It’s A Boy!

Yesterday I came across some truly great news. We went to the gender ultra sound and we found out we are having a boy! We have an 18 month old girl named Lennon and late this summer we will have another baby boy.

I have sweated some pretty big river cards in my day, but nothing compares to the sweat I had yesterday at the ultrasound appointment. The baby was positioned in such a way that made it very difficult to determine the sex. I sat there feeling as nervous as humanly possible while they tried to determine the sex. It took over 45 minutes of trying to before the ultrasound tech said it was a boy. I always dreamed of having one boy and one girl and my wife and I already agreed that we were only going to have two no matter what the sex. So this was an awfully big moment since I really wanted a son. When the tech finally said we were having a boy, that was definitely a moment I won't soon forget.

One thing that is going to be impossible is to find a name that lives up to our daughter's name. I don't know how many of you know about this story since I told this in my blog over 18 months ago, but we named our daughter Lennon after John Lennon. We picked out the name Lennon just a few days after we found out the sex which was about 5 months before she was born. She was due November 1st, 2009, but ended up popping out more than 3 weeks early on October 9th, 2009 at 10:24AM. I texted some friends to say that she was born and my friend and business partner, Scott, texted me and said that he couldn't believe that my daughter Lennon was born on John Lennon's birthday. I had no idea it was John Lennon's birthday and thought that was a miracle in itself that she was born on the same day as her name sake.

Later that night while my wife was sleeping, I did some research online and tried to figure out what time John Lennon was born. I discovered that John was born on October 9th at 624PM in England. 624 PM in England is 1024AM here in Oregon where Lennon was born, so they were born on the exact same day and time!! And I can prove that I picked this name out for her well in advance because I wrote an entire blog 5 months before she was born about how we picked out her name. So needless to say, that is a pretty extraordinary circumstance revolving around my daughter's birth, and I don't really know how we follow up on picking names after something like that! We have our work cut out for us!

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Poker has been great this month so far. My results online and live have been excellent. Despite taking 2 weeks in March where I vacationed in Laguna Beach and played only a very small amount of poker on the trip, I am still having one of my best months in over a year poker wise. It sure is nice to rake in some big bucks on a short month with my vacation. I am going to get some graphs up of my results poker wise since I wrote Don't Listen To Phil Hellmuth. When I was writing that book, I really had to take a look at my entire poker game and examine it from every angle. In the process of writing the book, I realized that I had many flaws in my game. And since I am never going to put out a book that I don't think will truly help people in a tremendous way, I knew that I basically needed to rip apart my own game in order to write a good book. Sure, I knew I could just write down many of my existing strategies and it would still be an OK book, but I wanted to write something that I thought would be great, not simply OK.

So Paul Hoppe (Co author) and I broke down my game from every angle and rebuilt it. While we did that, we realized a ton of things that we felt simply had to be in the book. So this book is sort of a reflection on the evolution of my own game. And since I wrote Don't Listen To Phil Hellmuth, my win rate is the best it has been since 2007 when I won 10bb/100 (bb = big blinds) on the year over a million + hands. So far I am winning about 8bb/100 since my book was released in paper back. The crazy thing is, when I wrote Treat Your Poker Like A Business, I also had one of my best all time months the month following writing the book. When you have to break things down as much as I do when I write these books, it just really gets your poker mind thinking in the right direction. So who knows, maybe I will keep writing as many of these as I can simply to improve my own game!

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Some dustyschmidt.net notes. First off, the new podcast calledLeatherass On Poker is going really well. We are getting far more downloads than expected, so as a result we are going to take the show much more seriously. We are going to air the show more often than just once a week and mess around with the formatting of the show to give people more of what they want. It is exciting to be a part of this podcast and to see so many people liking the show. If anyone is interested in listening to the show, you can follow us here:

Our 30% off sale on all of my books is coming to a close at the end of the month. For those that missed it, we are running a 30% off sale in honor of my 30th birthday in March (it was March 6th). No codes are needed. If you go to the store, the discount is already applied. So far we have seen an enormous number of people take advantage of this promotion and I want to thank everyone who has.

I also started a "Hand of the Day" where I put up onfacebook my most interesting hand of the day (only on the days I actually play poker). Some of these posts are getting up to 100 comments on my wall, so I know people are liking this. With that in mind, I want to let everyone know who is not already my friend on Facebook, that you can simply friend request me and I will be sure to add you so you can be a part of the discussion. We get some great conversation going since I have over 4,000 friends on there right now, most of them poker players.