The Good And Bad Of No Online Poker

My post Black Friday days have sure gone a lot differently than pre Black Friday, mostly for the good fortunately. After both my daughter and my son peeing on me, along with my son spitting up on me several times, my daughter and I made our way to the grocery store. We have been doing a lot of stuff together lately (she's about 2 years old) and it has been pretty fun. She ate an entire apple in the grocery store and did the Hokey Poker in the frozen foods aisle! This is quite a departure from my typical pre Black Friday day when I was mostly grinding high stakes poker online for most of the day.

While poker will forever make me look at money a lot differently than before, I have started to reach a middle ground I believe. My wife and I were reminiscing today about the good old days of online poker. For our first anniversary (which was four years ago last week) we stayed at a posh hotel and went wine tasting. We got pretty drunk and bought a case of wine at every winery we went to. I think I probably spent $4-5k on that 3 day trip and didn't even think twice about it. In fact, I probably made twice that money back within a day or two of returning to the tables. I certainly didn't think much about spending money, but did manage to save the vast majority I made, mostly because I knew a day like Black Friday could come and also because I was playing so much poker I didn't even have time to spend much.

Things are still great even without poker, but I don't care how much I have in the bank, I will never spend more than I have coming in each month. These days I have only a fraction of what I used to make coming in, so I have started to look at prices of things a lot more and almost became physically ill in the grocery store when I realized that the Goat's milk I buy my daughter cost $17 a gallon! She needs to drink a lot of that, since it is her doctor's orders, but geez! Hopefully congress can pull their heads out of their asses soon enough and we can all get back to playing poker again. I need it to pay for milk! Before nothing really bothered me. If our water heater went out, heck, that was just a continuation bet at the games I was playing, no biggie. Or at least that was the way I looked at it. At least until poker comes back, needless to say, that is not how I will be looking at it moving forward.

So long as poker returns, I will probably be forever grateful for poker vanishing overnight. I have gotten the chance to spend so much quality time with my family. My daughter Lennon and I are like best friends these days. We have been doing virtually everything together since my wife is occupied with our newborn. We have water balloon fights, color, watch Elmo and Blue's Clues, go to the water park, do the Hokey Pokey, read books, play with flash cards and countless other things. I even took her to the golf course for the first time and she had a blast. I can just tell the way she is looking at me that she is really enjoying it. She behaves extremely well with me and virtually always has a smile on her face. I can't imagine having more fun than I am having with her. I hope she feels the same way.

Words can not describe how awesome the past few months have been. My golf game has been arguably better than it has ever been. I have been playing a lot more golf lately with some pretty good results. I reached a +4 handicap which is as low as I have ever been. I won my club championship last month and just last week, had probably the most fun I have ever had on the golf course playing in the Idaho Open. I honestly didn't have any expectations going into the event. I just wanted to compete and have fun. I figured the field would be decent, but not great. Boy was I wrong! Turns out the Nationwide Tour was off that week and with the Nationwide tour coming to Boise the following week, many of the tour pros came to the Idaho Open to tune up for the Nationwide event. There were probably 30 players with some level of Nationwide or PGA tour experience and then there was me who was playing in his first pro event since my heart attack 7 years ago haha.

I ended up having (for me anyway) somewhat of a magical week. I started off with a 65 on day 1 to end the day in 3rd place. I followed it up with a 67 on day 2 and found myself in the 2nd to last pairing with a legitimate chance to win with one more great round. I birdied 3 of my first 4 holes of the final round to grab a share of the lead. The wheels came off after that and after a double bogey on the final hole, shot a 73 to come in 18th place. While it probably looks like I choked, I honestly didn't. I was having a great time out there and I am just simply not as good as those guys. I just began playing again a couple of months ago and to even do as well as I did was far beyond anything I even knew I was capable of at this point. It was probably the most positive experience I have had on the golf course in my entire professional career. Going into the last day, I was actually watching a current active PGA Tour pro (Troy Merrit) tee off in front of me because I was beating him! I mean that is sort of like a dream for me. I got to play with Clay Ogden in the final round and he played in the Master's Tournament a few years ago. The whole thing was just nuts. If you want to check out the scores, you can do so by clicking <a href="
http://rmspga.bluegolf.com/bluegolf/rmspga11/event/rmspga1110/contest/1/leaderboard.htm">Idaho Open Scores</a>

In the last month I have had a great time with my students teaching them poker, witnessed the birth of my son which was one of the most powerful experiences of my life, got to play a ton of golf, won the club championship, had a chance to win the Idaho Open with 14 holes to go, and compiled so many positive experiences with my daughter. I just don't know how it could get much better than that. If poker was still around, I am sure I would have just sat with a bunch of miserable people at the WSOP (not everyone is miserable of course, but it sure seems like that when you play those things) and spent most of the rest of the time in front of a computer screen. No thanks!

I do miss the ability to just print money on the computer of course. And I obviously realize that if poker never comes back, at some point I am going to have to do something to get the money train going again, and it likely won't be as fun, easy or as profitable as poker. But for now anyway, I am pretty content to be in the situation I am in.

The good Oregon weather is on its last legs. We are probably about 4-5 weeks away from our standard terrible fall, winter and spring months. Right now I do know at least one thing that I am going to be doing and that is finishing
<a href="http://dustyschmidt.net">Treat Your Poker Like A Business 2</a> . I have toyed around with the idea of also writing another book, but I am not sure if I will or not. I might wait and see if the "Super Committee" will finally agree to license and regulate online poker by the end of the year. As I understand it, they have until their winter recess to find at least 1.5 trillion dollars in budget savings. With poker generating about $50B over 10 years in tax revenue, I am optimistic that they will once and for all pull their heads out of their asses, but I honestly don't know why I am optimistic considering they fuck up just about everything that they get their hands on. But that is a discussion for another day.

Lastly, if anyone was in contact me about coaching and didn't receive a reply, that is because my coaching email address was hacked. Please write me again at Leatherasscoaching@gmail.com And if you are a new prospective student, please write me there as well if you are interested in coaching. I am close to reaching my maximum number of students, so please write me soon if you are interested.