By Bond18 on March 4th, 2008 (more posts by author)

Calling them Sundays here seems a little ‘I’m American and America is the center of the world!!!’ish but for the majority of people in the online world the biggest tournament day of the week is known as Sunday. This week there was bonus action, a $1500, 2 million dollar guaranteed tournament on ipoker network with massive overlay and terrible players. There was one catch though, it was at 7am (well two, there were no antes either.) I did not enjoy myself.

Even though I was responsible and got to bed at a reasonable hour the night before (which took it’s fair share of melatonin and discipline) a few hours into my Sunday I started feeling groggy and terrible. Then, I just started playing bad. Over the course of the day I made at least five truly awful mistakes. Just flat out terribly played hands. It didn’t help that I went super deep in the Tilt $150 with 750 entrants then lost a flip with 15 left. When I finished with my day sometime in the mid afternoon (I realized the state I was in and stopped registering for new stuff early) I went over to the couch and fell into what can only be described as a coma. When Bondgirl woke me up three hours later I initially told her to “Go away. Go away, pleeeeease let me sleep”
“But I’m almost at the final table of the 30 rebuys”
“You’ll be fine. I need sleep.”

She was too persistent though. It was only fair, I had started staking her for UB tournaments since she’d had a really bad month on Tilt/Stars and I have the magical ability to print money on UB. In my groggy state I lay on the couch and tried to give her the best advice I could in my impaired state (no, I don’t tell her what to do, if I get something wrong then I have to hear about it for hours.) An hour or so later she’d won the tournament and made my disastrous Sunday suddenly profitable.

Meanwhile I finally got a response from a poker site in regards to my ‘Around the World in 90 Days’ idea. Full Tilt emailed to say they have a sort of blogging page of their own and would likely be interested in the content and wondering what I want in compensation. I emailed back asking more specifically what their looking for out of me. I realized there is one fairly serious catch to working with a poker site while doing this project; considering my writing style and sense of humor it’s possible they may seriously want to edit or censure my work. Seeing as I am not a professional writer who needs the income to survive, I have the privilege of being uncompromising if I choose so. Say for example it is Full Tilt who picks up my work, and at some point in a tournament I have a hand against a pro which they sponsor, for the sake of example let’s say Scott Fischman who I have seen play terrible in the past, and he plays some hand God awful against me and sucks out. Later on in my blog I may wish to describe Scott as “A complete fucking mongoloid whose poker skill is the rough equivalent of a drunken mechanic trying to be a barber and has about as much class as skat porn.” This is almost certainly at a massive conflict of interest with Full Tilt when distributing my work. So how much would it cost for someone who doesn’t need the money to censor a project that’s very important to them? I don’t know, but I can’t think it’s cheap.

That is of course the catch and the beauty of being a professional poker player. We don’t rely on anyone else, no team work is required, and there’s no such thing as business manners, office politics, and unless you’re talking about cheating not little concern about saving face. We do what we want, when we want, how we want. We do so, because there are no consequences and nobody to stop us from doing so.

That’s not to say that people in the working world are better or more mature than we are. Most people who have worked in the business world long enough can regale you with stories about coworkers screwing each other over, bosses taking credit for their work, or office politics reaching a state of 1984esque paranoia. I imagine many out there are highly jealous of our lifestyle, and were it feasible, would be doing the same. Yes yes, I know, those with families and real responsibilities wouldn’t. It’s an inevitably self satisfying lifestyle not made for the family man.

I’ve massively derailed myself here though. The point is, I’m only going to give my content to a site if
A. They give an awesome offer with censorship.
B. They give me an acceptable offer without censorship.

So we’ll see what happens.