Playa Flamingo, Costa Rica

Hey everyone, just here to make a small post….ive been hitting final tables pretty much every day since i came back from the pca.I just won the nightly 100k on stars tonight for 23k so heres to hoping the hot streak continues, im enjoying it big time =).Gl guys, see you around

“I think I see an Angel.”

[1/26/2010 1:37:16 PM] Alexander Fitzgerald: 1/25/2010 9:49:33 PM] Ben (Raventhon): Wait Buki is ft?
[1/25/2010 9:51:31 PM] Alexander Fitzgerald: obv
[1/25/2010 9:51:35 PM] Alexander Fitzgerald: buki’s the shiznit
[1/25/2010 10:03:58 PM] Ben (Raventhon): Fort minorrrrrrr
[1/25/2010 10:04:47 PM] Ben (Raventhon): Bored as shit and checking last.fm is better than rejoining the Mile High Club: Solo Aviator Division
[1/25/2010 11:00:25 PM] Ben (Raventhon): Like honestly I ate at tgi Fridays and I legit feel like piling now
[1/25/2010 11:00:38 PM] Ben (Raventhon): Puking, even
[1/25/2010 11:00:55 PM] Ben (Raventhon): Burger tasted like it was dipped in sugar and fat
[1/25/2010 11:53:00 PM] *** Missed call from Ben (Raventhon). ***
[1/25/2010 11:53:05 PM] Ben (Raventhon): NOTE TO SELF
[1/25/2010 11:53:14 PM] Ben (Raventhon): DO NOT LET PARENTS ARRANGE HOTEL ACCOMODATIONS BECAUSE THEY FORGET
[1/25/2010 11:53:28 PM] Ben (Raventhon): WANDERING STREETS OF BOSTON AT MIDNIGHT LOOKING FOR LODGING
[1/25/2010 11:53:49 PM] Alexander Fitzgerald: oh fuck dude
[1/25/2010 11:53:50 PM] Alexander Fitzgerald: for real?
[1/25/2010 11:54:17 PM] Ben (Raventhon): yes
[1/25/2010 11:54:18 PM] Ben (Raventhon): for real
[1/25/2010 11:54:23 PM] Ben (Raventhon): also, my phone doesn’t work here
[1/25/2010 11:54:36 PM] Ben (Raventhon): so i’m fucking cold skyping my random girl hookup connections at fucking midnight
[1/25/2010 11:54:41 PM] Ben (Raventhon): from an airport internet kiosk
[1/25/2010 11:54:50 PM] Ben (Raventhon): if i land a place to stay tonight i am a fucking golden god

Playa Flamingo, Costa Rica

“Girls say my songs are too strange to shake their groove thang”

I wake up and pace for about thirty minutes thinking, thinking about the hands. Thinking about what I’m going to do. I pace more. I grab a Gatorade bottle from last night and sip what’s left. I smoke.

Adjusting to normal life after what I’ve been through would be called difficult. What I have is something much stranger. And more wonderful.

I wake up in a daze pretty much every day wondering how any of it happened. Then I grit my teeth and work through a number of challenges each day. Somehow I never connect the two. The idea that there are people who wake up and consciously avoid their problems is unbelievable to me. I could never deal with that kind of stress.

My greatest difficulty now is existing in a world that makes the assumption that I am sane and functional.

I’m comforted by the fact this is how most of my friends feel. Hell, this is how most people on Earth feel.

Knowing that I can assume we either live in a world that seeks to profit off of us through created insecurity or that we are all just personally screwed up and full of ourselves. It’s likely a combination of the two.

So I do a review. I look at it as an outside observer. The ending result is always “wow, from Casino Road to this in about four years. One hell of a real life course. Now you actually have a little bit of money to show from it finally. You’re not just a broke fucking grinder living at his girlfriend’s place trying to find new private games to work.”

The problem being that never helps me with – how do I write a business email?

Furthermore how do you write four of them a day when you don’t know how to write one? How do you fit that in when you’d also like to play cards for six hours?

Okay, I’ll Google it. Google and Adult Swim raised me, if I learned how to fix a shower head on Google it can teach me how to write this kind of business letter.

You want to be a writer right? How are you going to put that in?

I guess you could take time off and do it later – that’s what every loser at Starbucks does, don’t you want to be like them? What about the word ‘blowhard’ scares you so much?

You have to learn Spanish how are you going to channel that in? Okay, so you do a Rosetta Stone lesson today and your 1,000 words, cool. How do you feel? Exhausted? Okay, is this a good time to be playing poker? No? If not when are you going to fit these things in? You are usually completely wiped out after a session, so much so that you now have a hard time staying awake reading a book, how in the hell are you going to write anything worth a tin shit in that state? How are you going to study Spanish? Okay, you woke up late today. Should you skip the lessons and writing or shorten your session? Are you waking up on purpose because you subconsciously want a shorter work day?

Whatever, get the lesson in. Shit, the upstairs wireless is fucked. How am I going to watch some training videos in the morning, I never remember to download them the night before. I need to get back on that and quit streaming them. But yeah, write that down somewhere, Ben’s on networking. Fuck, I know I’ll forget it though until I really need it. Okay, get into the grind room, how are all my horses doing? That one’s being having a bad run, how’s he dealing with it? What’s his bankroll at? What games should he be playing? What is he actually playing? How much money have I spent on him, what’s his makeup at? How long will it take to make that back, do I think? When was the last time I checked his sheets? Is he running bad because his mom back home just gave him shit about being a poker player, did his girlfriend break up with him, or does his elbow just really really hurt? How am I going to deal with that money being out for that long? Okay cool, I’ll do this, I’ll re-arrange this to make that work. Shit, I gotta send those emails. Where are those audits from Stars and Tilt? I wish I just kept a spreadsheet from the time I came in, then this would be much easier. I need those sheets for the accountant too. She told me to get a credit card for all of our business expenses, I haven’t done that. How far ahead did I pay the rent here and did I get a receipt for that? Buki’s got it. I got review the house spreadsheets and enter my expenses too, I haven’t done that. I wonder if we’ll get this place after the series. I wonder how far my boys will be along by then. Did I ever hit back Dub B? I meant to tell the guy it was cool for him to come chill here. Did I send that report to my investors? I gotta hit back Jerry about something on Pwnage and I think I have a lesson today. I haven’t sent my lesson log in. I have a back log of lessons. By the way, what else did I need Ben to pick up in the states while he’s there? When’s my next live event? Is my girl coming? When do I need to know that by to get cheaper tickets? Shouldn’t I be like Jaka and have this planned out five months in advance, “why is you clowning dog?” That’s totally within your grasp. Get on your shit. You got your sister’s future coming up, you got your future coming up, your boys are relying on your stupid ass, where’s your head at?

Yo, what?

I used to wake up a little hungover every morning in Seoul, jog, shower, and then kind of tune out. At the time I thought I had a lot of responsibility because I was in deep makeup and not getting out, but I didn’t. I just farted around. I didn’t have a clue how good I had it. I woke up and grinded tournaments. My poor girlfriend at the time had to clean up after me always, I was so messy. I was so lost in my own little world. How I ever get anyone to join me in it is beyond me. I’d wake up in a daze, eat some kimbop and play donkaments. I’d walk up to the top of the hill and write while drinking a beer in a small hut. It was right near a church, and floods of kids would always come out with their parents. Something about happy kids always puts me in a better mood. They’d always come up with their parents and try to talk to me in English, and when I looked as embarrassed talking in Korean they’d laugh hysterically. I wrote the whole outline for the book I’m writing here then, did all my research stealing off of 50 different wireless connections. I wonder what all those signals running through you will do to us long term. I researched and planned it out, 200 pages of notes and outlines. Once it was about 5:00 or 6:00 I could go home and watch a Korean baseball game, or I could go to the PC room and 16-table Cake in front of 10 dizzy Starcraft players. At nights there was always a new bar or club to go to, or if a juicy side game was running at one of the clubs I might just duck into the backroom. Carrying that 2 million won (wan?) at a time was my only responsibility then.

I don’t long for that. It served it’s purpose in my life, it was the dime store adventure I wanted. Living in Korea was exciting and amazing for my writing and poker playing career. I had to relearn finesse poker which I’d largely abandoned in pursuit of mass multitabling. I finally got down and wrote the real boring stuff for my first book, and went through all the growing pains that result from having no clue what I was doing. But yeah, I never had any real responsibilities really, other than make money for myself, which was never something I was bad at since poker.

I compare that time as a ‘professional’ to now and it’s so different. Oh my god, once your whole life is wrapped in it, your friends, your family, everything, that’s way different. I have a lot more money now and way more responsibilities. I let my best friends down now if I screw up. I also love the game and my life more because I am contributing and I think there is something primitive in a man that desires to be supportive.

It’s just so different and I’m still transitioning. I love how I’m doing this right now, and before this next year’s series I should have my life all cleaned up. There were many loose ends I didn’t tend to for a long time. I’m going to beach to work out, I’m going to dentist, I’m going to the therapist. I like how the harder I work now the more the people I love are benefited. I want to help my sister with school, I want to take my boys to the top, I want to provide for the people I love. One day I want to be able to fly every one of my family members and a few friends to spend Christmas with me in my first house in Costa Rica. I would never return these dreams for the boyhood loner fantasy I lived out in Asia. I feel so much more a part of a group that loves me now. It’s just…a very new experience to me. It scares me sometimes. But I love it, for real.

I’m taking a day off today. Probably going to read some comic books, and take my scooter down to the beach so I can jog there. I look pretty hot on it right now. I’m getting skinny, have a big beard starting, douchey ass boatshoes, and a gigantic dike biker’s helmet that says “fuck off” in pink cursive on the back.

Playa Flamingo, Costa Rica

It’s impossible for me to get a session in.

“The price of crack must’ve gone way up, when I see what these dames will do for a buck”

Part of my frustration with the last couple months has been there has been some constant distraction every time I have tried to play. MTTs are not that interesting to me anymore 90% of the time I play them. What brings me joy in my work is seeking perfection, in trying new things out on different players with sound reasoning behind them. That zen-like state I get into when I play cards is probably the biggest reason I am in this game. If you love what you do it’s very easy to work hard at it.

Recently, the last couple months, anything that could come up did. We had connects of ours screw up, which is a pretty big deal in an MTT backing house. We came to Costa Rica hoping to negotiate a reduced price for the holidays in conjunction with a 6 month lease or something till the series. What I instead got was a brash introduction to Costa Rican real estate. I realized many of the people who do business down here are flakes and many could never get a job in the states. They make their money destroying villages and communities Costa Ricans have been living in forever, they put up the biggest piece of shit condo complex you’ve ever seen, then they turn around tell me its a good product and there is no animosity toward me in the community. They try to charge me five times what the actual rate is because of my skin color. Buki’s a fucking fantastic manager but having a Japanese guy is almost as bad as having two white guys. They think they can work all of us.

We were ready to put money down on a house that was pretty damned decent, but it didn’t totally fit our needs. Still we’d interrupted our work looking at 40-50 houses to rent, and this was the best we were finding. We then found out that place had been robbed four times. Goody.

Between all the constant house hunting I was hemorrhaging money like it was nothing. It’s hard to explain to your horses what you’re going through, but soon any note of “it’s all fine” fucking infuriates you. You’re losing money every day, they’re not winning, and you can feel like you’re giving everyone a fucking paid vacation that no one is taking seriously. Of course, it’s complete horseshit, and if they were as down as you you’d probably lose the company, but it’s hard to keep a smile on your face when you and all your horses blank for two months. It’s even harder to be optimistic, but I’d try to so hard to keep my own negativity to myself.

Normally, when my group of horses has not done as great I’ve picked up the slack. As arrogant as it sounds when I put a week in I expect to win a tournament. I expect to do huge things. I expect to make money. You can call me delusional, but delusion is a skill in this game.

I just couldn’t do it here. I’d do my whole morning ritual then the network wouldn’t recognize my computer for two hours. Full Tilt would randomly go off for an hour. UB, when I was chip lead of the 100r on the bubble, just decides it doesn’t like working anymore.

All this and…oh yeah, what I wrote before about my family life and what went on in Seattle.

Then yeah there was this dude I kept at a distance, who closed that gap, and then proved to me why I always kept that gap. In a big big way. In an invading my privacy and life way.

The breaking point came when I took a week off to sort myself out, and did my whole routine in the morning excited to get to the tables. I went to my grind room, registered for everything, and then somebody ran a fucking car into our cable internet provider. Like no shit. I was registered for everything. I lost my shit, straight up. I had chips in a few tournaments and I didn’t even get to fucking play. It’s just more money lit on fire. More money these loser ass MTT regs I could outplay any day of the week don’t fucking deserve. MY FUCKING MONEY.

Then yeah, here, I thought what more could happen? We got back up power supplies, satellite internet, high speed internet from a landline, and my horses know who’s supposed to run for my supplies. I was feeling weird, getting back on the saddle after everything, and then something new happened.

I got food poisoning. I went to vomit it and I couldn’t. Instead it just felt like I had the alien from Alien trying to poke his head out my stomach. For six hours. While I’m playing 1ks and 100rs and shit. I felt short of breath and screwed up most of the time. My judgement was clouded, and I had a hard time thinking through decisions. I’d start checking stats on Hold’em Manager and my vision would blur. I rushed so many decisions and fucked up so bad.

There’s just so much pent up anger in me when it comes to poker. I’m not polite anymore, people run better in this game. All that shit about the long run catches up, it’s bullshit. If I got a huge score three years ago I would’ve had so much to work with, I could be so far right now. I woke up every day, studied videos, played ten hours, and got robbed of that. I made my own mistakes at different times too I know but I have so many fucking bubbles on my own money of major final tables. Like just one would’ve helped me so much, and I had like 50, literally 50, major final table bubbles. I thought I did something so wrong for years, but you know it, it’s bullshit, tournament poker is bullshit. I want to just fucking quit and be a writer sometimes. I’m so sick of everyone in this industry, and how I can only seem to win when my back is against the wall. I handpick my fucking horses and train them myself, and they just get robbed repeatedly. World Series, Super Tuesday, EPTs, fuck I got bubbles in all kid. They always go out firing, giving themselves a great chance to win. The second I drop them they’ll chop something for 500k. I want to scream.

It’s just fucking infuriating. To repeatedly get hyped for it and to just have a time bomb go off in my stomach. I don’t even care that I lost I just wanted to play. My mother was sick every day I was alive, or so she pretty much claimed. I wonder if I just have an awful immune system coming from her or if this shit just does happen to me.

I’m just…so competitive. I want so badly to win. Not just to win I want a couple million before I leave this, and rest assured I intend to leave this fucking game. I don’t want Sheets and Bax numbers, but I like how the guys who have come out from under me are guys like 99nvrlosez and Mcmatto. My horses go on to be respected professionals who are trustworthy. Buki’s going to be the next one. He gets deep every week, and he loves it. He conducts himself with such class. If he doesn’t have a huge huge win here for me in the next six months I’d honestly be very surprised.

I have everything set up here to blow. I’m going to be at every 10k I want, I have the girl of my dreams making me much more emotionally stable, and I’ve cut out the crap from my life. Like I couldn’t come up with a better place for my horses, and last weekend ALL WERE PROFITABLE. I have fucking beasts in my stable.

I just feel spent in this game sometimes. Don’t give me shit about being 22, this is all I’ve had since I was 15.

It’s done everything for me and I just want more. I don’t want to be in this game when I’m 26, not as serious as I am now.

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t love it, but the last three months have pushed me to the end.
But now it’s out of me. Writing is my therapy. You call me a whiner. I call myself responsible. I bitch about what’s on my mind here, which by the way is a super fucking profitable blog now given how much traffic I drive to my training site, and I don’t let it effect me the rest of the day. I stay positive for my guys.

I gotta get to work. I’m done bitching to everyone and no one at the same time. I’m putting in hours the rest of the week for the double week on Tilt then I’m taking a bus to see my girlfriend. It’s like twenty bucks to get from my palace in the boonies, to the hustle and bustle of San Jose, and the cold mountain air is just twenty minutes beyond that. I feel like I take a bus from Hawaii to Seattle.

I think I’m going to go with a two weeks on, four day off schedule soon. Having something to look forward to on the weekends has done a lot for me. I’ve found a lot of peace in this girl and her family’s hospitality, especially after Christmas. I don’t know how so many Costa Ricans are so nice, or why this family has accepted me so willingly, but I thank God for that.

Now that I think of that…everything I just wrote seems so immature, petty, and meaningless. So irrelevant to what’s actually important. I’m just competitive and stupid.

***

Oh yeah, and if you see xnumchuckx at the tables be sure to call him a luckbox. He’s my newest horse, and after only a couple months he shipped his first open, the 5 cubed for (holy shit) $6.5k. He’d had a bunch of close calls but he finally ran well at a final table. So fun to watch a guy get hyped over his first win again.

Currently Listening To:

Viro The Virus - Bud, Sex, and Beers Volume 1,
Viro The Virus - Jersey’s Finest
Akon And Green Lantern - Unreleased CD
Astral Projection - Another World