just wrote this for my creative writing class. kinda funny and probably not too far off for some people
Cameron Duncan
English 161 short story #1
During the first years of college Darnell began playing poker in the dorms. Five and ten dollar games in the evenings between buddies. Tending to win he soon realized there was potential for more than just recreation with this game. On weekends Darnell and his best friend Maxwell would make the two hour drive from San Luis Obispo to Santa Barbara to play Sunday tournaments at the Chumash Indian Casino. Success continued and the boys began to forgo partying in favor of card games; eventually forgoing classes as well once introduced to online poker.
Unlike at the live tables on the online felt Darnell was free to play at any time on as many tables as possible. He built his skills studying the game, playing almost a thousand hands per hour, and discussing poker hands with other adept players. Prompted by success stories of eighteen year old kids making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year playing online poker and personal success with the game for over two years he decided to put school on hold and pursue cards full time.
Darnell grew up in an LA ghetto and never had much materially but was bright, and made good choices. A strong sense of logic propelled him past many of his peers. With poker it was no different. Within two months of going pro he shipped his first big win in a large field multi-table tournament on PokerStars. He beat out sixteen hundred players for a first place prize of eighty thousand dollars; life changing money. Darnell knew that while luck is a huge factor in the short term results of a poker player, in the long term the man who makes the best decisions overall will win out. Down the road skill will overcome variance.
So our new pro gambler decided to move down to the coast of San Diego and rent out a nice place with some fellow players on the beach. Life was good and the success continued as Darnell improved his game further. He bought a nice new Mercedes Benz, expensive clothes, and spent lavishly at the bars on Garnett street in Pacific Beach having a grand time doing big things both day and night.
Drunk one night celebrating a win in the one hundred dollar rebuy tournament on Full Tilt Poker for thirty four grand with an open bar at the Typhoon, Darnell met a beautiful girl named Marissa. Things moved quickly but with the freedom offered by online poker and the unlimited ceiling for success Darnell was ready to make some bold decisions. He withdrew a large portion of his online bankroll to put a hefty down payment on a waterfront two bedroom condo for him and his new girl. He never worried too much about making payments or the amount he was spending on bars and Gucci purses. Then it hit.
On April 15 2011 The US Department of Justice unexpectedly and inexplicably shut down all of the major online poker sites operating in the states. A hundred thousand American poker players instantly lost their online bankrolls. Like a puff of smoke it was all gone; the money and the opportunity. Cash was seized by the government or sites ran off with it overseas. Unfortunately for Darnell he never saw a dime of the near two hundred racks he had online. His was a true riches to rags story.
Darnell had drive and tried to turn things around but his hole was deeper than he realized. He tried playing live poker in the San Diego cardrooms with what cash he had remaining in bank accounts but he couldn’t handle the smell of despair, desperation and cigarettes that permeated the places. Playing one table at a time it was just impossible to have the same winrate as before and large worldwide tournaments with the chance for huge scores were gone. Marissa was hot and the sex was good but she couldn’t carry her weight any further than around a pole. It didn’t take long for her to split when the handbags and the allowance was gone. Darnell couldn’t pay off the home loan and ultimately lost that too.
Darnell found a sick irony in that it was only in the land of the free that online poker was effectively banned. He could go play online in Iraq if he wanted. With a years long resume gap and no way back into college Darnell sold the Benz and moved up to Vancouver Canada to try to get his online grind back on as a last resort. It was never really the same for him though. Unfamiliar European poker sites with much harder games without the recreational US players. Depression over a girl and family and a lost lifestyle; it all seemed an insurmountable mountain to climb. Without any friends in the area Darnell began abusing prescription pain killers which didn’t help his poker game any. Not lucid and perhaps a turn of bad luck led to him becoming a losing player. Within months Darnell was blowing the last of his savings going into east Vancouver ghettos daily to score heroin after succumbing to an IV addiction. Before long he shot a hot dose of fentanyl cut dope and was dead. Darnell took a proverbial “bad beat” in the game of life and subsequently tilted the rest away as, sadly, many are prone to do.
Didnt play Poker last 2 months.
Lived of my +1050$ march results and cashing out rest of my bankroll.
March was an excellent month but after this 1 month of daily grind i simply hated poker and had zero motivation to ever play again.
I tried the first days of april but speewed away like 300$ and then cashed out.
Unfortunately life is expensive even when u are a nit and since i didnt find a job that i can do comfortable besides university i declared bankrupt 2 weeks ago and needed a 500€ loan from my parents to be able to pay June bills T_T
basically there are not many good jobs u can do alongside studying at university.
So there i stood ....
Last Sunday decided to take 50€ of the 500€ of my parents loan and put it on Pokerstars
Started grinding 3.40$ HU SNGS with 71$ Bankroll...
moved up to 7$ last days
Getting back on track is toughby LemOn[5thF], June 26
No doubt in part because of one thing I lack very often-moderation (see my last blog post) my routine was just completely blown away.
From the maximum of the couple weeks of doing everything right I went to the standard low from a couple months ago. How?
Well, first I got ill had a nasty cold and a headache, and subsequent mucus on lungs eww, it would be gone in a couple days, but as god wanted, it perfectly overlapped with my graduation and my 86year old great aunt visiting for 4 days. Now she always supported me and she sends me letters every month giving me updates about our family and what's up in my country of origin and she travelled 1,000 kilometres alone just to see my grdatuation, we had a great time, she met my girlfriend and we travelled through Edinburgh (what a great city by the way). It also meant I didn't get much sleep because she arrived late at night and her plane left 8 am in the morning and I had to explore the city and get some graduation drinks when at the climax of the illness. On top of that my wisdom teeth started calling again, and I spent about 6 days on painkillers.
Well what can I say, my regime? Gone, and right now I got back to my old ways. It sucks when you can't go to the gym, when you can't do things to the max and worse of all if you are me, if you have any sort of excuse to get back to your old self.
last few days I even stopped writing my food diary and yesterday and today the worst symptom of being 'me' turned up. I stopped doing easy things like 'I will play now' 'I won't play until I watch 2 videos' I will go to sleep at 12:30' 'I will write my poker diary after this session' and I started to spend again some 4 hours per day, frantically pressing F5 and posting for the sake of it. Well although I learned some nice concepts, it's not what I want to do, and I don't feel in control.
Well it's time to get back on track...again
/end rant
EDIT: I wrote this in the gym while waiting for my girlfriend (She always takes 20-30 minutes to shower and do whatever mysterious female thingies females do)
I actually did a good intensity workout, breathing heavily and from there we went right to the supermarket and bought up like 4kg of fruit and veg. Tomorrow is my day without poker so I will get my head clear and I will own the Food diary again, my number one commitment that I omitted for some 3-4 days.
It's funny but very often too much poker can be harmful for me, I start obsessing and when I skip my regime, exercise and socializing i lose the protective barrier that gets built up with the increase of the important neurotransmitters, and for example today I had a NL50 session where I got hammered second time in a row, just in some 400 hands and I lost just 1.4BI but my heart started pounding heavily and fight or flight and obsessive behavior was induced along with a rapid drop in mood after losing a miniscule amount of both money and BIs. Don't get me wrong, I don't mind dwelling on some hands or concepts for very long, but I need to be able to tell myself when to stop, and when you stop doing stuff like socializing, breakfast, morning routine and generally doing things that make you feel good, your serotonin levels get low and obsessive behavior takes very little to be triggered, and I also lose motivation to get out if it and actually do the good things that are very simple to do when you think about them rationally.
Taking the first proper step out of the rut is the most important, but also the hardest thing to do, and hopefully I just made it. It took me 3 days of 'for sure I will do it' confirmation before I actually kicked my fat ass and force it to go to the gym and pool.
so last night was fucking bizarre, it reached 82 degrees F during the day and there was a fucking hail storm at night. it was really brief, only a few minutes, but the most intense fucking hail i've ever seen. i looked out my window and literally couldn't see more than maybe a foot out it was so thick. there were also a couple funnel clouds that never got close enough to the ground to be officially labeled tornadoes. weird fucking shit all at once. maybe volcanoes tomorrow -.-
anyway, good news: the river has crested about 2 feet lower than they previously predicted, worst appears to be over.
bad news: town still got annihilated, still smashed the old record of from 1881, thousands of homes ruined, and they announced the tap water is possibly infected with parasites so we can't/shouldn't use it for 24 hours minimum without boiling it (longer if they confirm it is indeed infected).
worth noting that i remember seeing all of these a couple days ago which means they were taken well before the river crested, exception being the last one which might have been taken yesterday.
edit - just found this photo montage someone made:
Breaking Bad season 4 and other seriesby whamm!, June 25
Love the show, can't wait for this...and
Does anyone have the torrent for this show? I've seen a couple episodes and I feel it's one of thsoe very underrated comedy shows. Free Radioseasons 1 and 2
Justified Season 2Solid show
The KennedysGood show if you're interested in the family
Chicago CodeFrom the makers of the shield, good watch
Hey guys, my friend is the COO of a start-up and I'd appreciate anyone willing to partake in this event. All that's required is a few mouse clicks . FWIW it's 100% free and legit; I've received a prize from an earlier event (starbucks card) in my mail.
I went there mainly for an electronica/house music festival that lasted 4days, it was alot of fun.. Montreal's so alive comapared to where I live, such a nice city.
I only played like 30k hands last month, 30k this month so far.. gotta start focusing more on poker again. I also just recently started taking ADD medication for my ADD, I haven't taken any until now. Poker is the main reason I decided to start taking any, I don't feel a big difference in focus yet.. maybe a slight improvement in mental endurance when playing long sessions, but not much. The psychiatrist told me that the pills will help me do better in poker, I found that pretty funny
Also played abit of live poker while I was there, I played 2/4 and it was reallyy juicy... but I ended up lossing anyways because I suck at live poker and don't have the patience for it. It's boring playing against a table full of nits and retards!
I posted this short analysis of LFVN in May http://www.liquidpoker.net/blog/viewblog.php?id=972314 , They had issued over $5m of convertible debt that possessed terms exceedingly awful for their shareholders' (us). needless to say I was very bearish on the stock. I expected it to implode on itself at some point because of this bad debt, and likely soon while the stockprice was massively inflated on negative earnings(!).
On the important K-8 form they chose to submit to the stockholders as a *powerpoint* on June 13th ( http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/dat.../000095012311058732/a59749exv99w1.htm )
On the 4th from the last slide, hidden at the bottom of a useless marketing slideshow, they mention how they chose to redeem $3m in convertible debt they had out. In response to this the creditors choose to exercise their warrants and options instead of receiving cash in repayment, resulting in their gain of the rights to 24m shares of common stock at an approx average share price of $.37(!), which traded on the market at $1.80 with 73.5m shares outstanding during this time.
To clarify the bit about the K-8, Wikipedia says the, "Form 8-K is a very broad form used to notify investors of any material event that is important to shareholders" Usually, this is a simple text-only form. They submitted a large marketing powerpoint with the only material event, the redemption of $3m in covertible debt, in a slide near the very end of the slideshow.
Since my post in May, where they were trading at $1.80/share with 73.5m shares outstanding, the stock price has been on a steady turn to $1.20 with 79.3m shares outstanding.
O RLY? HOW U FIG?
Turns out that for every $1m in debt creditors convert, they receive ~8,000,000 ("warrants" for 3,074,844 shares@ $.20/each, "options" for 4,919,815shares @ $.50/each) shares of common stock. So by the end of F11 they will have to finish selling $3m of debt's worth of options and warrants aka
3 x 8,000,000 = 24,000,000 shares.
So far the creditors have sold 6m of these shares, and the stock has tanked from $1.80 to $1.20. According to the slideshow document, "All conversions expected to be completed by year-end FY11". According to their annual report, the company's fiscal year 11 ends on June 30th, 2011. Wonder whats gonna happen in the next 7 days as 18m more shares are "expected to be sold" o_O?
Furthermore, I've never seen these creditors named in their documentation. They could easily be executives within the company for all I know.
My roommate has one super fucking annoying flaw which is whenever a disagreement or debate comes up about any issues they get super loud, super emotionally involved, and spout of things which are ideological crap and have no basis in reality or facts to back them up at all. This occurs over fucking everything, which movie is better, which band is better, etc. Obviously it also occurs more vehemently over other issues where we differ like healthcare, taxation, government, economics, iraq, religion. Seeing how I'm an atheist/left-centrist and she's a orthodox christian/libertarian.
One ultra depressing side not is that despite this her and i have managed to reach compromise agreements on everything which satisfies both of us, something congress never seems to do ever. Also granted I sometimes fuck up in statements and have to go back and correct myself. Perfect example was last night. I said I hated the statement "more people have died due to religion then any other cause" which is repeated over and over by atheists in soundbytes on interviews and is pretty much a straight up lie. But that got us to the typical line which follows afterwords "without religion good ppl would do good things and bad ppl would do bad things, but if you want a good person to do a bad thing, that takes religion" which I happen to agree with massively (note: i do agree other things cause good ppl to do bad things like economic troubles leading to theft for food etc but these are unimportant to the statement). Then I pointed out examples of this mainly the pope letting child molesters go free and misinformation about condoms helping the spread of aids.
Any how we go on arguing this for a while and eventually I get to the war on drugs being another example since the temperance movements and anti-drug movements get their upstart, and base justification from religious ideals which has led to a waste on resources, ppl, and extremely poor drug controls, even scientists in the 70s said pot should not be a schedule 1 drug. (e.g. Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) was the main driving force of prohibition and protestant ministers were the creators in large part.)To which her response was not the expected "well i'm christian and i don't think drugs should be illegal" (which obv response is, ur the exception not the rule as seen by ur also accepting evolution) but instead she responded with "some drugs need to be made illegal like meth, crack, heroin, and maybe things would be better off if alcohol was illegal". WTF complete fucking 180 degree turn from her libertarian ideals of "everything should be legalized the gov't has no right to tell me what i can and can not put in my body" solely just to be consistent in her blind refutation that religion causes and said the only reason I brought this up was "because I want pot to be legalized so badly". Which I don't even fucking want, decriminalization of possesion&personal growing along with medical legalization is completely different then flat out legalization.
Then we go on and eventually get to what makes ppl poor (at this point the whole religion thing is gone) where I argue that many americans are not paid an actual livable wage, combined with the cost of college tuition leads to a situation of lower standards of living then there should be for many americans and occasional rampent credit card debt. She says that it is solely based on poor dumb ppl misspending money and having runaway debt. Which is a fucking lie also, the whole "average american is in debt 7.5k" is a bullshit statistic because it's the mean debt of americans. The median and mode credit card debt for the average american is fucking 0. The median debt for a person who actually has credit card debt is only 3k. ( http://www.erictyson.com/articles/20090623 ) so yes there are some ppl misusing credit cards, but there are many more who just make shit money. The whole "save for college, get a degree and you'll get a good job" is bullshit since with the rising cost of college many ppl can't afford to go or won't get in. Plus college degrees don't guarantee jackshit ( http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/07/opinion/07krugman.html?_r=2&ref=opinion )
The combination of always being emotionally angry, arrogant as fuck about her misled facts which never hold up to any actual scrutiny is fucking aggravating. This is on the whole an EXTREMELY SMALL problem since we rarely talk about anything that will lead to an argument (often by me just not really talking much )
One disclaimer is that I did say one thing which was factually wrong last night when I said that the majority of Africa is Christian (this was during the catholic aids debate) but apparently africa is 47% islam, 42% christian. But countries that are primarily islam have almost no aids, the countries that are primarily christian have the worst aids rates http://www.martinrothonline.com/MRCC11.htm so the fact was wrong, but the idea behind it was correct.
/whine
I'm not gonna have some drawn out debate in any comments w/ someone about any of these views either, i just needed to vent this fucking annoyance
EDIT:
EDIT2:
didn't want to make a new entry, but this is cool.
im looking for skilled plo coach, HU or 6 max or both.
im transitionning to plo from NL, playing PLO 100 and 200 now.
i wanted miPwnya, but unfortunately hes busy with his sick vpps plan for this year.
pls write me here or pm if interested, also recomendations would be cool if you know someone good.
my town is about to get annihilated =o don't remember us making national news before (only 35k people) but we're going to turn into a lake for a couple weeks (i'm just outside the city so i'm not going to be affected but i've been helping family evacuate their homes during the last couple days). my sister isn't even in one of the normal high-risk flood areas and she's supposed to get like 8 feet of water above her main floor o_O - some areas are going to be much worse
the local news guy was on the cbs early show too but i can't find video online. national guards posted everywhere, town is total chaos, feels like armageddon. mandatory evacuation for danger zones was originally supposed to be 10pm(cst) tonight, but mayor just went on TV and said there's problems with the levees and flood sirens are likely going off in less than 1 hr from now... anyway, wish us luck!
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on button. Same villain raises to about 10 and I reraise to 35ish. Everyone else folds and he flat calls.
. He bets about 50...
feels bad man
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