"This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.
Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship--be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles--is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.
Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings.
They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing.
And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the centre of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving.... The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.
That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.
I know that this stuff probably doesn't sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational the way a commencement speech is supposed to sound. What it is, as far as I can see, is the capital-T Truth, with a whole lot of rhetorical niceties stripped away. You are, of course, free to think of it whatever you wish. But please don't just dismiss it as just some finger-wagging Dr Laura sermon. None of this stuff is really about morality or religion or dogma or big fancy questions of life after death.
The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death.
It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:
"This is water."
"This is water."
It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime. And it commences: now.
I wish you way more than luck."
— David Foster Wallace (This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life)
There are hundreds of blogs of players who document their ‘challenge’ to take a small bankroll of $10 dollars and turn it into $10k, or else, there are blogs where winning casual poker players decided that they are going to go professional and go all-in with their decision by moving to Vegas or grind online for 12 hours a day.
This blog is along the same lines, but from a different perspective… I'd like to do the same thing, but with a poker site, Hero Poker.
Hi, my name is David Jung, I was the Regional Director of PokerStars in Asia and nearly singlehandedly established poker across Asia, and I am the current CEO of Hero Poker, a new site on the Merge Gaming Network. I'm on a quest to make Hero Poker, the world's premier boutique poker site.
I am going to blog about the trials and tribulations of this challenge and I've chosen two poker communities to really work with during this time and one of them is LiquidPoker.net.
STACKED AGAINST THE HOUSE
If you think becoming a poker pro has some odds stacked against you, taking a new network poker site and trying to break into the top ten of global poker sites is virtually drawing dead. Even if you hit that two outer, no amount of corporate chip stack is going to prepare you for the 900 pound gorilla of the market leaders. And I should know, I worked at PokerStars as a senior manager and director from 2007 to 2010. I know the nature of the beast and from a competitive standpoint, the online poker jungle has its obvious hierarchy, we know who the lions and gorillas are.
AND THE WORD FROM VEGAS IS…
Recently I got word from Vegas that the word on the street is that, if you don't have 100M USD for seed money for online poker, you can forget about even competing. I'd reckon that would be the case for these major US live casinos (with the exception of Harrahs/Cesears) as probably they would donk off the first 50M to every type of marketing agency out there. Another 25M would go to useless online promotions and the last 25M they would start to use properly, but then realize that they actually short stacked at this point. Then things would really start to fall apart as ‘reloading’ your capital/bankroll as a public company has some major costs. And what is really shocking/breaking news is the joint venture with PokerStars and Wynn. Now the significance of Wynn making a relationship with PokerStars means that they think that the market is so damn competitive that even the legendary Steve Wynn is willing to make a joint venture...its pretty heavy news.
SO WHERE DO I THINK I COULD DO BETTER?
This is the part of the blog where I justify that my past experience will help me get the job done. And this also will lead to comments of 'good luck buddy you haven't got a chance' or 'prop bets to see how long this site will actually be up for'. And the truth is, no amount of experience could prepare one to take on such a complex and difficult task, even if you had 100M in chip. Because I accept this, I’ve let go of trying to compete with the beasts. Before I joined PokerStars, I was a senior management consultant for PricewaterhouseCoopers (the biggest global accounting firm). At the time I was specialized in business strategy, international negotiations and casino investments. What I loved about my job was that it wasn't a typical bs consultant's job. My main role wasn't to take a nearly bankrupt company and bring it to life again, or turn a so/so company into a super duper company with some wonky market strategy. Rather, my role was to make strategy that allowed companies to sidestep the competition. The key thing about this kind of strategic approach is that it isn’t flashy or mind-blowing stuff, it just looks to focus on one good point that everyone would normally take as a negative.
FOCUS IS GOOD
There comes a point when a company completely controls the playing field or that there is so much competition that there is no space to manoeuvre. This is the case with the online poker industry right now. For the stand alone sites, the market leaders have a lock on it; for the smaller network sites, their own network partners can be both friend or foe. So how to side step it all to make the competition irrelevant for a moment so that you can create your own beach head in this battle? So what is the obvious most negative thing and how to make it positive? And what is the most negative thing in online poker? Player liquidity…
PLAYER LIQUIDITY NUMBERS
Without player liquidity, players sometimes can't even maximize the use of their tournament bankrolls because there isn't enough tournaments to register into. Player liquidity affects the selection of the game in term of available limits, number of tables and tournament prize pools. But everyone is so focused on player liquidity, it is easy to forget liquidity doesn't always add to the quality of the game. It is a common fact that playing at one of the major stand alone sites is a harder game to win, because the players are more educated, they use HUDs and there is just a bigger tournament field.
THE QUALITY GAME
There is this single huge cash game in Macau, the biggest in the world. It's a single table and this table moves between Starworld to Lisboa to Grand Lisboa and sometimes makes a stop at the Wynn in any given week. And this game is by invitation only. You've heard of this game, it's a game populated by casino owners and VIP junket operators where there are single 1M USD pots and you can be up 5 or 8M or be down 2 M in the same game, and to them, this is still a fraction of their worth. This is the single table game that every pro worth his salt would die to get a regular place in it. But that is at one end of the spectrum. About 6 months ago I was in Shenzen (just across the border of Hong Kong) for a casual game of poker and three guys came down from Shanghai. One guy's family sold yachts and the other two were just full on wealthy and they had just started playing poker. But since they had a lot of disposable income, we played a $10/$20 and I bought in for $1200, but in just 4 hours I was up $3000. One of the guys looks at me and says, 'Wow you are so lucky, how come you always have a flush or straight' and I said, 'this is a game of skill, you allow me the cards to make my hands' and he just laughed at me and said, 'this is just luck and you are one lucky guy!'. Now that was a quality game.
LET NOTHING COME BETWEEN YOU AND THE CARDS
In live poker, you play that single table and can't multi-table (unless you're at the WSOP and you have that option). Now a lot of internet poker players feel that playing live poker is quite boring at first. The two aspects of continually trying to read your opponents while trying to set them up is different for live play than online, in that, it is far more intense. After setting up two poker rooms in Macau and being part of countless live tournaments working on the floor, I know that live poker players want to be, above else, comfortable. But comfortable here doesn’t mean it’s ‘Cheers’ and everyone knows your name. It’s when players know that someone is actively looking out for their interests so they can simply just focus and play their game.
I'm not saying that I want to turn an online site into a live poker room, I'll leave that to PKR, rather, I want to provide an experience where the players know that they can directly speak with the CEO and have that level of comfort to simply play their game at their best. If you’re going to play with us, then we want to provide that environment where you know you can talk to the management and get answers.
FISH COME AND GO, BUT QUALITY LASTS FOREVER
No matter what anyone says, size does matter, but size isn't about the general liquidity, but it’s about the amount of quality. To this end, we've focused our entire site on newer players and low stakes tournament players. Our focused marketing is casting the net wide to actively target and develop new players for low stakes tournament poker. Hero Poker is already part of a network that has low stake guaranteed tournaments with consistent overlays. This is the perfect environment for a low stakes player to play in relatively smaller fields with value. That being said, there are a lot of pending changes to the client and while we are one of the fastest growing poker networks, you can't ignore player liquidity as a major factor for the long term survive and competitiveness of our site. But right now, its a matter of allowing the disadvantage be a benefit and if I'm right liquidity will follow.
Now, in terms of LiquidPoker.net and HeroPoker, LiquidPoker is a bit nearer to my heart in that it is a 'sister site' to 'Teamliquid.net' where I've been a long time member. While I've kept things very separate, I do know that there is cross over, I'd just like people to respect the separation and not post on TL about whatever I'm doing business wise on LP; and while some of you already know, David Jung is MightyAtom. I still have a great love for SCBW and SC2 and of course E-sports. If I do something on TL, it would be sponsor a SCBW tournament, not that I have anything against SC2. While I do keep a blog on TL.net, its more on general business discourse, while this blog will really get into the nitty-gritty details of what is going on. I am maintaining two separate poker blogs, but I'd say that LP is quite different than the other community, so I will be a bit more personal here as I guess I can slightly let my guard down a bit more.
WE DO HAVE SPONSORED PROS, CLICHÉ, BUT SERIOUSLY THEY ARE WORLD CLASS PROS
HeroPoker is fortunate to be joined by six seasoned but still young veterans of the game, Gavin Griffin, Terrence Chan, James 'mig.com' Mackey, Daniel 'Rekrul' Schreiber, David 'u_dirty_dog' Ewing and Julian Powell. All of them play at the highest international level either both online and/or live. I know that many people in this community know Rekrul and Mig.com, obvious that was intentional from the beginning as I knew that one of the markets that I would like to focus on was the gamer market. Both Rekrul and Mig.com agreed after much discussion, I think both of them don't need sponsorship, and so our discussions weren't about the benefits more than if this was a good fit. I know both of them don't want to make a big deal out of it and don't want to seem like air headed figureheads, but that is what I'm going to do (although Rek is resisting like mad).
I know both of them are very talented but very different in personality. I don't think I need to go into details about them both here at LP, but I'm very very grateful and fortunate to have them both on the team. I've know Rek forever, and I did sponsor him for the 1st Team Asia Pros for PokerStars, but after I used him after one year, dropped him ^^ and Mig.com was introduced to me by Nazgul. I actually asked him for the best pro that he could think of that wasn't sponsored and fit what I was looking for, someone who could hold their own and was the best at what they did, and the first thought that came to him was Mig.com. Rekrul was there as we at the OGS-Liquid house (SC2 training house in Korea) and when I asked him his opinion, he was just basically speechless and said, 'Mig is as good as it gets'. After a couple weeks of talks, I had my full team. I'll get more into it about sponsored pros later, but I just wanted to share that story. I know that Rek is a controversial person and I'm willing to work through, not ignore, whatever come up because I do think he is worth it, but I'll leave it at that for now.
We will be running some type of promotions for LiquidPoker members exclusively, from some freerolls to some different type of promotions; we can even run a PLO freeroll, but honestly there isn't much PLO action on Hero Poker yet.
MOVING FORWARD
I will write about everything under the sun when it comes to the poker industry, professional business, careers and the trials and tribulations of this task and for all those who are doing the same thing but on the other side of the coin as a player. Feel free to request a blog topic and if I can write something decent about it, I will.
I’d like to leave you with this.
‘There Is Nothing Impossible To Him Who Will Try’
Alexander the Great
So I epic failed my March goals and actually got crushed at 25NL. After having a session where I ran roughly 8BI below ev I got really frustrated and took a few days off, then had another big losing session and only played once every few days. Almost a month later my roll is just over 400 and I'm struggling to motivate myself to play again, but in order to save my PlatinumStar for April I'm going to have to get about 2k VPP at 10NL before the month is over...so that'll be my motivation to play for now. I'm sort of concerned with how much interest I lost in poker once I had a tiny bit of runbad, but grinding for Masters on SC2 didn't help either since it split my focus. I've actually gotten decently good at SC2 so if anyone wants to play, add me (furrychobo at yahoo dot com) and we can game
GL at the tables LP! Will be updating this in a few days with whether or not I followed through on my goal to keep platinumstar.
Why do people expect you to have an opinion about everything? It is often most reasonable to hold no opinion or verdict on a topic, especially when it is outside the scope of one's area of study or expertise. People should respect those who choose to reserve judgement when they don't have a very large amount of knowledge about a subject.
This comes up pretty often in my US GOV class. The professor gives an assignment, which he wants you to give a brief answer (1paragraph) and verdict to, on an extremely complex issue. Today I got fed up with it and spent my paragraph trying to outline the variables which an informed decision might rely upon, and then stated that I had no personal verdict. I wonder if I will get full credit.
I was kind of demoralized after getting 10th in a 7k person tourny last night so I took the rest of the night off after that. I'm ready to go today. I will not be playing many smaller tournies, and will be mainly 6-10 tabling. Here's the schedule.
Full Tilt
$256 - Sunday Brawl
$216 Sunday Mulligan
Stars
$215 - Sunday Warm Up
$215 - Sunday Million
$215 - Second Chance
Sub Total = 1117 + 5% Mark Up Total = $1173
Im selling 60% of my action. Reply to this thread and send the money if you want a piece. OPR me or look back a couple blog posts to find my stats. I only have about 50 or so tournaments logged on stars, about 7k on FTP.
Pretty much just had to adjust to the greater increase in 3betting and squeezing. Stopped 3betting from the blinds as much because I get called by the BTN a lot. Started increasing my 3betting on the BTN cause people call a lot and give me position. Learned how to fold to these 3bets more often instead of bluffing/calling cause of tilt. Fish are still fish except now they are more aggressive which is actually even better.
Here's a fun hand for yall. I run pretty good sometimes.
Call it a month since last days poker got too me a bit emotionally what i did realise by the fact i started smoking again few days ago .... T_T
+ i kinda started having problems to sleep well recent days
lying in bed for 2-3h after evening session is done and just cant sleep.
The past 13 days i have played poker every day for 2-4h a day. Not a single day off.
So last 3 days of the month i will just relaxe have fun with friends for the most part. And not concern myself with playing even 1Hand
before April grind starts
I cant complain about the results by any means and overall i guess i did run semiluckbox style.
Cakepoker Nl20 HU
+ 170$
Stars Nl256max
+ 445$
Ipoker NL20€ HU
+ 92€ (+129$)
GG.net freeroll + 5$
---------------------------------------------------------
Overall
+ 749$ in 18 days of Poker ~ 30 K hands
Have 30$ on Isildur tomorrow busting DN
So nothing special here for u guys expcet a movie recommendation
Put up a rather conservative stop loss but other then that I'm aiming for 10 hours of (effective) poker today, breaks for food, toilette thingys and de-tilting acceptable assuming they're no longer then 20 minutes and no more then 3. Aiming to start at 1300 CET+1 and have it done before midnight. Hopefully I'll get 7 or 8k hands in if I don't hit my stop loss.
If I hit 7k hands I'm happy, 10k and I'm really glad.
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