WiltOnTilt's PlusEVPoker.com Blog

If you've been one of the guys like me who has been glued to the various forums hitting refresh between DC, 2+2, and twitter to read more opinions by randoms who have no idea what's going on, then I want to let you know right away that I'm just another random that has no idea what's going to happen.

I feel a little obligated to make a blog post about all of this because it's 3:30am, the pizza is gone, my ice cream is gone, and my weight loss prop bet is also gone.  The 3rd actually evaporated prior to the first two, if you're curious.  My crawfish competitor and I agreed that the current situation is far too stressful to not indulge in our vice of choice.  For him it was alcohol.  For me it was food.

I also feel obligated to warn you that this blog entry, whenever it ends up getting started, will basically be one large whine post, so if you're not into that thing then feel free to move along.

I've been sitting around all day, convincing myself to get off the computer and stop reading all the mess that has gone on today so naturally I head downstairs for dinner and pull out the ipad to stay connected to the stream of speculation.  It hasn't helped the stress level.

For those of you who have been reading the DC thread, you know that I've got a heavy chunk of my bankroll tied up in Stars/FTP/UB.  I'm not as convinced as others that we will get our money.  This is not my first rodeo in having big chunks of my bankroll stolen.  It happened first by Eurolinx when it went down, I had around 250k stolen from me.  I had never in my life (and still never since) ran as hot as I did on that site, only to have it stolen when the site went under. As far as I know nothing yet has happened to that POS who was running the operation.  The next time I got screwed (to be fair, I don't have 100% proof) is in the X*B*L*I*N*K situation where he somehow god modes $11 into over a million on UB.  Although I cannot prove it, I have been trying to go through multiple channels to either do an investigation myself or get an investigation done by a 3rd party.  Despite multiple "ins" I thought I had to get this done (can't get into specifics), it has ended up fruitless.  The guy is literally a massive cheater or runs so situationally hot that he's on the far end of the bell curve and literally the black swan of online poker.  Either way I lost "low" 6 figures in that nosebleed stakes adventure.

Since then, I've had some other 6 figure loss stretches at 50/100nl, but no other situations where I felt cheated or stolen from... until today.

I've got several hundred thousand now stuck in the 3 main sites.  Given my track record on this stuff, I'm not very optimistic about seeing this money.  If I don't get this money back, I'll have well over half million dollars stolen from me from online poker sites.  The thought of that is just daunting.  I've made a lot of money from poker but not the kind of money where the thought of losing this kind of money doesn't just make me sick to my stomach.

Last year was a tough year for me mentally.  A lot of life changes happened and add that to running pretty fucking bad it was extremely stressful.  I was really looking forward to 2011 for a fresh start and a real effort to actually get good at PLO.  After the first quarter of 2011, I was feeling pretty decent about my results for the first part of the year and looking to really dedicate myself to learning PLO.  I pulled out Tom Chambers' PLO book I bought a while ago and really was going to study it hard.  Now this rug has been pulled out from under my feet and I'm just not sure anymore.

Jk3a and I were making a real effort to get a bunch of these inexpensive group coaching lessons going for micro, small, and mid stakes players.  We had this amazing vision of offering high quality coaching for ridiculously cheap prices.  Now that we are about 3/4th the way through the development of that project, spent a lot of time and money, and now we have to take a step back and figure out if this is something we can still justify doing because of the cost to us and now the huge contingent of online poker players that can no longer play (and therefore probably don't want poker coaching).  So what now?

It seems like the hits just keep coming.  Every year it's a new drama bomb that puts a huge boulder in the poker road ahead of me.  I suppose the "half full" view is that despite these boulders, I've still been a successful high stakes poker player and produced content on DC that many people like.  The "half empty" view is much easier to see now though.. and that's clearly the realization/question about how can I possibly achieve my goals to play big poker games, be a sponsored pro, play the nosebleeds, play poker on tv, and most importantly provide a high quality of life for my family when these massive bombs keep exploding in front of me?

As I type all that out, I'm reminded of the quote that my dad said in PokerSense Episode 7 "Tough times never last, but tough people do."

Also, as I type all this out, I also realize that I am FAR away from having the "worst of it" when it comes to the recent blow up.  Sure I probably stand to lose more money than the vast majority of players out there, but I'm certain there are some small stakes grinders who probably didn't make great choices before going pro and therefore don't have much of a safety net under them.  If you are in that circumstance, I feel bad for complaining about my situation to you.  My family isn't going to go hungry and I'm not going to have to go work at McDonalds yet.  Or if you have to explain to your wife why you just lost a few paychecks into the FTP abyss, I'm sorry to complain to you.  We all have various levels of pain from this mess, and none of us deserve any of this pain...we can only do what we can do to help each other get through it.

I rocked by boy to sleep tonight even though he doesn't really need rocking anymore.  He's nearly 13 months old now and is a beast :)

I wondered how on earth I would explain to him this situation.   I wonder what he would think (or maybe what he will think some day down the road if he finds this blog post)?  Will he have any idea how much time and effort I've put into this stupid game in order to try to give him the best opportunities I can?  At least I'll have a few bullets ready in case he says to me some day "Daddy, I want to play poker for a living!" and I can explain to him what it was like in the Internet Wild West where you weren't only battling the rake and the other pros, you are battling the thievery of shady poker site owners, cheaters, and the Department of Injustice.