I'm not dead... (loooooong.)
.. but I sure feel like it right now. Being sick sucks. Thank god that it's a head thing though and not a stomach thing because I can still eat. Isn't that the worst when you feel like crap and are starving at the same time? On the other hand though it's made me pretty irritable and prone to tilt easily, so combine my perpetual run bad since my 2nd this summer, a congested head, and a rebuy tournament made me a little spewey today.
Anyways, I'm rambling. I suppose I'm trying to avoid the meat of what's on my mind and that is I am scared. I am depressed. My bankroll is at it's lowest point since January of 2006 (I'm about to go on a selling spree of many of the toys I've bought since then and I still have money and I'm not broke, so I cannot complain OBV...). But, I really feel like I cannot do a damn thing right in poker any more. Yesterday I was 8th in chips in an online tourney with 42 remaining, money at 40, and the very next hand I busted 41st. It was a cooler and it was against the only person at the table that could bust me. Just so sick. I am sure there are some leaks in my game, but historically I have been very good at identifying my leaks/doing damage control in these downswings. I was on one at the beginning of this year, dropped to 15-30/2-5, and rebuilt. I made things happen in the tourneys, scored big in the series, and have been on an overall downswing since.
It's interesting that before my last two big downswings I scored big. I think that tournament poker has made me lazy. When you score in tournament poker you feel like the king of the world and that turning a small sum into a large sum is the easiest thing in the world. But damn, I was fortunate in the start of my career in the big leagues of tournament poker in that when I got deep I ran good in the right spots. I mean, there are so many times that you end up all-in in a coin flip situation and there wasn't a damn thing you could do to avoid the situation and then it's all up to the cards. Then there are times like two weeks ago when you make it deep and just get screwed and it's about a BUNCH of money. I get it in AA v AQ flop 962 and it goes QQ, and I bust 10th instead of being 2nd in chips and get $1200 instead of whatever else I would have earned up to $24k.
I haven't consistently played live cash games since April of this year. I miss it. I miss the people, I miss the interaction, I miss the feeling of actually going to work. Call me crazy, I know, but I am not happy where I am at right now. I am constantly worried about going broke to the point that it has consumed me and made me pretty irritable at times. I chewed on the topic of being too wrapped up with becoming famous a couple of months abo, but I didn't exactly reach this point of realizing that I have been too consumed with poker until the past couple of weeks.
I'm not saying that I've been a degenerate or addict or anything like that. I'm saying that if I'm so wrapped up wiht poker that I am unhappy with life and depressed in general that something isn't healthy.
This weekend I went to Vegoose. It was the nuts. Check out the pics.
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I seriously think I should be a photographer. If any of y'all have any connections lemme know.
Anyways, Vegoose is a two day music festival out here in the corner of Las Vegas with 12 bands playing each day. We went on Sunday and it was headlined by Rage Against the Machine. It was a ton of fun.
I kept thinking during the festival how much I missed being a hippie. Now, this place was a straight up hippie festival, so I'm sure that had something to do with it, but really. The happiest times of my life have come being a hippie. My favorite time of my life was when I was guiding on the Kings river in central California outside of Fresno. I lived in a tent on the bank of a river ninety minutes from a traffic light. I would wake up with the sun, do whatever I wanted until about 11am on most days, and on most days this included something along the lines of fishing, playing my guitar, or just chillin with other hippie peeps. At 11 we would load boats and get gear ready, at noon the custies would show up and we'd take care of all the bidness. Up the river in a bus on a dirt road, and we were paddling by two. Done by six, unpack gear, kick it by the river playing harmonicas and guitars and bongos and djembes and mandolins, smoke, figure out some dinner around dark (which would be a 2-3 hour endeavor and nobody cared), and hang around the campfire with good people.
That community that I was a part of was the most loving and caring community I have ever experienced. When I first showed up on the river in 2001... Actually it's pretty funny how I ended up there in the first place. I was mowing my lawn in Los Angeles wondering what I was going to do now that school was out, decided that I was going to the river, and then six hours later I was walking down a trail to a campfire on the Kings river five hours away. That night at the campfire one of the guides said to me, "So do you love the river brah? Sweet man, me too. Me too. Cheers."
And that was it. That was the conditions of being a part of a community where people loved you unconditionally. Those were the sweetest of times.
The poker community has actually come the closest to that for me. I have met some of the best, most trustworthy people I have ever met in my life in the poker world, but it has been tainted by some of the most dishonest people also.
This blog has turned into quite the ramble, eh?
I wonder how much of my unhappiness is connected to my fissure from the church. I was very cynical to the church for a while after I started to guide because I saw one community of "unbelievers" that loved each other more than any group I have ever seen, yet every Sunday morning I saw a false community of people pretending to be happy. I was judged by the church for being a hippie. I was judged by the church for playing poker. I was judged by the church for drinking beer. But nobody I have ever guided with, smoked with, drank with, or played cards have ever judged me for being a Christian. Or going to church. Or being a missionary. Or any of the other faith based things I have done or want to do. People in the poker world think it's awesome that I want to start a camp - but there are way too many in the church world that do not think it's awesome that I'm a card player.
I have never wanted to be exclusively a poker player and I bet that is the source of my disdain lately. You REALLY REALLY REALLY gotta love this game to make it in the long term. Will I play poker all my life? You betcha. Do I want it to be everything I do? No shot.
I think I'm going to turn poker into something of more regularity here soon. Maybe I'll get onto a similar schedule as Jared. Head to work at 4pm, quit at midnight, five days a week. Play 2-5. 15-30 limit. Pay myself hourly again. If the roll rebuilds, then move up as allowed, and give myself a raise.
I'll never forget how sweet it was watching and working with my good friend Doc in Minnesota. Doc is a card player that doesn't play higher than 15-30 limit simply because he doesn't need to and he doesn't like the swings. He's not happy when he plays 30-60 and thus doesn't play it. Three nights a week he works as a bartender in a downtown Minneapolis bar. He doesn't need the money. He does it because he loves it and has done it for years. But you know what's awesome about Doc? Is that he makes Canterbury a better place. I have never met a single person that doesn't like him. He genuinely cares for people and genuinely loves people. He regularly has a handbag full of goodies. About once an hour somebody comes by asking for something . The employee with a headache? He has several pain-killing options. Need a piece of gum? He always has at least two flavors. He's a stud card-player. He is as rock-solid as they come and thus ends up taking more than his fair share of bad beats because he's almost always in the lead. I have never seen him get frazzled, and his usual speech is something like this with a cheery voice. "What's he got? Nines and fours? Yep! That'll do it! Very nice." He smiles, throws his cards in the muck, and moves on.
I think that's the point of being twenty-something. We gotta figure out how to make ourselves happy in this context of life, because happy people make other people happy and generally the world a better place. I believe that good things, things that are productive to the world, can happen on the green felt. Doc changed my life for the better and I am sure that he has changed others too. I want to be that guy that people are happy to see, that is happy to see people, and is happy to wake up in the morning. I am not that guy right now and need to do some work on that.
For the record, I 86ed my contact info from pokerpages since I was getting too much spam mail, but my e-mail is still maverickusc@gmail.com and you can always leave comments on my private blog at campfires.blogspot.com.
For all the haters out there, I know y'all get off telling other people how much they suck, but this blog was about how much I suck, so you don't need to tell me about it. K?
And for the record, as always with my blog, this was zero editing, zero thinking, just writing, just talking, just honesty. I believe that it what a blog should be - a free flow of thought.
Peace and good luck,
Devo
GG Absolute Poker
(completely unrelated to Justin's post this time!) I got an e-mail asking why I hadn't chimed in on the AP stuff since all the new evidence has come out.
If you're behind on the new stories, here's the uber laymans version as picked up by the Inquirer.
Reason number one? I've been lazy. I missed an article deadline this week and still haven't blogged about any caesars events including the one that broke my 0 for 26 live tournament cashless streak.
Number two but the real reason: This is bad. It is bad for poker, bad for online poker, and bad for my bankroll. People have claimed for years that they don't trust online poker for whatever reason, and the extreme ones have claimed that online poker is rigged. Now they have a place to show that online poker was rigged.
Here's the point. People do stupid things all the time. The whole bad apple ruins the bunch saying. One guy cheats on the highest games on one site and people's confidence in all sites is shaken even though the site really still is secure.
Obviously this type of cheating was detected, and even less obvious cheating will eventually be detected. It's really hard to pull something like this off as the level of corruption ran through many people and all the way up on this one that the probability of anything like this happening again is slim. Will it again eventually? Yep. Does it shake my confidence in online poker? Nope. I'm still making money!
Also, I'm playing smaller games. If somebody had this ability, they're only going to play the biggest games (as they did). Us small, medium, and mid-high stakes fish really don't have to worry. It's not possible to train bots to do this sort of thing.
So, if you're gonna tell people about this story, tell them that some AP exec went postal and took it out on the highest stakes games for a couple of weeks, not that online poker is rigged.
FWIW, I still have a significant percentage of my bankroll online and I'm not worried at all, but I am never going to play at Absolute Poker, mostly because of the way they have handled this situation, not that they got cracked in the first place.
Peace and good luck,
Devo
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Money Factory Open for Business
Man this place is sweet.
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It's been an awesome day so far. We all woke up somewhere around 10:30 and all put in a short session. I made a few hundred and the fellas made several thousand. Pickett is deep in the stars 100r with a ton of chips on a great table and playing on the Samsung big screen. Dave has been crushing as usual, and Bill took like $6k off of one guy playing 25-50 NL. Jay is playing "rebuild the computer". After a short session I hopped on the beach cruiser and rode down to the roller coaster to pick up some gyros. These guys should be affiliates for the Mediterranean food industry as these gyro things are fantastic. Pita bread, funky white sauce, and grilled lamb. Came back, put in some more time in my office seen above, went a little tilty after getting called heads up by a guy that had two unders and a back door flush draw on a Q87 flop (he had 53cc) and losing, and here I am writing this blog.
So, I'm gonna go grind some more, Pickett is going to win the 100r (they're ITM and he's 2nd in chips), Dave's gonna stack somebody a couple of times, Jay's gonna eventually fix his computer and then probably play Guitar Hero, and we'll all continue enjoying this rough life.
Peace and good luck,
Devo
Life awesome, poker not so awesome.
Insert witty sentence here
Friday afternoon I headed up to Newport Beach for my cousin's wedding which I was incredibly excited about. I have the greatest family and extended family ever and don't have the opportunity to see them very often. Everybody that has a significant other ends up bringing them to our side of the family, and it's a ton of fun. So, party on a yacht with this awesome family? I'm stoked!
The ceremony was short, simple, and beautiful. Shortly thereafter we headed downstairs and straight to the open bar. Now, if you've ever read this blog, you know that I have been known to throw a few back, and my family is on par. Last Christmas at the "kids" table we were doing tequila shooters. This day we were doing vodka and cranberry. I made sure my younger cousins always had a drink in hand and at one point actually did a shot with my sister - first time ever doing that.
After the wedding and reception and dinner and dance party we headed to Joe's Crab Shack for the after-party. I was planning on only having a beer before heading down to San Diego for my buddy's 21st birthday at midnight, but I met a bridesmaid and those plans got waylaid. I finally got out of Joes two hours later at midnight and hauled ass down to Mission Beach. I made it in an hour, hitting 100 twice on the way. When I got there it was the sweetest welcoming ever as everybody was trashed and didn't think I was going to make it. Before I could shake more than two hands I had two shots in my hands followed by two Miller Lites. From there we had philisophical conversations about the AIDS epidemic in Africa all the way home at 4am.
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My sister
My fam
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Married cuz!
Dave, Devo, Pickett, Jay Rockets
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Sweetest thing ever the following morning. The construction workers had the day off or something! I actually got to sleep until noon which was awesome. We woke up and went on a mission for breakfast. Jay, Pickett and I all jumped on beach cruisers to go acquire gyros. On the way we ran into our buddies on the beach, drank a quick beer, and then got our pitas full of lamb. We ate, played some guitar hero, and then the six of us headed over to the beach. It was a long walk across the street to the ocean side. Cooler full of beer, the bose jambox, chairs, a football, a whiffle ball with a bat forgotten at the pad, and horseshoes. Good times. We headed back around 5pm, ate Round Table pizza, and basically chilled for three hours until people started showing up for the 21st birthday, part two.
At 9:30 twenty of us piled into a limo followed by another SUV full of people and we headed to Confidential in downtown San Diego. Booth, bottles, the whole nine yards as usual. We were there forever. We took cabs back and fell asleep at some time before sunrise. Telling stories today has been quite the blast. We've decided that we need to make friends with some 20 year olds so we can do this again soon.
It was neat seeing all these 21 year olds that were friends of our buddy having the night of their lives. The five of us poker players bankrolled the night, and it felt good to hook up our friend and his friends with a night that they could never make happen otherwise.
Today, I was psyched to play some cards, but I shoulda just kept drinking. I blew almost $1400 in the usual fashion. I was chip leader in the 750k and played a HUGE pot with a guy that really overplayed AQ and he naturally hit his 3 outer on the flop. No problem. Oh, later I flop top two on an A92 flop, and he manages to get it all in for a 10x CRAI (lingo: 10 times bigger than my flop bet Check-Raise-All-In. Analysis: really bad.) with AT and it goes JJ, so I lose getting counterfitted. I got it good in every tourney except the million where I bluffed off my whole stack against a very well disguised hand. Well played.
Still though, frustrating. My roll's officially hurting and I'm going to have to go back to some serious grinding. I have been lazy and haven't been playing as much as I should be, but that is going to change soon. I discovered a new website with play that is incredibly soft with 33% rakeback, so I'm gonna grind a bunch of hands there until I win a million for my backer in one of the 10k's coming up :-).
I'm probably going to head back to Vegas Wednesday night, watch Poff get married on Friday, and start the Caesars classic on Sunday.
Peace and good luck,
Devo
Saan Deeyago... I Believe it's Spanish...
I love this place. I love how life just leads us into random places in random ways. My cousin is getting married tonight and I had planned on coming down for a while now. Then, about a week ago I caught up with my good buddy Jay from Minnesota who I knew was living in San Diego and he invited me to come and stay. I have heard wonderful things about this house and was like, "I'm in." Then, on the same day, I found myself at some random bar/casino/lounge called Lake Mead Lounge that I had never been to before with the roomies and a bunch of peeps from Half Shell. I was not drinking more than a beer here and there (unusual) so I was actually coherent enough to ask out the bartender and have at least a one percent chance of getting a positive response rather than my standard zero percent. Furthermore, I haven't randomly asked somebody out in, like, as long as I can remember really. She naturally said, "Well, why don't you leave me your number," and I thought to myself, "Good game Devo." Drawing dead really.
So, fast forward to Monday night and we're back to the usual nonsense at the local bar and I get a call from a random 702 number. I had given up all hope so answered the phone wondering who it was and it was Summer the bartender. Sweet! Chatted for a bit, and she asked if I wanted to go to San Diego with her. Any chick that is nuts/spontaneous enough to take a random road trip with a random guy is right up my alley. I was already planning on going to San Diego anyways so we drove down together, kicked it at her friends house for a couple of days, and then I took her to the airport to take a one way back last night. Best part was that she took the plane back cause she had to work, not because she hated me! Good times.
So, after that I headed up to Jay and Dave's pad (last night). I had recently discovered that Mike Pickett was also hanging at the house, so I was stoked to see my three buddies. I literally laughed out loud when I saw their place. It's right on the boardwalk on Mission Bay on the ocean side in Mission Beach. The entire east wall is sliding glass doors with a wonderful view. It's a sick bachelor pad.
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Pretty sick, eh? I was chatting with Mike about how long he had been here. He said he came here for a week about three weeks ago. After the week he flew back to Minnesota, stayed for three days, and flew straight back. He talked about how awesome it is with the community and location in general. "We're up early every day, play poker online, work out, eat healthy, and then go out every night." Jay has dubbed the room "The Money Factory." Today in the Money Factory, Paul played a guy 25-50 NL heads-up while cooking hamburgers on the barbecue outside for everybody. Paul won.
I must say that I'm pretty envious. It's awesome that a group of guys can live in community and encourage each other in everything from their poker games to their diets. They invited me to hang out as long as I want, so I think I'm going to stick around for a bit. I hope that I can work on my game some. Perhaps these guys can help me find some of my leaks that I have right now. Plus, I've been here for one day and had a great time.
Tonight one of their roomies turns 21 at midnight. That sealed the deal for me. I'm coming back down after the wedding. I'm stoked.
Peace and good luck,
Devo
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