the decision that it wasn't right for me. Most of you would probably just call me nuts to turn down the chance to make 50-80k a month, and I wouldn't blame you. (You probably wouldn't need that much info to call me nuts if you had seen some of my posts in 2p2 MSNL recently.) The thing was, I was so unhappy there that the money wasn't a significant difference over what I can make playing poker in the US to make me want to endure the hardships and the frustration of being in a place where I know literally no one and also don't speak the native language. It was actually really weird there. I've never been stared at by so many random people, but I can sort of imagine what it feels like to be a celebrity here. Eventually it gets to be not that big of a deal though.

One of the big issues was, my "friend" who invited me out there seemed to contantly just leave me by myself in my hotel room to sit around and wait for him to come and get me again (at one point he left me in the hotel for >30 hours by myself which personally I thought was pretty out of line--something I would never do to someone who was a guest of mine from a different country). Now I know a lot of you would say "hey dude why not just go out and explore?" And yeah I did that a bit during the day, but especially at night I think it probably was just a little too dangerous to try something like that. I did try to go to one night club. My friends didn't want to go with me so they dropped me off at the front door. When I walked up to the bouncers I pulled out my passport, and without even taking a look at it they looked at me, put their hands up, waved, and just said "BYE". I was befuddled... "what do you mean?" "is there some sort of problem?", they retorted nothing more than "BYE". This put a huge damper on my experience and my trip in general. Clearly this was just a huge sign on the side of the road that said to me "YOU ARE NOT WELCOME HERE", so that's how I felt.

Out of respect for what they are doing I won't give full disclosure as to what I was doing there, but essentially there was a game spread by the casinos that can be beaten by the players. The only issue is, in order to make the 50-80k I was talking about previously, I would have had to put in 8-10hour days. If you know me at all and how much time I put into poker, you'd know that I am lucky to get in 20 hours a week. 20 hours a week, that is, playing a game I really for the most part enjoy. The game I was there to play was extremely monotonous, something I just didn't have the patience to deal with. I'm also a little uncomfortable with constantly lying to people about my reasons for being there which is a requisite to keep the casinos from suspecting that you are a pro.

All in all, it just wasn't the right opportunity for me. If I want to put in 8-10 hours a day playing online poker there's no doubt in my mind I can make 20-30k a month, and this is without the inconvience of being in a foreign place, without the ability to buy and cook the regular meals I am accustomed to, being around my friends (yes, the few real friends that I have), and the basketball team I came back to help coach.

I had to make the decision to come home.

So now I'll finish out the last 3 months of our basketball season in Tempe, AZ, then after that I will move to Vegas and probably live with some other poker players.

So I'm not going to get rich super quick, this isn't the most difficult thing for to deal with though. My plan now is just to continue preparing for when legislation strikes, as that's for sure going to be the very last poker boom, so I better be ready to make at least 300k that year, and hopefully closer to 500.

--------------------

I've made the decsion that I'm no longer going to make videos of myself playing, but if CR members are interested in doing dual commentary leakfinders up through 5/10 I would be comfortable doing that, or just of submitting a video for me to leakfind, I'll talk to Alex and see if we can get something going. I've even been thinking about doing micro stakes videos if people would be interested in them. Obviously I'm a bit out of touch with the games, but I doubt the advice I could give would be anything but helpful.

My coaching rates from here on out are going to be $150/hr.

That's all for now I guess.

So.... A lot has happened since my last post. I honestly still can't figure out why so many of you guys come and read this blog on a regular basis. I don't try particularly hard to make it entertaining or informational or anything. On the other hand, I guess I do live a pretty crazy/weird life that most people probably think I'm nuts.

Anyways, I had to leave the basketball team earlier this week. We were doing okay, we had a 2-2 record, though we should have been 3-1 after being up by more than 10 for pretty much the whole game, then giving the game away in the last 2 minutes. Was pretty heartbreaking, but we turned the ball over way too much and played defense like a bunch of matadors. The money I raised went to good use though as the school needed uniforms and we needed 7 or 8 balls to run practices and such.

So right now I'm sitting ... I actually don't know where the hell I am. I'm somewhere in the Istanbul airport on layover waiting for my connecting flight to Ercan. Ercan is the airport in Nicosia, the capital city of Cyprus. Cyprus is in the middle of the Meditteranean Sea, just west of Syria Lebanon and Israel.

I assume you might be asking, what on God's Earth would I be doing here? I don't want to get into it too much cuz it's kind of a secret, but let's just say I dropped everything I was doing when I found out about this and I immediately booked a flight here to get involved. There is the potential for a lot of money to be made, and if I have that type of oppportunity I'm sure not gonna waste it. This is why I lived my life the way I did, never being too attached to any one place and always leaving my options open... so that one day an opportunity like this could arise and I could pounce on it.

I can only be in Cyprus for 90 days without a visa, and after that I guess I'll have to leave the country and then come back in order to continue to build my empire... I mean, that's assuming things work out which obviously they may still fall flat on their face. I guess only the future will tell.

Let me know if you want me to include pictures and stuff, I can do my best but I can't really say I enjoy photography or anything.

For the time being I'm quitting texas and omaha, hopefully it will be an extended break as that means I'm out here getting rich. Anyways, that's it for now.

So weird... I was just walking by this woman talking to me... til I figured out she was actually a billboard.

So this is my 5th year now as a pro and I have to say I still have such trouble understanding how and why this game works the way it does.

I hadn't won anything in weeks. It isn't that uncommon for that to happen though. My whole career I've pretty much treaded water, breaking even, breaking even, lose a little, win a little, more breaking even... Then out of no where I just have like a huge day or string of days and literally 75% of my profit has to have come from specifically these upswings. Like in January when I came up 50k in like 2 weeks.

I haven't been in particularly good financial shape the last couple months, and it was actually getting to the point that I was starting to consider taking a staking offer. Somehow though, two 12 hour sessions later and I'm up 13k -- from just playing 2/4NL and $100 HU SNG's. Obviously 13k isn't that much money in the big scheme of things, I just find it so odd that this type of thing happens again and again. I was +3k from the SNG's so 10k @ 2/4 that's 25 buy ins. Maybe this is how it works for everybody, I just don't really get it. It gets really depressing during those down times when nothing is happening, but these upswings always seem to make me feel better. The more I think about it though, the more irritated I am about how I feel because I shouldn't be letting how I'm running at poker dictate how I'm feeling on a day to day basis. It's something I've pretty much always struggled with, and I don't see that stopping until I can find balance in my day to day life. That balance always seems to elude me though.

Guess I should be back at 5/10 soon.

So. I've managed to get in 30 solid hours of poker so far this month. This seems to be a downgrade on the previous 18h/week I had been averaging prior to this. I've been playing mostly 200nl with a little bit of 400nl mixed in. I actually think the 400nl is softer. Well, it's not softer, but I just feel more comfortable playing against better players because I have certain assumptions in place, and those assumptions just work better and more often against players who aren't so nitty and understand when they are supposed to fold and what not. I guess this is going to seem like kind of a weak response to why I'm not doing particularly well in the 200nl games, but it's just how I feel. Oh and I'm also 4k under EV over the course of 23k hands. This would put me at +$800... Clearly not setting the world on fire. If I'm supposed to be up 5k though then I guess I can't really claim to be playing that badly.

I've been doing so poorly as far as putting in hours at the tables because I've just been really busy with basketball and some other goals I've recently set. I've actually been to the gym the last 13 days in a row for between 20 minutes to 1 hour per visit. I've never really done any kind of consistent work out in my life until just now. I never really had to before because I always seemed to stay in decent shape without needing to do it. I've just crossed the line and am now up there at ~210 pounds. I've never weighed this much and it just kinda hurts my self-esteem if I'm being honest about it. I hate going on those machines though, I call the ski-er machine I use the rat-mobile because I feel like a mouse running on a wheel when I'm doing it.

I've really been trying to cut down on my drinking too, but having such an addictive personality, it's pretty much impossible to quit one addiction and not pick another up to supplant it. In any case, at least I'm not drinking more than a beer a day.

My basketball team has it's first game this Thursday. I'm not expecting things to go well at all. Our team is pretty lousy and about 7 of the 11 kids on our team have never played organized basketball before in their lives. We have one kid who is an all star and has already been recruited to UAB to play basketball there, but he will only be here with us until December 20th then he ships out to Austin. After he leaves, we have a significant drop off in talent from him to our next best player. I actually won't be surprised if he scores 30 points a game for us. It's likely going to be a long and rough season, but at least I feel like I have something going on in my life for the first time in about 5 years. I guess that's a positive.

So I've done a lot of thinking about some of the responses to my last post, and about some of the things people have said to me since I wrote it. I'm a lot more clear headed now and I'm actually kind of embarassed that I seemed proud of what I was doing. Makes it pretty obvious that a lot of choices I was making were kinda dumb. This is life though, live and learn.

So I guess I have to start climbing back up the ladder now. I've been living off of my bankroll for the past 3 months and hardly playing any poker, so my bankroll has diminished a ton and I have pretty much nothing to show for it. I'm getting too old now to always be grinding 2/4 and to never move up. It seems stupid to do that when I've won >100k in the last 12 months at 5/10+.

I had a goal for like 3 1/2 years to break into the 5/10 games and be a regular because I thought then I would have financial security. I finally accomplished that and it seems like not much has really changed from when I played 2/4. What that tells me is just being a regular or winning at a solid clip in those games isn't enough. My hourly playing 5/10 isn't that much more than at 2/4, and that's because you need to have a massive bankroll to be able to play across multiple sites and game select @ 5/10+. Without having at least 20k on every site I play on (which still probably isn't enough) it just can't be done without constantly risking going broke. And the other thing is, when 10/20 or 25/50 runs, those games are generally MUCH softer than the 5/10 ones. Put this all together and it just means that it's time for me to grind like a madman and just save up the bankroll. I've done everything I could to avoid that as I have been feeling super burnt out lately, but now I just don't have a choice. I actually just checked and apparently I have been averaging 18 hours of play per week which is pretty pathetic. I should be putting in at least 30 a week, and probably more now that I'm going to have to drop back down to 1/2 as my bankroll is so low on each site.

Basketball season is starting in 3 weeks so hopefully being on a normal schedule will kick me into gear.

Oh yeah, lastly, I have one more video coming out sometime in the relative future and I think it's probably one of my most informative ones. I think I may end up taking an extended break at this point because I need to refocus on these other things I talked about above. I mean unless someone specifically comes to me with an idea that they want to work on, so probably it won't be until I've accomplished the goals I need to accomplish until I make a comeback in that arena. I'm kinda tired of everyone knowing how I play anyways, I think it finally might be now costing me more at the tables than I am profiting from making the videos.

A Gift or a Curse?


I just finished a coaching session. I'd say it was pretty successful. I asked the client after the session if there was anything he thought I might be doing that isn't the most conducive to him having a successful learning process, if there was anything I might be able to change--methodology or approach--in order for the experience to be better for him. His answers were no and that he felt he learned a lot from the session.

Half of the session consisted of him sweating me playing mostly 1/2 and 2/4NL (4-5 tables) with a little bit of heads up mixed in. I was about 6 beers and 3 norcos deep in the middle of all this. Once I wrapped up the session I ended coming up 3 1/2's buyins at 2/4. We concluded the session by going over the most interesting hands I played and after that I mentioned to him that I had been drunk the entire time and asked him if it bothered him. He said no and was actually surprised that I was able to speak my thoughts so clearly, logically and coherently while at the same time playing multiple tables and being under the influence.

This is just an example. This is the thing with me. I'm able to do this on a regular basis. It's gotten to the point where I'm sometimes waking up and I just start drinking or popping pills (I have no delusions, I realize I'm an alcoholic and a pill addict). I do all this while working roughly 15 hours a week and making somewhere in the ballpark of 80-150k a year (depending on variance).

What are the hindrances? I have retarded sleeping hours. For example, I woke up today at 8:30pm. I have nothing resembling a normal life, and I clearly have some rough addictions to some pharmaceuticals and to alcohol--It's a given at this point that I don't really expect to live passed the age of 65 (if I continue like this, AND I'm lucky). I rarely seem to go out anymore or to meet new people because of this lifestyle, but it's just so damn easy for me. It's so easy that it makes everything else--being a normal person within society SOOOOO hard.

Additionally, I live such a comfortable life that I have no motivation to put in extra hours of work in order to earn a big enough salary to be what a lot of people would consider a "baller" and I just feel super complacent with my station in life.

So which is it, a gift or a curse?

After my last post, a lot has happened. I mended the fences with my friend here in Scottsdale and he has really changed his attitude 100% to one where we will be working together in an atmosphere where he will be completely accountable and trustworthy. These things are #1 as far as importance to me in running a strong, legitimate program.

I want to thank all of you who have reached out to me after the last blog post, particularly those who have offered me a short term place to stay while traveling through Europe---somethign which I've decided I definitely want to do after the basketball season ends (roughly around May).

As far as needing your guys help, tryouts start in 3 weeks, and the season starts 5 weeks from today. My goal for raising money was to reach $1,000. After a lot of fundaraising already, I've reached $690, which is $310 away from my goal. I really need your guys help to reach that last $310 dollars.

My last blog post received 1500 views. If I was able to get $10 from 30 people (1 out of ever 5 viewers), I'd be able to reach that goal. The main reason for raising these funds is in order to purchase gym time for practices, uniforms, a video camera for recording games, referees for our games and buying into a tournament or two.

It's an under funded high school basketball team, the school is named Tempe Accelerated High, so it's both for gifted kids and for kids who have struggled with the administrative system and have screwed up but are trying to work their way through and get out with at least a GED. We are coaching their team and we require the funds because the school did not get a high enough enrollment for state funding to kick in.

I can accept money by the following means:

Carbon (ID - RxCowbell)
Cake (E-mail tk1983ap@hotmail.com)
Pokerstars (ID - iV.Geoffrey) -- A friend of mine who is willing to accept transfers and forward the money to me
Paypal (ID - Pjennings28@hotmail.com)
GDMP's
Amazon Gift Cards

Your help will be greatly appreciated, and I will be updating our teams progress over the course of the year within this blog. Any amount you might be able to help will mean something, even a couple bucks.

Thanks for your consideration.

Peter

It seems the only people in the world I truly thought were my friends are people I can't trust.

I set my next 6 months up based on the premise that trust was there.

Now I don't know what to do with myself, these seem to be my options:

A)Find a poker house to move into in Vegas and party it up

B)Buy a plane ticket to Europe and travel across the continent (would be my number 1 choice but I got no one to do it with and would hate to do it by myself)

C)Move into my parents house, grind like a madman for 8 months, then buy a house (Probably about ~500k) -- by far my least desirable choice

Which should I do?

This issue came up in a discussion regarding a video a pro released over at Leggopoker wherein an open seat became available immediately to the left of a fish, the pro left the table and rejoined in that particular seat.

The reason I want to bring attention to this matter is because a lot of people just don't understand that this behavior is straight up unethical.

A little over a year ago when I was becoming a reg in HS games with very small player pools this was something I myself had done. Another reg whom I had a lot of respect for became irate about it and at the time I just didn't think it was a big deal at all. As a player who was primarily a MSNL grinder this type of thing seemed fairly commonplace and not a big deal at all. In MSNL and more particularly SSNL, it's really not a big deal for the reason that the player pools are exceedingly large thus there are lots of fish at lots of tables and additionally, attempting to leave the table and rejoin before the seat gets taken by another player is difficult to do.

In HS games with small player pools, it is completely unacceptable to leave the table and rejoin to the left of a fish if the seat opens up.

There is a reason that when two regs start a table that they sit across from each other... Each has an equal chance of any fish joining the table landing on his left. It's a fair proposition. If immediately after a fish sat at that table and it happened to be to the left of the other reg, then you decided to quit the table and rejoin to get a better position on the fish in between him and the reg you started the table with, how often do you think this guy would want to start tables with you again in the future? It's flat out bad business. Not only does the fish see this behavior, but if it were to constantly occur, regs would be seat hopping ALL THE TIME.

The most obvious solution to this is for there to be an understanding amongst regs in games where the player pool is exceedingly small. I won't seat hop on you and I expect you to treat me with the same courtesy.

If this is something you are currently doing I highly recommend that you reconsider your actions regarding this matter as it is something really pisses me off, and if other people are doing it to you, it should piss you off as well.

There isn't really any point to this blog post, just been feelin pretty good lately and felt like sharing.

It always feels like poker skill/success is measured in money won. I just don't look at it like that at all. I was listening to Wiz Khalifa's album Rolling Papers for the first time and this track "When I'm Gone" really caught my ear. I liked the idea behind it and I definitely relate to it...

"I'm gonna spend it all//
Why wait for another day?//
I'ma take all this money I own//
And blow it all away//
Cuz I can't take it when I'm gone"



I haven't had anything like the success some people have had in poker, but I've made a lot of money for someone who wants to live the lifestyle I've chosen. I'm almost 6 years removed from college now, my chosen path in life is pretty clear, and I have to say this wasn't what I originally planned which is why it was a little difficult to come to grips with it at first, but now that I've accepted it, I am pretty satisfied with it.

For the last month I've been spending most of my days in bed poppin norco's, xany bars and alcohol. And my nights roaming the Pacific Beach streets hangin at some neighbor's and friends houses and walking down the coast.

I haven't had any responsibility in 5 years, I'm actually just now about to embark on my first actual adult responsibility, coaching a high school varsity basketball team. I'm movin out of San Diego for 5 months on the 31st and headed to Scottsdale Arizona. It'll be nice to have a little change of pace, but of course I wouldn't want too much of it.

I like not having responsibilities, I like not having stress or being rushed, I like having the time and money to just chill.

If I really wanted to bust my ass and work 40 hours a week, I think I could make a quarter mill a year, but what am I gonna do with all that money? I don't see any advantage to it, it'd be a very stressful time for me, and when I think about it, I'd probably blow it all just the same.