I never thought this day would come. Or maybe I thought it would happen 60 years later. But sadly it has arrived much sooner than it should have, and at 26 years old I'm facing a possible retirement from poker for medical reasons. I've been to a dozen different doctors and rushed to the ER in a foreign country in the last month. This is not good. What am I going to do if poker's taken away from me? The last time I had a full time job was in 2006. I don't have any kind of education. I have pretty much all of my eggs in one basket, and that basket has a big leaking hole in the bottom.

It's a long story, but I'll start from the beginning.

I spent the winter in Mexico, had a spectacular month online in January, a losing but not a dramatic one in February. I moved to Vancouver with a 1,5 month lease at the end of February after stopping in Vegas for 10 days of losing live poker. I rented an amazing flat from the 28th floor of a huge building in the middle of the city that I luckboxed for a very cheap price. I was excited to get on the grind and life was looking great. Since I was only going to stay there for six weeks, I didn't want to spend money on buying a desk, a chair, a screen etc. Instead I just played on the crappy table plus garden chair with no back rest setup they had, and rented a 27-incher from a 2+2er to go with my lappy. The screen had horrible resolution and hurt my eyes from the beginning.

On a random night about 10 days into my grind, I had played a long session earlier in the day and went to do a swimming exercise after. When I got up from the pool, at the exact moment when I was lifting myself from the edge of the pool using my hands, I felt it for the first time. A slashing headache that felt like someone was stabbing me in the head. Just a single, incredibly painful blow, followed by a couple of weaker ones, and then it was gone. The whole thing lasted maybe two seconds and I was feeling fine afterwards. I went to the steam room, and soon the same thing happened again. When I left the swimming hall my ears started blocking themselves. Not in the way when you have water in your ears, but more like when you're in an airplane. I could feel the pressure slowly increasing in them, and after a point they always blocked. I could easily release the blockage by simply swallowing or blowing into my nose, but the pressure started building again and again.

I didn't think much of it at first. In the following days I had a few of the same headstab type aches, maybe 5-10 total. Every time they happened I was either turning my head fast, getting up from the bed rapidly, or doing a physical exercise such as bench pressing. My ears kept blocking themselves, and I would open them 300 times a day only to have them start building pressure again.

Maybe five days into this I went to see a doctor. It was a walk-in clinic as I'm not a Canadian citizen and I was feeling being rushed off a little bit. They prescribed me a nasal spray and gave me some pills. These were meant to remove some kind of blockage in my ears that the doctor wasn't even sure existed. I took the meds for two weeks with zero results.

Maybe ten or so days into this I was starting to feel dizzy. It was very mild at first, like I would be walking on a street thinking "hmm I feel weird, why does walking feel a little bit difficult?". It would be nothing noticeable to anyone else but me. It wasn't (and never has been) a spinning sensation, or basically anything that would have a clear direction or a repetitive pattern. This is my best way to describe it: Imagine rowing into the middle of a dead calm lake with zero waves. Stand up on the boat and close your eyes. That's how it feels to me. A continuous sensation of the ground moving slightly, without a clear routine, just these little pushes coming from every direction. Walking would feel like when you're slightly high - you don't really have trouble walking, but it's just enough difficult that you need to constantly think about it and it feels a bit weird.

Pretty soon after this I started to get vision issues. I can't recall if it got bad instantly or if it built up getting worse over days. But anyway, I started seeing these tiny flying spots everywhere, and my understanding of lights, shadows etc got worse. Walls, streets and so on would start "shining" (this is really hard to explain). I'm again using the weed example - you know when you're high and everything looks kinda cool and a bit different? Lights being stronger, colours being brighter, etc. I would feel basically like that all the time. I remember the first time I noticed this, I was walking home around noon and the rays of sun made the tiny rocks in the pavement shine like they were diamonds. I remember getting more dizzy all of a sudden, and all the shadows from the trees looking absurdly weird. It felt like I was dreaming. I nearly panicked (this is the first actual attack I remember getting) and ran home. There I sat on my couch, and looked at an empty wall. It had tiny, bright sparks flying around, thousands of them. I've had this ever since.

The same went on and I started seeing specialists. I couldn't go to a neurologist because apparently Canada has some ridiculous law that prohibits foreigners from seeing private neurologists. However, I went to an ENT (ear, nose, throat) specialist and he did all the possible tests and took scans of my ears. They found nothing wrong, my hearing was also perfect, there was no blockage of any kind. They also said that this wasn't positional dizziness which is usually ear based (this I already knew since I was dizzy all the time). I tried to tell them about how I can feel the pressure build inside my head and especially in my ears, but they also checked the ear pressure and found it normal. They said that they don't know what it is, but it's definitely not the ears. I also went to get a very extensive eye check that took almost an hour. They again took every test possible, including looking behind the eyes with an x-ray type machine to see if there's any pressure inside my skull. Again my tests came back perfect and my vision turned out to be perfect. Again they didn't know what was wrong, but it was definitely not the eyes.

It was around mid-March at this point, and this is also when for the first time I was in roughly the same state I still am. So, to re-cap, I was (and have since been) experiencing:

-Constant dizziness, occasionally getting worse on random attacks
-Constant feeling of unrealness, occasionally getting worse on random attacks
-Blurry vision, trouble tracking movement of anything, seeing tiny flying spots, difficulties looking at lights, shadows or anything out of the ordinary. Comes and goes, worsens dramatically when I look at a computer or a TV
-Extreme trouble zooming into anything or looking at just one spot. For example, let's say I place two apples on a table and go behind the first apple. It's literally impossible for me to focus on apple one, because after about a second of looking at it my eyes start zooming back and forth between apples 1 and 2.
-Ears blocking themselves all the time. How often it happens seems to vary at random, but roughly they block themselves maybe 200 times a day
-Occasional changes in gravity, e.g. I might feel really heavy or light

This is also when I decided to stop playing poker. I have now gone six weeks without playing online. I didn't know if poker was causing this, but my symptoms were making playing impossible anyway. I couldn't focus on anything because my eyes wouldn't follow my thoughts, making multi-tabling virtually impossible.

Days went by. I went on long walks, only to realise I can't even tell if the girl passing me on the street was hot or not. If she stopped I'd see her face clearly, but if she moved it would all be a blur. Every day was just an endless dream from the moment I woke up. If you've ever had a lucid dream, my life has basically been an endless one for two months now. I keep waiting to wake up, but it just doesn't happen. I don't know, maybe I got hit by a car and have been in a coma for two months now, and this is actually just one endless dream. I'll use my one time on that.

I started to google my symptoms more and more, posting on health forums, etc. A ton of the searches for these symptoms gave results such as cancer and MS, which made me more anxious and scared. This, in turn, also led to the attacks getting worse as there was probably a bit of a panic attack-type thing mixed in. This whole thing definitely isn't in my head, but I would be keen to believe that panicking does make it worse for me. I hadn't gone through any big life changes, I wasn't unusually stressed, I didn't have difficulty sleeping, etc etc. Basically I was a happy-go-lucky guy with not a worry in the world and I didn't suffer from any kind of disorders such as anxiety before this.

One thing the google searches also returned were neck problems. I found some neck related message boards where people were complaining about symptoms similar to mine. All they claimed to have was a tension neck. It seemed absurd to me that a neck could cause all these issues. My own neck had been a bit stiff in the months leading into this. It didn't really affect my everyday life in any way, except sometimes when I went to the gym it would give me a headache that I could feel was coming from my neck. I never thought much of that. Anyway, I thought I might as well give it a shot and started seeing chiropractors, osteopaths, masseuses, physioterapists, you name it. All of these specialists basically said something to the tone of "your neck seems to be a little bit stiff, but it's not really bad and I can't really say if it's causing this". None of the visits helped me at all with the symptoms.

Since nothing helped I started thinking about going back home to Finland. I was getting more and more certain I was having a cancer or something and really wanted to get every possible check done (I had a small-scale scan of my head done in Canada but it wasn't really comprehensive, since I couldn't see a proper neurologist). However I also wondered if this could still just be from the neck. In the end I decided I'd go on a long beach holiday first since I was so far away from home (Vancouver-Helsinki is like 20 hours of flying) and I had a ton of friends in Mexico and Belize. I wasn't supposed to go back to Finland until summer and I really didn't want to go there yet, so I thought I'd try the holiday first and go back in a couple of weeks if it didn't work out. However, I started worrying about flying, since I still had a ton of issues with my ears and I thought the pressure in planes might make me lose it completely. I wasn't really convinced about the quality of Mexican health care (I don't have any first hand experience so my apologies if I sound racist), so I decided to book a flight to Miami. I planned a five-day stopover there, so that if the flight messed me up I could go to a hospital, and if I felt normal (on my new scale of normalness) I'd continue to Mexico.

I landed in Miami about three weeks ago. The flight was a turbulent nightmare, but I didn't experience any symptoms in the plane that were worse than usual. My ears were blocking the normal amount as well. I felt fine after landing, took a cab to my hotel, no troubles there. After finally getting into my room after an endless day of traveling (I was held for ages at the U.S. border but that's another story) I decided to take a quick shower. After closing my eyes and letting water run on my face I felt it for the first time. Absolute chaos. I felt like I was on a massive earthquake, the whole bathroom felt like it was shaking. It was throwing me violently from side to side and for the first time I had genuine trouble standing up. When I opened my eyes everything looked normal (I've never hallucinated), I knew it was just in my head, but it was bad. I soon realized that my brains thought I was still in the airplane and it was mimicking the turbulence that happened before. It felt exactly like that. This was by far the worst I'd had. I got really nauseous and almost vomited too. However, I had been up for like 24+ hours so I just went to sleep. When I was laying in bed it kept shaking to the tone of the turbulence, but somehow I still managed to fall asleep.

I woke up at like 5PM the following night still feeling extremely nauseous and dizzy. It wasn't so clearly turbulence-mimicking shaking anymore, more like an overall feeling of being thrown around at a stormy sea. For some stupid reason I thought that instead of getting medical help it would be a good idea to go play live poker, so I went to the Seminole Hollywood for the first time in my life and regged into a WPT side event (Doug Lee was at my table and played horribly for the short time I witnessed him play). I was able to sit down for literally two hands before I had to get up. I started getting so horribly absurdly dizzy I don't have words to describe it. I wanted to vomit on the table. I felt like someone was rocking my chair from side to another and I had trouble sitting on it. This was the second "dizziness attack" I got. So I was being 24/7 dizzy, and on the top of that I started getting these really bad attacks. I had to leave my chips at the table and blind out from a WPT event. I hope this is enough to point out the severity of all this. I went back to my hotel and slept another 14 hours or something.

The next day I went to see another doctor (another visit with no help). The whole trip took me maybe three hours, and by the time I got back to my hotel it was about 5PM. I had been awake for less than five hours. Immediately upon laying in bed I started to get extremely sleepy. I managed to stay awake for maybe two minutes and then just completely passed out. I woke up NINETEEN hours later when I was being thrown out of the hotel having missed my check-out by an hour. I felt like I had woken up from a coma. All of my limbs were weak. It was a huge struggle to brush my teeth as the toothbrush felt so heavy I could hardly use it. My hands were shaking hard. After managing to hastily pack my bags I left the room, and I had to wait an hour to get a taxi. For the entire hour I was feeling so dizzy that I could't stand up at all (for some reason this always gets worse when I'm sitting or standing still, better when I'm either moving or laying down), I had to walk in a circle. I took my bags to another hotel, and by the time I got into my room I was feeling so dizzy and nauseous I came pretty close to calling 911. In the end I took another cab, this time to the ER at the Aventura Hospital.

I got admitted to the hospital pretty quickly. They put me in a depressing green hospital uniform and had me lay down when they took blood tests. I also had to give a urine sample. Then I was carried to a huge x-ray machine that scanned my brains. Upon waiting for the results I kept looking at the nurses and doctors who looked like they were straight from Grey's Anatomy. I could barely keep my eyes open, but to boost my consciousness I played a game of who's had sex with who in my head trying to take reads from their awkwardness when the nurses and doctors were interacting. A young, cute nurse blushed every single time she was talking to this big african american doctor. It smelled of death and sorrow in the hospital.

After maybe three hours of waiting and napping they came back with the results. They had found nothing. "I guess you must be feeling better now?", the doctor asked. "Not really", I said. They ignored this and basically kicked me out with a 3,5k bill in my hand. I was so dizzy I had to lean against the wall to even get out of the hospital. Upon exiting from the front door I realized I hadn't eaten anything for 30 hours, so I figured it might be a good idea. It had been hard for me to eat anything for a while because of the nausea, but I managed to down about a half of a mozzarella tomato salad. I didn't start feeling any better, and I didn't even know where I was. I started walking around Aventura, Florida pointlessly. I saw rich people's yachts and gated communities everywhere. The posh ladies walking past me looked at me like I was drunk, because it was hard for me to even walk properly. At some point I walked past a squirrel that was standing still on the side of the road. I didn't see it until it was almost next to me, so that I could only see it in the corner of my eye. It jumped off and the fastness of the move made my eyes black out entirely. I fell backwards and my whole world went pitch black. I woke up a few moments later and noticed a sign to Aventura Mall. I had been there a year earlier on a holiday trip, so I went inside and took a cab to my hotel. For some reason I started feeling a bit better in the cab (I've always felt best in moving cars, I really don't know why), and managed the rest of the night somewhat okay. I booked a flight home because I decided this is when I have to give up my trip and go home to get proper treatment.

I landed in Finland about 20 days ago. I went straight to see a neurologist. The doctor seemed good and trustworthy, I hand-picked him online from many candidates and I'm basically sure that he knows what he's doing (Finnish health care is considered to be the best in the world too). They took a comprehensive MRI scan of my brain instead of the partial CT scans they took in America. Luckily they didn't find a tumor or anything else serious, and my brain appeared to be functioning normally. We did all kinds of neurological tests and everything came back clear. Amazingly even my balance was alright, I don't even know how that's possible. The neurologist said that I should try to rest for a few weeks doing absolutely nothing and come back in 3-4 weeks. He also said I should see a physiotherapist.

I've now gone to a special physiotherapist who's very experienced with neck related issues and I've somewhat got my life back. At the darkest times I was unable to do basically anything. I couldn't sit still for long periods of time, I couldn't talk to anyone, I didn't want to meet anyone, I couldn't do sports, etc. After extensive physiotherapy I've regained enough strength to do sports and have a somewhat normal social life again. There are many things I still can't do because my eyes are still as bad as they ever were and I have next to no coordination. For example I can't play tennis because I can't track the movement of the ball at all. The ears blocking, pressure building, eyes not working, feeling of unrealness and other stuff are basically the same they ever were. However, the actual dizziness is about 80% gone. I haven't had a proper "dizziness attack" in weeks, and the overall dizziness I have 24/7 is so mild that it's barely noticeable. I still can't use computers for long periods of time, sitting down still doesn't make me feel very good, and mentally this is still pure hell because every day still feels like a gigantic dream. But I've been able to socialize, to get drunk with friends and do other normal people stuff, which feels like a victory already.

I had massive progress in the first couple of physiotherapy sessions, but after that the progress has stopped entirely. After getting my basic functions back my eyes especially have not been getting any better at all. Playing online poker still feels like a faraway dream. I've been playing a little bit of live poker in our local casino which I can do for a few hours at a time. However, my brain still isn't functioning normally (I suspect it's because it's getting wrong signals from my eyes). I keep forgetting things and can't think about stuff on a deep level. For example, normally if I play a 4 hour session of poker and someone uses sizing X in spot Y in the first hand, I remember that exact hand four hours later. Now I can't recall a single hand 5 minutes later. I can't observe people at all. Even if I decide to look at a hand I'm not involved in very closely, I just find myself two minutes later not having looked at it at all. I look around at the poker table and all the faces look weird to me, even that I've played with them for hours. I feel like I have a mental ADD on 24/7, like I just can't concentrate on anything because my eyes keep zooming from object to another and my mind follows them instead of it being the other way around. My absolute best poker game I can pull right now is about my C game. I can play basic poker based on five years of experience, in other words play really solid without making huge mistakes. But I can't play a great, history/leveling/read based poker, because my brain is unable to think about those things. My thought processes right now are like "I have a good hand, so I raise", instead of thinking about different variables, theory and so on. And this is just at live poker, which on top of everything else isn't even my bread and butter. Online I have all of the same problems, plus that I can't even look at a computer screen as I literally can't follow the movement at all.

It has now been 6 weeks since I last played poker, I've spent a huge chunk of my live savings on this, and no one's been able to tell me what's wrong. They've tested me for virtually every known disease and it appears I have none of them. From a medical point of view I'm as healthy as anyone, since none of the symptoms exist outside my head. My only hope is the physiotherapy somehow picking up, which is starting to look unlikely with the declining results of late. All I can do is wait and hope that it goes away.

If it doesn't go away, I'm going to be fucked. Like I said in the beginning, I do not have another plan besides poker. I don't really have money saved up. I don't have an education. I don't have a CV. I can't think of a single other profession besides poker and writing that I'd like, and they both need me to do the thing that's the hardest for me right now - sitting down on a computer.

I've decided to leave the decisions for until the summer is over. This is a pretty good time to be on a sick leave if there even is one. I'm planning to take it as easy possible, continue physiotherapy, rest a lot and exercise a lot, eat well and so on. If I haven't got rid of this by the end of August or so, I'll have to start looking for jobs. It's grim, but I can't wait forever. This is already busting my life roll pretty damn fast.

I have a bunch of CR videos that I've been meaning to make, people seemed to love my last video and I have some sequels lined up plus another few things. I don't know when I'll be able to finish my work, because I don't want to publish anything half-assed and I refuse to record a video when I'm not in a 100% state of mind.

If there's ever a spot to use the official one time, this is it for me. Please, if there's anyone up there, please don't take this all away from me. Please let me recover.

Disclaimer: I haven't smoked any weed since this started or used other drugs. I had a 6 week break from alcohol during this, and also only drank heavily a couple of times in the weeks leading to this. I've had my teeth checked and there's nothing there either. I don't have meniere's or any disease you can google.

-CB

Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose long days spent inside a dark, dusty room smelling of sweating men. Choose to travel around the world, only to see the casino, your hotel room and some bar with overpriced drinks and hot waitresses you're never going to be able to pull. Choose variance that doesn't even itself out in the span of your career. Choose playing perfect poker for four days only to bubble a tournament with aces against ace-king. Choose playing with some of the most moronic, annoying people you'll ever come across. Choose to be berated by Stealthmunk for opening a suited connector under the gun. Choose having your bracelet dreams being crushed every summer. Choose a golden AAdvantage card and a hotel upgrade to a suite that looks exactly like the standard room. Choose having to teach dealers how to split a pot in Omaha 8 or better. Choose folding AK to a three-bet in position. Choose having Italian playboys dance on their chairs after they have sucked out on you with their gutshots. Choose eating mouldy baguettes at the casino cafeteria. Choose munching on a bar of Snickers at four o'clock in the morning after you haven't eaten in 20 hours because nothing's open. Choose a $15 water from the mini-bar. Choose forgetting to change your underwear. Choose financial instability. Choose lighting money on fire. Choose shaking the sweaty hand of a smelly French businessman upon exiting a tournament. Choose making plans to see every tourist attraction in town only to book the next flight home on tilt after busting the main event. Choose your only social contacts being the dealers and waitresses. Choose tipping with five dollar chips because you're out of notes after stuffing all of them on a 40-year old stripper's underwear at a low-class strip club the previous night. Choose missing out on an online Sunday because the hotel internet connection is too bad. Choose becoming washed up. Choose live tournaments.

I have always been an avid lover of live tournaments. Unlike all the cool kids, I basically started as a live player, and I've been touring more live tourneys than most people of my generation. I have been to 60-something countries in the last three years, in hundreds of hotels, on hundreds of flights. I've pretty much bubbled the $10k WSOP Main Event, I've played a $50 side event, I've been everywhere from Macau to South Korea to Australia to Canada to Slovenia playing live tournaments. I have won a tournament for over $100k, and I've dropped more than $100k during the last couple of years.

I have come to realize, after blowing all of my online winnings and pretty much my savings too on live poker and traveling that it's simply not worth it for me. I love it, inherently, and nothing I can feel regarding online play can ever match the feeling when I enter a live tournament. I love the tension, the excitement. But lately, after getting four mincashes out of my last 105 tournaments for a combined loss of about $120k, getting bad-beated left and right, and blowing up some good opportunities myself by hoodflatting cold 4-bets with Q5o and spazzing post-flop, I've started feeling the symptoms of a serious live poker burnout. And I'm starting to think that's actually a good thing.

I'm scared to do the math on the expenses of my live poker habits from the past few years, but I think it's safe to say I've spent more than $100k on flights, hotels and other necessary stuff. I never book really expensive hotels, I never fly first class, I pretty much always trade luxury for saving money as long as it's not taking anything away from preparation for the tournament. Yet still I must have spent *at least* 100k on getting from place A to B and having a bed to sleep in. Add the hundreds of missed days online and the amount of money I've lost in buy-ins, and the expenses have skyrocketed to about a quarter million. This is way more money than I have ever had to my name.

I've always been a traveler and to a point I think it's fine to spend a little bit of money on a live tournament trip, as you'll also get to see new places. But lately I've been bumhunting live tournaments much more carefully and pretty much forgot about the seeing the world part. I've been to tournaments in the middle of nowhere so often, and then busted on day 1 wondering what the hell I'm going to do in rural France for the next four days. I've also been to way too many cool cities of which I've seen nothing, because I've been too busy playing the whole time. This has got to end.

I think it would be optimal for me and almost anyone who isn't Timex, Dan Smith or SirWatts, to simply never play live tournaments and just keep crushing online (I've been doing pretty well online lately and I'm also feeling really good about my online game at the moment, thanks for asking). It's really hard to think of a scenario where playing a live tournament would financially be a better idea than grinding online. I like money, so obviously after having figured this out years ago it would seem like an easy decision to simply do so and let other people keep lighting money on fire playing live and getting richer myself. But it's not an easy decision. There's only one reason, and it's a naive and stupid one, but it's a tough one for me to go around anyway. It's the glory.

Oh, the glory. There's simply nothing I can win online that'd make me feel proud in the same way as winning a WSOP bracelet or an EPT would. All of my poker related dreams have something to do with winning a live tournament, and it's been like that for as long as I remember. I would still give away everything to be one of those people who just know they are going to crush it when they enter a live tournament. But honestly, after doing some critical self-searching, I just don't think that's me. Lately when I've been entering live tourneys I've already been mentally out the door. I just played seven different tournaments here in Montreal, including two bullets at the $3,5k WPT Main, and I fully never expected to even make a day two. It's just not happening, and I need to stop seeking that pseudo glory that doesn't even exist.

If I was younger, maybe I would still keep pursuiting those dreams like I have been for the past few years, effectively half-way killing my entire career. But I'm turning 26 next month, and I need to start taking both my life and my finances more seriously. I have to stop being an idiot who only cares for short-lived glory and getting a new Hendon Mob flag (oh, how much I care for the Hendon Mob flags). I need to learn to take pride for having a succesful career instead of some stupid live donkament win.

Ironically, I'm flying to St. Maarten tomorrow morning to play in another live tournament, the Unibet Open grand final. I already have everything booked and my house in Mexico isn't available until early December, so I don't really have a choice. At least the tournaments there start at 6PM every day so I can actually do cool things outside playing since it's meant to be a pretty sweet spot. Anyway, when that one's finished, I'm going to take a LONG break from live tournaments and simply play online every single day and make a lot of money. Expect to see a lot of Chuck Bass in tournaments from about December 6th onwards.

I'd be lying if I said I could totally give up on live tournaments. I know that's something that I'll never fully be able to do, simply because I love live poker too much. But I'm going to be more selective. From now on, I'm not going to give a shit about the expected value of a tournament. No matter how absurd the field is in some tournament with a 1000BB starting stack and two-hour levels, I'm not going to play it unless it's in a location that I want to go to (goodbye, Foxwoods). Instead, from now on when I feel the need to play live, I'm going to treat it as a full-on holiday and choose some awesome destination. Since I now live in Mexico, the LAPT tournaments come to mind. I haven't looked at the schedule, since right now I don't have any sort of need to play live, but if they have something like a Brazil stop in the spring (since I assume I'm going to get serious live poker cravings in about 2-3 months, and I already know I won't be able to help myself) I could see myself attending that. But even for it, I'd just play the main with the attitude of not caring about it at all as the real money is online, and mainly focusing on having a great trip in a great country. I'm going to allow myself some expections for things like the WSOP Main or maybe the Midnight Sun in Helsinki, but I'll be damned if you can spot me playing an EPT in some dead town like Deauville again for a long time.

From now on, I'm going to focus on my career and being happy. I want to experience new things and have a life to be proud of outside poker. For the longest time I've seeked some kind of fulfillment from live tournaments, only to recently realize how dumb it all is. If I grind online for the next, say, five years, I'll probably make about $1 million in the process. And that will, eventually, feel like money I've deserved through hard work. If I keep playing live tournaments, 95 percent of the time I'm going to be left with nothing instead of the million and if I bink something, I'm just going to be that dolt with a huge, undeserved tournament score who ran hot for 300 hands at the right time.

Life-wise, I'm still kind of undecided what to do with mine. When I moved to Mexico a couple of months back, I was assuming I'd be doing some soul-searching. But the first two months have been so insanely busy (I trekked from San Diego to New York with stops in Vegas and Foxwoods, went back to Mexico for a week, then to Montreal for ten days, etc) that I haven't really had time to think about things at all. I feel like I need something or someone in my life outside poker to cling to, but I don't have any idea what or who it would be. I have a lot of friends, I've been exercising a fair bit lately and I've generally been pretty happy as well, but I've felt like something's missing for quite a while. All is good for now, though, since I'm going to have an awesome life in Playa Del Carmen and I'm going to have a lot of fun playing every day, hitting the gym every day, sunbathing every day and partying a little bit. I guess the life decisions can wait for later. But one thing's for sure - when I finally one day realize who I want to be in life and what I want to do, it's not going to hurt to have some capital to my name. And that's never going to happen if I keep touring live tournaments. For so many years, I've basically wanted to be that guy in the spotlight after winning an EPT. Instead I'm the guy with a +$250k online graph and a fraction of that in the bank. It's not the way it's supposed to be.

I'm going to close this off by saying that I've had some good live tournament trips, too. Last year I had an amazing time in Barcelona when we were there for a week before the EPT with my then-girlfriend being tourists (and then I went deep in the main, too). I had a great time in Perth last year even that I bricked everything I played, just because it's Australia and Australia is awesome. There are a couple of other similar cases, and I actually think that this St. Maarten leg is going to be amazing too just for all the activities we can do outside playing. But for every trip like that, I've had ten miserable trips in terrible locations where I've been on constant lifetilt from the beginning. From this point on, whenever I decide to waste money and sacrifice grinding days for playing live, I'm going to make sure it's going to be worth it as an experience.


PS. My 4-part series of my Big 162 win is debuting this week on CardRunners. Hope you guys like it!

I wrote a blog entry last week telling about my endless downswing, possibly sounding a little emo. Progress since then: I didn't play before Sunday, and on Sunday I played all majors, ft bubbled one and got bad beated for cl pots with less than 100 left in four other tourneys with 40k+ first, resulting in a -4k Sunday. That was my best Sunday in a looooooooong time. I haven't played a day since.

I've been trying to think about all this lately, to maybe come up with solutions, or at least with new weapons to tackle the situation (to learn about the situation, see my previous entry). I have yet to come up with a solution, but there's a thought that's come to my head recently that I want to write about.

I think there's a good chance that I'm on the verge of burning out.

I have played poker professionally for over four years now, for most of my adulthood. I've always been pretty obsessed with it, I've always put on more volume that almost anyone I know. I've always put it ahead of relationships, family, everything. I've been a good student, and outside the 60 hours a week I've spent playing I've also probably spent 5-10 studying. Poker has been with me everywhere I've gone to. If I'm alone somewhere, say on a bus or airplane, it's a rare thing my first random thoughts aren't poker related.

In the last year or so I've pursued this thing harder than ever. I've previously written about how I went entirely broke in late 2009, making me stop my entire cash game career and switch to MTTs. Before that I didn't really have bankroll management or anything like that, but going through the pain of hitting the absolute rock bottom made me a huge bankroll nit. From then on I always put money before success, bankroll management before taking shots, and took every possible precaution to never ever go broke again. For the next couple of years poker was just a job to me, I simply grinded because I was making good money, and I played with a bankroll of an absurd amount of average buy-ins and never really tried to take my chances at the highest buy-ins.

Exactly a year ago I was faced with an opportunity to try my luck at higher stakes getting guidance from someone much better than me. It was what I wanted, I was getting a bit bored at being stuck at the $60 ABI level, even that I was up 200k from the last 1,5 years. I wanted to pursue becoming one of the best, not just one of those guys making six figs a year taking money from the fish at mid-stakes. I wanted to feel pride for what I do.

When we started with my mentor/backer I made it clear that my motivation in this was to pursue the highest stakes and to become elite at MTTs. Many people asked me why I got backed, it made virtually no sense since I had enough money to play on my own and was doing well for myself. I'm going to tell you what I told them, and what was 100% the truth - I did it one hundred percent to improve. I was fully aware that my hourly rate would drop since I had to give half of my winnings away, and I knew that it wouldn't happen fast. But I really thought it would happen.

The first few months were really tough. I took really tough beats for huge equities late in live tournaments, and I had a bad online downer (although compared to what's been going on lately this was a piece of cake). Then in November pieces started clicking together and I had a 100k month, built from tons of 10-20k scores here and there. After this I was pretty sure I would just rape everyone this year, and I made a humble yearly goal of winning 250k.

During this whole time I've both grinded and worked towards my goal of getting better and winning a lot of money tirelessly. I've already played more tournaments this year than I played in the whole last year and it's only August. I've played so fucking much. I've done hand history reviews, watched videos, had long theoretical conversations, posted hands, yadda yadda bla bla bla for such a crazy amount of time it's not even real.

I got really obsessed with the PocketFives rankings too, as I made the #1 spot for Finland last December for the first time and then lost it early this year. I really really wanted to get it back and played extra hours just to get there. I wanted to win a triple crown too, just to have that stupid badge, and played more extra hours whenever I had the chance of winning it, and it took me 15 attempts and about 100 extra hours on the felt playing meaningless early morning tournaments to finally bink it last month.

I'm not even going to try to pretend that I'd have played my A-game the whole time. I've had obsessive stretches where I've played 12 hour sessions every day for weeks, I've played on days when I knew it was a really bad idea to play because I was tired/tilted, I've played poorly for a variety of reasons. If I had been more humble with my goals and hadn't pursued them mindlessly I'm sure I'd be in much less make-up.

And then there are the live tournaments. Oh, the fucking live tournaments. For my entire career up until this year I've been doing pretty well in them. But ever since we started, coincidental or not, I've just lost and lost and lost in them. I'm not sure how much it's affected the overall picture, but I'm sure at least a little bit. I must say that I love live tournaments much more than I love online poker, and I have never not played my best wherever I've been playing live. But obviously when you drop 20k on some EPT trip it takes its toll mentally for your online game (even that it shouldn't), because all of a sudden you have to work three weeks just to catch up with that 5-day trip.

In a nutshell, I've just worked way too much. I haven't rested, I haven't taken breaks, I haven't played feeling good and revitalized for an absolute eternity. In normal jobs people have something like 150 off days a year, when I've had maybe 15-20 percent of that in the last few years. And for what reward? A six-figure make-up that doesn't seem to be going anywhere and is just getting worse every session.

I've always loved poker. Not just loved like everyone loves it because it's a great game, but loved it in an obsessive way. Every day I've taken off I've missed it dearly, and every time when I've been starting a session I've been pumped, like ridiculously PUMPED to get it going. I've loved all the tournaments I've played, the whole thing. It's just been one of the most precious things in my life, my treasure.

The last couple of weeks have been really weird, because I haven't even felt like playing. I guess this is normal for a lot of people, but not for me. I ALWAYS want to play poker. I have never experienced these feelings since I first played poker in 2007. All of last week I really didn't want to play until it was Sunday and I got a bit excited for majors. I think I played really good for the first 6-7 hours building stacks everywhere (pretty sure I'd never even been deep in so many majors at the same time), but once the endless late-game beats started I could feel myself slowly letting go again. By the end of the session I was just really happy and relieved that I didn't have to play, and haven't felt the slightest of needs to play ever since. I have no idea if I'll play before next Sunday, but I doubt it. I know it's bad in a make-up situation like mine, but I really need to learn to take care of myself better and choose to play only when I feel like it. Fuck PocketFives rankings, I'm not even going to look how far I've slipped from the top spot. Yes to mental health.

A funny thing happened a few days back. I was having one of these pointless off days when I didn't really do anything at all, but didn't play either because I didn't want to. It was like 2AM, and I didn't have anything to do. I just entirely randomly went to our local casino and played 2/2 NL for a couple of hours. This was the first time I've played live cash in Helsinki in approximately four years. I didn't go there to win (or lose), I didn't go there to work. I just wanted to play live poker, because live poker is fucking awesome and I felt like socializing with other sleepless people.

I didn't know a soul at the table, but I chatted with a couple of guys and just had fun. I don't even remember if I won or lost and it's not important at all. I doubt I'll be going back for another four years, but I thought this was an encouraging experience - I actually enjoyed myself. If I could play live poker 24/7 and somehow be rolled for it I'm sure I'd never burn out.

Another encouraging experience happened to me just now, when I noticed a PM from a CardRunners member thanking me for my videos saying they had helped him a lot and that he just had his record month online. When I think about it objectively, I still think I make really good videos, and I've always been good at analysing hands on paper. I don't think the skill has gone anywhere, and I don't doubt that I still have it in me to win whatever I want to, but I just don't have it in me at the moment to function properly when I play. I'm just too burnt out from playing, and simply should not be playing until I feel better. (I still love making videos though, so I'm going to do a couple of interesting ones this week I think).

This week feels pretty stupid already, because the weather in Finland is getting shit, there's nothing to do yet I still don't want to play. I strongly believe things will take a turn for the better in a couple of weeks when I have some friends from abroad coming over for a week of general debauchery. I'm sure we'll be getting drunk a lot and playing a few fun-filled sessions. They are all much more successful than me, so I can only learn from them, and some fun social grinding might be exactly what I need at the moment. I'm just so tired of being stuck in this room, alone in the dark of the night, clicking buttons (losing) having no one to talk to.

When my friends leave early September I'm leaving too, for the Unibet Open London and then WPT Malta. After that I'm going to stay in Malta with friends until the end of WCOOP. I'm aiming to play a decent amount of live, and every time I play online I'm going to have people around me. This is something I'm already looking forward to, even that I'm not (yet) really looking forward to the actual playing online part. I think a big part of my burning out has something to do with being in this alone, always playing alone, never making it a fun, careless thing. I have a really nice group of people on Skype who I talk to during sessions, and while it's kind of great since they are all really positive fellas, it's also a bit sad because many of these people grind together and always maintain a positive attitude, whereas I always find myself playing alone feeling depressed. I can't wait to join all the weed heads to get in the right mood from the start.

Side note: I've played alone for about 98% of my lifetime Sunday sessions. The four biggest scores I've had in my life, I've had someone with me on a live trip or by chance at home.

And with that, I'm off to the couch to watch Breaking Bad.

As a training site pro I've always thought that I should try to remain low-key about large losses, because you're supposed to be setting an example, and if you lose month after month after month people could easily start questioning why you of all people are a site pro in the first place. Why would anyone want to watch your videos, if all you do is lose? Of course variance is a normal part of poker, and blogging about "normal" losses just shows maturity and acceptance of variance. But what if you lose ALL THE ****ING TIME for an entire year?

Well, I'll play with fire.

This year has been, by far, the second toughest of my poker career (the toughest was in 2009 when I ended up entirely busto, but this was when I was an immature wannabe-baller cash game degen). No other year after I started playing seriously comes even close. And I highly doubt that anything can possibly happen during the remainder of the year that would make me feel good about this year at the end of December. To match my last year which ended up +200k I have about 300k worth of catching up to do.

For the first six months, January through June, I pretty much lost non-stop. I don't know, maybe I had a winning month there somewhere, but I sure as hell can't remember. The year kicked off with a -20k EPT Deauville when I played 11 tournaments or something and bricked hard. Then I came back home, played online 5-6 days a week, and lost and lost and lost and lost. At some stage I decided to take a break and flew to Miami and Curacao for a few weeks. When I got back I got 4th in the Big 162 in my first session and had some other encouraging scores. In May I almost won a Pokerfest 109r for 20k+, but got unlucky losing with JJ to AJ for all the chips 4-handed.

I decided to skip the WSOP. For the entire spring I grinded thinking that I'll go if I can get out of my hole, but it never happened. I could've got backing for the WSOP, but I wanted to win money instead of having another -30k live trip, so I decided to stay in the super soft online summer games. This was a pretty smart decision in my opinion, even that it wasn't rewarded.

And soft the games were, for sure. With all the regs gone the 109r was like a $22 freezeout. But just when I thought I couldn't run any worse, I started running worse than it is humanly possible. I was already in a solid 600 buy-in downswing dropping like 30 buy-ins per session (this is MTTs in case someone hasn't been following), and when the games were at their softest I was entirely incapable of winning a flip and started losing 50-60 buy-ins per session instead. My downswing topped at -138k at the end of June.

Then July came and I finally started winning. I won the Entraction Summer Special for 20k (there is a video about it on CardRunners that just came out), and I went deep in a ton of other stuff. I had numerous scores in the 10k ballpark, and got 5-9th in a ton of Sunday Majors that could've been year-changing had I gone all the way. I had three top tens in six weeks in the Stars 109r Sunday that has over 60k for the winner... but I got 8th, 9th and 10th losing with AK to JJ for 25% of chips in the first one, and TT to 55, AK to K4 in the other two. I managed to win ~50k in a couple of weeks I think, and the future was starting to look brighter.

Mid-July I was at -80k and decided to just grind it all out now that I had started my comeback, and instead of enjoying the extremely short Finnish summer played poker non-stop. Results: Four weeks of breakeven poker, still down 800 buy-ins.

And now, August. This ****ing month. I've dropped 40k again in like seven sessions. WHOOOSSSSHHHHHHHHHHHH. Back to square one.

It's just ridiculous.

Out of my last seven sessions I have entirely bricked five. I play about 50 tournaments a night, and since I should be itm about 15% of the time I should be expecting to at least get some money out of some donkament 7-8 times a night. But instead I've whiffed entirely. Last Sunday was one of my most expensive Sundays ever; I lost 11k in one night, mincashing The Big 162 for $300 out of $11500 buy-ins. WTFWTFWTF.

And now I'm suddenly again way into the six figures. It's just incredibly...depressing.

I don't know, if I wrote this entry a couple of days back this would've come off depressing as hell, but I've taken a couple of days off now and I'm feeling better already. I'm still devastated enough to skip the whole week though. I mean, I know as poker players we should just do our day to day thing, "print the daily coupon" like the Aussie legend Seabeast says, but there has to be a breaking point for everyone when it's better to just stay away.

So yeah, that's how I'm doing. It'll be interesting to see how many people will now suggest that when you hit a six-figure downer you probably should just give up and stop trying to educate people. I don't care though, I still got game and sooner or later I'm gonna come back. But that moment isn't gonna be this week, since just the thought of poker makes me want to vomit. Instead I'm gonna go to a music festival, get drunk and grind Wii table tennis or something.

But yeah if anyone has any spare run good, I could really use some. I'm running about 65 000 000 chips below all-in ev for this year according to HEM, I'm not sure what it even means but I guess it goes for some sort of proof that I've not been running too well. I'm up 80-90k for the same time frame from euro sites, but for entertainment/dramatic purposes below is my Stars graph from 1/1/2012 onwards:

I just looked at my CardRunners blog and what a lazy blogger I have been. Three months since the last update? Really? And I'm supposed to love writing.

I don't really know where to begin, so I guess I'll go through my checklist one thing at a time:

Life

I moved in with my girlfriend two months back. I spent exactly one night in our new apartment, everything still unpacked, and ran away to play live for the next couple of weeks. After that it took about a month to get the place in order, and now it's starting to look good. We still don't have a couch (it shall arrive next week), but overall this is definitely starting to feel like home. I'm still slightly terrified just of the idea of living with a girlfriend, since being a semi-commitment-phobe and a huge moving-in-together-phobe this was the one thing I thought might never work out for me. Luckily, it's been smooth so far. I have my own office, which is also my hideaway place when I need my alone time. The location of this place is so good I can't wait for the summer arrive, so I can hit the beach (yeah I know, lol Finnish beaches) every day and enjoy living in the heart of the city.

I have a new hobby - juicing. I've always been AWFUL at eating vegetables and fruit. It's not that I didn't like the taste of most of them, they've just always seemed like a lot of work. Then one day I randomly came across a 2+2 thread on juicing (it's in the OOT forums for those interested) and realized how awesome it is. For the past three weeks or so I've juiced every day (my standard cocktail: 3 apples, 3 oranges, one lemon, a piece of ginger, 2 pomegranates, a bag of spinach, one broccoli, 5 carrots), and I have felt way healthier than for a while. I've also hit the gym pretty hard for the last month and it's starting to even show a bit, so I'm definitely happy with the health/fitness department of my life at the moment.

Online Poker & SCOOP

This year's SCOOP is almost over and I have yet to cash in an event. Actually, I'm pretty sure I have yet to finish in the top 30% in a single event and the only tournaments I have left are the 1k and 109 mains, plus possibly the 215 6max if I wake up early enough on Sunday. Before the SCOOP started, I was probably the only reg who wasn't excited about it all. Everyone else was firing excited twitter updates (I think Rupert and his tea cup updates wins the prize though), and people were saying on Facebook that they are going to turn their phones off for the SCOOP's 16-day duration to play 24/7.

I never planned to play more than half of the events, and now that it's over it appears that I have registered a mere 12% of all tournaments, a total of 11 so far. There are a couple of reasons. The main reason is that the way the buy-ins are distributed between the mids and the highs is really bad for my personal buy-in preferences. I'd love to play something like $500 freezeouts or $109+rebuys, but there have been NONE (the only 109r they had was a big antes tournament at the peak hour of euro nightlies) in that buy-in category. I have 0 interest in the lows, because I don't have the heart in me to even attempt beating 50 000 players in some $11 freezeout, and even the $215s have been such slow-structured two-day events with infinite players that I kind of haven't just...bothered. I know it's terrible and I know that I should have played all of them, but I just find it really hard to get excited and motivated for a tournament that's just a normal buy-in for me, takes ages, has such a slow structure that the last 50 players are going to be good anyway and what in like the best scenario is still going to end up in me getting 11th/23559 players for 4x buy-in.

So yeah. I'm not a SCOOP guy. I would definitely be if I played the 1ks and 2ks (=if I was better at poker so I could battle the dragons like shaundeeb and Isildur1), but it's too early for me, it was never going to happen this year. In a nutshell; the lows were too low, the highs were too high, and the mediums just had interesting tourneys too rarely for me to actually care for SCOOP at all. I truly hope that next year I'll be in the 1ks and 2ks, in which case it'll be a different story.

In other games I've been getting some decent scores recently online. From the last couple of months I've got back to back victories in Entraction majors - first the montly one for $24k and then the weekly for $10k, a 4th place in Pokerfest $109r (lost JJ vs AJ for half the chips, sigh), a couple of wins in highrollers, a French poker series 5th place and a few other scores in the $5-$10k ballpark that I'm forgetting about. It still hasn't been a particularly good year so far, especially since I've lost a shit ton live. Which brings us to...


Live Poker & WSOP

I'm not going to the WSOP this year unless something miraculous (me winning the SCOOP main?) happens. I acknowledge that I could get full backing to freeroll the entire series, but I've decided against it. For my entire career I have been financially irresponsible, just hunting glory not caring about money. But now that I've matured a bit and am actually an old man (I'm 25, WTF? I just turned 20?!?!) I see things differently.

For so long in my career I just dreamt about big scores. I played huge live tournaments (I think I have played live tourneys where the buy-in was like 300% of my remaining bankroll after buying in) taking massive risks, and I have put glory above everything else. Like everyone else, I've dreamt of winning an EPT or a bracelet. I've dreamt of getting massive online scores. I've dreamt of being the force to be recognized, the guy who rapes every tournament so hard that people are afraid of him. I've approached it all wrong.

In my defence, I have always been a good grinder. I've played 14000 MTTs, most non-turbos in the last couple of years, so it's not like I'd only have been fucking around. But mentally, my mind hasn't really been on the grind. I've never really thought or cared for having money in the bank, which I guess should be the main goal of every poker player. I've only been motivated to grind so that I could tour more live tournaments with my winnings and gradually go up in stakes trying to bink something huge.

It's just such, such a wrong way to approach it. I've now (a bit late, one could say!) realized that when looking at one's career in hindsight, the three biggest scores should be removed to truly explore one's career. Fuck, I'd hate to bink an EPT, then never properly grind again and just slowly bleed my money away. I want to have a long, great career where I'm achieving great things year after year. And in that sense, playing the WSOP would be an awful idea. It's the softest time of the year online, since all the best players will be in Vegas. What I'm going to do in June is play like an animal online, hopefully making a ton of money.

I've already been to the WSOP twice (never cashed an event), so I know what it's about and I've experienced even the Main Event day 4. I've seen the clubs, strip clubs, casinos, hotels, everything. I don't really miss Vegas. It's summer in here, too, but the difference is that the Finnish summer lasts about two months - the duration of the WSOP - and I don't want to miss it again. There's no point in it financially, since the online games will be soft but the WSOP almost certainly will be tougher than ever this year, and as a Finn we have to pay 50% taxes for WSOP winnings but 0% for online winnings. It's not really even a hard decision. The only thing that makes it marginally hard is that I have so many friends from around the world going and without any doubt I'd be having a blast over there, but it's not the time.

In my new philosophy, it's time for live tournaments and things like the WSOP when you've truly proved yourself online over a long enough time frame. I'm up like $200k-$250k from online, which isn't anything really. My time will come to play all the live stuff I want, but it's not now. If only I had realised this sooner and started my growing process online two years ago.

So yeah, no WSOP for me. Have fun guys. Sorry for blocking your twitters for all of WSOP because I definitely don't want to hear about all the fun you'll be having :(

I might play something in the Helsinki Midnight Sun in a couple of weeks. I haven't decided yet, and I'll probably decide on a whim. I don't feel like I have anything to prove in the Finnish live scene anymore since I final tabled both of our big annual live festival main events last year and won the bigger one, and they aren't very good value either because even most random Finnish live players are quite tough to play against, but I live next to the casino now so I might as well go and show my face. We'll see. Other than that I don't know if I'm even going to be traveling anywhere all summer. Probably not. It'd be my first entire summer spent in Finland since like 1995.

The Wire

Now, onto the main subject. I know I'm more than just a late bloomer, but I finished watching all five seasons of The Wire only a couple of days ago.

I had seen random episodes of it when I was too young and stupid to understand (it's a tough show to appreciate when you're young, gambling addicted and don't know the characters), but never the series. I had to have my entire skype list tell me to watch it before I finally started. It was always on my "to do" list, but there was always a Breaking Bad or something else that got me addicted. I don't really watch tv, I just buy a dvd box every now and then at random, so that I'll have something to watch in the time frame between poker and sleeping (I finish sessions at ~4am our time, and try to fall asleep by 5ish).

I first thought about starting the Wire in 2008, but only started two months ago. What a fucking epic two months it has been. I realize that I'm years late and no one gives a shit, but I really feel the need to do this. That's what The Wire does to you I guess.

My take on the "rank the seasons" game:

I thought 3&4 were the greatest and pretty even in quality. Best tv ever.
I thought 1&2 were the second greatest, also pretty even in quality, and also incredibly good and better than pretty much any tv ever.
I thought 5 was pretty shit, the press stuff didn't carry at all, and it definitely was not better than all of tv. It was still pretty good tho, I'd give 1-4 five stars and 5 about four.

I also predict that season two will massively grown on me on second watching.

Characters: I pretty much loved them all. There are other shows that have single characters who are hall of fame, but in the character front there is no other show that could even challenge The Wire. In any other show, someone like Nick Sobotka or Bunk would be a praised character, but in The Wire they are just drops in the ocean. I especially loved Stringer, Omar, Bubbles and McNulty. I guess I'm a bit mainstream. The only guy I really didn't like was Marlo.

I don't have words to describe how empty my life feels right now. There's no more? What do I do now? I'm fairly sure there won't be a tv show for a long time or possibly ever that will make me feel as strongly for the show and its characters as The Wire. I get addicted to shows easily and enjoy that, but The Wire was the first time I felt I was addicted to an entire world and not just a show. I cared for the characters and nearly found myself in tears when some of them died. The show moved me deeply, and I find myself thinking about it over and over. I can't even sleep at night when all I can think of is The Wire.

Now that it's been a few days and I've had more time to think about it, I'd like to elaborate on my take in the endings of different characters and how I would have wanted it to end. I know this has been done a million times years ago, but I can't help myself. *SPOILERS*

My list of The Wire deaths/character endings that I feel the need to discuss:

Stringer: He was my favourite character by that point, and kind of an obvious choice for a poker player. The way he thinks about the business is exactly like a poker player should think. When he died it felt so wrong at first, because I really wanted Avon to die and him to live. But looking at it afterwards, it's clear he had to die. Even that everything he pursued was awesome and he would have deserved a better reward, killing him was the only way to show how the drug world just doesn't work in the way Stringer wanted it to work.

McNulty: In a way I wanted to see him continue as a cop. It seemed so obvious that he was meant for the job, even that it was also killing him inside and destroying his life. I hated the whole fake murders plot on S05, but anyway after that it would've been also credible to make him a random street cop again, which he clearly liked. I think I would've prefered an ending where McNulty is shown in the streets again, smiling, knowing that he will never go back to a murder detective again. I didn't mind this ending either, though. I like how they left it a bit open.

Marlo: I didn't like Marlo, but it definitely would not have worked if they just threw him in jail. I think he either had to die or get the kind of an ending he got. I liked the scene where he tried to get into investing in property only to realize that it wasn't his world.

Omar: Seriously, you killed Omar? While it was kind of awesome that it was Kenard of all people who killed him and that his death wasn't made a spectacle, it was still awful. I don't know what kind of ending I would've wanted, but of all the endings I hated the one Omar got the most. Best character ever.

Daniels: Heartbreaking that Valchek got the top job and Daniels had to leave. Clearly also the only way for the writers to go without ruining the show. They had to show how ruined the police department is and how there was no hope of better, and having a happy ending for Daniels would have ruined it. He seemed happy as a lawyer though, maybe the scene with Daniels and Rhonda in the end seemed a little bit sugar-coated for The Wire but I'm not complaining.

Dukie: I guess everyone's heart was broken a bit when he was shown shooting heroine in the end. I doubt even the most cynic person on earth can say he really didn't want Dukie to miraculously go and get that apartment with that $250 Prezbo gave him. So sad, and so awesome. The best thing that could possibly happen to Dukie is that he'd become the new Bubbles, but he doesn't even have family like Bubbles has the sister, so I think the kid's drawing pretty dead at life. Heartbreaking as it is, I feel it really had to end that way. I loved this ending although the time frame in which he started shooting heroine seemed incredibly short? I think they should have shown how he started doing drugs a bit more in detail.

Michael: The new Omar. What a great ending.

Proposition Joe: Alongside with Stringer the other poker player's character, and another one I also wanted to survive. Realistically, Stringer was never going to survive, because he was too extreme, too far outside the game to survive in it. But Prop Joe, him I could've seen quit the game. When he made his final proposition to Marlo to just quit the game instead of getting killed, I really hoped that Marlo would let him. I don't think it would've been unrealistic that he would have actually just quit the game and left. Proposition Joe was smart, and didn't seem like the kind of guy who'd come back just for revenge. And Marlo betrayed him so hard, I guess it's emotions like this that make The Wire so great, but fuck I hated Marlo so much when he pulled the trigger.

Kevin and Wee-bey as prison buddies: Awesome. Would love to get an extra episode just of those two reminiscing in the prison yard.

Carcetti: I thought he was a great character. In the first (?) episode when he was introduced he was shown as a bit of a villain, when he cheated on his wife. However it became clear soon that he'd be a great mayor and then governor, yet all the shit in Baltimore ultimately made him sell all of his dignity to not end up any better than the guys before him. The way his character was played out was just beautiful.

Bubbles: If they would have killed Bubbles I might not be able to get out of bed in the morning. Thank you.


I might just make 20 long posts about The Wire later, I don't know. For now I'm happy with that elementary school level ramble.



PS. This week I shot two new videos and two quickies for CardRunners which should be up very soon! Stay tuned.

What a shithouse year it has been for me so far. I always mock other poker players for only updating when they're winning, but I seem to fall under that category myself. I've quietly dropped an amount so obscure in the past three months that I'm not sure I can count that far, but it's in the $50k ballpark.

I've got 3000 MTTs under my belt for the past three months. 1000 a month, steadily, also steadily losing $15k every month. Intense shit.

I've been studying so much too, I've done hand history reviews with people every other day, played with pushbot ranges, talked to people, posted hands, the usual shit. I don't think there's a single week when I wouldn't have worked at least 60 hours in the past three months.

I've tried to lead a somewhat balanced life with my hobbies, friends and my girlfriend alongside the poker, but I have to admit that in the past few months poker has gone above anything else for the first time. I've felt so good about game and improvement, and I've tried my everything to stay in the flow and never have a break too long to lose the rhythm, and I feel like it's all gone great and I have never played this good poker in my life. I've got a lot more aggro in the past months, found new spots to do aggro shit in, and put myself in a lot of favourable spots in tournaments.

I've seen my girlfriend less than I have in the duration of our relationship, I've seen my friends so little it makes me feel guilty, and the only exercise I've had has been boxing against the wall when I've got sucked out on.

I've given it everything I've got, played as well as I possibly could have and better than I would have been able to ever before. Results: -$50k.

Poker is an absurd game. I realize that the variance in MTTs is so big that this 3000 MTT sample isn't a lot to work with, and a lot of the makeup has been dropping money live too.

But still. Can I just get one fucking break every few months please? The last time I had a score at all in a non-turbo MTT was early in December when I won the 55r for $14k. After that I haven't had a $10k score anywhere and barely even a $5k one.

Every Sunday I've gone deep in at least three majors, being in the last 25 players out of 2000+ in tournaments that pay $40k+ first, and I've always lost the crucial flip to get ~12th. I'm not going to go through the list of beats, it doesn't really matter, but it's just really shithouse to be 12 left at a soft table with $40k first and get it in QQ vs A8o and see an ace on the door ever single fucking time for the chiplead pot. And get like 10% of your Sunday buyins back for the standard -$7k Sunday.

Right now I'm so full of this shit that it's about time to take some time off. I'm heading to Miami in 24 hours, I'll be gone for at least two weeks and possibly more, and I'll come back revitalized (I hope). I might play a couple of hands of live poker there if I get a chance, but basically it'll be a poker-free holiday.

It's not even really losing the money that tilts me so hard at the moment. My frustration comes from the sacrifices I've made for this and the fact that I know I'm going to have to grind another insane 60 hours/week stretch for infinite weeks to get out of this hole in the spring, too. No reward for the commitment, no light at the end of the tunnel, just a pile of make-up and fear of losing the last bit of financial stability I have. I love grinding, but I hate the pressure you get when you're so deep in make-up that even winning one of those Sunday majors I always get 12th in won't get me out of it. The only way out is to grind more and more, but what if it never changes? What if I keep running like this for the next infinite games? I know it won't happen, but this whole situation is so fucked up it sometimes puts really dark thoughts into my head.

I don't think that the time and commitment I've put into this in the past months has been a bad investment, and when looking at the grand scheme of things I don't regret it at all. I just literally fear what will happen if I don't start actually winning soon. I hate this stress and the dark place this stretch has put me in mentally.

I think SO much of winning in poker has go to do with mental stability and general happiness. When you know you're awesome and crush the games, got so much money in the bank it doesn't matter shit whether you win or lose and are generally content, you win. I would say my situation is currently about the opposite of the careless, happy grinder who can just shrug at the lost flip and not care at all, and somehow it shows in my results too. It's not like I play scared or anything, I just really care too much, sweat the flips way too hard and can't get in the beastmode mentally. Lately when I've flipped I've even kind of anti-sweated myself. Like, when I got it all-in with JJ vs AQ and TT for all the chips in the .fr major with 50k first and 20 left a week ago, I saw the queen on the board before it was even dealt out. The couple of seconds I had with myself before seeing the board I spent fast-forwarding different ways I could lose this flip that's worth a five-figure amount in my head. I thought of the sickest scenario: JxxKT. When I saw the queen on the door I wasn't surprised, I had already given up. It's like a self-protection system of the disappointment that I know will soon happen. All this year I have given up long before seeing the board when I'm all-in, because I know I don't win, and of course I never win. Somehow I think that if I started believing in my ability to win, even if it's just stupid mindfuck variance gibberish, I would actually start winning. It's just so hard for me right now.

Winning the GSOP $215 yesterday would've improved my situation dramatically, but sadly I wasted my 6x average stack on this: http://weaktight.com/4417056 and losing the standard AKvsJJ a few hands later destroyed those dreams.

I hope the Miami sunlight and water activities, not to mention diving in Curacao and getting drunk on mojitos will clear my head a bit and make me feel better. And when I get back, I would fucking appreciate it if I could win the 109r at least three times in the first week. That's all I ask for.

(I tried to insert some cool 2012 graphs but the blogging software isn't letting me, anyway you can see my encouraging grinds for two of my main sites for this year here: http://i44.tinypic.com/6zszz8.jpg)

Sup blog,

I'm going to make a proper update later this month once I've got 15th in a couple of more Sunday majors (sighaments) but I just wanted to quickly throw this out:

Does anyone who happens to read this live in Miami or know of MTT / 2+2 etc bosses who live in the Miami area? I'm going there next thursday for 2-3 weeks (not sure if I'll stay for the Pompano Beach main) so I'd be happy to hang out and get drunk with people.

After four unsuccesful attempts I finally managed to win money on a Sunday this year. It was nothing big, I think I ended up netting like $4k for my efforts. All of that basically came from binking a Party $120 turbo for a little over $10k. It was pretty close though, I got 20th in the Entraction major after losing two flips, 19th in Party $109 out of 580 players (basically a major hence the 58k prize pool), 22nd in Stars.fr highroller after losing the crucial flip AKvsQQ for double average, and lost KKvsQQ for 4,5x average and massive chiplead in the .fr major getting 40th/1500 or something. Had I won that I would've had over final table average in a tournament with a $200k prizepool :(

Enough whining. In all honesty I think I played pretty poorly for at least half of my sessions this month. I'm still happy with my progress, since this was a month of big chance schedules-wise. For the first time after two years of having next to no clue about pushbotting I studied turbos on a daily basis, going through spots and doing HH reviews with people who do well in them. I'm still not a master, but I think I've got a lot better with my turbo game already, and I'm going to keep studying them next month no matter how tedious I find them.

Being able to add turbos to my schedule means that I'll get to play less random smaller scheduled tournaments and get to focus more on the bigger ones. I've been toying around with my schedule, trying to find a perfect balance, failing miserably on some days. I played at least four sessions this month when I drastically underestimated the amount of tables I'd have popping, resulting in me playing like a massive nit in all of my 35 tables since I didn't have time to press buttons and was sitting out everywhere.

In the end I think I got pretty close to coming up with a near-perfect weekday schedule with about 80% freezeouts and 20% turbos, but I feel like it still has too many tourneys overall and I'm going to have to get rid of a couple of tournaments. I just love them all so I have no idea what I could actually drop. Oh, the heartbreak.

My biggest scores for the month were today's $10,2k from the Party $120 turbo, $8k on both occasions for winning the Microgaming weekday rebuy twice and $5k for getting second in it once (all within like a week, pretty decent run there), $6,5k for winning the Stars daily $75 turbo, 4,2k for winning the Party 22r and $3,6k for losing HU in the Stars $33r.

It's pretty sick to think that I bought in for over $100k this month, when about a year ago I probably bought in for maybe $20k. I'm now officially aiming to buy in for $1M this year. If I could even get a 30% ROI doing that... I definitely got volume covered, but honestly I played way too much meaningless shit that took focus from more important stuff, and I feel like I (almost) deserve these results. To be honest, sharkscope is even screwing up something since I think I actually didn't even win $9k but got closer to breakeven. I don't have exact statistics anywhere but I think my actual result for the month was like +$4k.





So on the plus side, I think my game kept getting leaps forward, I both got some smallish post-flop leaks plugged and improved my turbo game. If I hadn't scheduled so poorly all the time I think I would easily have made at least $20k. That's what I'm aiming for next month.

If anything good came out of the month it's two new CardRunners videos. The two-part series should be out very soon and concentrates on LAG play. Enjoy!

I'm heading to Deauville tomorrow for the EPT, planning to play everything but the highroller and the 5k turbo 6max. Last year I played the same schedule and didn't cash a single tournament, so at least it can't go any worse. Wish me luck.

I didn't really know where to put this, so let's try out this blog.

I've been a very succesful poker player for quite a while and I'm going to keep pursuing it full time, and plan to have poker as my profession until the foreseeable future. However, I'd like to have a back-up plan and pretty much the only work in life I enjoy outside poker is writing, so I'm seeking for any kind of part-time work in that area.

I am Finnish but I speak English fluently (I lived in Australia for two years and have studied English for 12 years). I worked as a full time writer for a Finnish newspaper publisher for about a year before I started playing poker full time. During this time I wrote for 9 different magazines, including 12-page cover stories.

I've blogged on a couple of poker forums since 2007 and my blogs have got about 5 million views combined. My Finnish blog was the most read poker blog in Finland for the entire time I blogged in Finnish (three years). I've blogged in English for a couple of years as well now. I currently write strategy articles for a Finnish poker magazine, random ramblings for CardPlayer magazine in English, and have my ongoing life story thread on 2+2 that has received a lot of positive feedback.

I'm interested in all kinds of entertainment, sports, psychology and people in general, and I feel that these would be the areas I'd have a lot to say about outside poker. I'm a pretty critical human being (or maybe just an angry cunt), and I believe I excel in criticism.

The medias outside the poker world I read the most are Esquire and GQ magazines, The Onion and Pitchforkmedia.

You can read my CardPlayer blogs here: http://www.cardplayer.com/poker-blogs/70-miikka-anttonen
My 2+2 thread here: http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/54/poker-beats-brags-variance/my-somewhat-different-poker-story-extremely-tl-dr-1085130/
A sample strategy article about floating in tournaments here: http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/183/midstakes-mtt/scandinavian-float-974896/

Just to point out, I've made over $300k playing tournaments in two years and I'm fairly sure my long term hourly rate playing poker is over $100/hour. However, I'm not looking to be paid anywhere near that much, since I know it isn't realistic. My motivation for doing this isn't money at all (althought I'd like to be paid whatever writers make), but to keep my writing skills sharp and to fill a gap in my cv in case I ever need one.

I'd like to work between 2 and 20 hours per month, although I'm sure this can be negotiated. I'm also interested in random one-time gigs, and I'd be happy to provide samples for free before getting paid.

You can contact me by email at chuckbassldo(at)gmail.com. Alternatively, if you're reading this and think you know someone who might be able to help me out, feel free to pass me his details or point him to this ad.

Thanks for reading!

It's been a pretty slow month for me so far. I've played most days this year but had just two winning sessions. On both of them I won the MicroGaming 16,50 rebuy for $8k. Every other day I've lost pretty heavily and thanks to those two big scores I still think I'm only breakeven for the year. I've had quite a few deep runs, including some Sunday majors where I've got 6th, 11th, 15th, 21st, 22nd and 24h so far this year out of huge fields. So close but yet so far :(

I've been studying a lot lately, doing hh review sessions via TeamViewer and Skype with good players and discussing hands a lot in general. I've significantly toned down my 2+2 posting and selected a tiny group of very smart people to talk to instead, it's both more effective and they understand my spewing better than the good old HSMTT nits. (Sorry.)

As a result of studying I feel like my game has continued to take big leaps forward in recent weeks, and I have every reason to believe this is going to be a good year. I should still try to cut down the spewing slightly, for example I could maybe not do this the next time when I'm 2/17 in $22 rebuy: http://weaktight.com/4267182 how come they always have AA?

My next grudge tournament I really want to win is the 109r. So far I've got 11th AAvsAK and 12th AK
vsA4. Today I got 15th or 16th losing JJvsK8o and A5vsK5o in two almost consecutive hands. It's the one tournament where I always seem to run awful, and I have yet to final table it despite having a go at it every day and statistically I should have ft'd it ages ago even if I was a massive fish. I'm pretty sure that the one time all my bad run in that gets counterfeited and I hit the ft I'm going to bink. Fingers crossed!

I finally got HEM2 installed properly and I've spent quite some time exploring it. It's such an amazing program, although it's still full of bugs and always freezes my computer. The features and especially the hud are just amazing. For the first time I've built myself a really massive hud for an MTT player with close to 20 stats displayed all the time, and after getting some help from guys who use HEM a lot playing MTTs I've added some stats to my arsenal that I don't think many regs use. You don't usually ever get much of a sample of people's post-flop play in tournaments and I've always been really skeptical about the usefulness and accuracy of post-flop stats (apart from really simple ones like c-bet% or AF), but it's been working amazingly. I still need to get used to everything, but I have a really good feeling about my new-found HEM obsession and I think my custom hud will help me significantly in the future.

I've found it a bit hard to find stability in my grinding all year for some reason. Either my mind isn't there and I'm playing like a nit, or then my mind is all over the place and I play like a super LAG idiot (see the HH above). I guess it's good in a way to have two personas so my opponents won't be able to read me easily, but I'd like to be able to have a more solid standard of play that I wouldn't deviate from that much in both the good and the bad. I feel like I'm only truly unleashing my potential in maybe 30-40% of my sessions, and in the rest I just click buttons. I've been trying to figure out what it could be about but I haven't found any explanations so far. I did buy a cool numpad (like a keyboard without letters) and I'm going to have only that and my mouse available during sessions from now on, so I won't be able to use MSN/Skype/Facebook/Youporn while I play. I'll also try to take a walk before each session to get air, since way too often I've started playing almost immediately after eating breakfast (at 6PM). When I think of it, most of the days when I've had good results I've actually been doing something in the daytime and I might even have been a bit tired from waking up early. I don't know, maybe it's a some kind of hyper-activation mode that I get from concentrating too much on poker only that stops me from just chilling and playing my A+ game every day.

If anything's got better for me recently it's definitely Sundays. If it wasn't for Seabeast I still wouldn't have understood the importance of the Sunday grind and how profilically it's different from any other day's grinding. For example, I always used to fire all kinds of random tournaments at the same time with the early majors to have enough action on the screen. I've only recently realized that it's actually important to have a slow, chilled start where you have just a few tables and who cares maybe even surf online while playing. Brain power is an asset that you run out of quickly if you overload your brain all day long, and to be sharp in the endgame you need to use as little brain power as possible early. It's simple really, but it took me almost two years into my MTT career to realize that and even then I needed someone else to almost force me to skip the 5rs and whatever I used to play on the side early on Sundays.

It's those kinds of small changes I've made in recent months - dropping most 6max tourneys, dropping smaller tourneys, scheduling better with less tourneys at the beginning of the session and loading it up towards the end, customizing my hud, looking up people on OPR, talking to people on Skype - that aren't worth much on paper but combined have had a really good effect on me. Now I'm just waiting/hoping to get more results.

I must say that for the first time I've also really, really enjoyed online grinding in almost the same way in which I enjoy live tournaments in the past couple of months. Everyone who knows me knows how I always go on about how online is shit and live is the real thing. I guess I still feel like that at heart, but making my sessions both more enjoyable and interesting by cutting off tables and so on I've come to realize that online is pretty damn awesome too. There aren't many better feelings in everyday life than the one when you're about to start a session, you're brewing green tea, you know you've got all the 60 tournaments of the night ahead of you and that you'll be having fun playing poker AND making heaps of money for the next 12 hours or so. Damn I love my job.

PS. I finally managed to record a new video series that should be coming out soon. The first part is called "Sunday LAG". I 3-bet 63o in the first hand it keeps going on like that throughout the video where I'm 4-tabling. It was definitely fun recording it, I hope you guys get something out of it. The next part is going to be called "Weekday LAG", concentrating on the slight differences in aggroing it up on weekdays as opposed to weekends (random Sunday fish vs. weekday regs). At the very least neither of them will lack in action :)