I am still alive!
My life has changed dramatically since my last post, mostly for the better. The only thing that isn't better about my life right now is that I am no longer an island dweller. I still go out to my camp on Paradise a few times a summer, but it's just not the same.
"So what have you been doing with you life IslandGuy?" I hear you asking. Well... plenty of interesting stuff, but I don't want to give it all away in one post. I'm going to keep this one brief, and commit to making one post a week for a bit so that I can chronicle all of the journeys that I have been on since last posting. I promise that nothing will be held back.
A little bit of a teaser for all of you(if there are any of you still left). I failed out of poker. I was continuing to win, but giving a significant portion of my profits to the stable while playing at such low stakes made it nearly impossible to be able to support myself. The last few months of playing full time really got to me. I was on a downswing online, and the only thing keeping me afloat was the LLSNL sessions I would play daily when the online games were slow.
In 2020
I learned to code. I used $12 Udemy courses to learn about AWS(cloud computing) and got several AWS certifications and learned some of the more widely used programming languages. As a 36 year old felon, high school dropout with neck and hand tattoos I managed to break into the industry about a year after I started learning.
Best decision of my life.
My journey in coding has been incredible so far. With only 1.5 years into my career I am already surpassing many of my coworkers(still the same humble island guy you all love). The work ethic that I applied to lobstering and poker is what I apply to coding. The tech industry has some really hard workers in it, but the general masses of software developers are lazy, wimpy, and entitled. The work ethic and grit that I bring to the industry is incredibly rare from what I have seen so far. I will dive deeper into this journey in a future post.
Oh, and
I'm married now! I have always been adamant that I would never get married, but here I am. That is a pretty interesting story as well.
Poker
So when I stopped playing poker full time I was on a bit of a downswing. I was at about -$1500 USD and my contract with the stable says that I owe that money if I stop grinding. I made a few small payments over the past few years, but I still owe them most of it. I have been paying off a bunch of debt in the past year(finally paid off my taxes! I wrote a $80k check to the IRS a couple of months ago) and they obviously aren't at the top of my list of people to pay back, but I certainly haven't forgotten about it. They treated me better than I deserved so I want to do right by them when I get to a point where I can. Hoping this next Spring.
Once I stopped playing full time, I essentially just stopped playing poker for the most part. I have played a game here or there, but knowing what I know about poker now I don't feel right playing if I don't have a proper bankroll. Sitting down at a $1/$2 live table with only a few hundred bucks just doesn't feel good so I have pretty much just avoided poker. Plus, you don't pay off debts the way I have in the past couple of years by donkeying money to the poker tables.
I have really been missing poker though. I have such a love/hate relationship with it. I really enjoy the strategy and battle of it though. I think that the skills I have developed learning to be a software developer will really help me improve my poker game.
So finally I broke down and deposited on Igntion. I deposited $250 and thought a 10 buy-in bankroll would be sufficient since I'm not relying on it for income so I started playing 25NL. That was about a week ago. The first few hundred hands were fairly normal. I made a couple of mistakes that I noted, but it didn't take long to get dialed back in, but I have been running very poorly. I'm sure my game isn't as good as it was when I was playing full time, but I have just been going down hard.
After losing 6 buy-ins at 25NL I dropped down to 10NL. Even at 10NL I have been getting eaten alive! I haven't done a ton of analysis yet, but I've analyzed some of the spots where I keep losing and I don't think I'm making any huge errors. I'm hoping that I'm just running bad and that I don't just suck at poker now. Even after dropping down to 10NL I had to deposit another $50. So now I'm in for $300 and my balance is $43.
I really want to start playing LLSNL again though, I'm just using ignition to brush up on my skills and analyze my play. Plus I don't have the money for a proper LLSNL bankroll. I'm hoping that around this time next year I will be able to come up with the $5k or so that I would need to play in the local $1/$2 game. I played in that game twice last year, and it's insane how good it is. No max buy, it's filled with sports bettors, even the one reg I played with sucked. I need to be disciplined though so other than those 2 times I played a year ago I've just avoided playing.
Until Next Week(or maybe sooner idfk)
If there are still any of you out there listening, I'm back! I am busy as hell but I will do my best to start keeping this blog active again. From here on, there won't be much about island living, but I promise I have fun stories. I know this hasn't really been one of them, but I just wanted to kind of cram some of the cliffs notes in and give a poker update.
Some upcoming posts regarding my story:
- Working and living on a natural gas drilling rig(oh yeah, I did that for almost a year)
- Bodybuilding and PEDs(yep, that too)
- Taking control of my love life and becoming responsible for my own happiness(teaser - I got to a point where I essentially had a constantly rotating harem)
- The state of the New England lobster fishing industry(it's bad... really bad)
- Living on another island(one with people, but still very primitive)
- My blind wife and our plans to conquer the world(trust me, it will be better than it sounds. I'll include the stuff about swinging if there is any interest)
I hope you're all happy to hear that I'm alive. I'll do my best to write another full story post by next weekend. Those of you who have followed me for the island stories may be let down, but for those who just like to read about the wacky world of IslandGuy... buckle up.