Since yesterday I've got a wisdom tooth absolutely killing my face. Tonight I was eating a cake one of my girlfriends from high school made me for me leaving to move to Las Vegas and I could barely open my mouth. One of my good friends, Jacqui, made me a poker table going away cake since I'm moving to Vegas on Monday. Jacqui and her boyfriend Steven are two of my best friends from my hometown and are two of the most honest good people I know. I'm just glad I am doing enough right to have someone care that much about me leaving as to make a cake for me...and a bomb funfetti poker table cake at that.
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As for poker this week has been what I'd been waiting for impatiently. The past 2 weeks I've run over 10BI under 0EV and to end up running slightly over 0EV this week and really crushing the games feels really good. As much as I like to enjoy the upswings, like I discussed with Kelisitaan an Epipen tonight, I think it's really important to not care about the upswings and/or downswings and really stay focused on improving my game, putting in solid volume (hands/month), and using my bankroll to improve my life as efficiently as possible. Right now I'm relatively happy with the decisions I'm making and while a lot of pressure is on me now I feel like I'm ready for it and that pressure just might bring the best out of me. At some point tomorrow I will have < 48 hours before I leave to move to Las Vegas for September so I'll hopefully get some packing done. Now that the monitor is shipped out I really don't have much to worry about. I pack my clothes in luggage I'll be checking with Jet Blue and my laptop, hard drives, laptop cooler, etc I will take in my carry on luggage. More or less, I'm just ready and waiting to go and would be lying if I said I wasn't extremely anxious and excited....it's going to be an amazingly fun month of my life for sure.
Now I'm going to take some Advil to hopefully numb this wisdom tooth pain so I can fall asleep. Tomorrow I will be up to get myself mentally organized for Monday and put in a solid volume of hopefully 2k+ hands.
Today I woke up around 4pm and felt amazing. I've been staying with my family since I moved out of my Boston apartment where I lived with Pterodactly6, a 400nl-1knl reg on PS, for the summer. I've been not getting the long sleeps here in my hometown like I had in Boston...it was nice to be fully rested today.
I just finished a short session that ended up up 2-3 buyins. What was important about this session was that for the first time I put in 500+ hands cascading tables instead of tiling. If you don't know what that means look it up cuz it's not the easiest to explain and more importantly if you don't know already you probly shouldn't be reading this...otherwise try google. I'm still not sure what I'm going to do about this damn wireless mouse. It seems to be working fine now but I was too degen yesterday to make it to the store to buy a new one. I think I might just order a sick one from buy.com or newegg.com and have it shipped to my vegas house for when I get there. Which leads e to the UPS Store....
Today I took my 22" Widescreen Acer (as seen here on far right) to the UPS Store. This was the only way I could get my external monitor to my Vegas townhouse without having the huge thing in a carry or or checking a bag with a fragile flat panel monitor. Shit ended up being $70 total to get it there for a week from tomorrow (Thursday) and packaged by them which insures the package up to $200....which is the approximate value of the entire package. Hopefully I will end up staying in Vegas for at least October as well so it doesn't end up costing me a really stupid amount of $ to ship just a monitor back and forth for what would almost be the price of a new one.
I'm going to get back to seshing but before I sign off....I want to mention I don't know if I will have the desire to continue posting this often. I've posted once a day since I started this blog and I just don't see how that could continue. I will most likely post several times a week if for no other reason than I just think a lot and therefor have a lot to talk about. This blog won't be released until myself an SS decide is best but from then on it will obviously be open to the public. Tomorrow I will be enjoying my favorite part of California in my home state of Donkachusetts with a nice little piece of ass I went to high school with....SHIP.
Before I get to the SNG let me say that up until today I've had nothing but good luck with Logitech. As I should, they are after all one of the leaders in wireless input/output technology in the computer industry, among other things. I haven't been able to figure out exactly why the wireless gaming mouse I bought a few months ago is lagging and causing me to time out while 20 tabling on PokerStars but I'm going to be pissed if I have to get a new mouse before I can put in a session again.
Anyways, tonight I played a $50 live 6 handed SNG at a friend's house. Pat has been a freind of mine for a few years now and is actually almost twice my age. He owns a local diner about 25 minutes west of Boston down Route 9 that offers some of the best hot dogs, cheesburgers, and sandwiches in metrowest Boston. On top of all that, he was one of my first backers into online poker. It took me about 4 months to turn $500 four tabling 25nl 6max on Full Tilt into over $10,000 eventually 16 tabling 200nl FR, also on FT.
The long and the short of it was, I blew it. I was more there with a couple friends from my hometown to play some casual donkament poker but what really fucked me up was the chips. The chipset he has no denominations on them whatsoever which subliminally tilts the shit out of me I think. having like 5 different values of chips and forgetting which was which cuz it's always something different when i play there just made it really hard to realize how short/deep I was. Turns out I made some plays I shouldn't have, given my stack size, and ended up having to shove A6o 5 handed and AJ snapped me off.....lolSNGaments.
Other than that useless bulshit today is just another day closer to leaving for Vegas when the real game begins.....6 days and counting.....SHIP the mini golf course next to my inground pool and jacuzzi under my balcony.
Before I say anything, as a keynote, I want to set the tone for this blog by having everyone who may or may not read this blog regularly know that right now I am currently motivated to get myself into this world of blogging but that could very easily change at any point. ATM I am interested in creating a blog that will contain relatively pointless information about myself from the past, present, and future that will most likely offer little to no form of value other than entertainment (esp if you enjoy shameless brags) and some insight into the thoughts of the very early days of an aspiring internet poker pro .
That being said, allow me to introduce myself. My name is Derek. Most of you reading this would better know me as one of my many online handles but for now those are not important. What's important is that I am 22 years old and after years of learning to play No Limit Hold Em profitably on the internet I am now at the point where I feel my day-to-day life is worthy of sharing/keeping note. I may or may not go into the details later of how I've got where I am but for now it's only necessary to note that I am a LSNL reg on PokerStars. I'm currently in the processing of finding a balance between maximizing the volume of tables(hands/hr) I can mentally afford to play while also being sure not to negatively impact my winrate by playing too many. If I am honest with myself I think that the equilibrium point for me right now is somewhere between 14 and 20 tables (at once obv). I almost wanted to set 12 as the low point but that is really just a little too low, I can honestly say that I can play 14 and not have it negatively affect the WR i would have at 12. I feel like I tailed off into poker discussion (which will be much of what this blog is) without any notice but like Tyson said, if you don't like it....change your station.
I kind of turned that mini-bio intro into more poker detail than it needed to get into so I'm going to force myself to stay on the track I had predetermined for this first post and get right to it. Earlier today I received an email on my Verizon XV8600 informing me my application had been approved for the American Express Platinum Charge Card. Just to clarify, a charge card is different than a credit card in that it isn't intended to hold a balance month to month (though it is possible for large purchases). The purpose of a charge card is to allow me to have less need to carry cash on me and more importantly receive the rewards AMEX offers to their Platinum members for spending with their card. Before I get into some of those let me explain why I am still surprised hours after receiving the email. This card is the top of the chain when it comes to charge cards (other than those which are by invitation only like the AMEX Black etc). For someone my age with my credit history I would have bet I'd be declined before I bet I'd be approved. Not to say that I have bad credit history but I know enough about this card to know not just anyone would be approved. When I found out I was approved I immediately thought of the reason(s) that this could be. This reminded me of a conversation I had with a Bank of America credit card account manager a few weeks back. To make a long story short, over the past year or 2 I had been spending beyond my means (like many people do) on my BOA credit card. I always made at least the minimum payment and was late in payment a few times from just not paying attention to the due dates. This leads up to a month or 2 ago when I paid the $5-6k balance off in cash all at once. Here is where I think my mindset differs from most. In realizing the value of this to BOA I made a phone call. I told the BOA agent I needed to speak with a CC account manager. Once I got on the line with this guy I began to explain to him within the next 12 months I would be generating an income of somewhere between $50k and $100k from my internet poker profession. I explained to him that because of this I would be needing a credit card I can rely on to help me along as I need it. Unfortunately, I told him, I would not be able to continue with the BOA CC as my APR had risen (through nobody's fault but my own ftr) along with my credit score. I basically told the guy either adjust those things that needed to be adjusted or I would need to find business elsewhere with a lower APR. He in turn lowered my APR to a point below where it was to begin with as well as somehow affected my credit score in a positive way. Basically....there is no better way for me to put in words how effective that decision/conversation was than to tell you I was approved for the AMEX Platinum Charge Card.
Now after all this talk about the AMEX Platinum if I were reading this up til this point I'd be wondering who the fuck cares??? Well the answer is....anyone in their right mind. The AMEX Platinum card boasts so many advantages it's almost laughable.....beginning with 24/7 concierge service. Not only can I get discounts at shows, restaurants, flights, hotels, rental cars, etc around the world but I will have free roadside assistance and rental car insurance among other things....just for being a member! The money I will spend on the card, just like I would spend the cash, will also accrue reward points that I can use to pay for or towards literally anything, including my rent. By for or towards I mean, say X number of points will pay for a month rent. If I only have 2/3 enough points to cover that $ amount I can use the points to pay as much as they can and charge the rest, it's really unbelievable. As if that wasn't unreal enough, not only that, but I can also request up to 60k points in advance! For example, if I want to do something worth 80k AMEX reward points and I only have 60k, they will front be the 20k I need to cover the difference and as I charge from then on I will be making up for the negative points balance I hold until I'm back to break even. I don't want to go on too far with the details of this card but I think you should now be able to understand why this is such a big deal.
The first thing I'm planning on doing to take advantage of this is use the concierge service to rent a luxury car during my stay in Las Vegas this September. I will be staying in a 3 bedroom luxury townhouse 5 minutes from the LV strip with 2 other internet pros (aka we make all of our income from online poker). During this time I have decided to not pay ~$500 to have my car shipped out there as I only have my plans definite to be there for the month of Sept and not any further as of now. If and when that changes I will re-analyze the situation but until then I will have no car there. Renting a car for something like the middle 2 weeks of the month seems like a good decision. I will very soon make a phone call to AMEX concierge and tell them of my plans. Without doing any paperwork or any bullshit dealing with the car rental company(s)....I will just sit back and wait to hear from AMEX telling me the car of my choice is ready. Oh and in case you forgot, I won't have any need to pay the extra $ for rental car insurance as it is included free with being a Platinum card member.
For the sake of keeping this post from getting insanely long I'm going to cut it off here. Be aware that I fully understand my grammar isn't the best and I tend to have a lot of run on sentences and use punctuation incorrectly but I really don't give a shit. I get the point across and other than that I could give a shit less about being gramatically correct....that means nothing to me. What does mean something is that you now have an idea of what kind of blog this is going to be. I'm moving to Las Vegas in less than 7 days and after being a dream of mine through a year of probation and even longer from when I was introduced to the game until now when I make enough to afford to move to Las Vegas.....I would be lying if I didn't say I was excited. I will most likely be back here some time tomorrow to post some more thoughts and try to work out some of the many rough edges I have when it comes to blogging. One of which is producing a reasonable outro to each post.....
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