No my God.

Do u have a social live OP?

Not meant in a bad way

fuuuuuuuuck man now i wanna move and grind too. you deciding it's worth it would be my ultimate justification

vancouver awaits

Truly inspirational read, OP. Are your screennames public?

Stars and full tilt are public, I was ZepHendrix on those. Cereus name was never public but I was UMPHREYSMCGE there.

Yooooooooo, indulge me if you will

In general I think a real job is much better than poker. My main problem is not so much my job which I really like. It's more that I've been here for over 5 years, since I graduated college basically. When my boss left my work and responsibility increased greatly and I was told I would get a raise. On top of that I just had my yearly review, where I have gotten a raise every single year so far, and on top of it all, I am graduating from b-school and should get a big raise from that. The problem is that it appears as though I am not getting a raise for any of these things, which makes me very unhappy, especially considering how much good I've done here.

However, that part that really pisses me off and will be the main contributor for why I quit is that my boss keeps dodging the questions regarding what is happening with the raises he said I would be getting. I told him many times that this is very important to me, and he has done nothing to help ease my worries. In fact, he has made it much worse. On top of not giving me any information he constantly dodges the direct questions I ask. For example, several times I have asked "what are the guidelines that I need to meet for my raise" and he'll say something like "we're nowhere near where we need to be" (btw the quotas for the raise were never mentioned until it was time for it, and have never been mentioned before). Also, I've asked him directly how big a raise he put in for and he says stuff like "I should have that for you next week" or "oh I've got it written on my desk, I can't remember"... it's like he thinks I'm an idiot or something. It's extremely frustrating and it makes me mad even writing this (although it also makes me feel much better).

Anyways I kind of got off on a tangent there but my point is I'm considering quitting more because I feel like I'm getting shafted pretty hard here and on top of it because I'm being treated like ****. Honestly if my boss were straight up with me and didn't make me pry information out of him only to get BS responses every single time then I probably wouldn't be writing this or considering leave because I really do enjoy it. So don't quit on your job too fast if you actually like it. Good jobs are really, really hard to find, as is any job in general right now. My brother moved in with me about 6 months ago... he spent four months looking for a job, and he would have taken anything despite the fact that he's extremely smart and has a good degree. He snap called on the first part time gig he got offered and he's riding that out as we speak as he studies for the GMAT and tries to increase his hours. So moral of the story is to think long and hard about what you want to do and the pros and cons both short term and long term.

That being said, if this goes down I'd love to have the Screwball around ballin on a budget. SNE one time with no school or jobs? Should be a lot easier...

I actually really wanted to go to Vancouver as my first Canada choice (for obv reasons) but right now it looks like Toronto is in the lead because my gf is from Detroit and that's a lot closer to all our friends and family. That being said we're not even really close to being able to pick a city so it's kind of irrelevant.

ooookkkkkk here we go:

what i found in my very limited stint in private equity was that advancing is much easier by moving firms rather than moving up internally. this was 100% true at my firm and it seems like a full circle thing (if people were advancing at other places just fine, why were they moving to my firm to advance? seems logical they were having a harder time moving up as well). most of our associates and VP's were outside hires, and in my department there were only 2 people who had been there for 5+ years, out of like 35 people. idk maybe that's standard, but pretty much everyone seemed to like working there, and it was pretty unanimous among analysts that moving was easier than getting promoted internally. maybe that's all the problem is? people at my work moved to move up, even though noone really complained too much about the working conditions or compensation there.

my read is that your new boss didn't sign up for this "raise every year, auto-promotion for graduating b-school" program you did. it sounds like he just doesn't care to give you a raise, because people don't treat other people like that when they do. if he didn't have it in the budget, he would do a better job of convincing you that you were valuable to the company and that he just couldn't justify it.

i don't have a RL job anymore. unfortunately, i got hired 8 months ago with the anticipation of adding on two or three major clients, and instead, we lost 3. our company has basically been constantly expanding since it was started like 20 years ago and isn't used to it (i was the first person let go in my department for non-performance reasons in the last 4 years), and since i was the newest hire, i was also the easiest to let go. i'm not upset at all about it, i missed poker hardcore anyway. so now i have a good recommendation letter at least, and a good resume builder, and some good contacts. but the hardest part about moving abroad in my opinion (quitting a good job) kind of took care of itself. i doubt i woulda had the balls to do it. i guess now all i would have to do is make sure you like dogs (i have a pug) and try to rent out my house?

Jesus, OP doesn't sleep untill he has all the monies?

sick life. Although I'm not sure I would trade my 10-12 hour sleeps for op's 4 hours. Amazing that you have the motivation.

congratz op.

Wd , super job, im way impressed, gl on it ! dont kill yourself too hard

very impressive OP, if you do come to toronto i'll take you out for a beer and hear your stories

sick ****ing thread op

in before zephendrix top hat

Final update ITT. I feel like making a closing post and reflecting a little bit.

I graduated last month. It took me 3.25 years total to graduate. Looking back I have no idea how I did it. Especially in my final two quarters where I could barely get myself to do all the work of my classes without playing a single hand of poker, I couldn't even remember how I used to do the same thing while also playing poker for 30-40 hours per week. I also have no idea how I would go weeks on end where I'd sleep 4 hours per night every night, while the other 20 hours a day I would legitimately be working my ass off. I like to think it was youth but it was only a little over a year ago that I actually did all this ****.

I constantly question whether I made the right decision in doing this for a variety of reasons. Here's the things that constantly go through my head on the negative end first. (Please understand I'm not trying to be emo with the negatives or cocky / douchey with the positives, just trying to subjectively evaluate everything)

1) I greatly lowered the value of my degree because I could never fully give it the effort that it warrented. I mean going to a 3 hour class after working a 10 hour day is hard enough... but it's even harder when you know you're going to play poker for 3-5 hours after that, and that you had done that the day prior as well. It's even harder when in the time frame of that class I could probably pay for my entire quarter's tuition (I did that several times actually).

2) I missed out on some important development years at work. You learn a TON from the age of 22 - 30 imo, more than you learn any other years of your professional life. And while I learned a ridiculous amount at my job basically doing everything possible for a trading group, I can't help but wonder if I would have maybe found something better or been able to really set the basis for a great trading career had I focused more. Right now I think it's quite possible that I won't be in trading that much longer.

3) I cut myself out of what I think is probably $1,000,000 or so from poker, maybe more. If I didn't work full time I would have played poker probably 60-80 hours per week, I think my winrate would have been higher and that I probably would have made ~500k or so / year on the felt pretty easily honestly. I did almost all of my play completely exhausted and stressed out, which is why I would tilt so much. When I play now I pretty much never tilt... ever. The main reason for this is I actually sleep now and I'm not stressed. But as far as the income forgone... I'm not sure whether I'll ever get that chance again from poker.

4) My health suffered greatly. I basically stopped playing basketball and lifting weights all together. Before I really got going on poker, and even in the beginning of the start of all this I was playing bball 2-3 times a week and lifting 3 times a week, and usually eating pretty healthy. By the end of this I was playing basketball every other week, never lifting, and eating just awful. I gained about 30 pounds over these three years, of which I've lost almost 10 since graduating from simply eating a little healthier. I also lost about 80% of my ability to remember things short term. I am pretty certain this is due to the lack of sleep for such a long time but it could be due to other things as well. It's really really frustrating some times, mainly when I continuously forget super short term important or trivial tasks that I simply am unable to keep in my mind. It's also extremely frustrating considering I used to have an incredible memory. I do think this is coming back slowly though, especially since I am sleeping more "normally" now and also working out again which is good for the brain.

5) I missed out on a lot of time with family and friends. I think this one would have happened regardless with just work and school, because even when poker ended I had a hard time finding time for all anyways, but I think I probably sacrificed time at the right time in my life, as I have seen peopel with a family of their own do the work + grad school combo and it does not look fun at all.

Okay people, enough of the negatives, let's take a look at the positives!

1) First, let's get the superficial things out of the way. Let's start with the scorekeeper in poker, and for some in life...



MONEY... I made a lot of money for my age, and set myself up to make a lot of money in the future. I made supernova elite two years in a row while being one of the minority SNEs who actually made money on the felt while doing so, and also had a full time job that paid fairly well on top of it. I still remember the time I won the Sunday Mulligan in 2008 when I was an MTT pro before the SNE hunt... I made $47,000 in that tournament, which was ~$2,000 more than my year's sallary at the time. I slept about 2 hours or so, barely because I was so jacked for the huge win. I remember walking to work at 6 am after the tournament finished at 4am. Walking tall thinking I was so awesome having made my sallary the night before. A couple months later I went back to school (Miami OH) for homecoming or something like that. I opened a bar tab for the entire bar (about 30-40 of my college friends) and left it open for a few hours. It has been really nice being able to buy the things I want, and help my friends or philanthropies when I feel it's right. Somehow, in addition to appreciating the money I made, I also learned that money doesn't matter. It's not the scorecard in life. I mean to some it is, but it's not to me. I love that line in Blow where Ray Liotta goes "Money doesn't matter George... it only seems like it does". That really is true.

2)


I learned to handle loss properly. I think Ike put it best in "A Kid's Game". He said something along the lines of when a normal person has something faulter in their car, they get all upset about it and feel sorry for themselves, but when it happens to a poker player, we just consider it running under EV because we're used to getting unlucky for absurdly large amounts of money numerous times a day. This comes from the guy who got 800k stuck in the Netteller. I try to explain this valuable life concept to non-poker players... it's impossible (much like trying to explain any poker concept to non-poker players). As grinders we learn so many lessons... some of them really useful in lots of facets of life, like improving our ability to do quick simple algebra calculations in our head, or the ability to know what a person is thinking more so than the average person. These are all very valuable long term, but none are more valuable than being able to handle losses IMO. After all, life is going to throw a lot of curve balls at us and we're not going to hit them all, and the ones who can step back up to the plate the best are the ones who get the furthest (or just hitting the ball every time works too). For example when the **** hit the fan on Black Friday, I was in Florida at my friend's bachelor party. When I heard the news I stayed calm for the most part, especially considering half my net worth was in mine or stakees' online poker accounts. I just tried to enjoy the weekend knowing there was nothing I could do about the problem. I wrote off the loss on FTP and UB a long time ago, and it really didn't sting too much, especially considering the only site I ever really had a lot of confidence and trust in was PokerStars.

3) I always had something to fall back on. Even the Movie Rounders tells us to always leave ourselves outs... It should be the cardinal rule for any person regardless of profession. You should always have a plan B, always have somewhere to go should you primary plan not work. I just so happened to set myself up with an extra safe multi-faceted fallback plan. And I'll tell you one thing, when everyone was pissing their pants on Black Friday with no idea what the f*ck they were going to do I was sitting on the beach chillin knowing I'd have a degree and career to fall back on. You can't buy that kind of comfort and security.

4) I travelled all over the world playing poker. I've been to a ton of places, both in the US and internationally for poker tournaments, as well as made friends from across the globe. I've met some really interesting people, all of which with varying personalities and some of which with traits that make me question how they can be a professional online poker grinder, but that just makes every encouter that much more interesting.

4.5) Another thing that is awesome about online poker grinding and travel is when you meet someone you've logged 100k+ hands with online and when you talk to them it's like you already know them. I mean you sit there for 100s of hours playing with the same people, competing at the highest level. All the while, you're trying to learn every facet about how your opponent thinks and why he does the things he does, and what he's going to do next. In doing so you're learning more about the person over time than their best friends probably do, so it's always very interesting to meet people that you have this kind of history with.

5) On the note of people, I learned a TON about people, mainly from staking. It became easy to see when people were genuine, when they were not, how smart they were, and if it was book or street smarts, whether they were shady, whether they were good with money, etc. I could go on and on but things that used to take me a long time of knowing a person to pick up on I would pick up on almost instantly from a couple AIM conversations or a few skype chats. I learned to tell when people were lying like clockwork. People would lie to me all the time, especially when I first started staking and staked a lot of people that I definitely shouldn't have. I learned how to spot it, not from some checklist of things that people would do when they lied but I just KNEW it. Sure some stuff slipped by me still and I'm sure I didn't pick up on everything, but I developed an ability to judge character and to know what I had to say to certain people to get a point across based on the kind of person THEY were.

6)



I became a great poker player, a game I enjoy very much. I have always loved poker and in college I was probably the best player in my games, which at the time didn't mean much. But when I think about my skill level then and what I've become now it really is astonishing. I mean a lot of that has to do with the game evolving and being there while it did, but still it really is cool to think about it. Also, being an extremely competitive person, realizing that I was able to rise to the challenges and be a significant winner in mid and high stakes FR / 6m / and HU has really made me happy. I always wanted to be the best at everything, I still kind of do deep down. But even though I never became the best poker player ever I'm still very happy and content to have become very good at a game that I enjoy so much. It really gives me a lot of satisfaction when I think about it.

7) Lastly, and probably most importantly, this journey has given me a greater appreciation for life and how good I have it.


Anyways Since graduating my life has been much easier and I am much, much happier. I definitely benefitted more from graduating from school than I did when poker was taken away, and I think that is due to the fact that by the end, I truly hated school and everything about it. I was simply "over it" as many would say. Anyways now I have spent a lot of time cleaning up 1000 things that I have put off over the year. I have been cleaning up my music collection which is enormous and a total disaster. I have gotten my life way more organized, everything from actually setting up my electronics properly and in a clean way, to donating about 2/3 of my clothes to charity and organizing the rest. Stupid stuff like that which has occupied my todo list for years... I've also been hanging out more with my friends and trying to plan trips to visit those in other states more... basically just trying to make my life better overall, rather than "trying to survive today" every day.

Was it all worth it? I don't know, you tell me. I can make strong points for both sides and I don't think it's clear cut by any means and I think that in general a lot of people would be on both sides of the argument, depending on obvious characteristics and personality traits.

To end this ridiculously tl;dr post, I'd like to say thanks if you read it all. I simply wanted to think out loud a little and I may have ended up rambling a bit but I think there's a lot that anyone who reads this could use to better their own life. You can take the points that I think I lost out on in my journey and apply them to you own life in an attempt to try to avoid or remove from your life. For the pros I listed, if any of them seem like a good idea to you, try to do it yourself. Any time I read a life concept I like, I either put it in the queue or try to implement it immediately. It's always an exciting challenge for me when it happens too, because life changes, especially at the character level are always difficult which makes it fun. I truly hope if you read this wall of text you picked up on some of that, and if nothing else I hope it was at least interesting to join me on some reflections.

Here's to online poker in the US. Also I really enjoyed writing this. Definitely considering getting the blog going again and might x-post this there to get the fire started a little.

Beat: No threadsaver.

What a time to stumble onto this thread--epic last post, looking forward to reading the whole thread. Kudos to you for such self-awareness. Best of luck with everything.

solid post

Thanks.

I just reread it for the first time and realized my grammar and spelling wasn't the best. I was just so excited to post it! I'll clean it up after work.

after reading whole thread i feel like ****

Good read

So what about the future? In a previous post you mentioned considering leaving work and becoming a poker pro. What happened with that ?

I will respond to this later after work.

Amazing thread, have read the first and the last post and have to say I am thrilled to read it all!

A lot of that was based on work related stuff with my boss and how my raise and bonus were being handled this year. Basically there was both a miscommunication and lack of communication on his part and it really, really pissed me off. I was legitimately looking for places in Malta and ready to do 3 months there then 6 months in Canada. I actually got a place lined up for Malta, but it was really expensive, and then I have a mortgage here in Chicago that would take me some time to get rid of, and if I dumped my place my brother would be out of a home too. Then after some research I found that it was a couple of weeks to get a bank account in Malta, possibly the same in Canada assuming you could even get in... then I factored in the cost of travel, not having my benefits any more, not having played a hand of poker in several months, and the fact that US Legislation could be right around the corner. I weighed all the factors and decided to stay at work. There are some really nice benefits that I often overlook because the job is so very stressful and I do the job of 3-4 people, literally.

Anyways, that's what happened with the thoughts of going abroad and playing. I really want to play, and I miss online poker a lot, mainly the money and competing, and just the game itself. However at this point in my life uprooting myself to play does not seem optimal, especially considering the choices I made in the past with school and work. But going forward I think I might start playing life a little here and there again. I do love holding cards and stacking idiot live players. However more often than not I get too tilted from a combination of the 100 annoying live nuances that you find in every casino so I'm not sure how long that will last. In the meantime I'm going to wait 3-6 months and see how the online poker scene in the US shakes out and then make some decisions at that time. Right now would likely be an awful time to make any big changes or commitments career wise.

brag: photo with the man himself although super old school photo


he is reppin walter peyton, im reppin black shirt crew. I remember when I met jimmy I thought he was a raging alcoholic, now it all makes sense, I would be to with my free time if I was doin it like he does it

true legendary grinder

Haha, sick photo joey. Thanks for the love.

Also, there's three Chicago SNEs in that picture. Chicago goes hard.