Injured - a fighter's lament

Injuries happen. Anyone who participates in any sport -- forget fighting -- realizes it. Everyone has teammates, and knows how those teammates feel when they get injured. But all that experience doesn't make it any easier when it happens.

Before last night, I'd gone over a full year without a serious injury. I'll define a serious injury as one that keeps me off the mats for more than a month. I considered myself very lucky, but I also attributed my relative durability to some lifestyle changes: 1) focusing more on conditioning while trading off live sparring; 2) resting or doing lower-intensity training when sore or fatigued; 3) better nutrition (eating cartilage, marrow, bone broth, etc).

For most of the last year I've also been tied up with Ultimate Poker/Ultimate Casino stuff, so I've also been to fewer MMA, BJJ and boxing classes in the last year than I had previously. I kept up my conditioning though, and the last month or so as things slowed down a bit at work, I've started to get back in a decent groove and had plans on making a comeback for the Vegas-based TuffNUff organization in April.

Unfortunately that balloon was popped along with each audible pop of my ankle last night. The accident itself was pretty freakish. No one was trying to attack my limbs. I was caught in what grapplers know as a de la Riva position, a bit like this:

I was the guy on top, but my legs were stretched wider. As I started to lose my balance, my body rotated but my foot got stuck on the mat, so my body turned independent of my foot, which blew up my ankle. It was a freak accident, just "one of those things".

I yelled in pain, and I knew immediately it was going to be bad. Ten minutes later I was calling for my roommate Chris to take me to the ER. X-rays confirmed no bone break, but they did send me home in a cast, crutches, and lots of painkillers.

As mentioned, the timing is awful. I finally started to get a decent handle on my work schedule, the WSOP is still a few months away, and I was finally starting to put in some good work lacing up the boxing gloves and MMA shorts on a regular basis. I mentioned to Chris that I would happily pay very good money to instead have this injury the day before the WSOP instead of 6 weeks from a (albeit still theoretical) fight.

So, I'm depressed -- at 33, I'm no spring chicken any more, and while I know these things are only more likely to happen and taken even longer to recover from, the competitive fire in me is still burning. It's not that I won't get to fight in April, it's that after that will be WSOP, then who knows how busy work will get. Months continue to fly off the calendar as I struggle to keep this body healthy like a poor college student tries to keep a run-down vehicle road-worthy.

All I want to do is sit at home, eat chocolate, and mope. What I will actually probably do is work from home, elevate my foot, and eat some high-collagen, high-gelatin bone broth. I may be getting older, but I'm getting smarter too.

Product Review: Beddit sleep tracker

I admit it: I'm a sucker for wellness apps. I'm an athlete, but I'm also a geek. So anything that intersects physical performance and numbers is right up my alley.

I also think that more than diet, more than exercise, sleep is probably the single most important major lifestyle determinant in wellness and human performance. How much and how well people sleep seems to have massive effects on body fat, cancer rate, athletic performance, cognitive performance, and more. Additionally, I find sleep results harder to modify and optimize than either diet or exercise. While diet and exercise are largely an issue of good decision making, commitment, and time management, I find that I often do all the "right things" when it comes to sleep and not get a great result. I try to go to bed shortly after sunset, sleep in a nearly pitch-black room, avoid late afternoon caffeine, do relaxation exercises, and basically everything that is thought to achieve a good sleep result, but my results are still inconsistent.

Enter the Beddit (www.beddit.com), which promises to "automatically tracks your sleeping patterns, heart rate, breathing, snoring, movements and environment. In the morning, Beddit tells you how you slept and how to do it better."

After hearing that pitch, this was me:

The Beddit consists mostly of a strap containing a sensor that goes underneath your bedsheet. It connects via Bluetooth to your smartphone and gives you results that look like this:

There's even more data promised in future versions.

This is the kind of shit that I love. The only small problem? It doesn't work.

To date, the Beddit is largely giving me garbage data. According to the Beddit, I haven't slept over 5 hours a single night that I've gotten it, and most nights it's said I've only slept 2-3 hours. I will be the first to admit that I don't get enough sleep, but after one night of just 2-3 hours I'm usually useless, and after a week of it I'd probably be approaching death. The Beddit is recording large gaps in my sleep during hours that I know I was definitely asleep.

Part of the problem may be the length of the Beddit strap. I have a queen-sized bed, and the strap covers less than half of my bed. That means if I roll over on to a part of the bed that the strap isn't sensing, then I'm not getting tracked for that sleep. On one particular night, the Beddit told me that I got up from bed 7 times, when I actually got up from bed once or twice, at most. I think increasing the strap length will help, but I do not think that is the only source of the Beddit's problems at this point, since even when I sleep through the night and wake up on the same side of the bed, my sleep is being dramatically underreported.

I've contacted Beddit support, and they've been fairly slow to respond. This is not too surprising considering that they're an indie company who probably weren't ready to handle the amount of business that they got. I'm happy to be an early adopter of this item and in spite of the fact that the product is currently unsatisfactory, I'll be happy that they got my money as long as that money goes towards product improvements. I want to support a company that comes up with good ideas like this, and I hope they are able to deliver on it. As someone who works in a startup that simultaneously seems to "get it", also desperately needs some major product improvements, I think I'm more sympathetic to this idea than anyone.

I'm continuing correspondence with Beddit support and will update this review if information changes (it's possible I just got a lemon, for example). But the bottom line is this: I think at this point unless you also want the good karma of supporting a sleep app, you should probably pass on the Beddit for now. 

But like some might say about my company, I'll be cheering for them.

The Value of Being Uncomfortable - And How You Can Start

So we're two weeks into the new year. By now, some people have already quit their 2014 resolutions, and some are going strong. Of late, it seems more en vogue and hip to haughtily and cynically eschew the New Year's resolution for some reason or another.

Very specific resolutions can be of limited value, especially those which prioritize an outcome over a process. I'd like to propose a non-specific resolution to you, the reader. It's not nearly as specific as "lose 20 pounds", "go to the gym four times a week", "stop eating junk food", "stop biting my nails" or anything of that nature. The resolution I propose is as follows:

Be uncomfortable.

Comfort is generally something we think of as a good thing. We want comfortable shoes, comfortable beds, comfortable sofas. We want the air to be at a comfortable temperature. When stressed, we seek comfort food.

But little attention is paid to the value of discomfort. Discomfort is tremendously important, just as important as comfort.

Exercise is the most obvious example of a beneficial discomfort. Living organisms generally want to conserve energy. Sometimes they are forced to expend energy (to survive a predatory attack, to kill prey themselves, to reproduce, to migrate, or a number of reasons). Since most 21st century humans don't actually have to exert physical energy avoiding predators, killing prey, attracting mates or moving countries, we use exercise as a substitute.

Exercise is necessarily discomfort. Like all organisms, we desire to conserve energy, so the expenditure of energy is necessarily uncomfortable.

Here's the thing, everyone understands that some amount of exercise is good for people. But if this type of discomfort is good for you, aren't there other discomforts that are good for you?

I have a roommate who strongly dislikes the cold. As soon as the room becomes too cold for his liking, he immediately turns up the heat up to a desired comfort level. Similarly when it's too hot for his liking, he'll turn on the air conditioning. And to be honest, I don't much like being too cold or too hot either. But humans are actually pretty well-adapted to being a little too hot or a little too cold. I'm not advocating that you go out in a t-shirt in Siberia or try to jog in a sweatsuit during a Vegas summer. And I'm not saying you should never use climate controls. But it is my contention that we should make an effort to be uncomfortable, with enough regularity that it creates a decent hormetic effect. If nothing else, think of the maxim that what won't kill you, makes you stronger.

I went through a phase for a while in November and December where I jumped in the freezing cold (not literally, but damn cold) outdoor swimming pool for a couple minutes a day. It fucking sucked, and I cannot know for sure that it provided any real health benefit (the research on cold water therapy actually seems pretty inconclusive), but I thought it was important to be consistent with the idea of being uncomfortable.

Another good example of discomfort is fasting. Sometimes people say that fasting is bad, that you'll waste away and lose valuable muscle mass and screw up your metabolism and so on, but I think the medical literature is decently clear that some amount of fasting is good. The incredible 24/7 availability of food to satiate any and all hunger pangs, as soon as you get them (or much sooner), is surely a contributing factor to the obesity epidemic. So, once in a while, when you're hungry -- just keep going hungry! Don't make that sandwich or order that pizza. Just suck it up, princess, and learn to embrace the hunger. Better yet, if you're hungry: go run a few miles, or lift some heavy shit, and then eat something. You'll get some improved insulin sensitivity out of it and hell, food just tastes better when you've earned it.

Fasting is something that I had never tried until fairly recently, but once I did it, I found out it wasn't really that hard. And now I reap the benefits. I used to be a cranky, ornery, son-of-a-bitch when I was hungry. How, I've learned to embrace the hunger and I'm better off both mentally and physically for it.

Discomfort does not need to be only physical, as well. Doing brain teasers, studying a new language, public speaking, and other cerebrally difficult or stressful things also qualify as discomfort. But most people (especially those who read blogs written by former professional poker players) are pretty good at practicing mental discomfort. Anyone who has ever made a big bluff in a cash game or late in a big tournament certainly experiences discomfort, and most poker pros have done this many times.

Important point: Too much discomfort is a bad thing.

It's pretty obvious how too much fasting would be a bad thing. At some point, excessive fasting becomes anorexia, or starvation. It's a bit less obvious, but too much exercise is a bad thing too. Too much exercise can leave one chronically stressed and cause serious health and injury problems. And obviously staying for a long time in extreme conditions of heat or cold without taking adequate mitigating measures is a bad idea. On the mental side, a professional poker player who grinds 10 hours a day, 10 tables at a time, 300+ days a year, is just asking for mental burnout (the cure for which cannot be purchased in the FPP store, by the way).

Nevertheless, I'd suppose most people reading this are leaning towards the "too comfortable" side of the balance. Are you reading this blog post in your comfy computer chair? Do you have a nice, just-right beverage sitting next to you? If you get hungry by the end of it, are you immediately going to the fridge to satisfy it?  My advice to you: get more uncomfortable. Turn off the heat or the a/c for a few hours. Take a cold, or at least a somewhat-too-cold, shower. Skip breakfast once in a while, or dinner, if you prefer. Or both. Learn a difficult language or a musical instrument. Gamble a little too big for your bankroll.

You shouldn't do it all the time -- you'll end up either chronically stressed, dying of heatstroke or hypothermia, mentally drained, or broke -- but you should at least do it with some regular frequency. So the next time you're faced with something that will cause you physical, mental, or emotional discomfort, don't look for a way out of it. Face it head on, and dive in. I think you'll be a better person for it.

All the best in 2014!

my Ultimate birthday

I've never really been a big birthday person at all. Like anyone else I certainly appreciate a day where everyone is nice to me, but I've generally thought of it as pretty much just another day of the week. My birthday was this past Sunday, and rather than celebrate with some event, I scheduled a building move the day after, meaning that my birthday was mostly spent packing boxes and getting ready for the move.

I had scheduled Monday off for the move, and it took longer than expected so I ended up not going to the office that day at all. I was utterly shocked at what I saw when I came into my office!

The pictures doesn't really do it justice - but that's "HAPPY BIRTHDAY TERRENCE" spelled out on my wall, aa hand-written note there from virtually everyone in the office, decorations, cards and gifts. As soon as I opened my office door on Tuesday, half the office heard me exclaim "holy shit!".

I was impressed and touched by that, but there was another surprise waiting. I'm known around the office for my unholy love for BBQ ribs, and I opened up the fridge to find a gigantic platter of ribs with my name on it!

It was a simple thing, but a very touching and well-appreciated gesture from my excellent Ultimate Gaming co-workers.

Crosspost: Going From Poker Pro To Poker Industry Pro

This is a crosspost from content I originally wrote as a two-parter for Ultimate Poker's content page, "The Rail".

Online poker had a tremendous effect on the lives of a number of young people throughout the 2000s. Prior to the last decade, to earn a high-income living as a young person, you needed to be a brilliant inventor or entrepreneur, an extremely talented and famous actor or singer, or maybe a professional athlete in a major sport. Obviously, this represented only a tiny percentage of the population of all young people.

But in the 2000s, with the first online poker boom, a great number of young people were suddenly able to earn high incomes playing online poker. Many intelligent young people put their university and college educations on hold or skipped them entirely because the allure of making far more money than any newly-minted graduate at an entry level position would make – and all by playing a game they loved.

Many of these young people would go on to become tremendously successful poker players and stars of the game. However, not everyone made it in the long run. Some players “burned out”, tiring of the online poker grind. Others saw the games they were playing in getting tougher and tougher as their opponents grew more educated, resulting in a major drop in income.

These players on the margins were now in a tough spot. The former pros found themselves in their mid or late 20s looking for work, but lacking both formal education and any significant traditional job experience.

The good news, if you’re one of these people, is that your experience playing hours of online poker, participating in forums, and generally being involved in the poker industry, makes you a valuable asset to online poker sites, including Ultimate Poker. At Ultimate Poker, we employ dozens of poker players in customer service, game room operations, product management, marketing and technology – all the way from entry level to senior executive.

Whether your poker industry experience ends up being as valuable as that engineering or law degree your parents wanted you to get will be a function of your own talent, skills, and attitude – but the point remains that you do offer relevant experience to companies like Ultimate Poker who are headquartered locally. 

Now I’d like to talk about how to get that job. The key thing to remember when entering the workforce is that despite your job or education gap, you bring value to poker companies! You provide skills and experience. The problem is, so do hundreds or even thousands of other poker pros who find themselves in a similar spot. How do you stand out from the crowd?

SOME DOS WHEN APPLYING FOR AN ONLINE POKER POSITION

Do include a cover letter, always. A customized cover letter is how the person reading your application (hiring manager or HR manager) knows that you spent the time to apply for position with this company and that you didn’t just spam the same resume to dozens of companies. It also should show you communicate effectively.

Do brag about what you know about poker. The cover letter is a good place for this. If you’ve played 2 million hands of poker on 10 different sites, you’re familiar with MTTs, SNGs, and cash games in hold’em, Omaha, stud and draw, brag about it here. While the hiring manager is probably not interested in how many final tables you made or what your lifetime BB/100 is, they certainly are interested in the breadth of your poker and gaming knowledge.

Do demonstrate your knowledge of the company. You should know a lot about the company that you’re applying for, whether it is low-level things like promotions and game features, or high-level items like jurisdictions and relationships with partners.

Do mention why you want to work for the company. A phrase that I absolutely love to see in a cover letter is “dream job”. More than any phrase on any cover letter, this makes me more likely to give a person an initial phone interview. Enthusiasm counts. Of course, you’ll have to be able to follow this up in both the phone and live interview, or you’ll be a big disappointment.

Do be specific about what job you want. “I’m really knowledgeable about poker in general, and I think I could fill a variety of roles in your organization.” I’ve seen this one many times, and honestly, I’d bet that it’s true most of the time. But you also have to realize that even in a new startup like Ultimate Gaming, applications are likely to be siphoned through a more traditional HR manager with a lot of corporate experience in more traditional brick-and-mortar based companies. So, even though you think you would be good at everything, you should indicate exactly what position you would like to have within the company. Gaming companies need people with all kinds of skills, from IT infrastructure to accounting to software development to customer service to marketing. While people with great general knowledge can bring value to any gaming or poker company, it’s the specialists who get noticed by HR.

And obviously, be realistic. If you are willing to work in an entry-level position but you say you’d be well suited as a Senior VP, well, it’s not very likely that the HR manager will consider you for that entry-level position.

AND NOW, THE DO NOTS.

Do not be quiet and demure in your interview. A lot of good poker players are real introverts. And while they are often intelligent, thoughtful and would make tremendous assets to any organization, it simply doesn’t come out in the interview. Your interviewer is not Phil Ivey staring you down for tells, so you shouldn’t be staring blankly, talking softly, and avoiding eye contact. Be engaging and demonstrate that you’re an individual with a personality, the kind of person that people want to have as a co-worker.

Do not hide any skeletons in your closet. In both Nevada and New Jersey, employees have been required to undergo background checks to work for Ultimate Gaming. While it is not always an absolute dealbreaker to have been previously convicted of a crime, it most likely is a dealbreaker if you aren’t immediately upfront about it. Additionally, the more senior the position in the company, the more likely that your background will be thoroughly investigated, so if you harbor hopes of one day being a senior executive in a gaming company, you’ll want to be honest from the get-go.

Do not misspell the name of the person you’re applying to. Seriously, this happens with alarming frequency. It’s not that I’m so egotistical I can’t handle having my name spelled incorrectly, but if I see it that way — after I’ve already corresponded with you — I’m going to be think that you’re not a detail-oriented person, and if you can get something like this wrong, you’ll probably get other things wrong too. I definitely don’t think that poor spelling is necessarily an indicator of lack of intelligence, but when there are potentially dozens or hundreds of people all applying for the same job, why stick out for all the wrong reasons?

There are plenty more dos and don’ts I could mention, but that would start to stray from the topic of how to go from poker player to poker industry into being a general “how to get a job” essay. But if you keep these points in mind, you’ll find yourself a lot more likely to land your desired position in your preferred company.

Until next time, best of luck – regardless of which side of the virtual felt you find yourself on.

No-gi World Championships tomorrow!

It's been a long while since I've posted about anything other than work, because like most people working here, work is most of what I do these days. The last month and a half though I've been actually getting back in a good training routine, enough that I signed up for the World No-Gi Championships tomorrow in Long Beach, California.

The toughest part for me was deciding whether I wanted to register for the Masters (over 30) division or the regular Adult (18+). Masters has just 7 people in it; Adult has 26. Obviously the path to winning the Masters division is much easier not just because of the numbers but because people over 30 are a little less physical, might have jobs/families/commitments and contain the 22-year-old kids who live in their parents' basements and train 4 times a day. But I decided to take the harder road because fuck it, it'll be more rewarding in the end. I think when I'm over 40 I'll do the old-man division but for now, why not get more fights in for any given trip? At the end of the day it's not like there's any prize money or real reward; the competition itself is the reward.

Well, I might have regretted this decision (if only for an instant) once the brackets were announced yesterday. I Googled my first round opponent and found this video of him. Even though that fight is mostly on the feet, he seems like he has some good wrestling and ground game. But my potential second round opponent is a really tall (figurative, of course) task. It's 17-4 MMA fighter Danny Martinez. Martinez has been a pro fighter since before I even took up jiujitsu (and a college wrestler before that). Three of Martinez' pro losses have come to guys in the UFC and all were by decision; he has never been submitted as a pro and he has fought two different guys who were previously the #1 flyweight in the world. I think it'll be tremendously tough, but if I can somehow win, it'd be a huge feather in my cap. I'm looking forward to the experience, if I get past my first opponent (which is no small feat itself!).

Beyond that I'll still have 3 more fights. I have decided not to psych myself out any further by looking to see who else I might face if I advance further...

In any case, I'm quite excited to get back into a major competition. In the absence of being able to do 2-a-days 6 days a week, I've trained intelligently on both technique and conditioning, and hopefully I'll get to use that. The weight cut has been smooth (as weight cuts go), so that's nice too. So no excuses, let's find out if it's all paid off!

(As for sweating: I will try to live-tweet the results. There might be a live stream, but it is very unclear from that website whether my mat (Mat #1) will actually be showing at the time of my matches.)

UTG+1 with Ultimate Gaming CMO/COO Joe Versaci

I did another UTG+1 podcast for Ultimate Poker. I'm up to five total, which you can view here. This most recent one is probably my favourite because I've been trying to have my boss and company CMO/COO Joe Versaci on the show forever and he has consistently ducked me. This is despite the fact that I've always thought he'd be a great interview due to his epic Dana White-esque rants around the office. Well, he didn't quite go off Dana-style (even if I tried to goad him into it), but it's still a great interview and should provide the outsider with a good idea of what things are like working here at Ultimate Gaming:

New Podcast - UTG+1 with Ultimate Gaming!

I've once again been neglecting the blog, but at least I am now generating content at work!

I've started a weekly podcast with the people I work with at Ultimate Gaming. The idea is that we actually have some fairly interesting jobs, backgrounds, and so on. A lot of people play online poker, but relatively few actually know what kind of work goes into running an online poker site, so I figure some people might be interested. My first guest is our Director of Poker Operations, Scott Yeates, the guy who is, well, the head of all poker room operations. He runs teh gamez.

So, here it is. The name is "Under The Gun +1 with Ultimate Gaming". (Or maybe just UTG+1 if that's a mouthful. Haven't decided yet.) I'm aware the audio quality is not very good (particularly on my mic) but we'll have that fixed next week.



For audio only, go to the bottom of this page, right click anywhere on the grey box, and select Download Document

Grappler's Quest/UFC 162/WSOP weekend wrapup

It's been a pretty interesting last 10 days or so for this now relatively boring corporate warrior. In those 10 days I:

• Cut 11 lbs to compete in Grappler's Quest at the UFC Fan Expo
• Medalled (silver) in the no-gi of said Grappler's Quest
• Was eliminated in the first round of the gi of said Grappler's Quest after blowing a big lead
• Watched UFC 162 with half the Ultimate Gaming company over at my apartment
• Played, and busted, from the main event.

Weight cut/Grappler's Quest

The weight cut was terrible. Weigh-ins were July 4, so while everyone in this country was enjoying hot dogs and apple pies, I'd gone 24 hours without water and was doing fun things like taking 10-minute baths in scalding hot water and going outside in the 115-degree sun wearing plastics and a terrycloth bathrobe. I felt gross and weak and sick by the time fireworks rolled around. Much thanks to Robyn because I certainly wouldn't have made it without her.

Nevertheless by Friday I felt totally recovered. I won by points in overtime in the semifinals and then lost in the finals by advantages. The win was right there for me, but I simply wasn't aggressive enough. I took a private lesson with my jiujitsu coach Sim Go on how to pass more aggressively and I feel if we rematched now I would win. But oh well, lesson learned.



The next day I went in determined to be more aggressive, and it worked...for a while. I got out to a quick 5-0 lead and was threatening my second pass of the match with a minute left when I foolishly got caught in an armbar. I know what I did wrong now -- I should have controlled the head as well as the feet while passing, then moved to checking the hip.


In any case, no excuses: I lost because I haven't been dedicated and haven't been spending enough time on the mat. I guess that's an inevitable consequence of being really busy, but I really expected to win these divisions and I'm still very disappointed I didn't.

WSOP Main Event

Of course, nothing soothes the ego pounding of losing at an amateur grappling competition like potentially winning $8 million in the biggest money competition in the world, so the day after that, I jumped into 1B of the main event. I had a good but not great table; good enough that the 69k I finished with the end of the day was mostly the result of other people's mistakes.

Day 2B was a disaster though. I played a 115k pot where my opponent was absolutely crushed. At 250/500 and only 3100 chips in the middle, Villain managed to blast off his >55k stack with 88 on a 543 flop. I had 33 and I wasn't even sure I was ahead when I stacked off, and this guy puts it in with 88. Well, I guess that's why you play the main. Needless to say, I did not win this pot, and busted about an hour later.

The WSOP was obviously tremendously disappointing this year. Ten small cashes might be frustrating, but 0 cashes is worse. Who'd have thought.

UFC 162

Obviously would be remiss if I didn't talk about one of the most talked about fights in the history of the sport. Like everyone else, my mouth was agape when Chris Weidman cracked Anderson Silva with a big left hook and hammered home the coffin nails with some nasty ground-and-pound to make the former champ's eyes roll back in his head.

First of all, I'll just say that if you thought this was a work, you're a moron. The UFC has so much to lose from a worked fight. If you thought Anderson was paid to lose by someone outside the UFC, you're just as dumb because I can't imagine who would pay Anderson enough to harm his sponsorship agreements with juggernauts like Nike and Burger King. Finally there's the obvious: if for some reason Silva intentionally were going to lose, I'm pretty sure tapping to the kneebar/heelhook combo Weidman put him through in the first round would be better than being crushed and concussed by a 210 pound professional fighter. Just sayin'.

So with that bit of nonsense out of the way, the next talking point is generally going to be the question "if Silva didn't dick around, would he have won?" Well the great news is, we're going to find out on December 28! That's going to be a mega-card which approaches a million PPVs, the first time we've talked about those kind of numbers in a fight that didn't involve Brock Lesnar or Georges St-Pierre.

To answer the question - who knows? I think it's important to remember the showboating, taunting etc is part and parcel of Anderson Silva's game. He wants you to come at him aggressively with strikes. Guys who come at him aggressively with strikes usually get plunked, plain and simple. And in taunting Weidman, he actually did get the latter off his takedown game.  To say "would Silva have won if he didn't drop his hands" is like asking whether elite poker pros would make more money if they didn't screw around with small suited 2-gappers. Elite poker pros are elite because they know when and how to play those small suited 2-gappers, not in spite of it.

But -- and this is a huge but -- it's important to remember that Silva has done this before, and Weidman was the only one to make him pay. Silva did this hands down, chin up thing with Forrest Griffin, Stephan Bonnar, Demian Maia and others, and no one made him pay for it. Weidman's better than all of those guys, plus at 38, Anderson is an aging fighter. Both his reflexes and chin simply can't be as good as they were before. I think Anderson should still be favoured in a rematch, but as I tweeted this morning, I think the line (currently -175/+145) will probably get very close to even at fight time. My advise is you should bet Weidman now if you want him, and wait to fight night to bet Silva if you want him.

That's it for now -- things are slightly less insane in the Ultimate Poker world these days, so hopefully I'll update more frequently. Hope you guys had better WSOP than I did! (Not exactly setting the bar high, I know.)

It's WSOP time - get after it! (for me)

So the WSOP starts in a week. Holy shit. When did that happen?

I feel like I can't even remember a time where the WSOP would sneak up on me. For the last 10 years, I've had it circled on my calendar and been counting the days. The only reason why today it got on my radar was because I was checking my @ messages on Twitter.

I was tremendously flattered to be picked in a pool by a player I respect as much as Matt, but also a little saddened. First for him, because I expect to be a lousy pick this year. Second for me, because I love the WSOP and for the first time since 2006 I'll be at best a part-time player in it.

"So, about that job thing"

Wow, I can't believe I haven't even posted about the Ultimate Poker launch. Actually, I guess I can believe it. I simply haven't had the time! But since 2005 I've posted every major life event on either this or my previous blog, so it seems bizarre to look at my own blog and see that big gaping hole.

Without a doubt, Ultimate Poker surpassed expectations dramatically. We're doing so much better than we projected, and have had a ton of positive media exposure. We've had our problems too, and lots of people have been justifiably critical of our technology and our support. But there can be no doubts that in 3 weeks we've changed the poker landscape and taken a lot of people by surprise.


As for me personally? I've had some good days, and bad days. Today was a good one. It was a big day for me. Today, I actually left the office at 6pm, something I haven't done since launch. I got a ton of stuff done at work, but what was different was that I also left a bunch at work. My problem I have a really hard time letting go of work that needs to be done. That's what a lot of people have encouraged me to do: to recognize that the work will still be there tomorrow and to pace myself so that I don't burn myself out in 3 months.


So I'm taking small steps towards leading a more healthy and balanced lifestyle, but there's still so much work to be done that it's hard to predict when I'll get unburied. As I wrote a month ago, the best way to put me on tilt these days is to simply ask me when I'll get to fight next. I feel like I'm so far away from that. And that a 13-year poker player would move to Las Vegas for eight weeks and not play a single hand of poker in that time has a most Morisettian irony to it.

In previous years, when the WSOP grind wore me down, I brought myself up by remembering that there were so many amateurs, wannabes, dreamers, has-beens, and never-weres who would die for the opportunity to do exactly what I was doing. It made me feel grateful.

I'm going to try my hardest to be a significant part of the WSOP this year, and as Matt himself says:

(I don't know how "easy" it is, seeing as how I've played 140 of them and made five final tables without winning one, but the point is understood.)

But to those with the opportunity to play a full schedule: get after it. I'm jealous, but I'll be pulling for you.

When a fighter meets a fighter

I met a guy today (personal trainer of Ultimate Poker chairman Tom Breitling) who has a boxing match coming up on Friday Night Fights next week.

When a non-fighter meets a fighter for the first time and the fighter has a fight coming up, the non-fighter will inevitably ask things like "Are you nervous?" "Are you excited?" "Where is it?"

When a fighter meets another fighter for the first time and one finds out the other has a fight coming up, the fighter will only ask one question:

"How's your weight?"

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And, oh yeah, this Ultimate Poker stuff is fucking nuts. If you're a friend, sorry if I haven't returned your e-mail, text message, tweet, IM, Facebook, whatever.

"...and he was never heard from again."

That was the joke one of my exes, Jacqueline, used to make in a mock-ominous voice referring to individuals who had started playing World of Warcraft. The year was 2006 and she'd encountered an inordinate number of regular bloggers whose last blog posts began with, "so I signed up for World of Warcraft today" and correspondingly got sucked into the game so much that they were never heard from again (at least in the blogosphere).

Just as I have never tried crack or meth, I never touched WoW. But for the last month, I do feel like I've disappeared off the face of the earth. Sure, I've gone many long stretches without blogging, but this last month is the first time in my life I've been so immersed in work that I've had almost no interaction with the outside world. Many times over the last few weeks I've wanted to blog about how the working world has been treating me but the only thing I have time to do once I get home is work out (sometimes), cram a prepackaged dinner down my throat, and fall asleep. The only reason that tonight I have time to blog is that at this moment I'm on call, waiting for a co-worker who is on the road (it's 9:30pm) and could need my assistance online at any time.

Sadly, I haven't really been doing much in the way of MMA training. I make it to jiujitsu once or twice a week. I've hired a boxing trainer to give me private lessons twice a week. I've been trying to keep up general fitness and done a decent job of that. That's about it. Every time someone asks "when's your next fight?" I feel a little bit of life-tilt because there's no way I am in fight shape.

To be brutally honest, if I had known beforehand that this is what my life would be like, I might not have accepted the job. But despite the workload, I'm still glad I did. It's actually been fun in its own way. We have had a tremendously harried week here at Ultimate Poker, but the whole team has come together to support one another and get shit done. It's been nice to be a part of that. My stress level at times has been just through the roof and I have had my share of "omfg this is a disaster" freakouts, but there's definite life-ev in being part of a team.

I also like that I get to dabble in a little of everything in my work. I have had my hands in the technology, marketing, customer support, HR, and finance aspect of things. I definitely don't think I would have survived in a job where I was just doing one thing, and I hope the breadth of my work here at Ultimate Poker continues to increase.

But it is a crazy pace and hopefully things do settle down a bit soon, because I definitely don't think I will last long at the current pace. My hope is to set up and establish systems that largely run without me, so that I can get off the daily grind of burning the candle at both ends and instead work towards making a lasting long-term contribution to the organization. Not to mention getting back to fighting and playing poker.

A lot of people have been asking when we're going to start taking bets here at Ultimate Poker. While I'd love to go into detail, all I can say is that things are definitely getting exciting around here. We are continuing that push towards hand #1 of legal online poker and we really think we have what it takes to be the market winner in Nevada and beyond!