Poker as a Second Income

The online poker world has certainly been turned on its ear while I have been away.  This legislation that I thought would never pass has obviously done so and now we all wait and see what impact it ultimately will have on our game.  Party Poker has officially announced that has of the President signing the bill, they will no longer accept deposits or wagers from U.S. players, so make sure all of your money is pulled out of Party by Thursday just to ensure that you have no issues.  On the other side of the coin, Absolute Poker and Full Tilt Poker have publically stated that it will be business as usual.  Good for them.  It is not very often that I like to see anyone thumb their nose at our government and its laws, but I am clearly biased on this one.  As a card-carrying Republican, I can not believe that my party has decided to push this bill through during an election year despite an overwhelming lack of support from the general public.  I suppose if the Democrats regain control of Congress, this may be one issue that is eventually corrected….sigh.  In the end, there is WAY too much money in online poker for it to dry up so take heart Americans.  From what I have read, the bill does not make us criminals, it tries to make criminals of the owners of sites who accept wagering from U.S. citizens.

So what have I been doing since August you ask?  Work, work and more work!!  I have played online some through September and finished the month in the black a couple of hundred dollars.  I also have been in Las Vegas twice in the last three weeks and played a great deal of poker while there and netted over $300 in profit.  I was there for work both times, but was able to play at night and visited the Bellagio, MGM, Excalibur, The Orleans, Mandalay Bay and the Luxor in search of the juiciest games.  Man, are they juicy.  The players at the lower stakes are so loose that six or seven players commonly see the flop and turn.  In one particular $4/$8 session at Bellagio, I won $180 in three hours and I won only ONE HAND that I did not have to showdown.  Every other hand I won was paid off by at least one person on the river…amazing.  You go through large swings in loose games like that, but if you remain patience, your wins are almost always quite sizable.

Playing live has some other benefits as well.  It is always so entertaining to watch the poker player wannabes with their cliche’ poker sayings and poker garb.  The sunglasses on a $4/$8 table are some of the most laughable poker accessories around.  I really enjoy playing live and will look to do more of it since I have success with it.  There are now a couple of casinos just over the Texas/Oklahoma border just cater to Dallas poker players and I plan to make more trips to those sites.

I hope you have had success at the tables since I last wrote on the blog.  I will look to update everyone on my efforts to make my WSOP buy-in at a later post.  I will also look to compile a list of online poker sites and their reaction to the new bill - who is closing shop to US citizens and who is not.  There are rumors that Neteller and Firepay may close US accounts, so I will investigate this as well.  Losing Neteller would be a travesty…

Good luck at the tables!

After going 2 full months of nearly total poker abstinence as well as my insistence (and my wife’s) to keep paying my car note and one other loan payment out of my poker bankroll, I have reached a grand total of $280 left in the poker accounts.  This has left me with two (well, three) options…

First, add money from my bank account to get it to where it needs to be in order to play $3/$6 tables.  This would be the easy way, but in reality, it would defeat the purpose and goal of trying to keep my car totally paid by poker winnings.  The family boss might give me some grief too.  Not so much about the money, but more about breaking “my promise” (isn’t it funny how every thing you ever tell your wife, somehow turns into a “promise” you had made?).  Regardless, I have chosen not to take the lazy way out.

Instead, option two appeals to me in a more challenging way. I hope it will also make for some interesting reading for you over the next year.  I have decided to take my $280 and grow it in the same fashion that I did my original $75 deposit nearly 3 years ago.  More importantly, my final goal will be to not only keep paying the 2 bills out of the poker money each month, but additionally earn enough to buy-in to a WSOP event in 2007.  The event may be one of the preliminary events ($1,500 or $2,000 for instance) or a live satellite(s) at the Rio into next year’s main event.  Much will depend on my travel schedule at that time.

The challenge should provide me with plenty of motivation and I hope it will be fun to follow along with me on this path.  If you are just starting out, I hope my journey will help you on yours as well.  If you are an established player and have been with me since the beginning, I hope you find this trek entertaining.

The third option?  Quit poker.  That is not really an option is it?

So how did night one of this new start go, you ask?  I actually made a $36 profit but in an unlikely manner.  Party Poker offered me a $50 bonus to try their casino software.  All I had to do was wager $50 in the casino.  I played about 20 minutes of $1 blackjack and cashed out $80 - the $50 bonus and $30 in winnings.  I played 2 $22 sit-n-go tourneys and finished 4th in one and 5th in the other for a net loss of $44.  ($80 - $44 = $36 profit).

I don’t plan to write every day on the progress, but I will try to keep a running count on a regular basis.

Starting roll:  $280 Latest profit/(loss):  $36 Current roll:  $316

Good luck at the tables!!

Business takes me to Toronto this week as the WSOP continues on.  Two of my poker crew teammates - one man, one woman - have won their seats to the WSOP.  The female player, Peg, won her seat to the main event via Party Poker where she plays exclusively in nearly every large tournament there.  I just received the text message this evening that my other buddy, Bill, won his seat to a WSOP event, which I took to mean that it was not the main event but I need to find out for sure.  I am EXCITED for them both, as well as lot envious!!  I really miss not being at the show this year, but will attempt to live vicariously through them at least.  Help me route Bill and Peg to WSOP victories!!

While I travel this week, I may actually have quite a bit of downtime in the evenings and I am going to make a concentrated effort to get back to playing regularly.  Since I can’t load poker software on my work laptop, you should be able to find me at the 3/6 tables on Poker Room via their Java client.  I am going to try and get on a schedule of playing at least 10 hours a week.

I did play online while in DC last week and manage to win $75 at one 3/6 table and then enter a $30 buy-in 139-person tournament only to finish in 33rd place when my pocket 6s ran into pocket 9s who called my all-in.  Never made any real noise the whole tournament and after the first break was pretty much left with all-in or nothing moves as the blinds had reached 300/600 and my stack had only grown to between 3K and 4K.

I will likely stick solely to cash games from now until the end of the month as I have the car payment to make this month and better half likes to remind me that I told her that I would be able to pay for the car solely from poker winnings.  Is this the month I break that promise - NOT BLOODY LIKELY!!

Good luck at the tables and GO BILL AND PEG!!!

Call me a purist, but I love when a legend in a sport actually wins an event that is truly the greatest test of the players’ skill.  This of course is only true if I am not competing against that individual, in which case I think it is better if I win, but since I did not have $50,000 to buy-in to WSOP Event #20, I am really glad to see Chip Reese win it.

Chip Reese has a reputation in the high-stakes poker world as the best all-around poker player, but fans who get all of their poker from watching the WSOP on ESPN or the WPT on The Travel Channel, may have wondered what the hype was all about if they knew who Chip Reese was at all.  While other big names like Phil Ivey, Phil Hellmuth, Doyle Brunson, and Mike “the Mouth” Matasow have receive loads of attention either through their victories on those shows or their antics, Chip Reese has remained a relative unknown to the lay recreational poker player.  Reese has made a couple of WPT final tables, but both times he exited fairly early.  Winning the largest buy-in event in poker history against nothing but top-notch competition in a H.O.R.S.E. tournament should propel Reese to the forefront of the average poker fan’s mind.

H.O.R.S.E. is not simply a no-limit hold-em tournament.  It requires players to be proficient in all of the top poker games - limit holdem, Omaha/8s or Better, Razz, Stud, and Stud/8s or Better.  Each level of the tournament is one of those games (they rotate in the order I listed) until the final table.  Only then does the game change exclusively to no-limit holdem.

Chip Reese made his name amongst the pros primarily through his cash game skill.  He is not flashy and at 55, he is not viewed by the common fan as one of the top young guns that draw so much attention.  While never having seen Chip Reese play in person, I respect the fact that he wins with substance over style.  His victory in the H.O.R.S.E. event should leave little doubt in the comman man’s mind who is the best all-around poker player in the world.  I would encourage you to watch this event when it airs on ESPN.

In other news, the House passed some version of an anti-gambling bill the other day, but it is not the same Goodlatte bill that has been talked about for the last few months.  It attempts the same restrictions, but until smarter people than I can analyze it, it is hard to say what impact (if any!) it would have.  Before anyone panics though, the Senate has showed very little interest in passing such a bill and without them, it never becomes law.  In addition, even if passed, the bill on the surface appears to only restrict the American public from using their credit cards from funding gambling (poker) sites.  How many of us can even do that now???  I don’t know about you, but I have NEVER had to use a credit card to fund my poker accounts, so any ban on that won’t have the slightlest effect on me.  Let’s keep an eye on it though.

It’s official…no WSOP appearance for me this year.  A combination of lack of poker focus due primarily to the work I am engaged in at my day job along with a depletion of the vacation account due to my daughter’s $6K trip to China has left me watching the WSOP events from home.  I am disappointed but resigned to the fact that it just was not going to happen this year.  Since the other aspects of my life are going well, it really is hard to complain, so hopefully I will be back at the WSOP in 2007.

For any of you who are going this year, I wish you nothing but the best of cards!!  Good luck at the tables!

My apologies, faithful reader.  I have not played poker during the month of July before this past Sunday night.  My hiatus was not based on anything poker-related, it has simply been a tremendously busy month for my day job.  Between working on business plan for entering new markets and a possible acquisition of another company, my mind has not been focussed on poker at all.

On top of the work related initiatives, we have been preparing to put my teenage daughter on a plane to China for two weeks with the Texas Girls Choir long tour.  She left Tuesday morning so the stress of those preparations have distracted me from poker as well.

I did play Sunday night and won $150 at Hollywood Poker on a 3/6 and a 2/4 table.  Monday night, I gave $100 back and then won about $10 last night, so I am back on the horse, so to speak.

I am happy to report that we received rousing support at the board meeting today, so the work stressors should lessen a bit for the foreseeable future, but I may be hitting the road quite a bit.  I plan to spend the rest of the week getting the website back up to current.

On top of everything else, I discover that my poker laptop had completely died.  D-E-D dead.  Apparently a motherboard problem, so I went out an purchased a new one - an HP Pavilion laptop with a widescreen.  I am in the process this week of reloading all my poker sites on the new laptop and praying that I can figure out a way to access the hard drive on the old one so I can pull all of my Poker Tracker data to the new one.  That would really stink to lose all that information!!!

I plan to start writing regularly again, so look for the next post this weekend…Hope you will come back on the tour with me.

Thanks!!