Alex Fitzgerald Blog

I need a restraining order against my brain. That guy harasses me like no other.

If you do not like how self-indulgent most blogs are you should really not read this one. I love me some me, and I’ve been thinking a lot about me for the last couple days, and now I will write extensively about me.

San Jose rainy season is brutal. Nine months of the year the climate in my suburb is like a warm summer day in Seattle. A little hotter and a little more humid, but my white ass can bare it. Now sweltering heats follow torrential downpours. My mind melts in the heat of my usually cool house.

But there was the rare Dr. Pepper at the supermercado, and a fan’s on. My brain releases a bit.

Words spread on the page much more easily when you’re hyper-zoomed into a Word document on your 30” screen. Makes me feel like I’m actually doing something.

I had a bit of a crash on Wednesday. Friend of mine sent me Stars money sorely needed for SCOOP. Unfortunately, he did it from Italy, so Pokerstars blocked it. I don’t know how he was logged in and playing on the site but hey, at least he didn’t send the money to Assasinato (Taiwan).

(I always wondered how profitable that would be, making accounts named after the most common misspellings of high-profile backed pros who are constantly receiving 5k to10k transfers.)

With the transfer not coming in I realized I was winded and just didn’t want to play. It’s not I’ve been playing a ton, but also investing time in other things. I wake up at 8:00 AM and go to bed at midnight, and often I’ve only taken an hour off between those two points.

I’m not complaining about that. Those hours were spent at my choosing. Now it looks like I’ve set up a couple endeavors that are paying me solidly and regularly. It took a couple years to establish but it paid off. I’ve also spent a lot of time learning and developing my game. Spent many more hours teaching, making videos, and writing articles, all of which feed how much I get paid for the other.

I’ve been very satisfied with everything. I once heard an interview with Chris “Fox” Wallace where he talked about how he didn’t have time to play for the last two weeks because he was teaching so much. That blew my mind at the time, that anyone would choose to teach over playing. Now, I enjoy working three hours in the morning and earning my expenses for the week.

My overhead is extremely low. It’s not that I live cheaply, it’s just my girlfriend has taught me how to live smarter. It’s a huge advantage to make your money in dollars in Costa Rica. I have a pretty large house in a good neighborhood here. For what I’m paying in rent here I couldn’t afford a decent studio apartment in Seattle. Fresh fish and vegetables are delivered daily, and cost a tenth of what I would pay in Seattle for them. I live healthy, richly, and thankfully cheaply. I feel very blessed to live here.

The lowering of costs and betterment of my life should reduce my stress levels – but it hasn’t. I’ve found myself getting three hours of lessons done, running outside to take my dog for a thirty minute run, doing another thirty minutes on the treadmill here with a training video playing, hopping in the shower, than running to play ten hours of MTTs.

Wow, I’m grinding! Except, for some reason, it’s not really adding up to anything. I can’t seem to put together big wins in MTTs. This really frustrates me. While I couldn’t win a large tournament to save my life when I was a teenager I just racked up small wins and a nice bankroll. As I got older I grinded out a great return at 200 and 400 NL. I couldn’t hang with the big boys for a while at high stakes tournaments, then I learned, and final tabled most of the big tournaments. Sure, I had down cycles, but that was usually brought on by my spending and tilting at the games.

Then, when amps/bowls/screwdrivers/percs went from a once a day thing to an all day “let’s mix them all together” thing, I just couldn’t stop stacking. In my haze I racked up six figures on multiple sites. Then yeah, blah blah, I was flying high, blah blah, I lost it all, I’m sure you’ve read this before on many an idiot addict’s self-indulgent manifesto.

Truth was I was very lucky, somewhat skilled, and really careless during that period, but it all came back to bite me in the ass. It drained me dry. I couldn’t think or focus anymore without having something every 20 minutes, and in my inner city San Jose shithole apartment I couldn’t win at 50 NL for multiple months.

So I threw away my stash, started feeling my head splitting (I guess normal people call it withdrawing), and wow…I was pissed again. I was fearless again and clear minded for the first time in – my life, truthfully. And I made another fortune. And then Full Tilt happened. Yeah.

I’ve written the above paragraphs four or five or 200 times in my blog. That’s just because I can’t get my head around it. How could I make so much when I was so ripped I couldn’t see and when I was breaking out in cold sweats and sleepless withdrawing? Why can I not replicate my past results when my life is so good now and I feel better physically and mentally than I have ever felt in my life?

Well, the obvious conclusion you can come to is I’ve lost my edge. That came to mind a few months ago, but thinking the last couple days – it seems really valid. I’ve expanded my game in some frontiers with my study, but I’ve also been a little more complacent. Some regulars have noted I won’t go off at any point like I used to, and now they rightfully feel like they can get away with more. I’m way too comfortable with going by my original plan, and not deviating from what I previously plotted. I just am not angry at people anymore, and I didn’t ever think that would be a problem. I’m less likely to just get pissed off and snap call a shove without thinking.

This helps me stay more consistent in small tournaments, but I’ve gotten ragdolled a few times by better players deep in bigger tournaments. I used to not care. I probably wasn’t going to see most of the money anyway knowing how I lived, so I just wanted to show this guy, this day, he didn’t have anything on me. Lately I haven’t been pushing it enough.

I always thought letting go of that need to win every pot would help me close tournaments. It bugged me. I final tabled the Super Tuesday, 1k Monday, Sunday Million, Full Tilt 1.5 Million, the 750K, an EPT, the Sunday 500, The Brawl, the Second Chance, 5k side events, an FTOPs…I’ve won exactly one of them. If you wanted to tilt yourself and you’d final tabled all those tournaments, which one would you choose to win? Yeah, the Second Chance, ship it.

Before you think I’m bitching about limping into a bunch of final tables and not winning, I came into the Super Tuesday, 1k Monday, Sunday Million, FTOPs, 750K, The 5k Side event, and The Sunday 500 as the chip leader.

I felt cursed at different times. I’d flip out, get one outted, bluff off my chips, fold to a huge bluff, check when I’d normally bet and let a hand get there, fivebet/fold my life away…I just didn’t think I deserved to win I guess. I played like I had to do something dramatic to win, like my normal game wouldn’t get me there, when my normal game had usually gotten me there as the chip leader.

That FTOPs was probably the most crushing one. 3-handed I had a guy down to one out on the river for 70% of the chips in play. He hit it. I went out third about half an hour later.

Well, at least I still got my six figures, and I’m sober now! Then yeah April 15th my mom called me up to tell me the news. “I’m sure we’ll get our money mom, don’t worry,” I told her.

Since that FTOPs final table more than a year ago I haven’t done much of anything. 4th in the Sunday 100r, 13th at PCA (going out a few hours after I was the chip leader…woooohooo), a small 100r win here and there, but yeah…nothing really.

Frustrated I just started grinding every hour. I did all right with a couple hundred in cashes to start 2012. It was nice to get some paychecks, a little in savings. Then, what the hell, I lost like 60K in six weeks. I knew it was possible with Pokerstars having a ton in buy-ins a day, but the last time I lost 60k online was, well, never. I’ve been on multiple six figure downswings, but those were mostly live with 20-40K online thrown in. I lost 50k online once and it took me nine months. To lose that much in such a short time astounded me. I never did daily records before that, because I really didn’t want to pay attention to numbers when I was losing. I checked the math four times because I couldn’t believe that happened.

I pulled up 20 hand histories at random and started going through them with a fine tooth comb. Inexplicably, I didn’t stack off too light on any river, I didn’t call off too many tournaments, all my reshoves were mathematically sound, I was getting in a lot of value bets, my c-bets and double barrels were effective – no I was making the stupidest error of them all. I’d stopped shoving. I was never a genius with the shove math. Not bad at all, just I’d miss one here and there. I had charts posted in my office but I stopped referring to them once I started always knowing what they would say, and I guess I missed one or two all-ins after I stopped religiously checking each shove.

Sometimes, I’d think I had missed a shove but my SNG friends would actually show me I’d had some instinct to know when a shove was not responsible that one time. There were cases when a guy was dying to call me light and it wasn’t appropriate to shove some certain hands that normally would be fine.

I trusted myself a little too much, and…I started passing all the time because…I don’t even know why. I did what jaded grinders who don’t make money anymore do, I just clammed up. It just goes to show you, I was ruthlessly checking on every part of my game except for one. The one I thought I’d had down for years turned out to really be my undoing.

So now I’m back up to speed on that, final tabling a bunch, feeling good…but still feeling a little desperate to get that win.

A part of me feels like I should have some big wins already, a house paid for, money in the bank. The crazy thing was I kept going broke trying to have all that, but if I’d just taken life a little slower I could be at that spot now.

There’s guilt, for how I lived my life, how I could have set myself and my loved ones up for life and instead I blew it. It’s hard visiting your mom in a duplex knowing a couple years back you were renting mansions with private beaches…and if you’d just taken that money and bought a simple house in Costa Rica she could be safe for life.

Of course, I probably couldn’t have helped my family at that time if I wanted, and Lord knows I did try, but that’s neither here nor there.

It’s kind of hard knowing you made the same mistakes every idiot who wins the Lotto does. Food stamps don’t teach you how to budget your money. Broke families usually got there because they didn’t come from a fiscally responsible culture. Instead of taking the time to slow down and learn differently I fell right back into where I came from.

Thank God my girlfriend came into my life. I thought she was too frugal when I met her. Now in the year since Black Friday, my worst earning year ever, I have somehow moved from one great household to another one. I somehow seem to always have everything I need, and a little saved up in case anything happens. I have this amazing home and somehow I own everything in it.

With that kind of support I’ve just wanted so sincerely to make my family and my girlfriend proud, and show them I can do it again. I wanted to do it legit this time. It’s been very frustrating not being able to replicate the success I attained so easily, and not very lucidly, in the past.

My Plugs: Check out my vids at Pocketfives Training, hit me up for lessons at assassinatocoaching@gmail.com, see other stuff I write with my friends atwww.pokerheadrush.com, and follow my Twitter at TheAssassinato

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I’m sitting here waiting for a student of mine to show up. He’s half an hour late. I was a little annoyed by this until I realized its been a good couple months since this happened. Most of my students are pretty cool. I’m really lucky now too, I seem to have a lesson almost every day. Waking up to fresh coffee and hand history discussions with motivated young professionals is really keeping me on my game. Then I hit the exercise room…err, where I keep the washer, dryer, and Orbitrek…and put a training video up on the laptop. I’ve been doing this professionally for six years. I’ve played millions of hands, but I still feel like I’m learning more now than ever before. It’s a rush to just final table multiple tournaments a day, fighting for wins, to put a couple thousand more in the bank account. It’s fun again.

It’s a trip to me to see so many grinders who made the trek out of the states, and have no idea what they’re doing. No hate, some of them seem to be having a blast and making more than ever. There’s just so many temptations in different countries. I got swallowed up a couple years ago. I can’t imagine how hard it is now with the games being the way they are.

I study tons of hand histories as well, and the some of the “best” regs have such glaring leaks. If they went through two hand histories of their own they would stick out like a sore thumb, but they’d rather put in another 10 hours of suboptimal grinding. Get a buzz off of shoving them there chips in.

I can’t hate, I’m addicted to this as much as anyone. But the more I study the more obsessive I am with what money I could be leaving on the table. And I do spew still.

Yesterday I had my first real losing session in six sessions. Sick run, I know, but in my mind I expect to final table one or two tournaments every day. Even a day where I only lose 1k is a victory in my mind, because 1k is much easier to recover than 6. But yeah, I did nothing yesterday. I finished 11th and 12th in some big tournaments, and I final tabled the $109 40K Gtd on Stars, but just got three outted in huge spots, couldn’t connect when I needed it, etc. No biggie, I’m sure I’ll be back at it tomorrow.

Now if I was smart I’d be spending today doing something refreshing, like playing Final Fantasy or finishing this book I’m reading Aztec. But I end up going out to lunch with my girlfriend’s father and her, eating a big fish made by the Lebanese, then going to pick up things for the house, see a movie, come home and organize/build up my grind castle a little more. Oh yeah, throw in some lessons and training videos. It’s good and all to stay active but when I do a spewier play I wonder if I’d just chilled on my day off if I’d be more in control.

I guess that’s why a lot of grinders resort to drugs. We’re obsessive types, always being pushed forward and into boxes by our thoughts, never truly disconnected. It’s tempting to find something that’ll help you disengage. Now I give in to my obsessive thoughts and work habits, but its bordering on an addiction as well. I feel like I don’t know what to do with myself when I’m actually alone sometimes and not working. The first twenty minutes of me watching a movie by myself I feel like jumping out of my skin. It’s only when I really try to relax that I can do it.

I get addicted to work because I like the feeling of being worn out and actually falling asleep.

My girl saves my ass a lot of the time. When she’s around for some reason I mellow out. I can’t explain why. I can hang out like a normal person with her around. By myself I always feel like I should be working.

A lot of people look on the lazy friends they had in high school with disdain. Man, I wish I could sit around all day playing video games, but I have a physical reaction against it. I have things to do, goals to accomplish. While it’s good to be driven I think people who just can do whatever they want without any semblance of responsibility might quietly be the richest people on earth. If only they knew it.

My Plugs: Check out my vids at Pocketfives Training, hit me up for lessons at assassinatocoaching@gmail.com, see other stuff I write with my friends at www.pokerheadrush.com, and follow my Twitter at TheAssassinato

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Jack Welch pointed out this morning that I’d won a triple crown last night when I won the iPoker 30r. I told him no, that all the prizepools had to be over 10k, or there had to be a 100 people, or for some reason I thought I didn’t qualify. I hadn’t really looked into it, but it had come to mind briefly before and I thought there was some reason I didn’t qualify. Then he pointed out all the first places came in tournament wins met those requirements. I looked again. Lock High Roller, sure that qualified. The 30r on iPoker, yeah that one qualified. Then in surprise I saw the 3k GTD I won on Party poker actually got more than a 10k prize pool. Wow, cool, I did win one

I’ve never really gone for a triple crown. A lot of times I’ve won two tournaments on different networks in a day then realized a week later I should have been beating up UB or some other network I didn’t normally play on. It was just never a concern when I played on Full Tilt and Pokerstars only. Now that I’m playing on five different sites I thought it would be cool to possibly win one. I didn’t think it would happen in my second week of putting in full schedules on different sites.

It’s just nice to get that little crown thingy. I want my students to know they’re working with someone who still knows how to beat the games. I feel more motivated to perform at my best now, because I know what I’m teaching most mornings, and if I can’t apply it when I myself am playing then I shouldn’t be teaching.

I don’t know where I’d be without my students. A lot of my work with them is educating them about the swings of MTT poker, and how between the life-changing upticks there can be harrowing dips to deal with. One thing I always tell them is, “You’re not in a downswing. I ask every one of you how you’re doing when I start a lesson, and how you’ve been running. No one ever says anything but ‘I just won this’ or ‘I’m on a downswing.’ You’re not going to win tournaments every day. Even if you do, you might not necessarily make money if you’re buying into all the higher stakes tournaments. So save yourself the grief and don’t tell yourself you’re in a slump when you can’t best thousands of people every single day.”

It’s like a self affirmation. If I tell people that in the morning to keep their cool and put in solid hours I can’t just spew off a tournament four hours later. If I do that I’m just a tiltbox, no better than a 1,000 other grinders, and why should anyone pay to work with me? If I’m going to call myself a professional, I need to hold myself to a higher standard. That means having as good of an attitude as I can muster.

My girlfriend also works very close to my office. She sees me throughout the day. I feel really selfish if she’s exerting so much effort in her job as a physical therapist, actually helping people walk again, and I’m whining while I eat platanitos and drink Coke in an air conditioned room and playing a glorified computer game. I make myself smile no matter what’s going on, and damn if it hasn’t been working. I don’t feel like I throw off a tournament anymore. I’m holding myself accountable for once.

I used to just get so down on myself whenever I made a mistake. And I made some big ones the last couple days. I made some ridiculously bad rejams and call downs, in the iPoker 109 double stacked turbo (wat), the 30r on Lock poker, and a 50 freezeout on Lock Poker. All three tournaments I had the chip lead three handed or heads-up, and I was just fatigued. One day I woke up at 5:30 and I couldn’t go back to sleep.

If I donked out of those tournaments a few months ago I’d have been livid. Now I accepted it a little better. It’s nice with these smaller fields, I can get deep more often, and I have more room to work. So when I blew off the 30r on Lock I made myself buckle down at the 30r final table on iPoker.

I did something there that I was proud of. Three handed in that tournament a pot came up where I had, let’s say, 75% of the chips in play. A guy who I could tell really cared about moving up, I mean he had let me bluff him off so many pots while the third guy was short, he raised on the button. I flatted with K-J in the small blind. BB, shortstack, jammed, not a full raise, and we both call.

I completely whiffed the board and the player desperate to move up checked to me. I always bet here when I want to win the tournament, and a payout jump means nothing to me. Maybe at an EPT final table with Durr about to go out and a 400k payout jump I’ll check it down. 2.8 for first, I want the win. I wasn’t thinking about it at the time but the Triple Crown had some ego equity too. Anyhow, I whiffed, I bet into the payout ladder junkie, knowing he’d think I’d never bet into a dry side pot without a hand. He folded. I showed KJ. BB showed queens, river was an ace and the player I bet out was livid. “I would have taken him out! Why did you bet?!?”

Even if when I bet there 100% of the time I lose the pot I might still do it. It was like this. If I check it down there and the button takes him out then I have 72% of the chips in play and the button has 28%. Heads-up, he has no more motivation to nit it up. There’s first to play for, and that’s it. With the big blind winning the pot there was still motivation for second place to nit it up. If these aren’t short short stacks, and the players perceive they can outwait each other for a chance to go at me Heads-Up, then I want this situation over a player busting. In the other scenario the nits have nothing to fear. They can get it in, and if they double up they’re almost even in chips with me. With another guy close to going out as well, they’re always going to second guess their river calls.

Sure enough I bluffed both players out on rivers after that, and in general could just double barrel and take a lot of pots. They both tried to outwait each other, while I took most of the pots. By the time one guy busted the other had 10 BBs left. Now he’d have to win 2 or 3 all-ins in order to get even in chips with me, and there was hardly any risk. As long as you’ve played some deeper stacked poker you know what cards to barrell, what bet sizes to use. People miss the overbet way too much on good rivers. The play was reaching, but I liked it, and I felt like I redeemed myself for my spew shove on Lock.

I don’t know how the hell people play without a HUD. My shove on Lock was dead standard versus two typical players, but one look at the raise first stats would tell you that shoving was a disaster. That shove cost me the tournament and $1,000, but could you imagine at The Sunday Million what you’re giving up with not knowing how to use a HUD or having a database?

This is off topic, but I was thinking about how fun it was to use the HUD on iPoker turbos. Then it occurred to me some of the smaller turbos there have better structures than Pokerstars major final tables. I made the Nightly Fifty Grand final tables on Thursday and Friday night (braaaaag!) but couldn’t get moving at either of them. I just was so shortstacked and so was most of the field. All their tournaments now pay out like 18% to first, the structure feels like a turbo at the end…I mean its a great strategy for running a poker site. Give everyone their buy in back, a slap on the ass, and a just enough to get raked again. Stars doesn’t want the best players taking all the money out of their games then quitting. They want us all grinding forever for our 30k a year.

It’s just so frustrating to remember three years ago final tabling the Nightly Hundred and being 50 BBs deep with a bunch of others at the final table. Getting into those mind games was so fun. But the way they have it structured now a lot of players can survive to the final table. I guess its good business on Pokerstars part but damn it annoys me as a player.

***

Damn, just got back from Saturday night church and can’t remember what I was writing about.

My backer hit me up to tell me I made an accounting error. I groaned out loud. I do that all the time. I’m good at making little plastic castles of chips build up, not counting what’s in the castle.

He then told me I counted one number twice and I forgot to pay myself $2K that was mine. Wow. Nice to have a backer looking out for you like that.

I feel stupid being happy about that though. It’s like I took 2K in hundreds, hid it when I was really high, then found it underneath a sofa I was moving years later and got all excited to find it. I won a retarded Easter egg hunt, except for the retarded kids probably could have done it faster. The money was always mine, I was just too stupid to hold onto it. And I’m dead sober and have no excuse for being that dumb.

Hah, a friend of a friend of mine actually did what I described above. Except for it was 7k and he didn’t notice it for six months. And his life roll couldn’t have been more than three times that at the time. Don’t do drugs kids.

***

I’m feeling good about the grind. Had a great start to 2012, then got my ass handed to me in Stars turbos. I’m making all that up now. I’m really comfortable in my new house. Making money, chilling, enjoying. I just feel on. I’m real excited for tomorrow’s Sunday. I can’t wait to play. And that’s how it should be.

My Plugs: Check out my vids at Pocketfives Training, hit me up for lessons at assassinatocoaching@gmail.com, see other stuff I write with my friends at www.pokerheadrush.com, and follow my Twitter at TheAssassinato

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Going to try to blog more regularly, just as a way to keep motivated. I get a lot of positive feedback on pretty much every blog I write, so getting the results out there along with some daily thoughts is nice. It makes me stay competitive too, reporting each score. I’ve been a stomping a bit lately and I want to keep that up. I don’t know if I’ll post all these blogs on Pocketfives and Bluff but I’ll get more on Pokerheardrush for sure.

I took 3rd in the $99 10k GTD tournament on Party last night. Had the chip lead three handed, but had a big bluff go wrong and then ran QQ into KK. I felt a little ragged. My internet took a complete dump on me when…it was pretty much the worst time. I went from 25/20 in the Super Tuesday, picking up a ton of pots, being among the chip leaders…to running 9/2 over 50+ hands. My main internet didn’t work, backup, nothing. It wasn’t completely off but I had like two seconds to act after every hand. My computer isn’t super robust but it can handle poker sites, so I knew it was the internet. Of course, an hour later it was fine, but then I flipped out with my shortstack in the 1k.

I was final two tables of the 10r when my internet started crapping out. I don’t think I played bad in it though. I did one ego-driven threebet bluff versus bananazoo that was really unnecessary (but I hadz the ace blocker!). I think tournament players get really too into that when there’s so much money to make just opening at the right times. I lost 8-8 to K-5 though and that’s what really crippled me, then ran A-10 into A-Q and bricked 9 outs on the turn and river.

Thought I was headed towards another monster day, so it was frustrating, but I guess that happens.

I got two lessons done this morning. Got two done on Monday. Had one scheduled for yesterday but Paypal wasn’t being friendly so we rescheduled. I think sometimes I might be making more money if I just focused on poker, but the stable money helps things so much. When I worked as a security guard I’d have to pull a double shift, 16 hours, to make what I make in an hour now. I don’t get any cut of what I make either when I’m in makeup, so I need to pay the bills, save up money, build with my other ventures. The articles, training videos, lessons…it all adds up. I’m addicted to it really, and working on all of that makes my game better. I just don’t think I’ll ever make a run at the rankings.

I also just skip times. Like I’m about to go with my girlfriend to a nearby park to take my poodle for a run with us. I respect the hell out of Naza114 and his monstrous 80 hour weeks with mad results, but I just don’t think its in me. I want to play Playstation. Read a book. Watch movies. Run around in a park. Go eat a family dinner. Hang out with my girlfriend.

I just don’t have the enthusiasm I once did either. Like I love my job, you can’t separate a man from what his passion is, but I used to feel like I was waking up to Christmas day every morning when I was 19. Maybe I need to get back on my own again to feel that way, but back then I didn’t play a buy-in over 50 dollars. Now I’ve come short at 5 different huge live events, final tabled most online majors…the pleasure centers are kind of burned out. I’d need a huge score to feel that ecstatic again.

I have fun and enjoy playing when I play now but its putting in your hours at Space Invaders. It’s fun, but it’s still my job. It’s a little repetitive after all these years. I still love it but you know…

Whatever. I’m on it. I made the necessary adjustments. I’m up like 20k the last week, and I think with what I’ve implemented that’s going to keep up.

Probably put in a session today and tomorrow after another couple hours of lessons. Then take a day off on Friday. It’s just kind of annoying, I want to play a lot and compete, but by the time I get to my day off there’s 30+ emails to respond to and all these people whining I didn’t get back to them sooner. I end up fitting in another lesson and answering emails and I end up taking half a day off. I should really get a solid day to relax. Maybe make a rule not to touch my computer. I’d probably be more refreshed for the weekend sessions.

I hope I don’t sound like I’m complaining Things have been going great lately. I’m just trying to figure out how to play and win more, as always. I always take a little too much on my plate, but the money’s real good right now and things are going really well. Just hoping to post some more numbers soon.

I just feel tired…after two sessions in three days. Sure one was 17 hours…I guess I’ve played 27 hours in three days, which isn’t nothing, but damn – it used to be so easy Getting a bit older I guess.

That’s why I love the lessons. Talking poker with players and challenging myself to find new ways to make them better makes me stay sharp. Running in the sun helps a lot too. Got one today. Going to go do the other, then put in a session.

My Plugs: Check out my vids at Pocketfives Training, hit me up for lessons at assassinatocoaching@gmail.com, see other stuff I write with my friends at www.pokerheadrush.com, and follow my Twitter at TheAssassinato

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Hope you guys will like the momentary Jonathan Little takeover we have going on at Pokerheadrush. You can read a ton of great entries from his new book for free on the site. I hope you guys find his writing as entertaining and informative as I found it. Anyways, on with the regular programming…

Sorry it’s been a little while.

The last week in Costa Rica was Holy Week, so nobody worked and all my CR family wanted to hang out. I was feeling lazy, so my girlfriend and I went to Jaco beach and chilled out for a couple days and swam in the waves. Then her brother wanted to come along with a friend so we drove back, hung out for a day or two at home, and then went back to Jaco beach.

Then after getting home I realized my visa in Costa Rica was about to expire and it was a little late to file for an extension. So I booked a last minute flight to Bocas Del Toro, and I’ve been spending the last four days here. I have the easiest life of anyone I know.

I didn’t even pay anything for the flight and hotel. Nature Air couldn’t get me to Nicaragua some months ago, so they ended up giving me free tickets. My girlfriend is so charming with people, I have no idea how she did it. We got round trip tickets for free and a little off the hotel. I ended up getting 80% of a whole vacation paid for when Nature Air just couldn’t get me on on leg of my trip…which was kind of a big deal at the time, because I had to leave to renew my visa, but normally I expect to get nothing. My girl’s just smart and seems to laugh with the ticos till they help us.

Bocas Del Toro has been fun, even if everything is overpriced and all the locals are complete assholes. It’s a little island with a large Carribean influence.I’m so used to everyone clowning around in Costa Rica. It’s weird to fly 40 minutes and be in a different world.
The houses are those pale tropical colors and always on stilts, like the Bahamas. Water’s beautiful and that tangerine blue you see in the Carribean. There’s lots of sea stars and tropical fish gliding around.

Still, not a ton to do here. Main town is interesting to see once but then it gets old paying $4.00 for a juice that’s twenty cents where the locals eat. It’s just so far to where the locals really chill, and everyone assures me my white American butt will get slaughtered. Not that I take that that seriously, but I got my girlfriend with me, probably better not to risk it and a 2 hour walk.

I like Costa Rica and Nicaragua a lot more. It’s weird how countries so close to each other can be so different. People are so happy in Costa Rica, then when I’m in a neighboring country the Spanish is way different and everyone seems to be grunting at me. Nicaraguans can be different. They aren’t mean they just are more like people from Seattle – disaffected and really couldn’t care less. You say thanks to their face and smile and they’ll begrudgingly smile back, and they will go out of their way to help you find a place. A lot of the locals are really nice. Panamanians in Bocos Del Toro really seem to hate the fact I’m here, despite the fact the fact I’m paying $25 for a slop of shit that would cost $2.20 in the worst restaurant on the main land. I sat down in three different restaurants and just got stared at by the waiting staff for 20 minutes before I left. When I say gracias to someone’s face they look away from me.

There’s some nice restaurants, cool beaches (Playa Estrellas was really cool), and real tranquil views. I enjoyed myself. But damn people in the Bahamas are way nicer.

I guess I wouldn’t love it if my home land got overrun by a bunch of disrespectful people that didn’t even look like me. I remember living in Malta, talking to the locals after they had a few beers in them. I couldn’t imagine growing up in such a culturally rich land, and then in ten years some local kids can’t even speak Maltese because they’re forced to speak English everywhere. How pissed would that make me, to see my kids swallowed up by popular rule when I live thousands of miles away.

Anyway, off my soapbox. I hope you didn’t expect anything particularly coherent for my first blog in a couple weeks. I’ve been working my ass off on some articles and that’s taken all the eloquent writing out of me. I originally was starting a piece on Bluff, you know, because I’m a workaholic and I can’t just walk around in the beaches, I have to take my coffee underneath an umbrella while it’s ocean raining and write too. Something about the caffeine, the sea air, the sun, and the subject just got me moving, and I wrote like six pages – and I’m not done. I don’t know how to publish it, but the piece comes at a good time. I’ve been happy with my video and lesson production. I feel like I’ve been putting a ton of work in that, and my students are being taught everything. I’ve not been fleshing out the writing portion of my work however. I didn’t have a lot of things structured with the publishers, and I wasn’t setting aside time for it like I should have. I published articles I’m proud of but I haven’t been tying in everything like I should have. I could be doing a lot more for myself and Pocketfives Training if I changed a few things up.

I grew up just playing cards when I woke up. Making videos, doing lessons for people, consulting, working on multiple websites, printing articles, tying it all together to make each one work better – that’s new to me. But it’s fun, it’s a new challenge, and I like getting up in the morning to all of this now.

It’s nice taking a day to write when I don’t feel like playing, or doing some videos when I feel like honestly bashing myself when I review. I guess it doesn’t do me much good in the rankings, but I guess I should feel good with my 170ish ranking given my lower volume. I’m looking forward to stepping it up when I get home. I always say that but I’m refreshed after the Costa Rican holiday weeks. I’m so lucky to just be able to chill in the sun when my friends and girlfriend are available.

One thing that’s been helping me a lot is this new exercise machine my girlfriend got for me. It’s one of those running machines with handles for pumping your arms a little too. I do some push-ups each day but really it’s just to prevent myself from looking like a string bean. This machine tying in some weights with running helps me a lot, because I’m really addicted to the runner’s high. Working out inside my house means I’m not prone to burning out during a particularly hot San Jose today, and I can watch training videos while I’m working out.I can watch two or three each day. I haven’t been able to watch that many vids ever. It’s hard for me to sit still when I’ve been at the computer all day really. Moving while I watch helps a lot.

By the way, you should all check out the Apestyles/Stevie444 vids on Pocketfives Training. Just watched through those and really enjoyed it. Their personalities and analysis are entertaining and informative. A lot of good thoughts, it really helped me warm my mind up in the morning.

I’ve needed the warm up too. I had the bright idea of sending a box of a 100 5 hour energy shots to myself. An addict’s always an addict. I never drink more than the odd beer now, and I haven’t smoked in a year plus, but like every friend I know who just got out of rehab I’m doing something else. My addictions seem to be work, food, running and caffeine. I take a 5 hour energy shot practically every morning before I work out, then put in 1.5 hours of running/light weight lifting, then I work and drink coffee/water all day.

Anyways, I sent myself a box of a 100 energy drinks. Got them for real cheap, sweet. Then has to buy 30 bucks for shipping. All right, I’m fine. Then the box gets to customs here. 300 dollars for importing them. Oh and I need to go to the doctor and get a physical saying I’m healthy enough to drink them. Aye yaye yaye, I get why they’re not allowed here anymore.

Ha, “rehab.” That word reminds me. I dated this Muslim girl for 4+ years, the only other serious relationship I’ve ever had. When we broke she moved with her family to Egypt, to a city called “Rehab” but pronounced “Rii Haaawb.” Of course, I conveniently forgot that pronunciation when her friends asked me what happened with the relationship and where she was. “She’s in rehab,” I’d answer, with a real glum face, then look away. Good thing with Asians (and 90% of our mutual friends were Asian) is that drug addiction seems to be so serious to them that they never asked any follow up questions…it’s like I announced she died. Then a few months later I got an angry phone call from her, but I couldn’t stop giggling throughout the whole thing.

***
Got back home a few days ago. Scheduled 7 lessons for this week that I’m back, because I feel recharged. Hit me up at assassinatocoaching@gmail.com if you want to study cards with me. On Saturday went to one of my girlfriend’s friends wedding. The bride seriously asked me before I attended “do you even own any nice clothes?” Guess I must really dress like crap when I’m in my office.

Sunday I had another killer session. Been feeling really good when I played lately. I was drowning playing mostly on Stars while my Moneybookers got verified. I’m so glad to be playing on a variety of sites now. Over the last four sessions I’ve played I’m made 12 final tables with five wins. Last night’s last win was especially exciting. Over 17 hours I’d made five final tables and won at two of them. The last one was the Merge High Roller. I love this tournament because first is 15k and 3rd is 6k. None of that flat Stars payout “give every dumb shit grinder a buck to get raked” structure. I could just raise and raise and raise when I got the chip lead six handed, and nobody really played back at me.

That’s not to say the players weren’t good. It’s just when the payout structures more top heavy you can’t just spew out as easily, because 6th is the same as 4th.

I think Merge changed the structure of the tournament, which bugs me. It was shorter stacked then the last couple times I made that final table, but still there was a lot of play leading up to it. It was a fun tournament to play, and I ran extremely well to finish it out.

I feel really good. I went on some absurd downswing while I was moving houses and taking care of some other things. Now a lot of things are handled and I seem to be rallying back right before SCOOP. I think I was playing bad. I was just frustrated. I’m glad I took some time to review my game. I must have gone through 20+ hand histories. I found some key adjustments, took some time off to get my mind right, then came back. That was before this four session run I got going on.

I think everybody gets into ruts in poker. You just have to get out of it by staying hard on yourself and not on other players, and making time to examine your game.

It really fuels me competitively to find something I may think the top 30 Stars regs are missing, and costing themselves tens of thousands by doing. Then the first four sessions I implement I make 25K.
Then again, they must be doing something really right I’m missing to make more on that site than I do, so I have some more studying to do.

Or maybe Stars structures really are just as much as a crapshoot as I think they are.

My Plugs: Check out my vids at Pocketfives Training, hit me up for lessons at [email]assassinatocoaching@gmail.com[/email], see other stuff I write with my friends at [url]www.pokerheadrush.com[/url], and follow my Twitter at TheAssassinato

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I remember when this game was so simple. I woke up in my dumpy apartment in Seattle, I ran eight miles, then I came home and played tournaments for 12 hours six days a week…and I loved every minute of it. I never played a buy-in over $50.00 but I still ran up a huge roll. When I felt like it there was a whole college town and inner city community college to hang out in. Smoke, check out some weird foreign flick at one of the five movie theaters within walking distance, pass out reading something at a book store/tea shop. Get a drink from the Chinese or Korean restaurant that never IDed me. It was a pretty trippy existence, real bohemian. I felt like I learned a lot and enjoyed a lot.

Now man, I still love my job, but my life isn’t so simple right now. I feel like I’m battling everyone to just keep what’s mine, and I can never settle down and grind. Business ventures are a war. The USA doesn’t seem to like me too much as far as I can tell from my recent dealings with them. I have a bank account frozen for literally no reason. I have to go get another document to open a poker account of mine. Costa Rica is saying they could kick me out of the country because I just keep renewing my visa and coming back here. I can’t work in my home country, so that’s a bit of a problem. I lost a dispute over my unlawful deportation and subsequent arbitrary $1,000 charge TACA airlines gave me (when they said straight to my face they would not charge me anything) , a $1,000 charge I refuse to pay for half a year, but looks awful as long as it’s outstanding…and I just decided to pay it, so that’s pissing me off. Computer or internet’s on the fritz. All this and then I just got this painful as hell cavity.

There’s a lot of businesses, people, things, annoyances…and everyone has their hand out. Always. I can’t make it go away by ignoring it, so I usually end up just paying for it, but at some point it makes you sick. Nobody was there for me a year and a half ago when I was down and out, no one but God, my family, my girlfriend’s family, my girlfriend, and Jack Welch. While they’re a hell of a team, once I have money again magically a hundred other people come back around. Then at some point the government wants this, or this open ticket you bought for immigration reasons is expired for no reason, or if you want this to actually work you need to pay a little extra, or if you want this actually fixed and not some half-assed job you have to pay more than you previously agreed or call the guy eighteen thousand times, or hey I really can’t pay you back what I owe you. It’s too much work to fight it for a hundred dollars here, a hundred there, a grand here, but it all adds up, and I don’t nickel and dime people like this so I don’t understand. I should be the one pulling this, not them, I didn’t grow up with money. I don’t know what their excuse is. This adds up and it’s annoying. I’ve accepted most people are selfish and lazy and do enough to just get by, but…I still don’t get it.

And over the last month I’ve equaled my greatest downswing in online tournaments, 50Kish. The last times I reached that number it took me four months and I was on drugs most of the time. Now I feel like I’ve been playing very well normally, and well, running and playing like crap when the time comes. So that’s a source of great frustration.

This is what I come home to after a couple days in the beach. Went to Playa Jaco, ate a lot of good natural food, saw a couple of natural beaches, hung out with my girl, chilled by the pool, had a great time. But the second I walk back into this office all of the above is staring me in the face and all I can think of is “ugh.”

I mean, this is why a lot of people do drugs. I do pretty well by anyone’s standards financially, I live pretty comfortable. This is still stressful as hell. I’d love an escape. I can’t imagine how tough it is for all my American friends, just drowning in that economy and everything be priced for the rich in the Seattle area. High as hell unemployment rate, the four year degrees they paid six figures to get practically useless. I wouldn’t care if I was in their situation, of course I’d act up. At least I can still straighten my life out, I feel blessed for that.

The weirder thing is I’ve never dealt with life really head on. I’ve always had some crutch. It’s different.

If I want to get my act together, do right by the girl who got me sober, have the life I know I’m capable of achieving, I don’t want to feel like garbage in the mornings. So every day I just try to do something to better my work, do my work, do something for my girl, pray, do something for my health/body, help my family with something, do something to untangle this mess I’m in, do something to make sure the cash comes in through other avenues, and then finally do something for myself at the end of the day…be it reading something, watching something, or just some extra wind sprints at night to relax. If I can do one in each category each day that’s a pretty full day, I figure, and if I keep doing all this every day things will solve themselves. If I just think about every single thing I need to work on I get dizzy.

I hesitate to write about, well, when poker isn’t just a dream all the time But I feel better and in control when I just write about them a bit. In general I feel in control but its…it gives you an idea of what you’re facing when you can just read through it. Also, I guess my thing has always been how much I put myself out there with my blog. People following me for years have turned around and partnered with me on really fruitful business deals. They said they felt like they already knew me, because of the blog.

It’s just more of what I’m a fan of. I like hip hop where the person really goes into their life, their work, their actual stresses. When they speak of their triumphs it feels realer, less like bragging. I’d like to think when people order a lesson from me they feel like they’re already familiar with the coach a little, which is a huge advantage for me. They know they’ll get the work up on their game that they want when they read strategy articles of mine and say “that’s the kind of thinking I want to incorporate.” They know they can deal with me as a person from the blog. It’s hard to spend hard-earned money on a coach, so I want people to know it’s worth it, and I hope I communicate that.

What’s really weird to me is I’m not all that stressed by all that’s going on around me. Sure, I have moments…like today, I paid someone to come fix something and they’ve been putting off finishing the job for a week, and then email inbox is full, tons of things need to be dealt with…yeah I go “argh”, but really I feel way more in control than I’ve ever felt.

Before even when I had way more money I felt way more out of control. Way way more stressed and in pain, much closer to freaking out. I could have a 100k liquid and be worried I’d be broke next month. Now there’s pretty much no chance of me going broke. I feel like I have a pretty full plate right now, as much as I’ve ever had in my career. I feel like it’s even harder to make money now with all the talented players. And yet…I’m not really worried. Money coming in…even when I’m not winning, damn I never expected that out of professional poker.

My dream when I got into this was to just make enough to have a place to sleep in Seattle. I hoped to have a girlfriend that I was chill with. I just wanted enough money to pay for my round or to get a pair of jeans I wanted. I just didn’t want to grow up to be on food stamps anymore. I didn’t want to be known as the broke one among my friends. I never thought I’d live in condos in Seoul or beach mansions in Costa Rica.

Now maybe I don’t spew as much monetarily each month but this beat still comes on in my head every time I wake up in my house: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQ3AfAunEEo

Not that I have the money I used to have or even that big of a place but everything feels so chill. My girlfriend’s aunt comes over to help me with the cleaning, and is nice enough to bring me a Tico breakfast and fresh Costa Rican coffee for me while I’m working. My girlfriend and I take the dog to a forest trail near here, and run him around in the sun. When we’re finished we drink fresh coconut juice out of the coconut, or go hang out with the family at her Grandma’s house, and lol, yeah there’s always food there too.

Working from a 30″ screen for the first time. Nice office. Ton of video games and cable when I get bored. Walk into the library, pick something. Got every TV series and movie I could think of on the hard drive. Getting new students through new interviews. Beach only an hour car ride away. Publishing videos. Getting that stable money. Putting money in savings.

I don’t have a “balla roll” anymore but I have more than I’ve ever had, even when I was stupid rich. I never had a fam or a girl who supports me. I’ve never actually taken my meds for this long.

I know the bipolar nature of this blog must be weird, but my own bipolar thoughts have been perplexing me lately. On one hand I feel like “damn, this is a lot.” And at some point I admit I go “man I’m done with this.” I was fighting for my Stars account two years ago when the Washington state thing happened. Then I moved everything to Cali. Then Black Friday happened. Then I moved everything to Costa Rica. Not in time to get my Full Tilt money. Stars doesn’t believe I live in CR even after Poker Hispano photographs the house. While my Pakistani friend just walks into a Costa Rican bank and gets an account in ten minutes I’m given the runaround by three or four banks. I call ahead, bring in my docs, and then get turned away. Tellers seem to lie to me so they don’t have to deal with me. I press on and they act like I just ran into the place with a gun. Then I found out, oh yeah, I actually was right, and everyone was lying to me. No apology. And the whole time I’m thinking, “I know most people don’t deal with this.” I bubble my fifth major live tournament final table. My house starts falling apart so I have to move. And on, and on.

And I remember when I was eighteen and it was just wake up, play, and your home country hasn’t forsaken you. You even have Neteller still.

Then again I’m taking trips to the Bahamas and living well in Costa Rica, so I have no right to complain. I sometimes do it, but it’s so dumb. I’m pretty happy with how things are going, despite downswings and headaches. The older I get the more I realize as long as your home life is balanced work problems are really nothing. And oh yeah, save. You feel a lot more secure when you’re socking away stable money from other ventures. It’s a relief to just focus on your work instead of wondering how you’re going to pay for this or that.

I guess I got frustrated because there was just more hold-ups and I haven’t been running that well. All you can do I guess is go in the next day and try to work harder, and wish your opponents well. Just be happy for the pursuit, and remember nothing satisfying ever came easy.

Gonna put in a small sesh today, should be playing a longer and more diverse schedule within a couple days, really looking forward to that. Also, I got a bunch of Pocketfives vids coming out, which I really put a ton of time and thought into, so I think you guys would really like them. Check them out if you get a chance.

Take care till next time, good luck to all of you.

My Plugs: Check out my vids at Pocketfives Training, hit me up for lessons at assassinatocoaching@gmail.com, see other stuff I write with my friends at www.pokerheadrush.com, and follow my Twitter at TheAssassinato

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Someone sent me a blog I wrote when I was 20. It said if at 24 I was still doing the same thing I would quit poker. Well, I’m a liar.

I got the money I thought at the time I would soon deserve. What I didn’t realize was holding onto what you make in poker is the whole point of being professional.

Until now, I’ve been a kid who is good at cards, and has traveled the world on that skill. I’ve not been a professional.

I saw a Law and Order: SVU episode last night. In it a schizophrenic rapes a young girl, but believes he actually saved her from the same rape. Everyone looks morose when in the courtroom he shouts out his late sister’s name, raving that he saved her.

The whole episode the TV doctors are pleading with him to take his medication. The medication he was supposed to take is what I take daily. Ugh.

I read what I wrote, public and private, during the last five years, and at no point do I sense I really saw reality. I have vivid recollections of conversations that never happened. I have no memory of many things tens of people swear I did. This is not comforting.

In the Law and Order episode the bad TV actor, whose biggest role I think was being the first murderer aprehended in Minority Report, talks about why he stopped taking his meds, my meds. He said it made him feel like he was in wet cement all day. He couldn’t form a thought or finish a sentence.

I definitely was scary quiet when I started the meds but I feel more balanced now. Still, it takes a lot for me to get running in the morning, where as before I had to run eight miles a day to slightly ease my nervous energy. I often say “really” or “huh” or something similar to not reveal how my mind takes an extra few seconds than it used to. This extra few seconds is great when I don’t want to blurt out the latest racist, elitist, sexist, homophobic, or sadistic thought that went through my head. This is not good when I am having a normal conversation with someone close to me. It sounds like I’m not listening.

“This place sucks, I hate their food.”

“…Really?”

“We were just there, like we literally just walked out. You ate the food, I’m asking your opinion Alex.”

In day to day life the meds seem to help me a lot. I don’t make fun of my students nearly as much as I used to. I’m really relaxed when I work and I seem to work a lot. The biggest difference I’ve seen is in my poker game. It took me several years to roll up my first six figure roll. After I blew said roll I got sober and started taking my meds. It took me only nine months to run up that amount again. That was from scratch, a couple grand I grinded up doing lessons, some 50 NL, some $11 SNGs.

My impulsivity used to undo me at the table. I could fourbet bluff off deep in a major, playing for hundreds of thousands, simply because, “hey, fuck that guy.”

I rolled up another huge roll..then left it on Full Tilt. God I’m smart. Since then I’ve made money, done well, invested semi-wisely, saved some on the side, but I’ve yet to recapture my old position.

This is quite annoying when the first time you made a ton of money you were on drugs, and the second time you made a ton of money you were withdrawing like a fiend. When you’re completely calm and happy, shouldn’t this be much easier?

One thing I’ve been noticing is my push/fold has gone to hell. I was doing very well in the turbos when I got back onto Stars, and I thought that was because I adjusted my push/fold to each opponent, whether they called too wide, didn’t call enough. At some point, for some reason, I started adjusting too harshly, and recently, going over my hand histories, I’m saying to myself “what the hell is this fold, and this?” Because of this I don’t feel all that smart playing the bevy of Stars turbos there are now. I know I’m mostly okay, but the variance in those things doesn’t appreciate okay poker, you need to have your push/fold down. I think I’m going to fire up a ton of close spots and see how well I guess, or find a simulator somewhere.

The more I learn about poker the more I realize there is to learn. The last couple weeks I’ve been sucking at the tables, and as a downswing happens I feel myself getting less attached. This I think is generally a bankroll-saving thing, in that I just stop playing when I’m bored with losing, I don’t feverishly go after my losses. However, I need to actually stop for that to work, and I’ve been putting in some frustrated/uninspired sessions. I don’t think it makes me play different, but the positive focus allows you to see plays or make folds that normally on paper don’t look great. Without that hopeful outlook you kind of play like a hundred other regs.

I just feel like there’s so many things in poker we all do because its common practice, or how we learned to play growing up, that just aren’t optimal. The more I study the more I find.

It’s been occuring to me lately that I need to up my study game tenfold to get to where I want to be financially and professionally. I teach many people, and that keeps me sharp, keeps me looking into things for them, but at some point I need to get out of my own mind. I have all these training videos to look at, all these great pros as friends, and I’m just not using them, or at least not the way I would have when I was 18 and broke. I need to reach out and get off my stable island.

I think it would be fun to blog about as I’m going through learning more, at my…I guess you could say…more advanced stage. I’d hope something that’s new to me might rock the world of someone just starting. But then the selfish question comes up, where’s the profit in it for me? The training vids, the lessons, they’re worth it in my mind, and what I share with people there you can find if you did the same study I did, I just am way better at finding every particular thing you need to work on in an hour session…as opposed to the hundreds of hours I put into it myself.

I live comfortably off my side projects but a part of me doesn’t want to discuss the newer things I’m reading into. They’re very valuable and I don’t see so many regulars using them. Yet, I have no intention of stopping to do training videos, and surely those things will come up there. It just is…I guess its the natural evolution of the game.

I guess you can’t have it both ways. You can’t make money from lessons/videos unless people know you’re really putting real thought into it, and then have people not understand more about your game.

I should make more strategy posts with ideas I’m coming across. Probably would be good to up Pocketfives Training and my personal coaching services.

In general, its just good to write more. As much as this is rambling and repetitive its a line check for me. What am I wasting/using my days on?

Last couple have been enjoyable. Been trying to call my stateside family but seem to be missing them, that’s the only annoying thing. Last Wednesday I threw up another weak session and just decided to take a step back for a few days. Thursday I loaded up on lessons, and then hung out with my girl, watched Boardwalk Empire and The Walking Dead, played some PS2. My local game vendor sells me PS2 games for $2.00 a piece, so I’ve been geeking out hard on that shit on my off hours. Amazing how old games can relax you.

Friday my girlfriend and I were sick of working/being around the house so we went and checked out this coffee plantation and zoo. The zoo was a trip, because in large areas you just walked around the woods and the animals, like deer, turtles, iguanas, swans, a crazy number of butterflies. It was like Alice In Wonderland or something. I couldn’t imagine an American zoo letting you walk around flocks of deer, without you signing fourty different waivers. I liked it a lot, just sitting on the side of a lake, watching a turtle swim around, waving his flipper like “what’s up dude.”

With the 80 things I manage on a daily basis, it’s nice to remind yourself you really aren’t important. My stress is undeserved. I can still get lost in the woods and no one should care.

This morning I made eggs and coffee, my girlfriend and her mom made rice and beans, we all had a breakfast together. Then I went into my office to write this, do lessons, watch training videos.

I think in the few days till my 30″ inch monitor finally gets here I’m going to take it easy at the tables. I’m going to play less tables, almost no turbos, and just focus hard on the tables I have. I think I’m going to film a bunch of tomorrow’s Sunday. Don’t even know what I’ll use but just filming keeps me really in check.

Even when I get my monitor I don’t think I’m going to massively multitable like I used to. I’m enjoying poker more when I think about it more, and when I get all automatic I feel like myself and 200 other regs are all playing a game of Whack-A-Mole, and we’re all pretty quick.

I love the rush of a lot of tables but…I don’t know, when you feel out of sync for a few weeks its not bad to play less tables, focus a little more, and gradually work more tournaments in.

I’ve been in overdrive since the start of the year, determined to make 2012 way better than the Black Friday year before it. Maybe now that I’m in a nicer house and have some money saved I should just take it easy, learn with a more open mind. There’s a lot to learn when you’re not just working the whole time.

Anyways, I’m off to watch some vids.

My Plugs: Check out my vids at Pocketfives Training, hit me up for lessons at assassinatocoaching@gmail.com, see other stuff I write with my friends at www.pokerheadrush.com, and follow my Twitter at TheAssassinato

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When you look for an escape in this game that’s all you end up getting out of it.

I haven’t blogged in a bit, life’s been kind of hectic. I got moved into my new place. I’m pretty happy with it. There’s an office, a library, a big living room, two big bedrooms, bigger kitchen then I had before, washer/dryer area, storage closet, and a big garage. Everything is pretty close, so I can actually have food delivered while I’m playing. There’s a dog park next door, but the first time I took my poodle there he found a way to escape and he ran in front of a bus. Freaked me out a bit. The neighborhood’s quiet. I’m friends with the neighbor’s dog, so he seems to holler extra loud when someone comes near my place now. I’m trying to think of a problem I’ve had with the place but I can’t really come up with one. Nice blank to draw.

I’ve been doing alright, just watching my friends crush for a bit. Naza114 had a triple crown and six final table day last week, so crazy to watch. Kid’s my hero. When I met him he was the most earnest and hard working grinder you could imagine, and he just keeps growing as a player. I really like his game time decisions, how he stays into it. His attitude’s a great reminder of what it takes to be a real professional. He’s just always playing his hardest, every hand, whether he’s playing for a 100k or 1k.

Me, I haven’t been doing too much. A final table here and there, a couple 30rs, won a small small turbo on iPoker, but nothing really clicking. Just had a couple weeks of not really connecting when I needed to, and not making some great decisions. It bugs me because I had a huge rush after PCA, but I didn’t play it well. It’s hard to have a huge huge edge in MTTs anymore, so a lot of your bottom line is determined by how well you manage the good weeks. If you make a few final tables and don’t take the fourth one as seriously you’ll be banging your head against the wall later when you’re not running as well, wondering why you didn’t pay more attention during your good run.

I handled a few real key decisions wrong. Now I’m not running so well.

Well I guess you could make the case going from final two table chip leader to not making the final table of PCA was not running well to begin with, but…I don’t know. You get bored with looking back at some point. Nothing really for you there.

If you really think about it in poker you can go crazy. I’ve finished final two tables of five different Stars live events, I have one final table that I busted out quickly from. I can rethink so many fourbet jams into the nuts, suckouts, spewy threebet bluffs, whatever. I can go “if this and this worked out I’m at so and so’s earnings”. I admit it I’ve done it before, but the more I work on poker as an actual job the more I just see the pointlessness in looking back, unless it’s to learn how you can be better going forward. I’ve been playing tournaments professionally for five years, and watched the whole world of it get flipped around. There’s tons of guys that look back, to when they were killing it, and just being pissed they don’t have it anymore.

I guess that’s why I’m really trying to get into it this time, and stay positive and open minded. Talking to newer guys helps a lot, because they still have that fire, that wonderment, that “wow I’m making six figures in my early twenties, now how can I really leave my mark?” So many of the guys I used to hang out with are so sarcastic, jaded, and lazy, I can’t stand it. You’re 25 and been around half the world playing for millions of dollars, why keep bumming over variance? Why balk at studying more?

I admit, this last week I kind of felt out of sorts. Just running bad and not thinking clearly, frustrated by so many near hits. Nothing to complain about, just the usual rough patch that comes up with professional gambling. But when you’re inside a house all day and left to your own devices its so easy to get caught up in your head, negative, or tired. There’s a lot of equity in just stepping away from the game for a day to review hand histories and watch some training videos. Or hell, just do something outdoors, go play with your dog in the park for a few hours, ride a bike, whatever, get away from the computer. Then come home and be totally lazy, play some video games, catch up on TV shows. Hang out with your girlfriend or your friends. If it makes you feel closer to 100% the next day its worth the day off to not play “meh” poker for a week.

For a long time after I got sober I felt like I was running against this clock. Playing the games now, I feel so stupid, knowing I was high for most of the years when poker players weren’t that advanced. When I did get my life together momentarily I was always withdrawing, which could be almost as bad. Now to be completely clear minded…poker is so fun now. I love my job. I love learning. I feel like I’m playing so well. It’s just annoying to think about all the years people didn’t have the first clue about poker, and how if I put the kind of study in I’ve been putting in the last two years…man if I did that at the beginning, how much money was out there? Damn.

I’ve never been, in my mind, that remarkable of an MTTer. I’ve blown most of my big opportunities. I blew the huge roll I had. I know a lot of guys like me, who were doing decent a few years ago, who rolled it up into a huge roll and started backing a bunch of their friends. For 90% of them they went broke. A lot of them got strung out. If I wanted to look at them for pointers I’d be pretty worried right now, almost none of them turned it around. A lot of them just seem to grind like a zombie when they do play now, making their $20,000 a year when they’re not drowning in makeup.

I’m trying to look at the new guys who really seem to have a handle on things, and a fresh perspective. Vets are really good to watch too, but I see them pass up on +EV spots simply because they didn’t grow up with it. A lot of them seem to just take the safest possible option on every play, their selective memory telling them they’re more likely to get drawn out on then the other guy. I really want to study some game film of a few of my friends when they’re massively multitabling, see what small spots they pass up on that occupies me too much, what small spots they drill that I don’t pay attention to.

Despite how much more educated the players get new killer players come up every year. I want to know what separates them. What understandings did they come to in their study a year ago that we all missed three years ago. What’s naturally built into them?

I’ve never gone this hard in poker, studying this much every day, and never drinking or smoking because I want that feeling of complete sober calm. I know other players can drink seemingly every night and still play killer sessions the next day but my body is just so weak when it comes to substances, I get wrung out and tense so easily. I’m feeling so damn on when I get the right amount of sleep, put in some push-ups and road work in the morning, eat home cooked meals, and drink Costa Rican coffee and fresh-squeezed orange juice. I really feel like I’m where I need to be, where a grinder should dream to be. I’m just trying to take advantage of it now.

For years I was a real lazy reg. Talking with a few players on Skype for poker discussions I feel is keeping me on my game. They’re all such hard workers, and just winners in their mindset. If they can work toward it they’re going to do it. It motivates me.

Before, I didn’t really care about anything but putting in anything but the standard amount of work, and getting enough money to keep travelling, keep partying. Staying in outer space so I never had to look at the mess I made on the ground. It just wasn’t how I was brought up, to put my all into something. I did at the beginning, but that’s because I was a fanatic about the game. It’s easy to stay focused when you’re living in some apartment complex known for how many people committed suicide there. It’s easy to stay into it when you got back from a stint at commercial fishing, and you realize real men with real families have to put in sixteen hour days putting their life on the line to support their families. After a while in poker la-la land, where all your friends are making six figures and playing credit card roulette for sometimes thousands every night, you become disconnected, spoiled, and rotten.

It’s not till you have only a mattress on the floor, an ash tray, and a thirty dollar desk in some boarded up apartment in San Jose that you realize…what this game means.

It just never made sense to me. My family wasn’t the Brady Bunch, but my mom never told me I couldn’t do something. We just were all into whatever substance we were on at that point. I was a clown in school, annoying. I got good grades in most classes but others I couldn’t wrap my head around. I got to a point in math where I barely was keeping up with the other kids. I probably studied more than most kids in my Japanese class but was the worst student. I didn’t take either subject seriously at the beginning of high school, but when I really put my all into it I was still at the back of the class, confused. I liked poker in school, took it more seriously than anything I’d ever seen, because I thought it was the way out. I never thought I’d be great at it. It just seems to be one of the things I could do okay at. Some kids could always kick my ass, my roommate especially, but I could always start a game in the back of a class and make five or ten bucks.

College never even really came up as a topic between my parents and I, my teachers and I. In a very well-off high school where pretty much everyone was going on to some higher education, I guess that should have bugged me. I just thought about poker as some pipe dream. I knew I’d probably be killing myself at some normal job, looking to get some credits at a community college. Nothing wrong with that, but my family was losing our house, I couldn’t live with my mom anymore, and I was on my own, bumming rooms from my friends, working whatever job I got. I wasn’t sad, I was happy to be on my own, and nobody held me down, but I did kind of have this attitude of “whatever I get is not deserved.”

When I wrote freelance and reviewed video games they’d always take me 1.5x as long to finish as it did for my colleagues. I tried so hard in a lot of classes and barely hung on. I was the slowest learned at a fast food restaurant, I mean, shit, that’s some aloofness/stupidity. My boss when I was commercial fishing I’m pretty sure thought I was retarded at some point, it took me so long to learn anything with my hands. I had this attitude at 18 of, you know, “maybe at 22 I’ll have an okay apartment, be playing poker semi-seriously, have a job I don’t hate, taking some classes, dating a girl whose not 200 pounds.”

Then I’m 19, splitting my time between this high-rise condo in Seoul, and this really nice apartment in Seattle. WTF?

I thought my attitude of whatever comes is extra for me, I don’t deserve anything…I thought it’d make me humble. But I realize you have to be a little entitled in this game, you have to put in enough work that you think you deserve it. Otherwise, you expect nothing, the game’s just going to go past you. And damn it went past me at different times.

I feel bad when I see a bunch of American regs finally get relocated and back on Stars. Their game was a little dated before Black Friday, now it’s garbage. They play full sessions for like a week and then you see them on once in a while. I can’t imagine having some of the entitlement a few of them have, with no work to really back it up. Then you just get your ass handed to you by these new Euro regs who’ve been on, what, a year? Must feel pretty daunting. I guess that’s why a lot of them don’t get over it.

I’m just trying to change what I can change now. Blogging, because writing keeps me into it. Studying with my friends, because it’s keeping me actively updating what I think about poker. Watching Pocketfives Training and Cardrunner vids, trying to get one in a day. Doing five lessons a week. Getting in Pocketfives Training videos. Watching televised poker again because it makes me more of a fan of the game. Ordered my 30″ monitor, it should be here in a few days. Moved to a house with way more security, super high-speed stable internet connections, and more space. Also in a new place I can get some necessary papers for Party Poker, because they don’t seem to like the papers every other site is accepting.

I found a sick line the other day I should have been doing for years. Discovering stuff like that makes me still thrilled to put in work outside of the tables. It might take thirty videos to find that line but if its going to make you thousands over the coming years you’re a fool for not looking for it.

The hardest part is being patient. Sometimes I want things to change all at once, but it’s a gradual process. Real gradual. This last week, I don’t know what was with me, I made a small final table and just couldn’t stay focused, I was so out of it. I have to tell my friends I’m at a final table sometimes, because if they’re watching I can’t check out. I probably wouldn’t have done some of the dumb call downs I did if they were able to go “what in the hell Alex?”

I think that’s the most difficult part of being a reg whose been doing this since I was out of high school. I’ve played so many pointless hands, put in so many worthless hours, grinded myself down so much, gone through so much money – it can all feel pretty routine now. It’s hard to convince your mind you’re really saving money in CDs and percentages of other companies when the other 17 times you made real money you blew it. I don’t feel any of it, which is great deep in a pretty big tournament, awful for a lot of the day-to-day grind that requires active focus. I guess this blog helps that. Reporting to a bunch of strangers what you’re doing makes you a little more accountable. Competing with your friends also makes you want to stay on your game.

I gotta go get my jog in at the local university track and fire up a session. Gl to all of you.

My Plugs: Check out my vids at Pocketfives Training, hit me up for lessons at assassinatocoaching@gmail.com, see other stuff I write with my friends at www.pokerheadrush.com, and follow my Twitter at TheAssassinato

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-$10K on the weekend or something. Fun. See, drop out of school kids! Poker is fun and easy!

I played bad in a few spots, but for the most part I can excuse myself. I just had one of those weekends where I couldn’t hit water if I fell out of a boat. Well, except for in my house, where I ran into actual water.

As if God wanted to give me a sign that moving from this house was a great idea this pipe burst in my yard. To make things more fun I’d just gotten done dropping a deuce in my bathroom, and the broken waterway made it so that I couldn’t flush. All of this was going on during Sundays.

The smell of a flooding system didn’t go away from my bathroom even after the burst pipe was sealed.

The owner of the house has no been to my place more times in the last three days then she was here for the year plus I was living here. She also likes to show up right in the middle of my sessions, unannounced, yelling at me from the street to open the door, because she forgot/lost here keys.

She’s telling people that look at the house all the same things I was told “oh I’m going to build a wall here for security, I’ll clear out this part of the neighbor’s yard for your view, it will all get taken care of.” I didn’t know how to drop this guy a subtle hint.

My girlfriend and I have taken apart the larger furniture, put everything in boxes, put everything by the door. Now we just gotta arrange the move. They weren’t done cleaning my new place yet so we put off moving for a day. Then my girlfriend realized she packed my passport in with a box that was already at the new place, so we had to take a trip there this morning. Man, what difference does a day or two make of cleaning. The place looked so good, and squashed any remaining doubts I had.

For the first time in my life I showed some risk analysis when picking a place to live, and I actually was squeemish signing another lease and dropping first and last month’s rent. This is not normal for me. I usually find some realtor to take advantage of my stupid foreigner ass and give me the most overpriced glossed-over space in the city, and fork over enough to put a down payment on a real house. I’ve rented…let me count…fourteen different places since I turned 18 (I’m 24 now), between Korea, Malta, Seattle, and San Jose. That’s not including Vegas homes or any month-long residence for poker. That’s signed a lease, shook a hand with a landlord, apartment. It’s not I’m a nomad, just kind of a dumb shit. I’d run up complaints with my neighbors, usually involving my drinking or the smell coming from my room, and then when I pissed off the girl I was living with at the time thoroughly I’d bail, because, nothing a new city can’t cure. You don’t have to think when no one around you can ask you questions in your language.

I finally feel on my game. I’m glad I haven’t lived with my girlfriend here in Costa Rica, because I realize now that’s a little too much exposure when you’re coming to understand a person’s rhythms. I also wouldn’t have wanted her to watch me detoxing for a year. Yeah, a whole damn year, I mean the last four months were just like someone was pinching a nerve, but I still woke up with it, had to shake my head hard in the morning to get over it. Probably why I run so much, runner’s high supplements everything.

Thank Jesus for my Seroquel. I heard an addiction medicine specialist refer to it as a tranquilizer. He said me smoking for years was me trying to manufacture the tranquilizing counteraction this drug accomplishes much more efficiently. You know, I love my work, I love working on a project all hours, but that same feeling makes it really difficult to sleep at nights. I think a lot of poker players feel like this. When it’s time to turn off that mind at nights it’s really hard for us. We got good at what we love thinking all the time, not because we want to, but because we have to. Then when it’s time to shut it down, or calm down enough to understand a player who is just starting to play poker, that’s where the difficulty comes in. I mean I have no problem telling people I was a chainsmoker and drinker, because I know most poker players are close to that, and that’s most of the people I talk to. I just opened my Facebook and it was “I was so drunk I missed a day 2″ and then this guy did his first status update in two years, after he blew 300k with his friend when they both got stoned and decided to split action on 200/400. I’m not judging at all, we’re addictive personalities, that stuff is going to happen, you just gotta laugh at it and move on and be more focused. It’s just a trip when you’re trying to get your things together and you realize a lot of your friends who didn’t get it together…well…they’re kind of messed up financially, or living at their Mom’s. Suburban failure. Hell, I messed up big time, I’ve just been lucky enough to have people help me bounce back. But you can’t depend on that. I’m a two time lottery winner just to have that bounce back after the fortune was blown, to have that support when it wasn’t necessarily built in early on.

But yeah I’ve been feeling like I’m really in balance with my meds. Before I couldn’t sleep, then I’d be aching mentally all day, strung out. Then I could sleep like a baby when I started taking my meds, but I’d end up sleeping for 12 hours and being slow as hell some days. Now I sleep eight hours like a baby, and wake up running to do the first things on my list. I’m getting a lot done, and it feels good.

I’m just trying to cut out all the things that slow down. I’m just a total lightweight with everything, and that’s taken a while to get used to. Like yeah it’s fun to have some drinks with my friends, but the next day I can’t work at all. It’s nice to have a smoke but then I end up depending on it, my body can’t take it and move on.

The annoying thing is now is that the more I go without these things, and just drink juice, eat fish, and rice and beans…the less of a tolerance my body seems to have. Beer at a business lunch, I’m crap for four hours. Big business lunch, I’m crap for four hours. I just was practically in a food coma from one burger from Burger King and an iced tea. Man, I used to live off of super size meals. I’d start my days in Malta with a full pizza. I’d go to sleep in Korea after a full Soju and eating Korean BBQ for hours, so yeah, it’s just weird to have this now. The more I pay attention to what I eat, and pretty much cut it out with every vice except for caffeine though, the more my energy level goes up. The more I talk to my awesome set of students the more excited I get for the game. They got so many questions about hands I played, so I can’t just butcher a hand without a reason now, I gotta defend my theories with some good critics.

I don’t know what’s wrong with me. People don’t believe me when I say this, but I was falling asleep at my Sunday Million final table. I just checked out, I don’t know. But you gotta fake it till you feel it. I get way more into an 11r Action Hour final table then I used to get into much bigger final tables. I know the money’s going somewhere useful now, and my friends get me hyped up. They’re all about that grind. Watching them play teaches me a ton too. You get to learn about what other strengths they see in their competition, what other lines they like to take, what other logic they use. I’ve always been in my own little bubble, and I could kick myself for that now. The guys who have taken over poker the last five years always came in teams, Durr and Galfond for instance, just bouncing hands back and forth.

Sometimes I get back in my old habits of, “I don’t care about this man I just want to grind and go home.” But I gotta make an effort to drop that. I gotta get into it, surround myself with my craft. I’ve never cared about other players before. You can’t learn anything from that though. You have to watch other HHs. I went from not watching another player’s hand history in years to watching literally hundreds of full tournaments over the last two years. Big players, complete newbies, all of them, I want to try to understand all of them. I’m really still struggling with a lot of things that weigh on my mind, but I can see a huge difference in my game from even six months ago, and that’s a great start. I was playing terrible, TERRIBLE, after Black Friday, and truthfully before I probably was one of the many countless regs who saw their profits increased tenfold by the 130 million of Full Tilt funny money. I’m going to choose to be appreciative of Full Tilt crumbling, because it’s going to make me a much more grateful and smart grinder.

I want to crack Pocketfives top 100 for the first time. I’ve never ever cared about the rankings, I don’t think I’ve ever even read into how their made, but I got respect for the guy’s at the top of the leaderboard now. I’ve been becoming more a fan of poker the last couple years, now that I’m going over so many hands with my students, and just trying to learn more about the game and love it more. Paying attention to some of these guys rocking the leaderboards is so good for your game. My favorite cat to watch is Bananazoo. Watching Bananazoo play is like “daaaamn”, that kid’s just right so often. Guy’s got sick rhythm and drive. Always such a pain in the ass at the tables, and I mean…I don’t get frustrated often. I respect and give up bets when I have to, but Bananazoo will make you legit pull out your hair. Then there’s guys like Naza114 or what little I’ve seen of Flush Entity. I’m sure they have their private frustrations and battles, but you can’t tell at the tables. They just put in work, seemingly all day every day, and you never see their game struggle under their work load. They’re just all about their work seemingly.

When you watch the real grinders work you realize how much of this game is just talk and a sea of random regs trying to separate themselves with their egos and boasting their one-off scores. It’s hard to stay in this for a long time. You think of who was top 50 a year ago, a year before, a year before that, the names change a lot. I’m sure a lot of them are just appreciating the money they’ve made and taking life slower, but a lot of them just flame out, grind out of their mind till they can’t see straight, or stop caring. I know many of them personally, they’re good guys, but at some point how competitive a job this is wears down a lot of people.

I’ve never really put my all into this. I was always kind of dumbfounded at the money I did make and never really wanted more. Now, I want to prove it to myself I can do it again, after I’ve lost the money a half dozen times. I just can’t let things sit how they are. I can’t accept I made all my money when I was an addict, and blew it all. I can live with myself saying, “a lot of people make mistakes in their teens and early twenties” but that relies on me taking things seriously now.

2012 I got a great start, cashing 70k out the gate with a PCA finish, and then about that much at home online. Got all my makeup paid off and a ton of other things hanging around since Black Friday that were bugging me. Now I’m just trying to iron out EVERYTHING that was bugging me. I was half assing my job and life in general, with this excuse “why should I grind, something else like Black Friday will just happen to me again” or “I shouldn’t upgrade my set up yet.” I kept putting things off to the next day, and then what the hell, half a year’s gone by. I’m trying to blog more frequently to hold myself accountable, to keep this energy up, because damn it’s so easy to half ass things in poker and still make a decent living…until one day everything’s passed you by.

So, first thing was the super secure grind pad. Check. Moving into it will take days, maybe weeks. There’s lots of little things to take care of, installing new high-speed internet, moving 800 boxes, adjusting to the layout, etc. The family who owns the people is really nice, but they lived their for a while with much different amenities than what I want. So they did their laundry a different way, and I actually have a washer and dryer, so I have to install the special plug for the washer. I’m using a different room for an office then they used, so I have to figure out how to get air conditioning in there and other things. All kind of annoying, but it’s nice building up something for your mental stability. A grind solace. Safe. Secure. Spacious. That’s what I want and deserve. That’s going to help me build.

It looked so good today, and they’re not done cleaning. I can’t wait to move in there. Also going to be nice as far as keeping the house clean. My girlfriend’s aunt helps me out, but I have to compensate her for the two hour commute she has going to my old residence. In the new place she can come more often, help me with meals while I’m playing, and there won’t be any dog messes to clean up since my poodle will have an outside area to run around and live in, an area he can’t escape from. Right now, my girlfriend’s aunt can’t come that often, so I end up cleaning the house myself a lot, and I could be using those hours more wisely. I can’t let my dog run around outside because he keeps escaping into the road, and he gots all anxious inside and starts chewing on something I inevitably have to clean up. So ready to be done with that.

The other thing I’m working on tomorrow besides moving is getting a new passport. I want to see my Dad’s family in Brazil sometime in the next couple months, and Brazil’s supposed to be especially nasty about the condition of US Passports. I’m proud of my passport, but it’s gone with me through 30-40 countries or something, and most of the time just getting it’s weak dated cover bent up in my jeans pocket. When the threading started coming undone border officials started threatening me with not letting me in. I blame Asian countries for always randomly arresting white people who don’t have their passport on them. Probably wore it out more than it needed to be.

Anyway, I’d have to renew it in a couple years anyway, so I’m going to get a new one and take care of this passport this time.

Then there’s getting the new monitor, getting money on new accounts, getting my Moneybookers transfer limits up, getting enrolled in school here, getting utility bills in my name finally, and yeah a hundred other things. I’m hoping I can get the majority of them done in the next month so the rest of 2012 I can just spend studying and working my ass off at poker in peace.

My Plugs: Check out my vids at Pocketfives Training, hit me up for lessons at assassinatocoaching@gmail.com, see other stuff I write with my friends at www.pokerheadrush.com, and follow my Twitter at TheAssassinato

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Felt real good to bang out a solid day of work yesterday. I put in five hours of one-on-one lessons and got a bunch of videos done for Pocketfives Training. I slept maybe four hours of good sleep the night before, but somehow that made me feel sordid energetic the whole day. I think I did some good work. I sure seemed to scream at my students more. In the end, it’s just nice to work a day and actually get paid by the hour. It’s crazy to me how I used to just talk cards in the back of broken ass breweries, bowling alleys, and other crap places, mostly because I had nothing else going for me, nothing else to occupy my mind. Now to get paid to talk each hour, I love it. I make a good product with the videos too, I know I put more into what I’m saying than 98% of training videos. I love to learn more about the game, and to be able to teach it means you’ve really mastered it, so I put a lot into those hours.

Today after some meetings I finally got to take a look at this house. It was still being cleaned out to rent, but the place was really big and not much more than what I’m paying now. I mean, all right I’ll just say why I was looking for a new place, my current place is really not secure. I didn’t want to publish that and have somebody maybe making a detour around my neighborhood, or going halfsies with a local here, but yeah I got a lot of things that people would want to have around here. I’ve been doing alright since I got sober. Oddly money seems to stack up when you’re not trying to light it on fire every weekend. The owner here was supposed to do a lot of things, but she informed me if I wanted a wall here that I’d have to pay for it. I have to leave my house unattended often, and there’s enough stuff in here to float someone a Costa Rican salary for a year. Losing all my databases, my scooter, my electronics…oh man it would’ve set me back so much. But hey I found a new place, and I’m going to be here all day for the remaining couple days I’m here, so yeah wooohooo didn’t get robbed for a year.

I love Costa Rica more than any place on Earth but its still Central America and there’s a lot of drug use and poverty. I mean, I hate it when Americans come here and act like they’re in Gomorrah, I dealt with the same things in the states. Actually, Korea had the same kind of security, and I’ve never lived in a more civil country than that. But yeah it’s an unfortunate reality. Electronics carry huge taxes here, so stealing them is like stealing gold, and because of my job and hobbies I have quite a few of them, and I just didn’t feel that good in this house every time I left. That wall never got built by the owner, so someone could just hop over the fence, go around the back, and start working on the bars on the windows.

That being said I left my washer and dryer out on my back patio for six months, and nobody ever took it, so I’m probably just paranoid. Still, I was about to invest a lot of money on new grind equipment, and I didn’t just want a quarter inch bar and some glass separating a thief from a year’s worth of rocks, just laying on a table.

Other thing I didn’t like about here was that the only internet I could get was a data card. I was assured a hundred times people had landline internet in my place before me, but then company after company couldn’t do it for me. The data card worked incredible, actually never went out once for an extended period of time now that I think of it, but if you run a bunch of sites on it I don’t think it’ll hold up. If I have to make a Skype call and I’m running something else it’ll go out for a minute, so if I do want to get on a bunch of different sites I don’t think this will hold out.

My dog also couldn’t run around the big property here. No matter how hard I tried, he found another way to get out onto a busy road. He’s going to have his own outside area at the new place.

Best thing about the new place is just the security. Big dog that freaks out whenever someone comes near, three lines of defense to get into any area of the house, the place is just barricaded. I don’t have to worry about neighborhood kids seeing the TV. Hell, the kids can’t see anything at this place.

It’s like that book Ready Player One. Not to get into specifics but the book follows online grinders of this virtual world, where their currency has become more stable than any world currency. The main character, some white trash kid from a trailer park, barricades himself into an apartment complex meant for a grinder like him. He goes on his mission to save the world from behind his walls, where the overpopulated ravenous world can’t get at him.

Now I’m plugging in more than I ever have. I haven’t grinded this way since I started. I’m loving it way more now. I’m way more calm and investing properly. I’m clearing up where I made mistakes. I’m building toward a future. I’m on my game, and into it.

Only problem with the new place is that I won’t have an acre of property to separate me from my neighbors. No more blasting trance all day.

You know it’s funny, I’m so worried about my house getting cleaned out, but someone would have to get through some bars on windows to do that. If someone wants to swipe a blade at my jugular on the street, hell, I probably won’t be ready for it. I don’t have bars of steel in front of that. With how much mental illness there is on this planet I’m surprised there’s not more murder. It just seems so easy to pull off compared to a lot of crimes. Not easy to escape from, but I have a hard time thinking most people ever consider the consequences of their actions. I’m this paranoid now about protecting what’s mine, but all that keeps you alive is one ticking heart. How many times in your life have you just retched, had a bad day? What’s to stop something vital in you from doing that? Then I think of everything I introduced into my body, the kind of mental illness I surrounded myself with, and man…seems so damn entitled to worry about these THINGS now. Pretty lucky to be tasting fresh air.

Man, mountain air. I’m not super happy to be leaving this place. If I could get security and landline internet I’d love to stay here. Waking up smelling fresh mountain air is a delicacy. That forest smell, walking around in a wood cabin, oh man. I’m going to bring my running shoes to my girlfriend’s parents place when I visit. They live near here, and I love my road work route here that much, that I’m going to visit it from afar. I will really miss waking up to running through these foothills. I’ve been blessed to see some beautiful places on my morning runs around the world. Seoul in winter, along that river in Budapest, forests in the northwest, white sand beaches…but, here might be my favorite. Now I’ll have to go back to running in a city again, or on a treadmill. I hate both. Oh well, maybe I’ll be able to watch training vids or study Spanish on a treadmill. I don’t know.

Whew, just abruptly ran out of gas. I gotta wake up early for my last road work/sessions in this house. Hope walking around all the moving boxes don’t drive me insane.

My Plugs: Check out my vids at Pocketfives Training, hit me up for lessons at assassinatocoaching@gmail.com, see other stuff I write with my friends at www.pokerheadrush.com, and follow my Twitter at TheAssassinato

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