I guess we can start with some basics, first we need to clear up some misconceptions brought on by tokeweed, I am not married, and do not have any kids! I am in my mid to late twenties, I can say for the most part you are correct in that I am pretty damn lucky I have gone almost 9 years since high school and been able to nearly completely avoid the normal "differed living" plan for life [work hard at a job you hate, retire too late to do the things you want, die]. I have had my ups and believe it or not worse financial downs in my poker life then what I am currently going through. I also should count myself lucky in that I own the things I do because I will (assuming I catch up my late bills), have paid off my house in August of this year, making house payment after house payment from my hard work at poker was the most satisfying thing I have done in the past few years.
Next as for what I really want to do: travel much more than the normal person, not be stuck at some job I hate barely making enough to get by, and play poker at the highest stakes. For some example life goals I have wanted to get married to someone I really love, have kids, a house, nice car, etc. For whatever reason getting a "normal" job scares the hell out of me, to me it is like dying. When it comes to my business[es] I have always liked the process of starting and building them up, not the day to day drudgery of running them.
Leading me to my next point: tokeweed you are handing out a bad pill my friend. We get one chance to live, and I honestly believe "accepting" what one has or ones station in life is equivalent to giving up, it is the exact same as hearing "life is hard [or sucks] then you die", I think that is the weak and cowardly way to handle adversity, rather than moving forward and making things the way you want them to be, accepting them as they are is simply a waste of life; in my young and very inexperience opinion. I add that last part because it has always been older and experienced people that I have heard things like that I have mentioned, and things like "grow up", "grow some balls", etc. You guys may really know something I don't but I honestly think that it is why the world moves forward we refuse to accept such statements that enforce the status quo, and potentially kill kindred spirits. I hate to pick on you like this, but at least you know my view on the subject. If I ask for advise it is specifically because I do not want to accept _____.
To cover the transition to live poker and questions about my online roll; it's very simple the added expense of live poker (getting there, being there, etc) and the need to keep paying my bills meant that it was only a 4.5BI downswing before I had to say "I can't keep doing this," and I was simply out of the game. I have not since Black Friday deposited more than $100 on the sites we can play on for the fear that any money deposited would go the way of my FTP money.
For those that are so concerned with something so unimportant as the statement, "I made a spreadsheet." I am going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you are in fact ignorant of the true capabilities of excel please take an opportunity to learn something new and look
here and
here to find out more. Simply put my spreadsheet took less than 1hr to make and will be infinitely usable in the future to calculate the EV of any job. I only need to enter a starting address, the name and city of the place to wokr (or exact address if needed), hourly pay, MPG of my car[truck], and benefits if they exist. From there drive time, miles, gas prices along route, take home pay, expected tax return, and several representative "actual" hourly rates are calculated. I am most proud of the fact that it accurately calculates take home pay because most companies spend hundreds of dollars on software to do this for them, and most payroll personal can not even give accurate figures when you ask. So yeah I did make a spreadsheet, and you better believe there is a lot more impressive and interesting stuff that I can do, and have done with excel, which brings me to the point of boting.
A couple of years ago I made a very hobbled together program that uses HEM, excel (with custom addins, and close to 1000 lines of VB code), AHK, and a little bit of python to evaluate hands and accurately project the range of the villain and calculate exact (as I could assuming it was even right) as possible equities for each action. I ran into several problems, first it was slower than hell the average hand would take over 1 minute to calculate for each action, add more players or simply add players that have a very high VPIP and/or PFR (widen their range) and things would take longer. The original intent was to make this to better understand how stats related to each other, at some point I realized it could be used for accurately determining ranges and that is what it became. I could never use it in live play, the whole thing was just too slow, and eventually I got board with the whole thing and forgot about it. But recently I have read much about bots, how they are killing the games, stopping the flow of money, and in general just cheating. It makes me feel cheated, it makes me hate the fact that I signed up to poker after the UIGEA, and most of all it makes me want to make my own bot. It's pretty simple I am a weak human, I can only stay awake, stay focused, and think clearly for a finite amount of time, however a bot can just keep going and going, they are likely the ******* players that are playing 150k hands a month at 4NL losing a little but surely making money in rakeback. I really feel like I could have made a bot, and if I was going to make a bot now is a better time to do it because poker looks so dead.
Right now I am sitting here realizing that almost all of the jobs that it seems I can get will leave me at ground zero when and if poker comes back to the USA, I will be starting all over from depositing some menial amount each week till I can grind up some kind of a roll and move up and/or put in enough hours to again not have to work. Which is another reason I hate bots many of them hang out at the lower micro stakes and as more of them show up it will be harder and harder to beat the high rake. It just pisses me off to know that I have to start all over because some politician has their head up their ass. It is more than frustrating to realize I have been told a lie all my life saying we are a free country, most of the things I like to do are illegal, in a supposedly free country. I am really considering selling everything and moving to Canada or some other country. Because I really do look at it like I can do that, and when things change in 5 years or the US changes their laws, or whatever unexpected change happens I can come back to the US or stay where I am and get a job, goto school, and focus on other means to make a living.
Last edited by metalme; 05-28-2012 at 09:04 PM.