"A stranger is being shown around a village that he has just become part of. He is shown a well and his guide says 'On any day except Saturday, you can shout any question down that well and you'll be told the answer.'

The man seems pretty impressed, and so he shouts down: Why not on Saturday? and the voice from in the well shouts back: Because on Saturday, it’s your day in the well."

Over the years, I have gained an enormous amount from the 2p2 community. I have never done a 'well', and since I am in the library for the next few days with finals week upon me, I will likely have some hours to kill. My blog was always a pretty open book, and I am happy to answer most questions.

Nice! I browse 2p2 maybe twice a month now but I get here for the Raptor well!

Was it hard for you to put poker on the back-burner in your life? Was it aided greatly by a certain X figure of $$ that you had made or do you think that you would have felt comfortable gradually releasing poker for other pursuits at that point in your life regardless of how well/bad poker had been going?


What are the two happiest moments in your life?

How do I get myself to do the things that I know are best for me yet can't motivate myself to do due to lazyness?

Would you say poker made you a happier person than you would be without it?

Whats the coolest move you can do on a snowboard?

What skills have you learned/acquired from poker that you think will most help you in your non-poker playing career going forward?

Favorite moment in poker?

What's the most degen thing you think you've ever done in your life? Favorite kind of cookie?

Huge.

How important is it, to be a happy and well adjusted person, in terms of being a winning poker player?

Personally, I had some fairly horrible **** that happened to me in my childhood, that made me a pretty paranoid person. I've realized that when I play live, my life coping, people reading skills help me to believe people and not be paranoid around them in person. However, when I play online, I'm constantly thinking that everyone is bluffing and making a moves because they're just a blank face and unkown on my computer, so I think the worst.

So my basic base assumptions about humanity come out in a negative way, when I can't get to know or experience my opponents in a real life setting.

This got me to thinking that it might be almost a real necessity to be a well adjusted, all around solid person on this level to be a consistent winning poker player. When I look around at all the solid winning players, they all seem to have had relatively happy lives and solid upbringings.

Being a high stakes guy, and knowing a lot of these people, do you agree?

Some days yes. When I decided to go back to school, I also decided it would be best to forego poker for at least my first semester. This would give me time to focus on school and make sure I could devote the time and energy needed to get through it. Shortly after my first semester started, Isildur came around and started going nuts. I had pieces of people still but didn’t actually get to play, and I really wanted to.

Good question. When I was 18, I thought if I had that 25k from a super Tuesday win (I never got one of those) my life would be complete. That number gets progressively bigger, and as far as I can tell, that never stops. I have always ‘suffered’ from wanting more. That being said, I have done pretty well with the $$ so it certainly can’t hurt my comfort in gradually pulling away. If I was broke I certainly wouldn’t be going back to an expensive school to study whatever interests me that day. I do think over time I would gradually release it regardless, but I think the release would go slower if I had not done as well.

This is surprisingly hard for me to come up with answer for. Two of my very best friends got married a few weeks ago (to each other) and I felt something I had never felt before while at the wedding. I don’t really know how to express it, but it felt really good and I was very happy for them. I have many sports memories that stick out, first home run, first 3 up 3 down by strikeouts inning in high school, a couple memorable interceptions and games in football, etc. I am horrible at golf, but I always feel really good playing with my Dad and having him help me out (he is an awesome golfer). Most of my happiest moments came before or after I was playing poker full time, not many I can think of during. Most of my more memorable experiences during poker were nice dinners with good friends and interesting conversation. I always enjoyed that infinitely more than popping bottles. I think poker tends to have a numbing effect on the emotions and it would be more difficult to experience a “happiest moment”.

I wish I had a good answer for this. Nike motto works decently. Honestly, there are a ton of things that I find difficult to motivate myself for, but I try to think from a future perspective, looking back on my life (this can even be a 3 hours from now perspective). I always feel better after a workout than I do after a game of Heroes of Newearth, so I try to go to the gym instead of playing videogames. This is not unique to the gym either, I usually feel pretty good after learning a bunch of new Econ stuff, or writing a cool paper, so I try to get it down. The time I spend worrying about other things I haven’t done is usually pretty miserable.

Probably. I never was the happiest person in the world, but I don’t think that has anything to do with poker. More money and freedom is nice, but am I any happier with it? I think I would be unhappy if I was constantly working 80 hours a week just to make ends meet, so my answer has to be yes.

I can launch off a ramp and land on my face fairly consistently. I am not a very good snowboarder unfortunately

Dealing with loss, dealing with emotional swings. I used to get pretty revved up about losing. I have always hated to lose, but I handle it much better now after losing millions of hands. I like to think this will help me somehow in the ‘real world’. I do think it hurts though in some ways, not being as emotionally ‘present’ about a lot of things. For me, poker created a kind of disconnect. If I wanted to turn off emotion about winning/losing in poker, I had to turn off emotion about most other things in my life. I think this has tremendous real world application, but it could be a blessing in disguise.

Does Koda like New York?

Do you see yourself at some point soon being completely removed from poker? Or will it always be a part of your life in some capacity? Will you play the main event in 30 years?

My first time playing in Bobby’s room I was playing 500-1k PLO (2007ish). This was way higher than I had ever played before, and I wasn’t particularly great at PLO. The game was amazing though so I figured it was worth taking a shot. They capped the game at 7 handed and I was technically ‘playing over’ Bobby’s seat (he was on the way to the casino). I won a 200k pot in the first orbit, then Bobby showed up and forced my hit and run. I would have stuck around a while, but honestly I felt really great about the run good and was happy to lock up the win.

Hopefully not stepping out of line here but just let me know and I'll delete otherwise. I recall you mentioning in one of your blogs that you were adopted. How has that affected you as a person?

The first time I met any 2p2ers was at Commerce in 2004. Alan Sass (TheUsher) told me he had a can’t lose idea for making money. We would play pai gow and be the bank, so everyone would bet against us. It was +ev and autowin. I had about 12k to my name and I lost ~10k of it that day. Oops. Some short time after that I was at another 2p2 meet-up in Vegas. I remember showing SkipperBob my 13kish wad of hundos and being proud of it. I lost like 1k playing poker so I went to bjack and put 1k, lost, 2k, lost, 4k, lost, all if it, lost, rage. I went to dinner and cc rouletted, luckily I didn’t have to pay or my credit card would have been close to maxed out. Oh yea, I was 19 and playing under a fake name at the time. I did some pretty moronic stuff in my teens. After that I never bet more than like 100 bucks while hanging out and getting drinks with friends. I think in a lot of ways I was lucky that I had my bad experiences with gambling early before it could really hurt me later.

Cookie: This is impossibly hard. Peanut butter probably

best adjustment heads up nl vrs opponent who 3 bets a polarized range? also how wo adjust vrs a guy who never folds pre or post flop i somehow have trouble against this type of opponent even tho it seems like they should be so easy to beat thanks!

I think this is mostly true. I am sure there are a number of exceptions, but most people that have gotten very good at poker are those that had the freedom, money, and time to learn the game. Most of these people are young, well adjusted late teen/early 20s kids.

That being said, my answer to your initial question is slightly different. I think there are some pretty maladjusted people that have become very successful at poker. I don’t think you have to be happy or a good person to be successful at the game. It probably makes it easier though.

Pretty sure Koda loves NY (Koda is my 110 pound 1.5 year old black Newfoundland dog). She gets to be inside all day and sleep/snuggle on the couch, and that is her element.

I think poker will always be a part of my life in some way. I doubt I will play the main event every year (I’m not even playing it this year), but I can definitely see myself later in life coming to Vegas for a week or two to try to win a big tourney or gamble it up with the young hotshots.

Not out of line for me, though some people are probably sensitive about it.

I can’t really say how it has affected me though. I was adopted when I was ~2 months old, so I don’t remember anything about my birth parents. It was a closed adoption so I got a 3 page file with some basic info on their blood type and interests, but that’s it. I look at my adoptive parents as my parents. They raised me from infancy, took all of my ****, and are still there loving me today. I’m sure it has some effect, but nothing I would be able to articulate. I think about my birth parents on occasion, but it is more like, ‘I wonder what my dad looks like and what he does,’ than ‘why the **** did they get rid of me’ or something along those lines.

Biggest "aha" moment in your development as a poker player?

There are a lot of answers to questions like these, my method may or may not be the best, but it worked for me. Against polarized range guys, I 4 bet a ton. Usually they will start tightening up, or 3 bet getting in 33 and stuff (yay for me). Against guys that never fold pre or post I ask them to play more tables. If I feel uncomfortable playing a ton of big pots, I will start limping buttons, calling more than 3 betting, and just being a little tighter overall. Some people just love getting into wars, and it is easy to get sucked into the madness. I’m a nit and tend to avoid ‘street poker’ though.

I've been awake like 30+ hrs, and I've tried thinking of good questions, but I'm one long burp. Mostly I just want to tell you you're pretty great, and I want to hear a story...about........................

a surreal experience.

Not "woah that was awesome", but like, "WOAH what the FF**KKKKKKKK was THAT (ajshgdajshgdJHGASDJHSGD)"

thanks!

When I figured out that I could shove every small blind for 10x or less and have a 10% roi in sit and gos (2004).

I don’t do any psychedelics, so I will have to rely on something I saw. I was with some friends in Fort Worth in probably 2006. We were on the way back from a movie some time around midnight, and traffic slowed down to a crawl on the highway. As we approached an overpass in single file, we saw lots of ambulances and police cars. As we got closer, we noticed some cones around something. It was a dead girl that must have jumped off of the overpass and been hit by a car. Her leg was all twisted up at a weird angle. I remember she had a black star tattoo on her wrist. I wondered how long she had been there and why no one had bothered to move her or cover her up or anything. I think what makes it surreal is that some days I think about it and wonder if it actually happened, but I know it did.

Well, I'm not a HS pro (yet) but I'm jumping in.

On a scale of 1-100. How complex a game would you define:
a) NLHE
b) PLO
c) Stud Hi

Cheers Dave

RaptorCaptor, Can you really read peoples souls? Also have you ever got so tilted where you berated someone?

Name someone besides Durrr who you think has an edge on you in NLHE