Hello Everyone, it certainly has been a wild swing of things in the poker community just as much as it is at the poker tables. I certainly have had the fortunate blessing to be able to play live poker and doing ok at it. I feel everything happens for a reason and thus will only make us better as poker players.
What can we do in the mean time? Really tough to answer for all of you and its all player dependent. Some of us are single, married, married with kids, single parents, have other forms of income outside of poker and some of us only had poker. I have thought a lot about how this effects us both in our lives and our mental side of it. I can speak for myself that I was and kinda in a sense still worried about everything that has happened. But the truth is, we cannot be worried about what has happened. We can't wait around for things to get better tomorrow, next week, months, or years. When the time comes, it will happen and only waiting around will really have an effect on yourself and others. This can be a reflective and positive period to figure out what to do next. Use the skills you have learned over the course of your poker knowledge. Remember, poker is related to business and correlate with each other if you really think about it. Maybe its a good time to really work on your game if you didn't do so in the past, or maybe its a good time to learn new things. Whatever the case may be, we can only move forward and not backwards. We cannot dwell on what use to be or how it was.
For me, I am continuing to fight and take care of my family. The day they shutdown online poker is the same day I went to play live poker and haven't looked back worried about what I'm going to do next. New opportunities open up, you meet new people, you find new passions in life. Never really thought about it until lately, but I truly do have more time to spend with my family, talk to other people and get out of the house more, have the freedom to do more things, meet new people, see the fresh sunlight everyday here in Florida, and have more time to spend studying and working on my game than I did before. Weird how things work out, because you would think staying at home grinding on the computer in room all day would still give me those things, but in reality, it held less true with my consuming of putting in volume, hours, hands, staring at the computer for hours on end.
I'm going to just keep on going. I have a lot of things to do in between. We are trying to get out of our lease now so that we can move closer to the casino here in Tampa, we are also planning on a family trip back up to New York for about a month as well for a wedding and visit family in July. So I will probably be grinding in Upstate New York at Turning Stone and some of the casino's by the Canadian border. The 2/5NL games are treating me good and I feel like I'm not running bad nor am I running good, but managing to still make things happen. I've been thinking about the 5/10 NL games which is good...so only time will tell.
Anyways, I hope all of you find yourself and if you are still playing online poker here in the USA or outside of the country, keep up the grind and continue to stay ahead of the curve. When that time comes around again for us USA players, we will be ready to rock at the tables again.
Jeff
