Merry Christmas and Poker Prosperous New Year!

Well my first winning year at poker is coming to an end. I am hopeful for a last minute bang up win for a real end of the year bankroll boast but I'm just happy to end the year with a small but decent profit and a double digit ROI.

Last February 1, I was broke on PokerStars and decided to make my last deposit of a mere $30, swearing I wasn't going to ever deposit again. Well it's been all uphill since then. By the end March I had turned that final $30 deposit into $1000 and actually made a withdrawal. It's been up and down since then and at one time I managed to lose back down around $30 but quickly pulled that back up and haven't gotten lower than a few hundred since. So no more deposit since then.

Below is my graph from PokerTracker3 showing my information for the this year. I love seeing the lovely line continuing to head in an upward direction.

Here's to a great 2011! Hopefully I'll add at least one more digit to my profit by early 2011.

We've been screwed....

Well looks like our wonderful crooked, stupid politicians have figured out a way to push through legislation to make online poker legal, but at what price?

I'm all for legalization, regulation and I don't even mind the taxation too much but there are many things that may be in this bill that I don't like at all.

The worst thing is 15 months with no online poker. What are people who play online for a living supposed to do? Their online winnings pay their bills. Many of them have families and mortgages and other bills that have to be paid.

Many online players live no where near a casino and even those who do can't make anything like the same amount of money live as they do online.

Why does there need to be a 15 month blackout? In my opinion it's in order to give brick and mortar casino corporations like Harrah's and MGM a leg up in starting up their own online poker rooms. It's obvious both companies have Harry Reid in their back pockets. Unfortunately I think if this bill gets through we can anticipate Harrah's and MGM having a monopoly on the U.S. market.

Another thing is the part about non U.S. citizens not being allowed to play on U.S. sites. Oh no, no one but U.S. players for 3 years, tell me it isn't true. Why should the U.S. not want to get tax dollars from foreign depositors.

And my favorite, the state opt out clause. If this goes through with most states who currently have no law prohibiting online gambling or skill games automatically opted in then fine but if only states with legalized gambling are automatically opted in then I'm so screwed because Georgia will never put through legislation to opt in.

I feel screwed over by the PPA, I really don't know how they can support this legislation. I think we will all be better off if it doesn't pass. I could be wrong but there definitely needs to be some serious modifications to the original bill.

Poker as we know it may be coming to an end. So let me grind away while I can. What really sucks is I recently lost my job and was hoping to be able to make some money playing poker and now if this bill passes I may not even have that.

Hummm, my husband's company has an office in Montreal. Maybe I should start learning French.