Black Friday & Other Ramblings

Sorry for the lack of updates recently, I actually had a blog post mostly written out the day before Black Friday and was going to finish and publish it on that Friday, but then deleted it because it would have been a silly post in light of what had just happened.

It was mostly about NAPT Mohegan Sun, where I got on the feature table with people like Daniel Negreanu, Victor Ramdin, Vanessa Selbst, and Andrew Li who is one of my best friends in poker and goes by the name of azntracker.  It was my first feature table and it was a really loose fun atmosphere and probably would have made for great tv, but who knows if it will ever even be edited into a broadcast at this point.  I'll be sure to link to it if it ever shows up somewhere on the internet.

After we both busted from that tournament, Andrew and I spent a day together that started with going to breakfast at Mohegan Sun with Kevin Thurman, who goes by WizardofAhhs on PokerStars and needbeer on twoplustwo.  It was supposed to be a quick breakfast because Andrew and I were planning on going on a road trip around the New England area that day, but the breakfast ended up lasting around 3 hours because we were having such a good time talking about poker stuff.  Ironically one of the bigger topics was how we all were putting in a lot of volume the last few years on PokerStars since you never know how long the games will last and you might as well make as much money as you can while you are still able to.  Little did we know the games would be unavailable to Americans just 2 days later.

After that Andrew and I drove around Rhode Island and went into Newport and toured a few mansions which was really interesting, then the next day we drove to Boston and had lunch at a restaurant inside Fenway Park. I've been to quite a few baseball stadiums over the years but there really is something majestic about Fenway. It's funny coming from Arizona where people definitely enjoy sports, but people only really care about the teams when they're doing good.  It's just not the same as a city like Boston where everyone is fanatical about it and every radio station talks about sports all the time, even the music stations.  I kind of enjoy that culture where people are so passionate about things like that.

So after Fenway we had a few hours before we had to catch our flights, so we went visit my friend Sam and hung out at his apartment for an hour or two, talking a lot about poker stuff.  It's almost sad thinking about those conversations now, because we were so naive about what was about to happen.

Well then we flew home and the next day, Black Friday happened.  I won't go into the details because many other people could give better accounts of it than I can, but basically the 3 biggest American online poker sites were blocked for Americans by the Department of Justice.

My first reaction was that I was dumb for leaving so much money online, but then I pretty much instantly realized that PokerStars would never screw over its players like that.  And true to form, they initiated payouts about 10 days later, while a certain 2 other sites haven't even begun payments yet 3 weeks later, one of which just filed for bankruptcy.  So much kudos to Stars for the way they've handled the situation so far.

As for me, after a few days of trying to comprehend everything that was happening, I started trying to figure out what I wanted to do now.  If it was possible I wanted to try to relocate in time for SCOOP, so I could attempt to defend my Player of the Year title (and win some money hopefully).  I was really close to getting a place in Vancouver and then in Costa Rica, but it was just stressing me out way too much to try to relocate with a kid and a dog and get set up in a new country in a span of 2 weeks, so a few days ago I decided to just hold off and relax for a while, and it was definitely the right choice.  I'm in a good enough spot financially right now where it doesn't make sense for me to rush into anything.

So now the plan is that we are going to go to Cleveland in a couple weeks and bring the baby to visit with my wife's family, and while we are there we are going to make a road trip to Toronto for a few days to see if it's somewhere we'd want to relocate.  We definitely won't actually relocate until probably August at the earliest though.  Since the WSOP is coming up in a few weeks it really doesn't make much sense to get a place now then come back to Vegas for 6 weeks immediately after that.

We aren't even sure we want to relocate at all yet anyway.  If I can find a way to, I'd rather stay here in the Phoenix area since we just bought a house and we do really like it here.  I might try playing some live cash games after WSOP and see how that goes.  Honestly I don't even know what kind of cash games go in the Phoenix area anymore as I haven't played cash games in the casino since 2004.  I could always fly out to Los Angeles for a few days at a time and play some games at Commerce too.  I don't really know yet, but I'll worry about that after the WSOP is over.  For now I'm just going to relax; no use stressing about it now.

Besides this all just gives me time to hang out more with this little guy, and that's definitely not the worst thing in the world.  :)

One last thing...I have no idea what my future is at PokerStars and with Team Online, but no matter what happens I've thoroughly enjoyed representing the best online poker site in the world.

A Slimmer, Leaner, Healthier Jorj95

So after seeing pictures of myself when Cooper was born along with other motivators such as constantly feeling fatigued and just simply wanting to be healthy as my son grows up, I decided to finally do something about my eating habits.  I weighed myself on Feb 15 for the first time in probably 6 months at least, thinking I would be around 240 or a little more, like the last time I weighed myself, but instead I weighed in at 258.6 pounds (I actually took a picture of the scale but I can't seem to find it now).

After a few minutes of research on the internet, I found the secret of weight loss:

It all seemed so simple.  And me being the type of person who either does something full-scale or not at all, that very day I decided I was going to start eating healthier and probably more importantly, just quit eating huge portions.

The first 5 days or so were really tough, I was probably averaging around 1000-1200 calories a day if I had to guess (I didn't really keep track but I made a point to look at the packaging sometimes).  For comparison I was probably averaging something like 2500-3000 calories a day before that if I had to guess, and probably even more than that on some days when we would go out to eat.  I know 1000 is probably a little lower than what is considered "healthy", but the way I'm wired, there's just no chance I can make gradual changes.  I really needed to kick start it as quickly and as dramatically as possible.  

I wasn't really eating that much healthier at that point but I was cutting my portions in half, and sometimes less than half, and also quit snacking on crap food like Cheez-its late at night.  I was pretty miserable and hungry for a few days and forced myself to go to sleep with a growling stomach a few nights but I got over it pretty quickly.  Gradually I started adding healthier foods to my diet, and also upped my caloric intake a bit and I'm probably averaging something like 1200-1500 a day now, which is definitely more sustainable for the long term.

So anyway after about 7 weeks of making healthier choices, I weighed myself today:

I have to say it's pretty exciting to lose 21 pounds in 7 weeks.  The really crazy thing is that except for those first few days it really hasn't been that hard at all, and in fact I find a lot of foods that I loved before to just be disgusting now.  Also with the baby around, we're just naturally not going out to eat as much, and I'm also just busier during the day so I don't have as much time to think about being hungry.  I'm just super motivated to do this and not as a temporary thing, but as a permanent change to my lifestyle.

I wasn't even going to post this to the blog at first and have hesitated to do so for a few weeks now, because frankly it's somewhat embarrassing that I am as big as I am, but I know if hundreds of people were aware that I'm doing this, that there will be pretty much zero chance that I will fail at this.  Whenever that delicious cookie is staring me in the face, I'll think of my blog readers.  Okay, maybe I'll have one cookie, but even that would be a huge improvement over what I used to do.

My original goal when I started was to get down to 200 pounds by the end of the year, and maybe something like 170 by the end of next year, but that almost seems too easy now.  I really feel like I could get to 190 or even lower by the end of the year without much more effort than I'm already expending on this.  I know the weight gets harder to take off as you lose more so I'm not getting my hopes up too high, and also I don't want to set unattainable goals and set myself up for failure.  But 200 seems more than reasonable, that's only about a pound a week for the rest of the year.  As long as I'm eating reasonable portions every day I can't imagine this will be hard at all to accomplish.

Just for fun here is a recent pic of our family:

Poor Cooper looks like he's trying to take a crap, but he's still pretty cute in my biased opinion.

Big Event Day 3

Lost JJ v AQ and 88 V AJ on consecutive hands, busto'd 4 spots from the money.

Get to hotel room, log into PokerStars to play a couple hours of Super Tuesday hypers, win back my main event buyin, ez game :)

10k bounty shootout starts on Thursday, with day 1A on Thursday and day 1B on Friday.  I won't know which one I'm playing until tomorrow but I'll put it up on Twitter when I find out.

Big Event Day 2

Quick update because I just got back from dinner with Victor Ramdin (who is honestly one of my favorite people in poker, just such a nice genuine person) and one of the tournament directors named Mark, and we split 2 bottles of wine between us and had a ton of seafood and steak, and now I'm really tired and ready to sleep up for tomorrow.

Anyway, I have about 133k chips now which should be just slightly below average, with 69 people left and 56 spots being paid, and we restart at noon tomorrow.

I can't remember any hands right now except that I busted nanonoko with JJ against his 88, which was pretty cool to be honest.  :)  I love nano but I have to admit it was fun to be the one to bust him.  Sorry nano!

Yeah ok time to hit the pillow and get some zzzz's, hopefully I have some rungood in store for myself tomorrow. Also good luck to Victor who is absolutely crushing with over a million chips and is by far the chip leader, and also my friend Ryan Hughes who has something like 230k.

Also I did a quick interview with my good friend Nichoel Jurgens on Live at the Bike tonight.  I don't have the link but I'm sure if you google Live at the Bike it can't be that hard to find.

68-tabling hypers

I was just bored while playing satellites for the Sunday Mil today and since the games were going off like crazy due to the $5mil guarantee, I wanted to see how many tables of Sunday Mil hyperturbos I could get going while still being able to play somewhat well.  I got up around 55-60 a few times then right before the Sunday Mil started I really went for it and registered for everything, and got up to 68 at one point:

The screenshot doesn't show the last 10 or 15 tables because I couldn't make that window any bigger on my laptop.

It was probably kind of dumb to do this because I was misclicking a ton, although I don't think I ever timed out at a table.  Also I'm at the hotel in LA for the tournament and I don't have a backup computer if something were to happen.  But oh well, it worked out, and I made a little bit of money in the process.

Unfortunately I busted the actual Sunday Million tournament about 20 minutes into it in 48,711th place.  The tournament ended up getting nearly 60,000 entrants with a total prize pool of nearly $12 million and a first place prize of over $1.6 million plus a new Lamborghini Gallardo, which is all just so insane for a $215 buyin tournament.

I played day 1 of the Big Event at the Bike in LA yesterday and had a pretty good day, turning the starting stack of 30k into about 72k heading into day 2 tomorrow with the average stack at around 60k.

The most interesting hand of the day at least to me was towards the end of the day, blinds were 300/600 and 75 ante, it got folded around to the small blind who raised to 1600 and I called with 7h5d.  Flop came 872 all spades, he bet 2200 and I called.  Turn came J of clubs, and we both checked.  River was K of spades putting 4 spades on board, he bet 5k and I called pretty quickly, and my hand was good.  It's just one of those hands that looks kind of weird but when you think about it most people aren't value betting all that many hands and are going to be bluffing a lot on that river card.  The only thing that would have made me sick is if he flipped over something like 97 with no spade, but I didn't really think he'd be bluffing with a better hand very often, if at all.

Anyway we start again at noon tomorrow and I'll be updating on Twitter as usual.

New Babies, New Computers, and Old Dogs

Sorry about the lack of updates recently, just been really busy as I'm sure you can understand.

Things have been going absolutely great with the baby so far, much better than I expected actually.  I have to admit I was pretty nervous about how the baby would affect my life and my routine but I think we got lucky.  Cooper is pretty quiet and just sleeps a lot, and really only gets fussy when he's hungry.  I also never realized how much I would enjoy having the kid around.  Everything about him is just so great and I just love spending time with him and seeing him do things, even though he really doesn't do much yet.  And yeah I know I'm probably a little biased but he's so darn cute it's hard not to want to take care of him and be there for him.  I'm not really much of a "baby person" normally but it really is different when it's your own son.

Cooper wondering why daddy is resting his head on him:

Family pic:

Doing one of the things he does best:

Me hanging out in the basement with the baby and the dog (more on the dog later):

And just for fun, here's a pic of me when I was 4 days old:

On the non-baby front, I finally stepped into the modern age of online poker and bought a new computer with a 24" monitor.  I know it's not a super baller setup compared to a lot of the online grinders, but it's a big step for me, because I've been playing on a laptop ever since I started playing online.

My old laptop is there on the left side of the picture.  Actually the story is a little better than that, I first bought this computer about 10 days ago because my old laptop was having some issues and I didn't think it was stable enough to play poker on anymore.  So I bring this computer home and it won't boot up because it doesn't have Windows installed properly so I try to reinstall Windows and it still won't boot up properly.  Finally I have to take it back to Best Buy and have them reload everything on it.  When I take it in they tell me it might take up to 3-4 weeks to fix (to reload Windows properly, wtf?).  So at this point I'm on tilt so I end up buying another laptop while I'm there because I still need a computer to play on while my other new computer is getting fixed, and I don't trust my old laptop enough to play on.

Fast forward about 5 days and they call and say my new computer is ready to be picked up (still not really sure why they quoted me 3-4 weeks originally)  So I bring it home and I still have my new laptop hooked up. That night Deb and I are drinking wine and I accidentally knock my glass over and it gets all my new laptop and soon after smoke starts coming out of it and it reeks of a burnt circuit board so I obviously try to turn it off as quickly as possible.  Luckily I bought the warranty so they should fix it or replace it, but they said 2-3 weeks this time, but with them who knows how long it will really be.


Back to our dog, Peanut.

We've had him for 7 years (Deb actually got him just before she and I met each other) and he's been a great dog around us.  Basically he's just a little snugglebug and he licks a lot.  He doesn't shed or pee in the house or anything like that, and he's pretty easily trainable.  The only big issue with him is that he tends to nip at people's ankles when he's nervous or being protective of us, so we have to watch for that.  But really that was easy enough to guard against in general because we'd just keep him out of situations where he'd be nervous, or obviously on walks or whatever we'd just keep him close to us.

The problem is now that we have a baby, it's so hard to say what he might do.  He's actually been really great around the baby so far and has been sniffing him in a curious, non-aggressive way.  The biggest problem so far has been that when the baby is on our lap, he gets really jealous and will try to nudge his way in.  We've kind of solved that though by making him stay on the floor and he's listened really well so far.  I don't really think there are any issues to worry about for now, but there will definitely be issues once the baby starts moving around on the floor.  Eventually the baby will do something that Peanut doesn't like and Peanut will nip at him.  When he's nipping at an adult's ankles, the worst that can happen is the person gets a scratch, but if he did that to a baby, who knows what could happen.

So in the last few days, Deb and I both came to the realization that we're probably going to have to get rid of him soon.  She's cried about it a few times and I actually cried a little with her once (I can't remember the last time I really cried about anything, probably been since I was a kid), just because it's so sad because we know the dog really means well, it's not like he's a mean dog or anything, but it's hard to imagine him being compatible with the kid.  It's really not his fault or anything.  So we're trying to look for a new home and we're getting a dog trainer to stop by to see if they can help us in the meantime.

Here's one more pic of Peanut humping the PokerStars monkey:

I actually have more I want to blog about but I'll save it for another post in a few days.

Mini Cooper Arrives!

So yeah you may not have seen me at the tables for the last week.  That's because 6:25am on Feb 10, my wife and I welcomed the newest addition to our family!

And now here's Michael Buffer to formally announce his entrance to the world:

"IN THE BLUE CORNER (obv because he's a boy), WEIGHING IN AT 7 POUNDS 6 OUNCES WITH A LENGTH OF 21 1/2 INCHES, COOPER AARON LIND!!!!!!"


Here he is from about 15 minutes after he was born:




A proud Jorj95 holding his son:

Our first family pic:

Cooper is ready to finally go home after being in the hospital a few days:

So we finally got home on Saturday night after being cooped up (pun intended) in the hospital since Tuesday.  It's really good to be home now but wow is our routine different.  The good news is that he likes to sleep a lot, but the bad news is that his "awake time" is between about 2am and 9am, which is when we'd rather be sleeping.

He's actually made quite a name for himself so far in his few days.  He already has a street named after him right by our new house:




He also decided to run for public office. I tried to discourage this since all politicians are scumbags, but you can only control their lives so much before you have to let them be their own person:

Fortunately he parlayed this name recognition into getting his own TV show.  We should be set for life now:

He said he wanted to buy us a car with the money he's making from the show.  I wanted something a little faster, but he insisted on this: