I could never handle the uncertainty of this. Makes me sick just reading it. Wishing you the best, Assani. I hope you keep up the blog here because it's certainly one of the most interesting things going.
I second this. Lots of guys, myself included, make a post about poker and it dies a quick death. Assani's roll on and on, because he is interesting and has a compelling amount of honesty, occasional delusion, goofiness and intelligence. It seems like only yesterday when he was posting his results about $200 SNG's. I feel like we have watched Assani grow up on this board. I hope everything works out the way you want to it too.
thanks to both of you
RFW, I wish this forum still had some of the old threads where you absolutely owned me in a few poker arguments when I first started playing. I've never lacked confidence/arrogance, and you were always very patient with me, so I thank you for that.
Before driving to Vegas the longest I had ever driven was the five hour drive from Maryland to New York. I thought that it was going to be absolutely miserable to be alone in a car for so long, but I was pleasantly surprised. I went into it with a fairly positive attitude and aside from hearing "Big Girls Don't Cry" by Fergie at least 1000 times on the radio it wasn't all that bad. Not to mention, I made phenomenal time. From my footballguys blog:
Made it to Vegas late Sunday night. I left Gaithersburg, Maryland on 3:00 PM EST on Saturday and arrived in Las Vegas at 11:00 PM EST on Sunday. Entire trip was 35 hours(probably 31.5 hours driving, 2.5 hours sleeping in my car at a rest point, and 1 hour at gas stations). I really felt as if I could've made it without sleeping at all and driven even longer too if it weren't for the darkness of the night...its just so much easier to stay awake and drive when its light outside.
For the next few weeks, my life was poker. I didn't even do much on my birthday except for going out to dinner with Robert. I was greatly enjoying Vegas and being able to play in so many new card rooms. I started cross posting my blog on allvegaspoker:
LINK, which is a pretty interesting read because in addition to the daily updates, I was giving my reviews of every card room and having a "hand of the day" for discussion.
I was playing $1/2 NLHE live and $1/2 PLO8 online, although I took a shot at $2/4 online , ran well, and took a shot at $3/6 before losing $2000 in a single day, which forced me all the way back to $1/2. Nevertheless that was one of my only mis-steps. Overall, things were going very well. I even achieved my fitness goal of getting under 200 lbs on September 17. I found the following post from my blog which was in response to a direct question one of my readers had asked me. I think it sums up my attitude at the time quite well:
Nah, I don't mind answering that at all man, and feel free to ask me anything about my poker career....I have gone through quite a bit of ups and downs. For the first two years of my career before I met Robert, I didn't really have any close friends that were also poker pros, so much of what I learned was self taught. Now as far as improving actual poker skill, I had tons of resources such as here, twoplustwo, books, etc. But nobody really taught me anything about money management, and having grown up relatively middle/lower class(dad never paid child support, mom is legally blind and did daycare out of our house to pay bills) having tons of money was quite the culture shock to me. To put it mildly, I was just stupid. I played too high for my bankroll and I was arrogant enough to think that I was +EV in literally any game(I've sat with Johnny Chan waiting for a game to fill up and I asked him if he wanted to play heads up!!!).
Now I still have considered myself somewhat successful. I've paid my rent for 3 years doing this, I have a pretty sick computer set up with 2 24 inch monitors and fancy technology, I've bought nice clothes, I've partied a lot(probably dropped $15-20K in Vegas last summer just out partying), I have a $2500 guitar and sleep number bed, etc.....but I havn't saved one penny, which does indeed suck.
So basically to answer your question: Downswings, playing over my bankroll, not investing money, and buying lots of stuff is why my bankroll is so low now.
But I do think that I've grown as both a person and a poker player through all of this, and I think I have a much clearer view of the long term now. I view this move to Vegas as my last chance really. If I ever go broke again, then I'm getting a real job and quitting poker. But thats not going to happen, and I will be successful. I'm determined to make it happen. I'm positive that I could easily get people to back me right now and I could play much higher stakes- I have turned down offers for this already. Thats not what I want to do. I want to build up myself, and I want to do things the right way this time.
On 9/11 I had a bad run at $3/6 and I dropped down to $1/2 as a result. It sucks, but I'll be ok. I've already earned about $700 in rakeback for September, and I have quite a few points at the Full Tilt and PokerStars stores, so theres that too.
If I get wiped out, then as I said, I'll get a real job. But thats not going to happen.
But then one day near the end of September, thing changed drastically. My roommate Robert called me over and told me that we needed to talk. He proceeded to tell me the following:
-He had been lying to me about how well he was doing with poker and he was close to broke
-He was not going to be able to pay me back the money he owed me like he had promised
-He was leaving Vegas to go back East and I'd be on my own to find and pay for housing(he had initially told me that for the first month or two he'd go so far as to pay 100% of our rent if I really needed it until I got myself in a better financial situation)
The news completely blindsided me. At the time I forgave Robert and told him to just try to pay me back whenever he could. However, he has not only never paid me back, but he has also borrowed and never paid back money from our mutual friend Kent, scammed a few 2p2 posters out of quite a bit of money, and completely stopped returning my phone calls. As I've told Kent before in some of our conversations about it, it isn't even the money that upsets me. He could've come to me at any time and said "I'm really sorry, but I don't think I'll ever be able to pay you back" and we'd still be friends to this day. Yet hes chosen to completely turn his back on me. Not only that, but due to my association with him, I had to go through a bit to clear my own name on 2p2 since many assumed that I had something to do with his scams.
I was now hurt in many ways. For one, I now lived 3000 miles from where I had lived my entire life and I didn't know a single person out here. But even worse, I now was in dire financial shape since I was fully expecting Robert to pay me back as he had promised.
I grew up as a devout Christian, but I've gone through my fair share of doubts and skepticism through my life. I fully understand the stumbling blocks that come through accepting something through faith. However, at many times in my life I've felt as if thing were simply too big of a coincidence for God not to be involved and what follows is one of those times: I had not posted a single thing in my blog about Robert or about my sudden financial worries. Yet literally the very next day I found a PM on footballguys from David Dodds, the co-owner of the site. It turns out that he had been reading my blog and was wondering interested in staking me. Now in the past I had turned down all staking offers as I simply wasn't comfortable playing with other people's money. However, a combination of factors made this different. Most obvious was my dire financial situation, but I was also happy to know that the person who would be staking me was very secure financially and that he wouldn't be hurt at all by losing money on me. And finally he offered me a deal that was extremely generous on his part. Basically, I didn't even think of not accepting it.
Dodds gave me $2500 on PokerStars to play with. That was the extent of the stake, so I started out at $.5/1. I withdrew my own money for expenses and to play live. The plan was to play online under Dodds during the week and then play live with my own money on the weekends when the games were the softest.
I ended up finding a small one bedroom apartment right by the strip on UNLV campus. It wasn't the nicest area around and it was seriously the smallest place I've ever lived in. I didn't even have a tv. However, this was all probably a blessing in disguise as it forced me to do nothing but play poker. In fact, looking back, I definitely consider having gone through all of this to be a blessing. I think that I grew as a poker player more during this time than I ever had. I think I finally learned to appreciate and understand bankroll management, game selection, managing one's own ego, and so on.
A blog post of mine from around this time, which I believe fully shows just how little money I had:
Found an apartment right by the south end of the strip and by UNLV. Its decent...one bedroom, living room, kitchen, bathroom. Only a 6 month lease, so I won't be staying long. $610/month + utilities. It has a community pool, which I like a lot. But I have to use public laundry rooms, which I hate. I only had around $700 in cash on me yesterday and I was told that I needed a little more than that by Friday in order to move in. So for the first time in my life, I went to the casino absolutely needing to win(techinically, I could always borrow more from my parents but I really don't want to do that). It was a bit scary, but I won $100+ on my very first hand as I hit a set and I won near $300 in just about 2 hours before leaving. Leaves me with an extra $200 for food, and hopefully I can get all of my money offline within a week or so and I'll start buying some basic furniture and stuff.
My exact results from my first month in Vegas:
Only been out here for one month exactly today.During the 5 days I was here in August I was up $1051.
I gave an estimate of September a few days ago, but I might as well add everything up exactly right now........
During the 26 days of September that I played I'm up $3483(+$1000 in rakeback/bonuses, +$309 in NFL Wagers, +$2174 in poker). My estimates a few days ago probably didn't include my big day of +$1400 on 9/22/07. Also it really hurts to think that I lost over $2000 on 9/11...definitely should've dropped down in stakes a little sooner there.
All that doesn't include the $600 or so that I've won under Dodds so far. It also doesn't include the $800 or so that I've made on September Full Tilt Rakeback which I'll get during the first week of October.
And finally a blog post that has absolutely nothing to do with poker but is one of my personal favorites:
In a somewhat funny story, I said the most ballsy thing I've ever said to a cop today...so I get pulled over because apparently my registration has expired...and apparently the sticker in my front window fell off too. First cop is a lady, and she is literally the nicest cop I've ever dealt with. Makes small talk about the uniqueness of my name, offers to give me directions to the local DMV to get my resitration, etc. Then out of nowhere this guy cop comes up and basically feels the need to repeat everything she has already told me only with a much more less friendly tone. He then asks me if I was lying about my sticker falling off and if I only took it off because I knew it was expired(which btw is the stupidiest idea ever since I would think that a cop passing by my car on the street would be much more likely to notice a missing sticker than a sticker with an expired date on it, but whatever). I told him that it just fell off. He tells me "I've been a cop for 20 years and reistration stickers don't just fall off." My reply: "Well I've been a sticker maker for
Good luck and kick ###!
Yeah, I was bored at work for a few days and had nothing better to do. For real. It was actually fun to follow some of those tourneys even though they took place long ago....
