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Harley is the newest addition to our family, and provided us with one heck of a week.

It’s been a rough week and a half since Christmas.  The day itself was nice, and it’s always fun to see the kids open their presents and such, but the gift that Santa gave our family of a new 3-month old Golden Retriever Puppy has me questioning my sanity.  Harley is a wonderful addition to the family.  He has an awesome temperament, and is a warm and friendly addition for all of us.  But having a puppy in the house is just tough.

It doesn’t make matters any easier by the fact that he was attacked by a Pit Bull just 3 days into having him.  Now we’re playing nurse as well. I’ve been itching to get this down, so that I can simply get it out of my system, but work and the duties of taking care of a new dog have just been in the way.  So here goes the story. Read more…

What if all of these teams had a chance at the National Championship?

Every year, about this time I sit down and spend some time in creating a fantasy College Football playoff bracket.  I’m a huge opponent of the current BCS format, and I’d love to see the NCAA get their act together and finally put together an adequate playoff system to determine a College Football National Champion.  I’m also a realist, and realize that the universities make far too much money from the currently flawed bowl system to even consider deviating from it, but it sure would be nice for us fans to watch a playoff. Instead, year after year, we’re left with nothing but passion and conjecture on who the nations best college football team REALLY is, and often debating whether or not the two most deserving teams ended up playing in the national championship game. Read more…

There is so much to be thankful for on a day like THIS day.

On a day where countless scores of people and their loved ones will sit down at a table and over-stuff themselves with Turkey and all the fixin’s, I finally found it in me a desire to write down some thoughts.  I miss writing a great deal from time to time, but I also suffer greatly from a lack of motivation to do it on most days, which lends to the reason that it’s been more than a month since my last blog entry.  But on today of all days, where we sit and recant the things that we’re thankful for, I had a few thoughts that I wanted to get down. Read more…

Congratulations to DeepStacks Live lead instructor Tristan Wade on his first career WSOP Bracelet win.

It’s been a while since I’ve played poker outside of the home game.  Since I took a 4th place finish at the $120 buy-in Venetian in Las Vegas during Brett’s bachelor party, I haven’t hit the tables at all.  Some of the reasons have been financial.  I just can’t really afford to go play poker these days.  But honestly, most of the reason has been a loss of excitement and desire, as I find myself losing the capability to connect to the game regularly.

I find myself having a more difficult time these days watching poker on television or even reading about it online.  I’ll tune in when people that I know are doing well in an event, like a friend of mine Tristan Wade, who just won his first WSOP Bracelet.  I first met Tristan at the World Series of Poker last year when he’d made a deep run in the Main Event. Read more…

Rafe Furst and Phil Gordon will continue to have my support for everything that they've done in the fight against cancer.

Change can be a good thing sometimes.  It’s inevitable in life that as time goes on, things change.  After all, we’re not immortal, and we’re far from perfect.  As a result, things will be different.  Change can be tough, and it can be good.  But it’s an element of life that we must all cope with.

April 15th remains a landmark day for me in many ways because of the way that it changed my life.  Gone are the days that I spent playing online poker.  Gone is my online poker bankroll, seemingly tied up in what looks like a sea of mismanaged assets and misappropriated distributions among owners of a site that has fallen to pieces.  I can no longer play online the game that I’m passionate about, nor can I carve out the time or the bankroll to play the game live.  I’ve been forced to move on from poker, despite holding onto the love and the passion of the game.  Things have changed. Read more…

We all got screwed by the Full Ponzi Poker Scheme

I’m not sure what all the hours that I logged on Full Tilt Poker are worth anymore.  It appears as though the Department of Justice wishes that time that I spent, and the money that I deposited to be viewed upon in the same manner as a purchase of a PlayStation game.  I could spend countless hours clicking buttons, claiming that there was a skill element in my wins, and then walk away with nothing but time wasted.

The Department of Justice opened old wounds in poker players’ souls yesterday and then poured salt directly on them.  The most recent revision to the civil complaint originally filed on April 15^th now includes the names Howard Lederer, Chris “Jesus” Ferguson, and Rafe Furst.  The last one bothers me the most.  The DOJ’s chief lapdog, US Attorney Preet Bharara went so far as to call the Full Tilt Poker concept a full fledged Ponzi Scheme, aimed at taking away customer money without the intent of giving it back, and instead distributing it among it’s chief board members and owners (of which there are purportedly 19). “Full Tilt was not a legitimate company, but a global Ponzi scheme.  Full Tilt insiders lined their own pockets with funds from the pockets of their most loyal customers while blithely lying to both players and the public alike about the safety and security of the money deposited,” said Bharara.  This giant mess got even messier, if that was even possible.

Let’s try and summarize the list of events: Read more…

Happy Birthday to me....it's been a great one.

There are moments in life where you just seem to appreciate the people around you more and more. It’s been an interesting month to say the least, filled with a lot of up’s and down’s.  But as I sit here and finally begin typing away on a blog that has seemed to go far too long without a post, I can’t help but think how lucky that I am to be loved as much as I am by so many people.

Today is my 33rd birthday.  I would have never dreamed that my life would be as it is today, or that I would be so lucky as I am.  First and foremost, I want to say a quick thanks to my wife Traci.  She worked her tail off to put together one heck of a week for me.  It kind of started on Thursday when I got home from work and decided to take the family to Disneyland for the evening. We got down to the park with about 2 hours left in their operating hours, and the kids decided that they were going to take full advantage of the 5-minute wait time on Big Thunder Mountain, riding the popular roller-coaster attraction 12 times consecutively.  It was a fun evening. Read more…

It’s been a while since I’ve really blogged about anything going on in my life, because honestly, there just hasn’t been much to talk about.  I’ve been working between 15-20 hours per week over at the Best Buy near my house for a few hundred bucks a week, and with the kids on Summer Vacation, I’ve kidnapped the family a little more than a half dozen times to make good on our Disneyland Annual passes.  But other than that, it’s been pretty much business as usual.

I’ve also been writing a bunch for PokerSoftware.com, and just recently had the opportunity to interview 2010 WSOP Main Event Champion Jonathan Duhamel.  I’ve met him in person twice since the November Nine, and I’m actually really impressed by the guy.  Earlier I wrote a piece about how I didn’t think that he would be good for the game of poker, and it was because we just didn’t know much about him.  The truth is, while he’s kind of a quiet and unassuming character by nature, Jonathan is a really fun guy to hang around and a really chatty and nice dude overall. Read more…

Phil Hellmuth may be the most decorated WSOP Player in history, but is he the best player ever?

It’s an argument that has some teeth to it, and you can make a case.  This year’s World Series of Poker saw The Poker Brat make 3 final tables, and pit himself heads-up for career WSOP Bracelet Number 12 all three times.  However, in every case he fell just one spot short and failed to extend his record of the most bracelets in WSOP history.  Despite the lack of titles this year, Phil Hellmuth saw the most profitable World Series of Poker of his career in 2011 with the Main Event still pending, a truly remarkable feat considering all of his prior accolades. His incredible play at this World Series has made him the front runner for Player of the Year honors.  But do the achievements of 2011 combined with the list of unprecedented accomplishments from years past make perhaps the most recognizable player in the game of poker, the greatest player ever?  Now that is a question worth talking about. Read more…

November Niners Matt Jarvis and Champion Jonathan Duhamel headline the $5k NLHE 6-max event.

The two tournaments affected by the hard stops yesterday completed in relatively short time, and within about an hour of each other.  Fabrice Soulier polished off Shawn Buchanan (who came into the day with just 4 big bets) in just a few hands to claim the $10,000 H.O.R.S.E. Championship bracelet and collect $609,130 for the win.  And in the $2,500 No-Limit Hold’em, Mikhail Lakhitov started out on fire, and blitz-Krieged his way through his final 4 opponents, knocking out all but one of them.  Lakhitov scored his first career bracelet as well and won $749,610 in the process.

One other tournament complete yesterday as well as Mitch Schock completed the quest for his first WSOP Gold Bracelet and winning the $310,225 first place prize by winning the $2,500 Pot-Limit Hold’em/Omaha mixed event.  So, congratulations to Soulier, Lakhitov, and Schock.  Not exactly the names that make great headlines, but that happens in poker sometimes.

Here’s the action that will be underway at the Rio today: Read more…