Ho-Ho-Ho.

Since I'm Polish and sort've catholic we celebrate Christmas on Christmas Eve. We eat pierogis and break oplatki and exchange gifts and whatnot with my mom's side of the family. I generally enjoy my family, although when I say that I mean relative to what I'd imagine other people's families are like. I think mine is probably in the top 1 or 2 percentile when making that comparison.

The problem is that family is family. It's very hard because they want to know what is going on in my life. Although it is very kind of them to ask, it's really hard to explain Leggo to them (they want to know how my business venture is), explain poker to them (they want to know how lucky I've been lately, I try to tell them I don't gamble), and explain what it's like to a few cars and never spend more than a few weeks in the same zip code. It's just a weird life. I remember years ago MTV was looking for interesting online poker players in some kind of "True Life: I live a double life" episode. I have absolutely no idea if that ever aired or not, but it is absolutely true that we live a double life.

I am someone on here that I sort of am in real life, but not really. My personality obviously shines through in my blog and forum posts and in my videos. I like to talk a lot and general clown around a lot (to be modest ob both fronts). Yet, this isn't real life. This is the internet. And my stardom was made because I put some time into a video game, basically. I learned how to reason and solve problems in such a quick and efficient manner I was able to rise to the level that I'm at today. Is that admirable? I'm not sure, maybe. It certainly seems that popular online poker players are admired, I don't know that it makes what we do worthy of that admiration.

My point is that I hate talking about what I do with anyone who isn't familiar with the online poker landscape. It's so difficult to explain to people how many games I play at once, why I play online instead of live, why I can't win when I play live (lol, almost had a WPT final table there!), when they'll see me on TV (I guess they don't get G4)... and any one of the dozens or hundreds of questions they could ask me that is repetitive. Honestly though, I bet a lot of people are better at talking to people about it than I am. I think of someone like Rob (Bobbo obv) and I feel like they are generally so much more positive than I am that they would be okay with talking to people about it. I generally get annoyed with people quickly, although my friend Starkey says that I've been very calm lately. I don't know what to attribute that to.

Enough about the annoyingness of the holidays. I have decided (tentatively) that Chewy and I will make an addition to the Memoirs that deals with exclusively Heads Up play. It probably won't be too long, maybe a total of a few hours of coverage, but I think it'll be very, very good since we're both so much better than we were a year or 18 months ago. So, keep your eye out for that, and if you've already bought the Memoirs.. congrats! It'll be great and we hope that if you don't play HU already you will start when (if?) this comes out.

Speaking of luckychewy, he wrote a strategy article here, in the Private Strategy Forum that deals with running the streets and common Heads Up spots that people struggle with. It's very good poker content, check it out if you get a second.

I'm hesitant to announce anything yet, but we'll have a new pro come 2010. He's been coveted by a lot of training sites for a while now and I'm very pleased that he liked what we had to offer best . Hopefully his first video will be available for your viewing pleasure in a week or so. I'm anxious and nervous that this is the new guy that puts us even further over the top as the #1 site for midstakes 6-max.

We've got a little Christmas treat for you guys as well, I hope you enjoy it. It's hard as fuck to do a 4 tabling video against a good player Heads Up and provide insight on the action! Hope everyone gets everything they want for Christmas and no one shoots their eye out.