Cheating, tapping the aquarium and other ramblings...

All the buzz in the poker world right now is about José “Girah” Macedo scamming high stakes cash players for over $30,000. Basically it boils down to a few young immature poker players working together to scam some people who unfortunately trusted them. More information can be found here. It's sad that this happens and while it does shed a bad light on poker, and particularly online poker, one should realize that cheating, scamming and lying goes on in most fields to one extent or the other. How many people have gotten ahead in the corporate world by stabbing someone else in the back, plenty. How many people are guilty of some form of insider trading, plenty. Actually my guess is more crooked business goes on in the corporate world in a day than happens in the poker world in a year. I also think it's over looked more in the corporate world, if not almost expected. You cheat and scam in the poker world you will be caught and exposed and blacklisted by everyone in the field. No excuses are good enough for people caught cheating in the poker world. I really commend everyone on 2+2 for getting to the bottom of this and exposing the cheaters. The saddest part in my opinion is that the guys involved were winning players who should of been able to make an honest living from just playing poker and had no real need to cheat in order to make money. Unfortunately one of the lessons most people learn from this is to watch out who you trust, which is a shame since I believe most poker players are pretty trustworthy people.

Now for people who insist on tapping the aquarium. I was playing in a 10NL cash game earlier and there was this sweet fishcake at the table. He was running 48/10 or so over quite a number of hands and he would get lucky and win a pot or two then lose it all back. I lost some money to him in an earlier hand but had won all of it back plus almost another buy in. Then some brilliant idiot decides to say something like "...and that's why you never get ahead". I relied with shhh! stop tapping and this big mouth goes on to say the guy doesn't know the difference. Well the guy immediately tightens up and I wasn't able to win any more off of him. I've seen this happen so much since I had to start playing on Merge and I just wish people would realize how stupid it is to do this. Poker players win off people who play the game badly and when someone points out to them that they are playing badly it's screws it up for everyone else. So people if you can't say something nice to someone at the table don't say anything at all! Keep your tilted ranting to yourself and STFU!

As for me and my game, not much new there. I'm still running like a three legged dog on an icy road in MTTs. I started playing some cash, as I mentioned earlier, and cash games seem to be going much better than MTTs so for now I'm playing cash five or six days a week and only playing low stakes MTTs one or two days a week. Hopefully my bankroll will begin to improve, as well as my luck in MTTs.

Well good luck and hope you all win, win, and win some more!

You don't know what you've got till it's gone...

AFTER - AAARRRGGGHHHH!!!!

BEFORE - HOW GREAT IS WAS!

Last night I picked up a copy of Bluff Magazine from Sept. 2009 I had laying around the house. As I flipped through the pages seeing all the ads from PokerStars and Full Tilt I realized how much we don't appreciate what we have until it's gone.

We could have gotten behind the Poker Players Alliance and pushed harder for legislation before the DOJ shut down these sites but we were happy enough with things the way they were. We had what we thought were two great sites to play on and getting money on and off was very easy. So why did we need government interference in our poker lives. Well I think we all learned why on April 15.

As I thumbed through the pages of Bluff I remembered how I looked forward to every Sunday and the Sunday tournaments. How I normally made a nice amount of money each week on PokerStars. How great the software was and how smoothly it ran. How after a session I could go back and load games in the Universal Replayer for an easy review. I thought about what great promotions PokerStars always had going and most importantly how much I trusted them. I thought about all the women I met (virtually) through the PokerStars Women's League, not to mention how much money I made off those women's games. I wondered if I realized how great it was at the time.

Thanks to our nanny government all that is gone now. We now have only small sites to play on with little volume and little game choice. The software is slow and buggy and hand history and in game last hand review is terrible. I have to say some of the sites do have good customer service but some are terrible. Getting money on and off is slow and difficult and making decent money seems almost impossible and can these sites be trusted?

We can go on this way or we can get busy and push hard for legislation. I'm am trying to do my part by contacting members of the house and senate asking them to support legislation. You can do your part too. The Poker Players Alliance has an ongoing thread on 2+2 poker forum where you can get links and names for senator's and representative's Facebook pages and email addresses to ask for their support. You can find the thread here, please help by making these contacts as often as you can.

Until we get legislation I'm afraid things won't get a whole lot better, so keep pushing your representatives and senators. Make your voice heard!

Legalize it and live and let live...

America's prisons are overrun with people who committed victim-less crimes. I have no idea how many tax dollars are spent prosecuting these crimes but I'm sure it's in the millions. The DOJ's recent indictment of the three major poker sites and the anti-online gambling laws are just one more way the U.S. infringes on peoples rights and freedoms.

So you want to legally play poker online, why should you not be able to. You want to smoke pot legally, you should be able to. Then there is prostitution, regulate it and tax it and protect the women. If someone wants to watch porn in the privacy of their own homes they should have no one trying to stop them but there are plenty of people who would stop this too if they could.

First off there is the tax revenue and keeping people safe with proper regulation. Can you even imagine how much tax money the U.S. could bring in from online poker, legalized pot and prostitution. I'm sure it would be billions of dollars a year. With proper regulation everyone who be much safer than they are now.

The point is whether you think these things are right or wrong is irrelevant, people are going to find a way to do these whether they are legal or not. Why not make them safe and make tax money from them. Our government needs to stop spending so much time and money trying to legislate morals and more time trying fix all things that are wrong in this country.

On a funny note, notice how all these things start with P, so...

Legalize it!

Pot

Poker

Prostitution

Porn

WSOP another year of no go...

Well I had hoped for 2011 to be my first year at the World Series of Poker but after April 15 and the shut down of PokerStars and Full Tilt my plans were aborted. After losing my job in October and then losing my second job, playing and winning online at PokerStars, there was just no way to swing the trip. This is the third summer since I started playing poker that I've watched the WSOP from afar. All I can do now is hope that "maybe next year" I'll make it there.

Hoping for next year is really getting old. I didn't get to one single live tournament I wanted to play this entire year so far. I'm hoping and planning to go to Tunica for the World Poker Open, which is actually to date the only tournament event I've ever been able to attend after going in 2009, so let's hope this one comes through.

Finished 3rd in the $1000 guarantee tonight on Cake Poker, first final table in awhile. I've just had trouble getting any momentum going since Black Friday. Maybe things will start to turn around soon. After all I'm sure I have earned quite a few Sklansky Bucks over the last 6 weeks with the crappy way I've been running.

My attitude has improved some after taking a week off from poker, but it's still hard at times not to get pissed off and fed up about this whole online poker thing.

Well here's to maybe next year and good luck to all who are lucky enough to make it to the WSOP this year.

Time for a change...

The title of this blog is not a pun on Obama's hope and change but seriously how is that hope and change working out for you. For me it isn't working out well at all. I've purposely avoided discussing my personal feelings about life after "Black Friday" but I guess it's about time I talk about it. Things have pretty much sucked since that day. I loved playing online poker and I loved playing at PokerStars. In the beginning of my poker playing days I chose to play on Players Only/Cake because at that time the Cake network was much bigger and better than it is today and I felt more comfortable playing there than I did on PokerStars and Full Tilt. For a new player the network was much softer and fields were much smaller so it was a great place to learn the game.

In August of 2009 I made my first deposit on PokerStars and then in September I deposited on Full Tilt. I was still a pretty big fish in those days so for the first few months I pretty much deposited, lost it in a month or two and made another deposit. Then in February 2010 things started to turn around on PokerStars and it was all uphill after that. That is until April 15, 2011. For more of how I began playing poker I cover it here in my first blog.

I had played on Carbon a little during the first year I played on PokerStars so it was an easy move there for me and I even had a few dollars on the site. I knew it wouldn't be the same but I never imagined how bad it would really be. I had advanced to the mid-stakes MTTs and MTSNGs on Stars and had a comfortable bankroll for those stakes. Now I'm not comfortable having much money online due to all the uncertainty so like so many people I'm back to playing low and even micro stakes and it's really funny how much harder it is to go backward than it was when I played those stakes a year or so back. Not to mention I've been running bad and just can't get in enough volume to balance the variance.

Most days I just feel like giving up online poker completely but then what? It's also like admitting defeat and I hate doing that. I just feel like the cat who's been kicked to the curb. I really don't know what to do with my time and I'm just losing my love of the game. PokerStars was an amazing poker site with great customer service and terrific volume. The games were great, the guarantees were wonderful and it's so enjoyable playing there. No other site can even come close to comparing.

So for now I'm still trying to figure it out and decide what I want to do. So much is just up in the air. I honestly don't think that the site available now will be around too much longer for US players, I hate to say it but it just doesn't look good.

For what it's worth I believe strongly that Caesar's entertainment and their friend and puppet Harry Reid had a big hand in the DOJ going after PokerStars and Full Tilt. Reid has introduced a new bill that will highly benefit his home state of Nevada. By ridding Caesar's of their two biggest competitors, PokerStars (and their partnership with Wynn) and Full Tilt, the road is paved with gold for Caesar's when and if federal legislation is past. I'm amazed, disgusted and appalled that our government has become what it has and both sides are equally to blame. More about Reid's attempts can be found here.

For now I wait and see...

Coming Soon....

I'm working on a review of the remaining poker rooms opened to US players. I mentioned this in a blog I did on Wednesday but Blogger has been having technical difficulties and that last post seems to have disappeared.

I am waiting to hear back from Doyle's Room on a few questions and I need to find out a couple of things from Bodog and Cake and then I'll do the review after I've played a couple of games on Doyle's Room.

What's next?

The action of the US Department on Justice has had a profound affect on the lives of many poker players, as I and many have discussed many times since April 15th. At this point all that can be said, thought, speculated and surmised has already been repeated in many a blog. Myself and others have written about using this time to take our game to the next level by study and review. Many have written about having to move out of the country to continue playing online.

Online pros have lost their lucrative contracts with the three poker sites involved in the indictment and they are either having to leave the country or figure out how to continue to make a living doing what they love. Others still have large sums of money tied up on the two sites that haven't paid out yet. All this said, yet again, it's time to figure out what we do now.

I recently purchased The Poker Mindset by Ian Taylor and Matthew Hilger. I'm now three chapters in and I really wish I had purchased this book two years ago. Since April 15th my mindset has been anything but productive for my game. I'm so pissed off and feel so cheated that I tilt over the least little thing. Why, because I don't want to be playing on Carbon Poker or Bodog or any other site except PokerStars. PokerStars was my constant companion for the last two years. When I was down or upset PokerStars was there with thousands of players and hundreds of games to play to keep my mind off of all the things that were bothering me. I totally enjoyed playing there, well except maybe during the worst of my downswings but even then I still didn't want to play anywhere else. Poker seems to have lost so much of it's allure for me right now.

So to the title of this blog, nope I don't have an answer but I wish I did. I have no idea what's next. At this point I trudge on and study and work on my game. I try out the others sites in hopes of finding one I enjoy half as much as I enjoyed PokerStars. I study and read and review (if I could just find a site with a decent method of saving hand histories so I can review my games). I hope the DOJ doesn't decide to shut down the remaining sites but that is a possibility that we all have to be aware of. Most of all I stop and I realize this is yet one more bump in the road of life. I realize how many other things I have to be thankful for and most importantly I work on my mindset. I do my best to stop being pissed off and accept what has happened and do what I can to improve the situation while accepting that what I can do is minimal.

I've been asked quite a bit about other sites and depositing and rakeback and all the general questions. While I'm no expert in online poker sites I do know quite a bit about how to find a new site and deposit and get rakeback and all those things so my next blog will be a review of each site still available in the U.S. (based solely on my experience and opinion) along with how you sign up, get rakeback and deposit. Until that update if you are interested in Cake or any of the sites on the Merge network please go through Rake the Rate using my referral code (a girl's gotta make money where a girl can) here. Click on the tab that says Rakeback Offers and choose the site you're interested in and follow the instructions. Merge pays 35% rakeback and Cake 33% (I will tell you now I'm a bit leery of Cake) by using my link you get 35% (on Merge) of your rake and I get 4%. You can refer people using your referral link after you sign up and you will get 4% referral rakeback on any of your referrals and I will get 1% from everyone you refer, certainly a win/win situation for us all.

Let us trudge on and hopefully prosper.