My aim got hacked and shit, contacted all my friends, told them he'd rape them, asked for money, etc. Oh well, I'm giving up on aim and not gonna use it anymore. I think aim overall is lowering my level of happiness. Before my aim was hacked I had blocked twoplustwo b/c I think that site was dragging on my overall level of happiness, b/c I'd spend too much time just reading the forums without really accomplishing anything. I'm also trying to improve my life by quitting smoking. I decided to go cold turkey after smoking for like 3-4 years. I was up to like 12 cigarettes a day or so, and I'm pretty confident I can quit cold turkey no problem. I also gave my friend a freeroll to insure I don't hastily smoke a cigarette ever. I told him next cig I smoke I'll ship him $200. My fiancee also quit, and her stipulation is if she smokes another one, she loses her ipod for a week (which would be hell for her since she listens to it for 8hrs a day at work) and she can't buy anything for a month. But in reality it's not very hard to quit smoking if you set your mind to it imo. Also, I had some grandma's cookies last night and I can't remember them ever tasting as good. Yay heightened sense of taste! It's really embarassing I smoked as long as I did. I knew I could quit cold turkey if I wanted to, but I found smoking fun =/ I guess I'm only on day 2, but the cravings are pretty manageable. It really makes me think people that can't quit smoking are pretty weak, although I can still in theory relapse, I just don't see it happening.

If I play above 2/4 NL without editing this post, whoever catches me wins $500 :) You have to aim me while I'm playing, aim name is: theriparianpoker. I'm planning on doing this until the end of the year for now.

Out of the goodness of my heart, I try to help out people that need to move money around to play poker. I have probably done transfers with about 200 different people over the years. Most of the time, I'm on the end that doesn't need the swap, but ocassionally I need the swap too. Out of the 200 or so people, only about 2 people have I actually met in real life. So naturally, I have run into scammers. I'm fucking sick of these lowlife degenerate motherfuckers. If I ever meet an online scammer in real life, I am going to punch them in the face, knee them in the balls, and piss on their face. What kind of life do you lead by just stealing other people's money? It's not "outsmarting" them, it's just simply being a fuckhead. Anywyas, I ended up swapping about $250 bucks to someone a month ago, and it turned out their a sccammer. Now I have to spend an hour tracking down old account numbers (for neteller, a mastercard that has been cancelled a year ago), and scan a bunch of paperwork. I have also moved and I don't think my current address was the address listed on pokerstars. I also don't have a copy of my current credit card bill, because, who the hell keeps those? Anyways, I can't play on pokerstars for awhile over some lowstakes scammer asshole. I hope this gets resolved quickly. Also, I've lost the spirit of helping randoms out for doing swaps between poker sites. This is the second time my account has been locked over some asshole scammer I was naively trying to help out. What a fucking headache.

The main reason this is a problem is that the pokersites have not gotten around to combing forces. Pokerstars and Full Tilt should facilitate intersite swaps. The intersite swap would be beneficial to both sites, because usually what happens is that someone runs hot on one site, runs bad on another site and needs some more money on the site they ran bad on. This would greatly reduce scammers as players would not have to deal with randoms in order to get their money on the other site. It would also allow both sites to be linked, and in case of a scammer, it would be harder to get the money out as nobody would be willing to swap with them except the pokersites, which would have a clear record of it and would be able to recover the funds very easily. The other solution I can think of is to stop having such a fuckwad of a government get in the way of us. Good job ending terrorism by making it harder for banks to do global commerce! Yeah that's gonna end terrorism! The government's main goal is to not fix ANY problem, but to just throw bandaids at it. If they really wanted to end terrorism, they would stop having such horrible foreign policy which is basically the cause of terrorism. People rarely terrorize neutral countries, they just terrorize the countries that are being total assholes to them.

/end rant

So 2nd time this week I did high stakes -EV gambling for no reason. Outside of the high stakes gambling I've been doing really well. I blew prob about 25k or so. Pretty pathetic as a professional gambler that I still take -EV shots for no reason. I'm going to spend the next week watching videos and devising some plans to get my head on straight. I did a 7day self-ecxclusion from all my sites to take some time off and regroup. Hopefully it works out and I come back ready to play poker and not gamble. This is the first time I ever did a self-exclusion, so it's obviously getting to be a problem. I just signed up for leggopoker and deucescracked, so I'll watch some more videos during my time off and finish reading tommy angelo's book elements of poker which will hopefully get my head on straight. Other than the random gambling, I've been playing pretty well though, so hopefully my time off will make me play awesome and I can become a winning mid stakes grinder that only plays midstakes.

In other news, my house move in was pretty successful and we're pretty much settled and it feels great to be in my own house with the woman I love. There was a pretty crazy storm that hit and I took pictures of the damage. It was the first time I've ever experienced such bad weather and I was pretty scared. It's likely really tame by internet standards, but it was a big deal to me. Here's the link to the pics:

pics

Lots of big things have been happening that I never got around to posting. First off, I'm engaged :). Erin is pretty awesome, so I'm pretty excited. Second off, I just bought a house and we're moving in on the 27th. It's a pretty nice house, but not amazing or anything. It's a bit under 2700 sq ft and is 7 yrs old. I'll post picturers after we move in and set it up. It's going to be a welcome change from our current 800 sq ft apartment that is basically falling apart. Thirdly, I can't remember if I ever mentioned that I got a 2nd dog or not. Cali (3 yr old half lab half retriever) is on the left, and my new dog Amos (1 yr old papillion) is on the right.

Here is Amos playing with another dog at the dog park.

Some fun news: I completely degenned it up at blackjack with my UB refund. My favorite hand from the degen session is pictured below (in case you can't tell what's going on, I was betting max/hand on 3 hands, dealer started with 4, I split my aces and hit a blackjack and 19, doubled my 10 and got 19, and I doubled my soft 17 and hit blackjack). You guys probably want the results of all my degen blackjacking. I ended up winning a little over 19k which makes my lifetime blackjack winnings about 18k :) b/c I never really played blackjack for significant money before this. I opted to cash out my UB account all but 1.5k to guarantee I don't degen anymore with blackjack.

kind've forgot to update in awhile, but a lot has been going on. The hand challenge ended up not too great. I think about 2ptbb/100 over 40k hands. I got engaged to my girlfriend of 2.5 years and we're looking at buying a house. I've been having a lot of fun away from the internet and haven't been playing as much. I've been playing 1/2 nl hu lately and doing pretty well. My grandpa also died and it was a pretty emotional experience. It was the first person that died that I was close to.

I forgot to make an update for awhile.

Day 4: 3485 hands, +$3215

Day 5: 10572 hands, +$3256

Day 6: 4951 hands, -$4025

Day 7: 2109 hands, -$1378

Day 8: 1214 hands, +$958

Day 9: 1128 hands, +984

After the two really bad days, I think I figured out I was tilting and really off my game. I then lowered the amount of tables down to 3-4. So now it's been really hard to get in the hands. Also Day 8 was mostly heads up. Day 6 was very tilt induced and c- game. I'm finding it very hard to stay consistent. I also ran a pokerEV graph to see how well I'm running in allin spots (of course that happens after a big downswing), and I'm about 15 buyins below expectation this month, so that's annoying. Total so far has been 38775 hands, +$11638 for 3.75 ptbb/100. Overall I'm fairly satisfied, but pretty disappointed with how I haven't been able to play steady. Also on that tilt induced day, I played a session drunk. Sometimes I really think I'm a pathetic pathetic poker player with no self control. That is one of the things I'm going to have to work on as a poker player. At least with this challenge I have shyed away from the more disastrous part of my lack of self-control: playing high stakes.

Day 1: 3821 hands, $+3058

Day 2: 4567 hands, $+97

Day 3: 4768 hands, $+4699

Going pretty well so far. Day 2 was a pretty tilt induced session. I'm finding it hard to control the different kinds of tilt. I'm not going through full blown monkey tilt, but I go on streaks of a little too many 3bets, a little too many bluffs, a little too many raises preflop. It really eats at profits. I wish I could be just a robot playing that can't tilt. I also just installed pokertracker/pokeracehud and am experimenting with stats. I'm founding it pretty useful, and am pretty embarassed I didn't use it before.

Day 1: 1565 hands, $1632

Since I've been spewing so much money at 5/10 NL+ lately, I'm going to start a 2/4 NL challenge. I'm going to play 100k hands and see how much money I've won/lost at the end of it. Hopefully I'll be up. Running pretty hot so far. I've found the key is to play 10 tables while watching Full House on the computer. I watched four episodes while playing. I watched the one where Stephanie accidentally cuts Jessies mullet and the one where DJ lies about having a horse (and two more less memorable ones).. I'm hoping to get 100k hands in by the end of the month, but that might be overkill.