Been a while since I checked in. I've gone through a pretty interesting episode since I last blogged. Actually, I was really sick for a while, came down with something on Dec 28th, spent New Years rolling over in bed with a fever, and didn't actually get much better until a couple days ago. So, has been a pretty grueling week or two. I haven't been playing any poker since then, but not specifically for that reason. There is actually an even shittier reason why I haven't touched any poker in two weeks.

I got hacked. I'm going to keep this story as short and as bare of details as possible, but here's basically how it goes. A few weeks ago I played against a character from Sweden. He seemed okay at PLO but he played a number of hands very suspiciously - it seemed like he never seemed to make wrong decisions in big pots and there were a few hands where he made ridiculous plays that turned out right, with strange (fast) timing. I lost to him pretty bad over two sessions and gave up, determined not to play him anymore. I lost an amount between 20k and 100k to him (intentionally vague). I never do stuff like this, but I ended up showing the hands to a couple of people and suggested that maybe he was cheating. I was mostly dismissed, but I had a very uneasy feeling about the match.

After another intentionally sparsely-detailed incident involving another player from Sweden, I began to get very suspicious that maybe there was a bug in my computer. I ended up getting an ex-hacker friend of a friend to run a port scan on my computer, and he had me run some kind of packet scanner that looked through all of the incoming and outgoing traffic on my internet connection. Turns out there was a computer from Stockholm, Sweden that had been tapping into my computer. There was no other explanation for the presence of this person, and we even went so far as to access his computer using his IP, revealing a Swedish Windows XP Login password screen. At that point I was pretty much convinced that I was hacked, and (using another computer) changed all of my passwords immediately and dumped my AIM account. I then cut my computers off from the internet and was going to reformat them completely before coming back online.

Well, the day after I did this I actually fell brutally sick, so it took me up until now to finally get my affairs back in order. But, in a nutshell, that's the story. I won't go into any more detail about it since I'm well aware that there is no possible recourse to any of this, all I can really do is secure my computer better and spread the word about incidents like this.

Anyway, FML. Can't run any worse at this goddamn game.

I'll be back in the swing of things soon enough though. I think. The exercise coaching deal went on a hiatus while this was going on, so if any of my students or prospective students are reading this, just letting you know that things will be going back to normal now, so hit me up if you want to schedule sessions.

Eternal Runbad,

Haseeb