Happy you updated! More degen stories!

BigA updates FTW! Though it's odd now I know what he looks like via GazzyB's PGC

I mean, I appreciate the heart you clearly have. That said the 86 doesn’t quite tell a story that’s believable and the jtcc honestly is just a spot where you re playing a timbey with only morons they if they take an Aggro line they ll just show up with the goods unless they are a very special type. You ll be surprised how well this on the surface supremely exploitable approach works because Doug Polk gets one point very wrong: nobody ever adjusts to this

All that said pleae gief moar updates

Confession

Alas, Vegas ended with the sort of ups and downs that I guess I should have come to expect. I’ll start with saying that life is pretty hard a lot of the time and to make it worth fighting over and enjoying you have to try and enjoy all the experiences, the good ones and the bad ones and just try and find reason for them. Vegas in a nutshell was probably a huge disaster for me. My deal ended, unceremoniously and that sucked. Me and my buddy (ex backer/current good friend) had big aspirations at the start of the trip. Unfortunately the largest of our dreams never really happened. Cash games on the backing were a disaster, lack of control, lack of understanding and a lack of strong decision making on my part for that one. We fired a lot of tournaments, big ones, small ones, medium ones and the main event (I will get to this later, it’s a real doozy). I have played a lot of high stakes poker in my time but I’ll have to reflect on the summer with fond memories. It’s an enormous privilege to fire the most premier events, $10ks and $25ks etc and have the license and freedom to fire all the big guarantees etc and I’ll forever have to thank Marginal. It’s also very satisfying to do a lot of the off the table work, to live and breath the game and to feel like I’m one of the better players in these high buy in fields, to be able to notice and home in on the mistakes players make, something I now realise I wasn’t able to do in the past. With each tournament I felt like I learnt a lesson along the way, whether it be a fundamental poker lesson, knowing I should have played a hand better etc or a more just general life lesson, figuring better ways to prepare, how to energise properly for long levels of boring tournament play, how to control my nerves and emotions and finally how to recognise game flow and see when to step on the gas and when to ease off.

Anyway, my last posts have had a more comprehensive run down of stories so this post will likely just wrap up the past few days I my bust out from the Main Event.

Sleepless in the Battle

So I scrapped into the money of the Main after 3 long and tiring days of tournament holdem. I had a ton of ups and downs. From losing half my stacking stack within an hour of taking my seat amongst feeling terribly unwell and fatigued to a surviving many end of day 2 shoves to ensure I beat my last finish in the event. I got to day 3 with a pretty manageable stack of 32bbs but the stack was definitely one of the shorter ones in the field and was way below average. I think in the first round I picked up AKo and KK, won both these hands and navigated up towards 45bb or so. Was a perfect start to the day as alleviated the opening pressure and gave me a lot more room to work with.

Hilarious Hand #1

I open K3dd in the HJ off about 50bb, and Dario Sammartino (a challenger for best looking and coolest man in poker just behind the reverend Nick Schulman) 3b me. I think it was me open 5k at 1/2k (500 ante) and he makes it 16.5k. Dario had started the day with a large stack but had been trending downwards. He’s obviously a world class player, will have a good strategies and will balance well and I’m sure he has reasonable emotional control but I could sense his frustration and him forcing the initiative in spots. I decided to 4b to 39k leaving myself about 55k or so behind. He thought for a while and folded.

Hilarious hand #2

My big hand of the day and probably the hand that meant I would have a cashing stack. Old man very straight forward and tight opens utg to 6k at 1200/2400 and I flat JJ in mid position and we take a flop HU. It comes down a frankly ridiculous J32r and he bets. I know, inset criticism here but I had been raising a ton of flops on the day so far and honestly this guy was so nitty and straight forward I assumed his continuing hands were weighted towards very strong holdings here. I raise his bet about 2.8x and he calls quickly. Turn 7x, he checks I bet 40k into like 45k and he piles with KK and I hold for like a 300k pot. Very welcome after starting the day at 65k. It put me above the average stack and made me believe.

After this hand the day was quite painful, I made one big hero blind on blind that I can’t really be bothered typing out and then sort of just clung onto my stack until the end of the day when we got towards the bubble. The bubble was quite frankly hilarious. Around the bubble I had like 30bb and then a funny spot comes up with 1187 remaining and 1182 paid.

Hilarious hand #3

I open KK (in reality I think this is a big mistake and perhaps I should just be open jamming my 30bb here with 7 till the money). It fold to the BB who seems like average American bum reg and he defends. Flop JT2r and he check calls like 35% pot bet from me. The turn comes a K and he shuffles weirdly in his chair. He checks and I check back. River comes a 6x, no flushes available and he bets 23k into like 55k. I call and he tables Q9o and I was short. I think I play the hand littered with mistakes and was just punished for not knowing ICM spots at all. The turn onwards all I can say is my intuition kicked in and I sensed something was amiss, villain was honestly an enormous tell box. Anyway the hand crippled me down to 17bb or so. I realised now I would just fold into the money, had some beers with my table mates and kicked it until the bubble burst. Queue high fives and celebrations. I was determined not to bust my day3 stack and although I ended the day with only 16bb going into day4 I had achieved my goal. I was happy, me and some Canadian friends went to grab another beer and some food (we hadn’t eaten in 8 hours) and bid each other good night, I was back in bed for 2:30am.

Day4 - A moment in history, a dark and stupid moment.

I set 3 alarms for day4. 9.48am, 9.52am, 9.56am. When sunlight broke through the curtains I was annoyed. I was bemoaning my luck that having a few beers in the night had left me waking up annoyingly early. The day before I’d been up early to watch the England game before day3 and it had turned into a 20 hour day. I’d only slept like 4 hours the night earlier. I knew I was exhausted and knew I needed more sleep. However, nightmare happened. I rolled over to look at my phone and the time was 11:50am (day4 restarted at 11am). I was dozed but now scared. There must have been a mistake because I’d set 3 alarms. I assumed my phone was just wrong or something but looked at whatsapp and had a flurry of missed calls and messages asking where I was. It dawned on my, I’d slept through the alarms and my already very small stack was blinding away on day4 of the Main. I threw whatever clothes on that were closest to me and managed to get over to the RIO in about 5 minutes. I rushed to my table and saw my stack had been pillaged and blinded down to a mere few bb. Everyone was sort of annoyingly smiling and laughing at me on my table and I felt first angry and very sad, I’ll be honest I wanted to hurt a few of them. I looked down at KTo in MP and jammed my 3.5bb and got called by A9d and alas didn’t hit and was out. My day 4 lasting one solitary hand. I stood forlorn, awaiting whatever clerk was to take me to be paid out. In was honestly one of my lowest moments. The breath had exited my body and I just stared at the felt. The reality was I’d slept through my day 4 stack. I rang my ex backer who had 50% of my Main and he just slammed the phone down, it was fair, it was expected to be honest. The news filtered to some other friends, they all had the same responses; ‘moron’, ‘time to quit’, ‘time to reassess your life’. Other friends from home, outside of poker were more sympathetic ‘don’t worry, mistakes happen’, ‘hey at least you cashed’ etc. It was a low time. I had actually slept into a pay jump of $15,920 and that was a very small silver lining. I mean the reality was that at 16bb the likelihood is that I was going bust early in the day more often than not anyway. Marginal (ex backer) eventually calmed and made up with me, thanked me for the 3 days of grind prior that had got us to the cash. He summed it up though, it’s just a sad way to bust, without being able to battle with the stack we’d preserved. I couldn’t agree more. I’ll live with it now, I’ve reflected and come to terms with it but it’ll probably haunt me for a while.

PLO 6max and End of the Series

I ended up leaving the RIO and going back to my hotel, had a bath, had a sulk and tried to decompress and take stock of the Main situation. I rang my best mate and he cheered me up no end. I started to feel ok and I decided to go in later in the afternoon and fire the 6max $3k Plo as it was likely my biggest edge event. Alas I believed the poker gods were thanking me as I tore through my opening table, clearly operating on a level above that which they could produce. I had one interesting spot where I 4b the now terrible Brian Hasting with bad AAxx and he called and we had 1.5x spr and I check folded Q95hh. Me and my buddy flong rated the fold and he saw the same merits as me for folding it in a tournament setting and the ranges we gave him and our likely actual equity. I ran my stack up to 4x starting and then it all fell apart. I lost a big flip and was heading back down to average stack. Jeff Gross, stars guy and vlogger, joined the table and within moments we clashed. He opened CO for 3x and I 3b pot the button with AA99ddss. He calls. Flop Q62r and we discuss the flop as he has SPR of 1. He asks me what the flop is like, I tell him it’s one I’ll have to stack off on and it’s one where he’s likely caught a pair or has to fold. He looks and tells me he’s absolutely smashed it and jams. I say obv I have to call without actually moving my chips and he’s like dude I’ve really smashed it. I laugh and ask him ‘QQ?’ And I again have this intuition where I sense something is up. He suggests, jokingly, it’d be a little angle like for me to fold now after our speech back and forth and I tell him ok, I can’t fold anyway and stick it in. He has KQQ4hhdd and we lose to get really short. Kind of a weird spot, he’s donked hard throughout. I think in a tournament he has to fold his hand to a 3b here setting up that SPR, I’m just never going to be light there. Also his open jam is really poor, if it’s occasion where I do have a double suited Axxx hand that’s not hit the flop at all I can now fold where if he checks I’m incentivized to jam my whole range basically. Finally, if I wanted to be really shark I could have just folded flop too as he basically told me he had QQ but almost made me feel like I’d angled a bit if I was now to fold. Overall a pretty weird spot.

After that I was short and got back to 20bb when I defend T985hhcc from the BB to a CO open and a Jeff Gross btn flat. Flop comes 982r and I lead pot leaving about 12bb back. CO jams and now Jeff calls off and somehow we’re in a horrific spot. I do a little math and realise I can’t fold here vs ranges and call off, in terrible shape. CO has QT98 and Jeff has KQJT and Jeff opens up his little video camera and starts filming the all in. He keeps referring to me in the video as ‘the English guy who slept through his day 4 Main stack’, solid rubdown. Honestly such an awful life spot for me to be in and I was feeling terrible expecting the worst. Turn rolls off Tx and we don’t fill up on the river and Jeff scoops a really big pot and my Vegas is over, on camera with my huge error earlier in the day being thrown in my face. Not a great ending.

Note: I actually really like Jeff and hope it doesn’t come off as too much of a slight on him, just had to explain how it was for the story. He seems like a high energy and cool guy and I think he’s trying to do good things for poker.

Moving Forward

Sadly this isn’t a resurrection of the blog. I just wanted to write out a few end tales from Vegas and hope y’all enjoyed reading them if you did till the end. I’m going to fly back to London on Thursday and then a week after that I move back to Manchester as my flat lease is over and i’M not going to renew. I’ll be moving back in with the parents, at 31 years old. Tragic. As for poker I guess I’ll either just quit now or perhaps find somewhere with low expenses and grind out some small gains online.

Thanks for reading. BigAisAok.

Awesome update brother

Thanks G.

Sorry dude that sucks. It seemed like you were killing it in 10/25 plo live games though, why not just continue playing that since it's such a good hourly? Unless of course you feel you need to move on completely or not at all. Gl either way, enjoyed the blog and hope you figure stuff out.

Safe flight back bro.

Don’t oversleep before the flight though...

Below the belt

But lol

sort of a sad ending, I guess the retirement part of thread title was a success though

You're a very gifted writer - I hate HHs yet yours seem exciting. Honestly, why dont you write a book (and chill from poker for a bit)? The swings of poker, degen, gambling stories, mental state and brutal honesty of how you're feeling would be a great read. There's that guy on twitter and 2p2 I forget his name grinded lots of mtts, Chuck Bass maybe? V good writer too and did a similar thing, quit poker, now is a writer (but wrote books prior etc.) I think, mightve got the wrong guy etc. gl i think you should consider it, its not that difficult to get published these days, youre a great writer and have some stories which would intrigue people.

Musings on Poker

I haven’t written the blog for a while; I dip in and out frequently having ‘ended’ it but occasionally the bug will bite and I’ll be forced to get some of my thoughts down.

Originally I stopped writing as a close friend of mine said that I used the blog in order to fetishise my depression and degeneracy. To take bad things happening in my life and to make them into entertainment, thusly making them seem worthwhile.

When I left Vegas and returned to the UK I think that it may have been the saddest and loneliest few months of my life. I was grinding the Vic and quite frankly playing pretty poorly a bunch of the time. My spouting random strategy advice has had severe detriment to the game and people are noticeably playing a lot more ‘correct’. Obviously it’d be a little self serving to suggest that this was the only route to their improvement; they could have been doing off the table work also. Kudos to them if they are. However, I digress. Like I said, I was lonely and to be honest I was sad. I enjoyed Vegas, the change in routine, playing some tournaments for a chance over cash etc. Being back in London, paying a high ass rent for a really ****ty flat whilst grinding out an existence in the drab surroundings of the Vic. It was pretty ****ty (see Bojack ‘****ty day’ speech in the eulogy episode of season 5 if you haven’t yet). Grinding out a tough game to just basically feel like I was surviving at best in a city I have no love or affinity for was the exact thing I never wanted to do, the exact reason I’d always played poker.

Anyway, I left that flat and went to stay with a poker buddy of mine. I think it was good for my mental health but also good for my poker game. The friend is a very good player and discussing spots and hands made us both feel sharp again.

Nottingham came around, the now infamous £5k, I headed up to play it. Apparently I’m half a tournament pro now. In Nottingham I saw the best of the poker world and also the worst of it I believe. The best was meeting some new faces; guys who let me stay in their Airbnb for free, guys who had a good hunger and passion for life, who played poker but also had hobbies or business outside of poker and who cherished their time being able to play poker. The worst being looking out across a sea of the same looking faces, a savage lack of diversity. Every Tom, dick and Harry white bearded face, all crammed in playing for pennies on the dollar going after what was essentially a gold rush. They had all watched Bencb’s free YouTube stuff it seemed and they all played pretty good. It wasn’t enjoyable, everyone sat stoic. Banter was at a total premium. It smelt like last chance saloon for a huge %.

I played pretty well; ie I played pretty well for me, a non tournament pro. I’m sure I was one of the weaker players in the field but I was solid and had a good mindset. Made a few really big hero calls that were all correct. I made day3 and consequently cashed for £12,500. My bust out hand was quite brutal but standard, min’d JJ off 20bb and called a BB jam who had KK. Flopped a J on Jxx but alas the river was a K and that was all she wrote. The funny thing was, id had a jovial day 3. I was in the exact same seat as I was in during day 2, which is quite strange. I was in seat 1 and thusly next to the rotating dealers. I conversed with them all day, sometimes showing them my hand etc and they loved it. When I busted there was an air of sadness that the floor staff didn’t want to see it happen; that felt really nice. Where there wasn’t an air of sadness was me seeing that K on the river, instead relief. I’d struggled all tournament; often guessing in spots and having to deal with the fact most of the table was playing better than me, more aggro, more polished, more dangerous. When the K fell I was just happy to be done and to take a train back to London.

Little caveat; I have to shout out Leon Louis who was in the carriage with me on the train back. He bought a bunch of beers and offered them to people in the carriage, don move, I accepted and we sat and chatted for a few hours on the journey back, made it a breeze. Funny and interesting bloke and I think that beer thing suggested he was a good and outgoing human.

Anyway, I couldn’t shake that feeling of unease about live poker after Nottingham though. I played some sessions at the Vic and my head just wasn’t there. I wasn’t playing enough A game and more importantly I was just really hating being sat there grinding. I think it dawned on me that my future probably isn’t in live poker. I sorted out a really sick flat to move into and so that’s been a great and positive boost. It’s provided me with a sick area to grind online and that’s mainly what I’ve been doing this past month. I’ve done like 50k hands at 1/2z and have crushed pretty hard. If I do that for another 150k hands I’ll think about charging at 2/5z again. There’s no rush however. At the end of next month GazzyB is moving into this sick flat with me. I can’t wait for that, I love Gazzy, guys a top bloke and he’s got a very infectious personality in general and certainly with his outlook and perspective on poker. We should get some pretty sick streams going.

Playing zoom and just chilling has shown me that I’m likely done full time chasing big money live. That doesn’t mean I’ll never play life again, it’s still the biggest hourly etc and I still intend to play poker to make money. However, with this new life/schedule I’ve been embarking on I’ve been healthier than ever, more social than ever and probably happier than I have been for a long, long time. It’s going to be difficult to give that up so who knows, maybe live will permanently hit the back burner.

Anyway, not really a blog resurrection but just some musings on my thoughts about pokers changing landscape as well as a little update on how I’ve been.

Gl to all the hero’s, appreciate the grind but do what makes you happy. That’s all that matters

Nice to see an update and hope things look up moving forward.

Have you considered moving back north? If live poker is less of a priority it'd seem you're free to move back home, and away from London.

Gl on all fronts!

Can't wait til after a week of pizza boxes and piss bottles everywhere you instantly regret ever agreeing to this

jesus christ

What keeps you coming back to poker? How about trying something different? I could see you enjoying a job in sales

'Coming back to poker..' is probably an incorrect way to look at it as I haven't ever 'left' poker. Occasionally i've given up writing on here because like I say, people close to me have said they see it as me writing up a blueprint for my sadness.

I guess I 'remain in poker' because for the whole of my adult life it's all i've ever known and to be honest the game continues to provide me with opportunities and situations that provide a good quality of life.

I will say that I'm reasonably aware that I'll no longer ever get 'rich' of poker, albeit rich, of course, being very relative to different people etc.

Poker does bring me less joy nowadays though you're right and I do think considering other job options for the future is worthwhile but I'm fortunate enough to have time and have some money so that I don't have to rush it.

Sales is an interesting shout, the one job I did prior to poker was Sales funnily enough and it was something I did well in. Not sure it's what I'd want for my future though

gl man, always liked your posts in plo forum (when it was alive)

Incoming implosion from BigA and Gazzy living together :P

inb4 gazzy dickpicks ITT!

Good to see you doing OK!

Pics of flat when you move in ofc
How much you guys paying?

Best of luck on the re-grind!

OP i just wanted to chime in and say this is one of my favourite reads on this site.

I hope you come out on top at the end of this all!

U seem like an absolute crusher at 2/5 live plo at the Vic! If i were you i'd try and grind it out at that for a while while you figure things out!

Wish i wasnt across the pond or i'd say lets grab a beer

Return of the Blog (For a while...)

So it's been over a month or so since I've had the urge to do any writing but the bug has finally hit me again so here we go.

Last time I checked in I'd been having sort of a hiatus from the stresses of higher stakes stuff and had been focusing on zoom. I was in a bad mindset for playing live and wanted to just concentrate on schedule and discipline.

I ended up moving from staying with my buddy at his temporarily into an awesome new flat with 2p2's own superstar GazzyB. More on this later.

In the new flat I started to get a little lonely within the first few weeks of being here (at this time Gazzy was in LA) and I'd been on a good schedule. I'd been going on several dates with a girl I liked (more on this later) and I was in good health, was eating well and overall was in a good head space.

I decided to return to play some Live Poker in order to just spend some time away from the computer screen and in order to get a little social integration. The decision was certainly very fruitful for the back end of October and most of November. I went on an absolute tear and was in cruise control, felt I was bringing close to my A game everyday and the results reflected this. We didn't have many regs in town and 10/25 was still getting up everyday; this should give you a good enough insight into the quality of the games during this period. However...

A Spanner in the Works

During the end of November we had an GUKPT Main Event here in London. Now the first interesting takeaway:

1) For the first time ever (since living in London) I didn't play the £2k Main Event. Now undoubtedly the GUKPT Main, as those who have played it before will know, is probably the softest main event of this size in the world and therefore I'm sure I'd have an edge in the field, even with my questionable MTT game. However, I was in a good place with PLO, had been doing a ton of study and I had told myself that if I hadn't done any MTT study then I wouldn't play the event. Alas, I didn't do the MTT study and thus decided to exercise good discipline and forego playing the main.

2) WE HAD CHEATERS IN THE BIG VIC GAME - Do not adjust your screens this is correct. This isn't a private game, this is a supposedly well regulated public game ran in one of London's most historical poker rooms/casino. Where to start with this little sub story? So a few random faces were playing the 10/25 game during the GUKPT week, this didn't raise any red flags as this is pretty normal when a tour is in town. They played a strange style and seemed generally quite tight but a little fishy, again completely normal and not enough to raise any red flags. A few of the new faces were running pretty good and cleaning up, again this couldn't really be viewed as a super red flag given over the course of a few nights we're playing a few hundred hands and we all know the variance of PLO. Anyway, we get to a session later in the week and I'm sat in the game alongside a London legend called Jeff Duvall.

Fun facts about Jeff:

1) Has been around forever, has played poker all over the world, in casino's, private games etc.

2) Very shrewd guy, worked in an MIT Blackjack Team, very aware of what is going on.

3) Is always suspicious of new players who turn up to the game and clean up. This perhaps is the most important thing us 'newer' grinders probably need to sharpen up on.

..anyway, digression over. So I'm next to Jeff and he turns to me and goes 'these lads in seats 8 and 9 are about to get thrown out'. Alas about 30 seconds later the card room manager goes up to these new 'crushers' who didn't speak any English, or any other language for that matter, apparently they were just mutes and quite forcefully asks them to stand up from the game. A conversation (not sure how this truly worked given the perpetrators muteness) takes place and the two players (turns out they had a 3rd who had been operating with them throughout the week) were escorted from the room and then money they had on the table, £10,000 or so, was bagged up and confiscated.

It turns out their operation was 'passing cards' under the table both pre flop and post flop in hands. Sounds completely ridiculous and borderline hilarious but they were professional and apparently, according to the card room staff and security, 'almost magician like with their skill and speed of doing so'. So essentially they were sat next to each other at the table and had the benefit of having 8 cards every hand where they could pass the relevant cards back and forth in order to make a very strong hand on the flop. Jeff, the legend that he is, had watched them really carefully for a few days and whilst he couldn't see any card movement noticed the two guy would quite often put their hands under the table at the same time in hands. Therefore he had messaged another reg in the game who was sat in the seats beside them and said something along the lines of 'watch these two guys next hand under the table if you can and tell me if you see anything suspicious'. Jeff and the reg looked under the table and both said they thought they saw a card being passed incredibly swiftly and alerted the front desk who checked the security and that's how they criminals were uncovered.

All in all they were able to win about £50,000 from the game in a few days. Not a bad little haul from a £10/25 game.

My takeaways from that story:

First and foremost we all, as professionals, really have to be diligent in keeping an eye out for shady going's on. I mean in hindsight, as regs, we should have noticed something wasn't right. These guys were skilled in terms of mechanics, ie it was going to be incredibly difficult to see the cards being swapped, even when reviewing footage apparently it's close to impossible but there were just too many occasions where their hands went under the table at the same time and they've randomly then smashed flops. This was happening hand after hand, day after day, that they were sat next to one and other. I mean when they weren't sat next to each other these guys played literally no hands and in general showed no interest in the game; which on reflection was a laughably big giveaway and is something us pro's should have probably picked up on earlier.

And lastly, I think it was an eye opener that although poker is becoming more of a regulated and reputable mental sport nowadays, it is still gambling and there will still be bad characters out there trying to gain unfair edges as well as just out and out cheating. For someone like myself who is relentlessly on the cusp of deciding whether I want to continue with poker as the way I make my living incidents like the continue to push me out the door as it's a lifestyle I don't want to be associated with.

Mental Health, the aftermath and why it's so important to implement intent.

Unsurprisingly in the aftermath of this cheating scandal the games were hurt in terms of what bigger games ran. 10/25 for the time being has been sort of wiped out again for a while with most of the action reverting down to 2/5 and the occasional 5/10.

As I mentioned earlier I had been dating this girl for a while and if I was fully honest with myself I had fallen head over heals for her. This was great for a while, it was motivating me to be my best self. I was structured, I was professional. It changed the care in which I dressed, groomed, held my posture even and all this leads into a confidence that'll reflect well in results. Alas, a few weeks ago she messaged me breaking it off and yeah, I was heartbroken a bit. She cited that we had 'lifestyle differences' that were going to me insurmountable and that she'd been in a 3 year relationship previously with someone who worked nights and that although she'd tried hard she'd been unable to make it work and didn't want to go through it again. It was a reasoned response and a fair concern. Therefore I had to lick my wounds and take my medicine.

All this left me disillusioned with poker even more so than I usually am. To me I'd just had to break it off with this girl I felt I had an amazing connection with and the reason was because of the stupid, vacuous career that I had and that I had always lauded as a cool career, one steeped in freedom and opportunity. Now the opposite was ringing true and as well as feeling like a constant job nowadays it was also a job that was holding my back from things making me truly happy.

All this led to me having a few weeks of mental torture. I was unable to operate within that good schedule. Drank a lot, slept late, bet big on sports and railed it into the early hours. I went into to play live a few times and lost like £15k in smaller games playing hands blind and just not caring. I know this isn't a good way to act and it's pretty damn pathetic.

My solution; to go back to an old therapist I'd seen over my anxiety and to start talking some matters out in order to find a healthier solution.

Early Takeaways he's recommended:

1) He was quick to point out that it's not uncommon to experience mental fragility when you fall hard and quickly for someone.

2) That I shouldn't view her responses as a negative necessarily against my career choice but to frame it in a way where if she didn't want to adapt to that then she probably wasn't the 'one' that I had envisaged.

3) That the spewing off of money comes down to a lack of 'Intent'. We discussed at length my gambling vices and why I self sabotage by going through periods of throwing away huge sums of money. He said it was because I lived my life without intent and played my poker without intent and this is essentially deathly. When I was dating the girl, I had intent, so I was able to frame the job in a manner that kept me a) on my A game b) adjusting my health and life to operate optimally c) and constantly having a reason to do well and maximise the profits and opportunities available to me,

The final point really resonated with me and is something that I'll discuss at length with him in the coming weeks. I think I have never really lived with intent, I've never had the longer term goals of thinking about what saved money could be used for, thinking about what I really want from life and if it is a wife/kids, why intent and goals are so important for achieving that goal. I'm a drifter, just essentially playing and living to survive and that's not really good enough, as it makes all the skill, effort and hard work meaningless because I'm not reflecting it or channelling it into something worthwhile.

Heading forward I'm going to use the blog as a bit of a diary again to try and document my path towards living with some intent. Currently, it may be embarrassing to admit, I'm too mentally fragile to mix up online and live. Live poker isn't for me right now, my emotional state is unbalanced and I'm going to be too easily triggered into doing the wrong/stupid thing.

I've been playing a little online and have been struggling to be honest, I'm running really far below EV though and this concerns me a bit about the bot situation on the site I've been playing on. That said, this is an easy excuse to make and I think the natural solution is to work and study harder and use that to allow the results to come!

The most important factor moving forward however will be this idea of living with Intent and the biggest thing to do with relation to that is to STOP WASTING MONEY. Wasting money is pathetic, it's low life behaviour and there's simply no excuse for it. Just because you have something doesn't been you should squander it recklessly, simple as.

I'll be on here tracking my poker play and discussing some real life stuff, being as open as always. It's likely going to be embarrassing to post my online results as I continue to get bashed up but as long as I'm playing hard and professionally I'll be happy.

Finally, a few weeks back GazzyB moved in and I have to say that Gazzy is a good inspiration for poker. We're in very different stages in our careers, this is indisputable, and we've had very different paths but one thing I can take away from him is hard work and a love for what he's doing.

Anyway, for anyone who was able to read on this long, congrats and my apologies. Thanks for reading and I look forward to posting again soon..

BigAisAok.

You forgot to say "He is also a miserable **** when he's losing and he once shush'd me with a single finger and he's generally a bastard".