Quoting Always so that I am not giving any more credit/airtime to the trolling of the idiot.

When you are not smart enough to discern between "kill" and the legal term-of-art "murder", you should not post your opinions in this epic thread.

Requesting ban for the troll.

edit: LOL just read his thread.
Homeless miserable bus driver trying to gain attention on this thread, gtfo

edit#2:

Oh he actually quit his busdriver job and is gambling with his entire net worth of ~2k or so (literally the rent money)
No wonder he's in here trolling, dude has nothing better to do

I've been looking for a ppk for a while and they're supposed to be pretty finicky with the type of ammo you feed through. I'd hesitate using one for defensive purposes just cause of all the ftf stories i hear from people

I'd be happy to discuss any firearm related questions through PM with anyone, anytime. I'll even give you my phone number. I just didn't want to go off topic with the story, we already have someone that wants to save me from my sins.

Stop giving solid advice...

I'm surprised, honestly, no one sees it my way. I get the impression that TST is sort of a bully. And all my life I have been standing up to bullies. When I was 10 a kid was getting pummeled on the ground and it took a half a second of no one else doing anything before I realized I had to act. I ran over and pushed the much larger kid off of the other kid he was punching on the ground. He took exception to that and punched me in my face and cut me above my eye. We both ended up getting suspended for fighting when all I did was save another kid from getting a beating. And when I read the story of TST threatening Mike's life, my visceral reaction is that I want to come to Mike's defense too. I dont know Mike and I understand that owing money is serious and failing to pay is serious. That being said it's not worth resorting to violence or threats to get someone to pay. If you loan money to a douchebag who wont pay you back you need to accept the fact that you made a mistake and move on. Hurting them is not the right answer. Try to wise up and not be so stupid as to give a degenerate like Mike a line of credit in the first place.

TST needs to hear from at least one person that threatening to murder someone over a debt is reprehensible behavior.

And the correct term is 'murder' not 'kill'.

I think the reaction you received has more to do with how you approached the situation, in a somewhat hostile manner. You're right though apart from the 'murder' - 'kill' bit. Both words fit, they're not mutually exclusive, quite the opposite.

No, no one needs to hear you sjw a guy telling stories from his past.
All you accomplish is him stopping the stories.
One post is aggravating, but you multiple posting, to the point of the definition of "murder" is ridiculous.

You pointing out his faults is not the point here, save it for when asked.

kill and murder cannot be used interchangeably. you can say i killed someone when 'murdered' would be more correct, which is what im trying to say TST really means. however if you kill someone in self-defense you did NOT murder them. to say "there are a lot of things I would kill over" implies murder since it would be asinine to state that you would kill someone to defend your own life. who wouldn't?? just own up to it and use the word murder. if someone murdered a member of my family and got away with it and was walking around scot free i would definitely consider murdering them ok. while it may be just in my eyes it would still be unlawful and therefore a murder.

its not social justice if im sticking up for a guy getting death threats. thats common decency. enjoy the stories keep them coming, im going to admonish OP any time his stories include violence or threats of violence, and an unapologetic attitude.

You are wrong, please stop posting about this murder/kill nonsense.

edit: and fwiw, I cringe hard when I read the threats too. Very eye-rolly, not commendable. But you're straight up wrong about the English language and should let the point go.

Fresh Doughmixer, I'm about to murder some red hot pepper chicken noodles.

Everybody lighten up and enjoy the stories.
Someone is entertaining us for free. Relax, this is just the internet, not something important like "The View"...

Don't get him banned I'm setting up a heads up challenge with him in the gto car sleeping thread.

TST keep em coming please. Moaaaaaar!

Would also be curious to hear your thoughts on skill level of live play in Florida. I only have experience online and in Macau and haven't played live in USA since 2006 so imagine it's changed drastically.

Would you mind outlining general %s of good recreational, bad recreational, good regs and bad regs at tables at various stakes? Are home games of lower skill level in general? Is there any significant difference in rake between home games and those in the casinos?

I'm asking because from what I've seen anecdotally on 2+2 it seems most big wins and losses are not so much from standard play but either a cooler or just some whale being a spew monkey - I'm assuming those games should be easy with all those whales but thinking it's more likely those spots are so uncommon, hence why people bother to write about them rather than the time they checked back mid pair and lost to an overpair for a small loss.

Have you played elsewhere in the US, if so how would you rank play in Florida compared to other regions?

Sure, I can tell you what I have played since I started grinding live regularly in 2011:

Everyone considers Florida to be a terrible skill level. The problem is Florida is so diverse North to South and East to West that it is hard to assess one level to the state. I have played at pretty much every poker room in the state except Daytona Beach, Pensacola, the new one near the Villages, and Fort Pierce Jai-Alai. When most people say Florida is bad, they are basically referring to the Miami-Fort Lauderdale-West Palm Beach area. I'll start here and say that the players here are usually the most recreational, as it is the most visited area in the state besides Orlando which has no poker room. Action at the rooms here - HR Hollywood, Coconut Creek, The Isle are usually good off season and amazing in season (season is Christmas to Easter).

The West Coast of Florida - Naples, Sarasota, St. Pete, Tampa HR and Lucky's I would say the players are more solid and the rooms are smaller except for the Tampa/St. Pete area. This area is excellent to play, there is always action here 24/7/365. Off season some of the smaller rooms can be lacking and can be close to outright dead on the worst of nights, but usually are good 90% of the time.

The rest of FL is mostly smaller rooms (besides Jacksonville which is great all the time) which will be mostly regulars with the occasional boom of snowbirds and tourists. I wouldn't recommend going out of your way to smaller rooms to try and play unless they have a special game you want to play.

The skill level of a 1/2 reg is going to be a eclectic mix of older nitty retired regs and slightly less nitty younger semi-pros. They don't seem to get along that well, but in larger rooms in Miami and Tampa theres a bit of everything. The snowbirds are usually the fishier type and will fuel the bigger games during season. At 2/5 you will find that the skill level has slightly increased, but I don't think there is much advanced play going on at most of the tables. Business guys, some real pros, and wealthier old guys will play the deeper 2/5 games. When you get into 5/10, the pool is really narrowed down to really good semi-pros/pros and wealthy businessman types. I know someone who is a winning 2/5 player at HR Tampa who decided to YOLO it at the 10/25NL at the Isle and destroyed his bankroll in a day. At those levels it all depends on the table.

PLO is usually good at most rooms, but I would say that Naples, Hialeah and Hard Rocks are my favorites. I haven't played in Hialeah in a while because they won't enforce any rules at the table and I can't speak Spanish fluently. I wouldn't care if it were all Spanish, there just needs to be some language enforcement. That and the tournament scandal makes me hesitant to throw money on the table there.

From my experience, the best games as far as stake level are:

1/2-1/3 - Derby Lane, you will see 2k stacks by the end of the night, it is a great game for someone who wants to transition to 2/5. The chairs can't be beat either.

2/5 - HR Tampa - game selection and plenty of white collar guys looking to play higher stakes, I found it profitable at least.

5/10 - This only runs regularly on the East Coast, but I think HR Hollywood and the Isle have good games?

PLO - Hialeah was my favorite, now probably HR Tampa.

Just know that it is a 6+ hour drive from Miami to Jacksonville, and 5 hours from Miami to Tampa. Having a car is essential to getting from room to room, public transit is downright terrible in 80% of these areas.

EDIT : Realized you wanted percentages of good and bad.

1-2, 1-3 - This can vary widely, but probably 60% bad regs and tourists, 40% competent players.

2/5 - Looking at more like 50/50 but in a big room this can go from you being the only competent player at the table to everyone being competent.

5/10 - Usually there are a couple very fishy players with a lot of money, I would say 25% bad and 75% good.

PLO - It varies so much from room to room I couldn't give you a percentage. Usually there are much more rec players in the game so take that into consideration.

DOUBLE EDIT: Also, games will be bigger and better where there is more money. Tampa is a big city but the average income and % of wealthy people is much lower than the Miami to West Palm area. Out of all the games I have seen run regularly in FL, the biggest game is the 5-10-20 PLO game in Naples. Naples is full of ultra-wealthy businessmen and when they come to these games they bring insane amounts of money with them. I have seen the betting area full of pyramids of black and green chips when two people are all in, theres often over 100k on the table. Something in that group happened because they brought it over to Seminole Immokalee for a while, it was funny to see on Bravo a 2-4 limit game running and a 5-10-20 PLO game over there, and that's it. I called my buddy to ask him if it was really running, and it is but it is essentially a private game and has been for years.

I was late to the party & spent the last few days catching up. This is by far the best thread I've read on this site. Please tell me there is more coming!!

But it's a fine line. In the largest home game I ever played in (10/25 which played at least 5k deep), you had to bring cash the first 3 or 4 times. If all went well, you were allowed to sign the book and play on credit thereafter. All credits were settled within 48 hours with no carry overs as far as a I knew.

At a certain point, you really can't play with all cash unless you have a big tolerance for security risk.

Do the games in Florida get better when the snowbirds arrive?

To reply simply - HELL YEAH! Not only the tourists, but everyone with a second house in Florida will come to visit or stay for a few months. These people have more disposable income and tend to play a lot of 2/5 and up. HR Tampa in the summer will have 4-5 tables of 1-2 on a weekday night in the summer, but from now until Easter it is usually double that, and I have seen 15 tables of 1-2 at the Rock before. HR Tampa is probably the cheapest place to grind 1-2 and 2-5 out in the country from an action/cost of living standpoint, though I can't speak for Vegas, I know you can get cheap housing there in some places.

Two Fall By the Wayside

As the summer of 2015 unfolded, there were four nights of home games - Tim's on Monday, mine on Tuesday, what was now TJ and Bookie's game on Thursday with Mike, and Vito's game on Saturday. This was way too much underground action for 1/2/5 players in the area during the summertime, there was just not enough cash players that could play in these games and travel from town to town. Tim's game was the OG game, so to speak and as long as someone sensical was dealing, it ran well. My game with Paulie was a solid game but was usually cash players and more restrictive. Thursday's game was a reconstruction of the mess that Mike left behind since the beginning of the year, and Saturday's game was Vito backing half the table and was fairly lackluster. It was laissez-faire economics at it's finest, there were no regulations holding anyone back.

Tim and I had a few conversations, and we decided that since the games started on the southside, they should continue on the southside. We had been there since the inception almost 18 months ago, and we weren't going to let northsiders take over what we built. The problem was they had a much larger player pool, and we had to dip into that. I finally got Bookie and TJ to agree to the terms that the $200 that the game owed me could be paid as a buy-in to the game. I had no desire to play at any game hosted at Vito's, plus if I go there and recruit players, I would get booted out pronto. I got a very social player by the name of Scotty to go there and play, and told TJ that he could take my buyin. He was at least as good a no limit player as me, and I didn't mind if he went busto. Losing the $200 was easily worth gaining even one player - I was never expecting to see that money anyway, and this would most likely guarantee more.

In the meantime, Tim had his Monday night games, which Mike and I split deal, with Willy coming in here and there. Me being there brought some legitimacy to the game, but people would come because Willy and Mike would donate their tips back and then some. Something I had not mentioned in the past was Mike and I had an agreement that people who dealt would not play in the same night. Some players saw it as using their own money to play against them and felt it was wrong. I had no problem with this as the game was something I wanted to run as a business, I would rather play PLO on my own time. Over the months, I got a lot of heat from Vito, Mike, and some of the players for not playing and treating it more like a business. "They want to see you have a degenerate side too" Mike would always say. I had never gone on the book at anyone's house, and had only played a few times at Vito's game - I just didn't like his idea of funding an entire table and looking for cash players to come in. It was an ongoing problem they just did not understand. I told them I would play if we switched to PLO, but most players just didn't want that.

Scotty was able to recruit a number of players to come down regularly on Tuesdays. He said that the Thursday game had more of a somber, business-like feel about it now because of the way it was managed. TJ and Bookie were not in the customer service business, and it showed. The Thursday night gang felt like a brotherhood to a lot of the players, and now it was more like going to a work meeting with some poker involved. The truth was TJ and Bookie knew how to run a book, but they did not have the charm that Mike had in social gatherings. Vito was no different - he was a self-proclaimed alpha male who could barely take a joke, and his games were like NA meetings with a little poker thrown in. It was all northsiders who could only afford to play on Vito's dime, and it wasn't going anywhere. They were lucky to be seven-handed most of the night, and the game was just dying out. This was all information I had gotten from Josh, as he ran the game and was Mike's boss, which Mike hated. When it came to business Mike wanted to hear from no one, and it hurt him a lot.

This went on for a few months, and two things happened that really put a blow to the games up north. The first was Vito and his wife just weren't getting along. They had been married for 18 months now, and the honeymoon period seemed to be wearing out. They had all the money they wanted, appeared happy on the outside, but Ellen and Vito were polar opposites. The only thing they had shared were their love for crack/pills at some time in the past. All the money in the world wasn't going to change that. Vito was known to treat her like total **** and there were rumors that both of them were back to bumping lines again. Another thing that Josh had told me was he was almost positive that Ellen was seeing someone, he just wasn't sure who. I know that a couple of the guys would flirt heavily with her, she was well endowed thanks to some plastic surgery and it was hard for guys to not stare at her while playing poker and drinking. One of my final weeks dealing, I had seen Vito come back from Sunset Music Festival in Tampa and his pupils were so dilated I thought his eyes were going to turn black. I had a bad feeling that this was the start of a downfall, and sure enough, I was right. One week Vito announced that there would no longer be games held at his house, and they would have to go elsewhere. It turned out that Ellen had been ****ing Wal-Mart Bill, who was a fairly lowlife womanizer type, but Ellen couldn't help herself. Vito moved out, got a divorce, and moved on with his life. I personally never cared for the guy, but he was a hard worker and I am sure he is doing well for himself as long as he is clean.

The second thing that heavily affected the underground poker economy was Bookie had been slowly going broke. Bookie was originally from Arkansas, and never really knew his parents. His grandfather had raised him, and when he passed away in June of 2015, it not only destroyed him mentally, it froze most of his assets. He had not planned on this, so Bookie quickly went from throwing around $1000s a night to even dealing his own game. He was looking for a deal with some large corporation to farm his family land back in Arkansas, but that apparently failed. Not having money was putting him in an even deeper depression, and as the months wore on, he had to start selling things. He had been coming down to our games which was a 45 minute drive from his house, but one night he stole Willy's phone to try and sell it. He used to loan money to everyone in the game, and now he was resorting to stealing. After that night he was never seen again at a poker game, and he contacted one of the car salesmen about getting a loan for his decked out Wrangler. It probably had 30k in mods on it and had been to Moab, but he borrowed 5000 on it to make ends meet. Finally after a few months, the tow truck showed up at his house, and the car salesmen gave him the option of letting them take it, or they were going to come again, and tear it down piece by piece. I remember driving by their car lot on 41 one day and seeing Bookie's Jeep there and wondering what the hell happened, and Tim filled me in. He said he had been giving Bookie money for food and his phone, but he ended up getting mixed up in drugs shortly thereafter. He met some younger crackhead who gave him a blowjob for $20, and finally they just shared his house smoking crack and ****ing **** up. Bookie had clearly given up on life. As recently as this week I got an update on him - he had moved some friend's relatives into his grandfather's old house to make ends meet. They were destroying the house, and he had nowhere else to go. His other truck broke down so he pitched a tent in his backyard and was basically homeless smoking crack in the tent with this girl. Maybe he had found love - who knows.

As summer came on, people who craved more action came to the southside over the local cardroom. Dealers, action players, locals, the fall of those two games brought Tim and I back full circle. Many things had changed in those 18 months, but many of the same players remained. At the same time, many new players came about and would make for a new dynamic in the game - it was a refreshing new game that had once started with the older nits from the Moose Lodge in town.

Dayum. Tough times.

Sent from my LGLS991 using Tapatalk

You make me feel sorry for characters that I would otherwise have apathy for. You are a good writer.

Flashbacks - Going Broke

Summer, 2010

It has always been said that almost every professional poker player will go broke countless times in their life. I had a somewhat different experience with going broke - being broke turned me towards playing for a living. Let me note that going broke didn't mean I didn't have two pennies to rub together. It meant I could no longer afford my lifestyle.

Since 2004, I had been somewhat padded by a small inheritance from my grandparents, and I used this to begin my plant nursery. By renting space, starting things from seed, and a killer economy, I did well for myself in the 2004-2008 area. When I had sold my plant nursery in early 2008 to go and work in Miami, I had figured I did not need that padding anymore. I had already bought a $35K Toyota FJ Cruiser with very little equity, a Honda VTX 1100 and a 68 Honda Super 90, a classic cafe style bike. I had a nice apartment in Pinecrest, an affluent suburb of Miami near Coral Gables, and figured I had nothing to worry about. The economy was going into the ****ter and I had a cushy job with great sidework. Once I had left this job and was doing just work with Ken, the bills started to add up. Money wasn't coming in regularly, and it became harder to pay the business credit line, which was this monkey on my back I couldn't get off. I wasn't making any money, as I was buying plants just to sell them off, and the interest was catching up on me.

By the time I had moved back to the West Coast in 2009, I had gotten a part time gig managing an island that was a 45 mile drive from where I lived. Even though it paid $40 an hour, I just wasn't getting enough hours in to keep up with my life needs and wants. I started getting closer and closer to that 40k max on my credit card, and my bank even called to ask me if I could pay it back. I told them not to worry, I didn't need my last chance at getting business going again getting yanked out from under me. The problem was the market was so bad that people didn't care what was in their front yard, and their landscape was the first thing to go. People who spent $500 a month with me back in 2007 were now dust, and I had a select few customers internationally that were keeping me afloat. A palm I could sell for $50 3 years before was now worth $15, as a glut in the market made the prices plummet. There seemed to be no end in sight, but I continued forward with building a new nursery on some agricultural property near Fort Myers, a long drive at the time.

An old friend from mine from Atlanta named Jon wanted to come down and rent a room from me so he could get a job on a big fishing boat and get his captain's license. Jon and I used to work on a ferry during the summer in New York, and we were inseparable because I identified more with the South, having grown up most of my grade school life in Richmond, VA. We would get wasted almost every night of the summer and try to catch some of the summer girls that came out to the East End of Long Island during those three months. He was a solid guy back then, but his drinking had hurt him in his college years. He dropped out of Western Carolina University and took a job with Verizon that was seemingly a dead end. He told me he had saved up $3000 to come down and live a meager life and find work. I charged him $300 a month to live at the house I rented from my mom starting in January of 2010, and for the first few months, it was the best time I had since moving down. We would go out to bars, the ladies loved Jon, and we had a sweet house pretty much to ourselves.

After two months, Jon had barely found some part time work after he talked to some dude at a bar that owned a car restoration shop in town. The first time I met him I could tell he was full of ****, and his shop was full of total maniacs who probably sniffed glue most of the day. One of the guys claimed he was an ex-Outlaw but just seemed like a wannabe biker. One guy in particular that stood out was Crazy Frank. Crazy Frank lived in an RV behind the shop, which was in an industrial park in town near the county courthouse. There was no shower or bathroom working in the RV, and just an extension cord gave him power to watch local TV and play video games on a small bed in the back. He wasn't charged any rent for this living arrangement, but it wasn't much more than a glorified cardboard box with some power. Frank lived like the world had stopped in 1988, wearing purple bandanas and having the demeanor similar to that of Axl Rose. His crazy side came out when he had gone through his afternoon speedball dose of Xanax and coke, and was completely unpredictable.

These habits started wearing off on Jon, who was looking for a friend in town, but in all the wrong places. Spending most of his money on beer and xanax, he would usually pass out for the night before he even got to make dinner. Jon would spend good money on cuts of meat, marinate it, then leave it out raw and fall asleep in the kitchen. He was a complete mess most nights and it was honestly depressing.

At this time, I had taken more of my time towards grinding out a living online. The only thing that was keeping me afloat and paying off credit card debt was multitabling 1/2 and 2/4 plo, with the occasional 5/10 shot. Instead of winning and figuring out what I could buy with the monies, I was figuring out how to get rid of all this debt. There came a breaking point in the spring of 2010 where my interest rates climbed on my card and I was not making enough to live off of poker with all my loans and liabilities. To add to that, Jon was so ****ed up one night he tried to hit on my neighbor's 13 year old daughter, and he was ready to call the police. I had to let Jon go, and it was sad saying goodbye to an old friend who just couldn't handle his own life. He left depressed with his car full of his only belongings, and I felt like I had lost a longtime friend. I did see him one more time at New Years 2011 when he drove down with his girlfriend, but she ended up being even more nuts than he was. I haven't heard from him in 5 years. The last thing he told me was he got a DUI by blowing a curb and crashing into a brick wall, and had no job.

I had decided that it was time for a lifestyle change of my own. I put an ad up on Craigslist for my FJ Cruiser, and was able to get what I owed out of it and get the $600/month payment off my back. I wanted a car that was reliable but cheap, and I didn't care about its appearance. Through a friend I found a 1993 Honda Accord with 200k miles on it, 5-speed, new tires for $400. None of the windows worked and the AC needed to be fixed. After about $200 in parts, I fixed it up and took it for its maiden voyage. I had never felt so free in my life, free of payments, having to keep up an appearance, and zero expectations. I never felt so happy to be so low on money. Later that month I sold both of my motorcycles and decided to max out the business card and say goodbye to Bank of America. I financed my new nursery by doing this, and made the long commute to make sure I had a business up and running again.

I managed to cash out and finance my life off my poker winnings on Stars and Full Tilt, but it was still meager - I probably was living off of $2k a month max in 2010 and early 2011. I was brokering plants out of the back of the car, and was able to save up to finally get a 95 Corolla that was automatic instead of manual with less miles. I didn't want a credit card, no loans, nothing. I just wanted a clean slate to start my life again. My last cashout on Stars was April 3rd, 2011 and I had no idea that was the last time I would be able to play online. I remember the girl I was dating at the time, we went shooting at a local gun range, and on the way home, we went to a local bar on the Gulf where they had a free poker league. I never played in these things, but I thought it might be fun to try some live poker once in a while. The dealer made an announcement that you could no longer play on Full Tilt or Pokerstars, and I thought it was a joke. Sure enough, when I went home, everything was locked up with that really cute DOJ logo, and my only other source of income had come to an end.

I had to make a decision at this point, and it was something I should have done 5 years before - I had to go back to college. My dad was constantly giving me a hard time about it, and there seemed like no other option. I couldn't run a nursery in its infancy and expect to make a living out of it. I enrolled that summer at the University of South Florida and took out a loan of 6k to live off of, at the same time going to Texas with Ken to get back in the big time brokering business. The summer of 2011 was a turning point in me getting out of the land of the broke and back on the right track. It was also the summer that I met Tim and we had started to play live, starting my career as a live player.

I finally graduated from USF in the spring of 2014, ten years later than I should have at Connecticut College. Better late than never......

I study bubbles in my free time (lol friends) and the systemic toxicity is fascinating to me. Even the plant market was in bubble pre 2008, crazy.

Dutch tulip mania ftw.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania

I really don't feel as though I wrote a quality post regarding "Going Broke". Obviously I did not go broke in the literal sense, but I felt like I zipped through it and did not tell enough details. I am very critical of my own writing and will be very OCD about it. On the upside I ran $500 into $3500 the other night in PLO, hopefully have some sort of story to go with that.