So I posted recently about how I had fallen on some hard times and wasn't sure what I would be doing in the near future after having been a full time player for the last 14 months. Well, I'm pleased to announce that things have been going well, and it looks like I will still be at the tables for the forseable future.

I recieved backing from another player that was impressed with the volume that I put in, as well as encouraged by my working with Probability. He agreed to stake me, which freed up some funds for me and removed a lot of short term stress. I started at nl50, and beat it pretty soundly over about a 20k sample between Thursday and Sunday, and was given the green light to move up to 100.

I have been playing pretty well, partly because I'm not as preoccupied with the consequences of running bad, and partly because of my work with Probability, which has been very helpful. His style of play is very similar to mine, so its been very easy for me to work with him and improve in some areas.

Today I recorded a little bit of my nl100 play, which will be reviewed, and you guys might get to see at a later point. I think it went decently for not having played SS in a while, but there were a couple spots I felt a little bit dirty about, so hopefully it will produce something interesting.

Anyways, the bottom line is that things are going pretty well right now. I've been pretty productive. I've established a pretty good working relationship with my backer and coach, and even been offered additional help from my backer and other good players. So, I guess it pays to be trustworthy, likeable, and to have a strong work ethic.

Thanks to everyone that offered support when I was down. I don't forget that sort of thing.

So, somehow I got talked into making a blog. While I'm not sure how many people will bother to open the software video guy's blog, I can promise you that my story is an interesting one.

I got started in poker a few years ago when I deposited $50 on ultimate bet after seeing some ad on TV. At the time, I was working in a gas station and kind of at that point in my life where I decided that I needed to stop being a bum and start working to undo all my years of laziness that had landed me in this situation. Up until then, all I had done was slept through college until i got kicked out, then spent a few years working **** jobs and playing video games. It was always easier to just distract myself from life as opposed to actually dealing with it, and of course this kind of approach just creates a viscious cycle, because the more your life erodes due to your distraction, the more distraction it takes not to notice. For whatever reason, I finally woke up and decided I was floating around in loserville, and I was going to do something about it.

At the time, I really didn't have any sort of skills at all, but I knew that I needed to stop spending all my free time on tv and video games. So, I got a second job at night, and went from working at a gas station to working at two gas stations. While it wasn't exactly a very impressive career move, I was making more money, had less time to spend it, and it started actually building up instead of just disappearing when it was time to pay the rent. During this time, I also became quite enthralled with the idea of making money playing card games, since something like that could provide the kind of distraction that I had always liked, but at the same time, actually be productive. I got me a copy of Sooper System II: Electric Boogaloo, and with the help of Jen Harman, was soon crushing the 0.01/0.02 fixed limit full ring games on Ultimate Bet in the small ammount of free time that I had.

After about a year and a half of working 60 hour weeks, a guy that worked for the city in the small town of gas station #1 came into the store on my shift and offered to hire me for the vacant maintenence job, because he had seen me around for quite a while, and knew that I showed up for work every day, and worked when I was at work. I accepted, dropped gas station #1, went to work for the city, and also kept working for gas station #2 at night. I started out just doing labor type stuff for about the same money that I made before, but I worked hard, and went to a lot of classes offtered by the state for government employees. I earned a lot of certifications in various different things, and was eventually promoted to a better position that paid much better than any of the crappy jobs I had worked before, and also provided me with health insurance. I decided to drop gas station #2, and start working hard on learning more about poker, which I had saved up a few bucks at as a novice. I started playing nlhe and reading and posting in the microstakes forums daily.

So, now I had a good job, a possibly lucrative side project that I found interesting, and a little bit of savings. It was about then that I started seeing this hot russian girl that I fell for. Funny how that works. You can go begging for years, and then when you get a few dollars in the bank, bam, hot russian girls just appear out of nowhere. Anyways, things went well with the job, the girl, and the poker. I liked my work, I was moving up through micros and saving up a little pile of money, and I was really into the girl. When it came time to decide whether or not I was willing to go back and live in moscow, I had a pretty big decision to make. I liked my job, but I had saved up about 10k from playing poker, worked my way up to ss, and really liked this girl and wanted to be able to make it work. In the end, the girl won out. I put in my notice, packed my bags for russia, and became a a full time pokers player December 1, 2007.

When I got to Moscow, I was pretty surprised with how high the cost of living is there. I guess it is like their version of Southern California. Nobody is actually from there, and you pay a dime a month for some ****box studio apartment.There were a lot of cool things there though. I went to a bowling alley where there was a coat check. There were guards and I had to go through a metal detector. Everything was marble and brass. There was a full bar, club music, club lights. It wasn't your dad's bowling imo. I think i spent 200 bux there that night.

All I was able to bring with me for poker was my tiny laptop, and I had no monitor to plug into it. I wanted to get one, but instead my girlfriend wanted me to use extra money on things like new clothes, because I look like I came from the future, and everyone is wearing pointy elf shoes and 10 pound hats that don't even cover your god damn ears. Anyways, so I got some new clothes and started playing mtts since I couldn't really fit many tables and stats on my tiny screen for playing cash games. Why I thought playing mtts would somehow cure this problem, I have no idea. I'm not exactly always a genius.

The first month of tournaments went pretty well. I really didn't know much about them, and pretty much just played like a meganit, ran hot, and made a few four digit scores. Whenever I would make a decent score, we would order pizza, which by the way, you have to order off of a menu in Moscow. You can't actually get what you want. You have to pick a number of an approved pizza. Want extra sauce? Sorry, not on this side of the planet. There's a coat check at the ****ing bowling alley, but I can't get some sauce on a ****ing pizza.

I decided that I liked mtts and that I was obv awesome because I had a 10 million percent roi after running hot for a month, which is obv sustainable imo. I started reading the mtt forums and trying to learn how to actually play correctly. My play got much better, but I didn't really realise that, because as variance would have it, the pizzas stopped rolling in. I was starting to get frustrated, and then I came across a post someone had made about how you could improve your end game by playing stts. Sweet idea. I'll just do that for a while and then I can get back to having a 10 million percent roi.

So, I started playing singles. I didn't know much about them, but I ran hot, and I liked how easy it was to play a bunch of these on my laptop. I decided that since I obv crush at these over a sample of about a week, that this is now the game I want to play . I got a book. I read the forums. I practiced with an ICM calculator so much that I became a human ICM calculator. About the time I got really good at it, I hit a ridiculous downswing, the worst I've ever had. I basically just tanked over a sample of about 1200 singles. It then occured to me that the lesson to be learned is that learning is clearly the path to destruction. Of course, this is a pretty bad thing to learn, because having learned it, I felt even more scewed than ever. I then got wasted and watched a Daria marathon dubbed in russian. It was not good.

It was getting close to the end of my 3 months in Moscow, I was running bad, and then I got some more bad news. I found out that while I was there, they had actually changed the laws to state that anyone wishing to renew thir russian visa would...