On the night of April 14th I was listening to some music and tweeted a line “I’m standing on a field full of land mines, doin the moonwalk, hopin I blow up in time.” That’s how I felt. Online poker (and poker in general) had been going very well for me the last few weeks. I had a lot of free time to play and I was having great results. I was gearing up for the WSOP and was enjoying working hard on my game. The very next day, April 15th, online poker came crashing down.

Well, damn. There goes my job. I’m taking it well for now. I read through the indictment and didn’t realize the poker sites were doing some of the things they were doing. There are so many things we don’t know that goes on. To think all of this started with the UIGEA. It’s pretty unbelievable. That should have not been passed in the first place. I don’t fault the poker sites for what they did (although I see both sides to what they were doing) because this could have been handled differently from the beginning. I also understand now why we didn’t get it regulated a few months ago. It’s pretty obvious they were building a case against these poker sites and were going to go after billions of dollars. Why would they want to regulate online poker when they can make a few billion dollars first? I hate politics.

I won’t get into all the technicalities with the indictment. We could talk about it for a while. It happened. Online poker has been stopped. It doesn’t matter how it happened, what started it, what finished it. All that matters is getting it back… the right way.

My plan right now is to keep working with DeepStacks, and to play a lot of live poker. This might be good for me for the time being. I will play a lot of live cash now and live tournaments. I will be ready for the WSOP. My WSOP results have been consistently getting better, with last year being my best series ever. I have very high expectations for myself this year. I’ll adjust my plans once I find out more about what is supposed to happen.

I just wanted to write something. Like I said, poker had been going well. I had a lot of great online results. I played a live tournament the other day at the Isle casino. It was a $1600 tournament with $500 bounties. I final tabled it last time a few months ago and got 6th I believe. This time I bubbled the final table, finishing 11th place. It was a fun tournament. I got down to 2000 chips at 3k/6k/500a on the bubble (14 cashed) and ran it back up to 120k.

I’m going to miss a lot of great live tournaments South Florida is offering in the next few weeks because I will be doing a lot of traveling for DeepStacks. I’ll be traveling for 3 weeks. I’m going to Michigan, New York, Toronto, California, Oregon and back to Florida. It should be fun, and I guess it is good timing as well. I was worried about missing a lot of FTOPS/SCOOP events. There’s always positives to everything haha.

Everybody hold your heads up. I know this situation isn’t easy. We just have to see what is going to happen and adjust from there. Let’s work together, stay positive, and hope for the best. The poker community is full of intelligent people. Everything will work out. When there are some more announcements I will write another blog. I’m still going to continue to do private coaching and I’m looking forward to see what happens in the near future with myself and poker. Good luck guys.