Come Visit Us in Costa Rica!!!

Happy Wednesday!!  Notice how I didn't say happy hump day?  That was intentional.  Part of me always hated when I was wished a happy hump day because it implied that we were wishing away the Monday - Friday work week.  I interpreted it as a shared grumbling about the fact that we were all in this miserable place but at least we had each other to work through it together.  I felt the same way any time I heard someone say they were "living the dream", which I heard multiple times every week.  It always sounded sarcastic, and I always thought to myself that if we are not actually striving to for the dream, then why do we keep coming back here every day?  I hoped that for most people "living the dream" is what they are truthfully doing with their lives, but I knew that for me it wasn't. I just hope that the sarcasm from everyone else truly is a joke and not their reality.  I don't know if I was the only one who felt that way; it's very possible that I was just being negative or that my expectations were too high, but either way it was something that I really wanted to get away from.

I take one exception to what I wrote above.  GEICO's hump day camel is hilarious.  

But that's not what I want to write about today.  Today I want to tell you about the specifics of our plans for Costa Rica, and encourage you all to come down for a visit!  I also want to make sure you understand that we are serious about this invitation.  If you are reading this blog, then you are welcome to come down to visit us.  We may not necessarily be able to hang out 24/7 or have enough space to put you up, but the area we are going to be living in has a lot to offer for everyone and we would love to help ensure that you have an awesome vacation as best we can.

When I left off in the last blog we had ideas ready but no logistics firmly in place.  We have a ton of updates since then.  On February 13th, Katie and I are flying from Boston to Liberia Airport (LIR) which is near the North Pacific coast of Costa Rica.  From there it is a 30 minute drive to Playas del Coco, which is a very popular vacation spot for Costa Rican tourists.  It is also a popular spot for American expats to settle down.  Our apartment will be a 5-minute walk from Playas del Coco, and a 15-minute walk from the black sand beaches of Playa Ocotal, which happens to be the location of our upcoming Divemaster internship.

I can't even begin to describe how excited I am for this internship at Rocket Frog Divers to begin.  For a little bit of background, the Divemaster certification is the entry level professional scuba diving certification.  It qualifies you to lead certified divers on guided dives, but it does not qualify you to teach diving courses.  Meeting all of the minimum requirements to become a certified Divemaster can probably be accomplished in 2-3 weeks, but doing the minimum would likely leave you with little experience and practically no ability to find a job at another dive shop.

The internship we are about to begin will give us much more than the bare minimum required to become certified Divemasters.  We are going to partake in a 6-8 week program that will involve six 8-hour work days per week, where we will dive in the mornings and work in the shop in the afternoons.  Over the course of our time there we will accumulate ~140-160 dives (minimum requirement is 60), and learn all aspects of what it takes to run a dive shop.  In their words, "if we know how to do it, we will teach you how to do it."  After the program is complete we will have all of the experience that any dive shop around the world would be looking for when hiring a Divemaster.  On top of that, we were encouraged to hear that there is a big need for traveling Divemasters around the world to fill in during shops' busy seasons, making our dream from my last post all the more attainable.

Beyond the dive specific experience and ability to find work as a Divemaster, this internship has the potential to provide so much more for me.  First, it allows me to enjoy my favorite hobby on a daily basis and potentially make some income from that hobby in the future.  Second, and most importantly, it provides me the opportunity to see how a small business is run from the ground level.  I completed my MBA last year with the hopes of learning how to run a business, and in theory I have all of the tools in my arsenal to do that.  But as any business owner will tell you, the theory and tools are useless if you can't apply them, and that experience is what I'm sorely missing.  I'm hopeful and confident that the skills we learn in this internship will be transferable to virtually any small business, and that even if I don't use diving as a primary source of income in the future, I'll be able to find other ways to apply this experience to all of my future endeavors.  Worst case scenario, I took a few months of my life to go diving every day, and I can't see myself ever regretting that.

So if you've made it through this entire post, I'd like to reiterate my invitation from earlier.  We will be staying in a studio apartment so our space may be limited, but depending on the circumstances we may be able to put you up.  Flights are dirt cheap; I found round trip tickets from LaGuardia (LGA) to Liberia Airport (LIR) for under $300.  We will be there from mid-February until at least mid-May, possibly longer.  If you want to scuba dive we can make that happen; if you want to become a certified diver we can make that happen too.  If you just want to enjoy some beautiful beaches that's not a problem, or if you want to enjoy the endless options for hiking, zip-lining, cloud forest tours, and other ecotourism activities that Costa Rica has to offer, that works too.  We may be working while you are in town but our hours will typically be from 7-3 so our afternoons and evenings should be free.  Either way, we encourage anyone who comes down to bring a friend.  Katie and I both really hope to see some of you guys down there :-)

It's Time for a Pivot.... Part 3

If you haven't already read them, please go back and read Part 1 and Part 2 of this post which you can find here and here respectively.  When we left off, I was taking a critical look at the decisions I've made over the past few months, and staring to look ahead to our upcoming plans.  With that, here's part 3:

I have barely played any poker over the past month because I have been planning and preparing to go with Katie so we can pursue our Divemaster certifications together.  We plan to leave in mid to late February or early March, and hope to spend 3-6 months out of the country.  We would like to start in Costa Rica, where it will be possible for me to get set up playing poker online and possibly build a network with the relatively large community of poker expats that live in the Playas del Coco area.  We have already been in touch with a dive shop regarding Divemaster internships, and we hope to nail down those details in the near future.  Our next step after achieving Divemaster in Costa Rica is completely up in the air, but we are excited to plan that step together while we are there.

I can't even begin to describe how excited I am for this next journey, because it brings me back to the reason I left my job in the first place, allows me to pursue something that I already know I love to do, and allows me to share my experience with someone amazing.  Not to mention it gets me into tropical weather in the winter and let's face it... fuck New England winters.  It also sets us up well for our "long term vision" which may be a complete pipe dream right now but who cares, pipe dreams are the reason we are taking this risk in the first place.

Our "long term vision" is really just a vision for the next 3-5 years.  We both love diving, we both love travel, we both love warm weather, we both love each other, I still want to make a living for myself as a professional poker player, and Katie wants to use her skills to make a difference and help people (she is clearly the more right-minded person between the two of us).  We envision ourselves finishing our stint in Central America with the certifications and experience we need to be hired by dive shops where needed.  We're picturing us finding a place in the Miami area where we are within striking distance of some of the best diving in the country, as well as some of the best poker games in the country, all while living in a vibrant culture that we both love.  We plan to spend about half of our time there, while the rest of our time is spent traveling to dive destinations around the world that have either live or online poker scenes that I can play in.  Katie will focus mainly on earning income through her dive certifications, and I'll supplement my poker income when needed by picking up diving work during busy seasons.

I know this all sounds crazy, and that's because it is, and that's what makes it awesome.  Those same things can be said about pretty much every entrepreneur's dream before they started the next big thing, and that's exactly how we're treating this.  What we end up doing probably won't look anything like what I wrote down in this blog post, and that doesn't matter.  What matters is that we're embarking on this journey together, and that we are risking everything along the way.  I really look forward to keeping you all posted as we get going, and I can't thank you all enough for the support you've shown so far.

And to kick off this whole ordeal, I finally got around to putting together a video of the trip we took to Roatan in September that got the ball rolling:

P.S. Silly me for thinking I could use this part of my lap for my laptop....

It's Time for a Pivot.... Part 2

If you haven't already read it, please go back and read Part 1 of this post which you can find here.  When we left off, I was battling with Katie's decision to to leave her job to pursue her Divemaster certification.  With that, here's part 2:

We started to plan our lives in different directions, and for a while it was really looking like we were going to be going down completely separate paths.  Katie was going off to Central America and I was headed to Vegas to "realize my dream" of becoming a poker pro.  Then everything came crashing down and I finally had my wake-up call.  I remembered that I started this whole journey with the purpose of not being tied down to one option, and I realized that tying myself down to poker was likely going to cost me the person I love most in the world.

While everything was going south, I listened to a podcast where Bill Perkins was being interviewed by Joe Ingram.  Those names probably mean nothing to most of you, but Bill Perkins is someone I've respected the opinion of ever since the first time I heard him talk.  He was asked how he is able to get the most out of life, which is an interesting question to ask of a millionaire who spends like a billionaire.  He told Joe that the formula is simple.

- Step 1: Figure out what is the biggest amount of risk you can possibly handle, and then add a little more.
- Step 2: Whatever risk you take, treat it like your life depends on it, because it does.

At first glance that statement sounds reckless.  When I interpret it, the first thing I think is that that can't be a recipe for success, and that's because it isn't.  In fact, in most cases it is certainly a recipe for failure.  When I think about it a little more, I realize that it doesn't matter if it's a recipe for failure, because the question wasn't about how to achieve success, it was about how to make the most out of life.  Regardless of whether you succeed or fail, this answer guarantees that you will make the most out of every experience, good or bad.  This advice also doesn't just apply to our professional careers either, it applies to every single aspect of our lives including our relationships.

So where wasn't I taking enough risk?  Let's start with my move to poker.  This is going to sound stupid to most of you, but in a weird way I prepared myself too well.  I saved up more than enough to live for over a year on no income, and I built my resume so much that I wouldn't have to worry about finding other work in the meantime.  Even if it came to driving an Uber for cash I was never even remotely worried about failure, and that lead me to never treat poker like my life depended on it.  How about my relationship?  I was so stubborn in convincing myself that I quit my job to become a professional poker player that I was afraid to take the risks I needed to take to commit to us building a future together.

This past month was spent taking a deep, honest, and critical look at the decisions I've made over the past few months, and where I saw myself going over the next year or so.  It was excruciating, and still is at times, but it has helped bring me clarity and an insane amount of excitement for where things are headed next.  So what's the plan?

I hope I haven't lost everyone's interest by now, so if you're still hanging in there, Part 3 of this post will be up tomorrow evening.  Thanks for reading so far!!

P.S. But seriously, isn't she adorable???

It's Time for a Pivot.... Part 1

What. A. Month.  That might just be the understatement of the year.  I haven't posted in over a month and that has been for good reason.  This month has been a mixture of some of the shittiest moments of my life blended with some of the most amazing.  I felt completely lost and hopeless for a good part of it, but at the same time I've been able to renew my passion and excitement for my journey and the next steps I plan to take.  It all came back to remembering what the point of my hiatus was in the first place, and getting back to a place where I could confidently say that I'm on that path.

So let's back up a little bit.  All of my posts until now have mainly been about my pursuit as a professional poker player.  I've told stories from the tables, given a taste of what the lifestyle is like, and given my take on what it takes to get started.  I had committed myself to putting in the work necessary to become a world class poker player.  Before I go into what is happening next, I want to make it clear that I am not wavering from that commitment... yet.

When I first decided to take a year off from my 9 to 5 engineering job, it was never with the intention of becoming a professional poker player.  The reason I left was to take the time I needed to explore my curiosity, discover new passions, enjoy myself fully, figure myself out, and try and make something of myself from scratch.  I always knew poker would be in the picture; it was my main curiosity at the time, and I knew it would be the first thing I tried doing.  I never intended for it to be the only option, but at some point along the way, I fell into the trap of treating it like I had no other options.

So when my girlfriend Katie suggested to me that she wanted to leave her job to go to Central America to pursue her PADI Divemaster / Instructor scuba diving certification, I was not completely supportive at the time.  Part of me worried that the decision was made too hastily, part of me didn't understand what the certifications would ultimately be used for, and a huge part of me was just super jealous that she was going to be spending months doing one of my favorite activities in the world while I was stuck crunching numbers and hanging out in casinos all day.  A lot of my resistance was hypocritical, and all of my resistance came from a place that didn't have our future together in mind.

This blog post turned out to be way longer than I expected it to be, so I'm breaking it into three parts.  I'll release Part 2 tomorrow, and Part 3 on Friday.

P.S.  I got a cat.  Here's a picture of her being unhappy about the fact that I'm writing a blog post right now and not paying attention to her.  Say hello to Bruschi!!

A day in the life...

Hey guys!  I don't have any real updates today so I figured I'd share a couple of stories just to give a sense of what this life is like on a daily basis.  I'm heading to Vegas on Wednesday for a few days and then heading to California for the Patriots @ San Francisco game.  The week after that is Thanksgiving so I likely won't be posting again for a couple of weeks after today.  For those of you who I don't see before then, have a great Thanksgiving!!!

A few weeks ago I was talking to a friend, one who hopefully reads this blog ;-), and I mentioned to him that I had played a 16+ hour session earlier that week.  He asked how it went and I told him that I finished the session down ~$50.  I was a little taken aback by his reaction when he exclaimed "Oh I'm so sorry!!"  While obviously I prefer to win every session that I play, I understand that this is a completely unreasonable expectation, and that all I can realistically do is put myself in the best position to win over the long run.  Much like the stock market, I'm going to have winning days and losing days, but the key to success lies in consistently making smart decisions.  Where the average job should show positive results over a 16 hour span, a job like this one may only show positive results over a 100-200 hour span.

So let me break down exactly why that session was a positive one despite the losing results.  This particular session happened on a day that Foxwoods likes to call "Monday Madness".  Without getting into too much detail, the poker room gives out over $36,000 in bonus money to the players over the course of 12 hours, and it causes a frenzy like no other.  At 1:00 in the afternoon there are close to 100 tables running where there would normally be 20-30 tables running at that time.  I try to never miss Monday Madness, which happens about once a month, because the games are always really good that day.  Unfortunately for me, I went pretty much my entire planned 12 hour session completely card dead, and lost a couple hundred over that time.  

Right around the time I was planning to leave, however, I caught a break in the form of a couple of really great opponents.  We're talking three friends who were all drinking and there to gamble and have a good time.  Needless to say, I never leave a table with this kind of action, and I quickly reloaded my stack to try and extract maximum value.  Well unfortunately for me, I got dealt KK on an early hand and ran it into AA for another $300 hit.  So at this point I was really deep in the hole, but still playing well and still understanding the value of staying at this table as long as these particular opponents were there.  Sure enough, over the course of the next six hours, I was able to win back almost all of my losses from smart play and careful table selection.  I have no way of controlling bad cards, but I do have some control over who my opponents are, and as long as I am constantly aware of this and taking advantage every chance I get, I should continue to be successful in the long run.

In a more extreme example, I encountered a man recently who called himself the "Casino Robin Hood".  He had recently won over $10,000 playing roulette and he was determined to lose a big chunk of it back to the poker players before calling it a night.  I have no idea why he was so excited to do this, but he knew he was losing and he truly didn't care.  Over the course of about 90-minutes he dropped close to $1,500 at my $1/$2 table (which is a very large amount for those stakes) and I was a beneficiary of a large chunk of those funds.  He was literally shoving his entire $100-$300 stacks into the middle before the cards were even dealt.  I don't think I could ever ask for a better opponent.

Anyway, thanks as always for reading, for following along with my journey, and for all of your words of support.  Have an awesome Thanksgiving and I look forward to writing again in a few weeks.  Hopefully I'll have a few stories from the Vegas trip that I'll be able to share ;-)

Grinding Grinding Grinding

So, I know what you're probably thinking.  It's been a long time since my last post... again.  Last time I took a while to write because things weren't going so well and it was difficult to write about what I perceived to be an ongoing failure.  So you're probably thinking that my lack of writing lately means that I've been going through more of the same. I mostly just think this because I've had multiple people approach me to make sure things are going okay.  I didn't understand why they were surprised to hear that things were going great, and then I remembered that the last update they received was a pretty depressing blog post.  Well I'm happy to report that things have started to turn around and I am in a much better place now than I was in a few weeks ago.  I received a ton of words of encouragement from many of you, and I can't thank you all enough for that.

Since I'm an engineer by trade, I figured the best way for me to outline how things are going would be through a labeled plot so we can all analyze some data together.  On the x-axis we've got hours played and on the y we have $ won/lost (I've taken out the actual dollar amounts).  The starting point is sometime in July after I left my job and officially started my professional career.  As you can see, things got off to a really fast start.  I got an unbelievable run of cards, everything went my way, and this was all before I started doing any serious studying.  Then I started to incorporate some studying into my game after about 25 hours of playing time.  If you've read my last blog post, you know how that went.  If you haven't read it, hours 25-100 in the graph below will give you a pretty good idea.  Luckily, things turned around for me after that.

I've put in ~150 hours of playing time since my last post and they have been very profitable.  This past Friday I finally took a shot at playing higher stakes, which is going to be one of the most important things for my progression through this journey.  While I can learn a ton and start to build a bankroll playing $1/$2 blinds, if I ever want to stop living off of my savings, I will need to start crushing $2/$5 games as well.

So, what changed between the last post and this one?  I think the answer lies in my constant persistence and working efficiently rather than trying to do too much at once.  When I first started studying I told myself that I needed to put in 4 hours of studying per day followed by 4 hour of playing per day.  It was brutal.  I dreaded the long study sessions, tried to cram too much information at once, and by the time I got to the tables I had too many new concepts that I tried to implement at the same time.  Then I remembered a little tidbit that I had read in countless poker blogs but failed to implement myself.  The best way to learn poker is to play poker.  So I started to play poker more.  I focused on hitting 30-40 hours / week of playing time, with 5-10 hours of study time.  All of a sudden I had motivation for everything.  I could really focus on learning a new concept with a 1-2 hour study session, and now I get to spend more time playing the game that I actually love playing.  It is amazingly easy to stick with a routine when you look forward to every part of the routine....
- Wake up sometime around noon
- Make food and study for a few hours hours
- Go to the rock gym & climb / workout for a few hours
- Head to Foxwoods and play until 4am
- Head home and sleep
- Rinse & Repeat every Tuesday - Saturday

This is my new grind.  I feel as busy, if not busier than I felt when I was working the 9 to 5 job, but now I'm loving every second of it.  My apologies for leaving everybody hanging after the last post, but this time I'm going to attribute it to just being busy and constantly grinding.  I have a few fun stories to share, but this post is starting to get long so I'll save those for next time and hopefully use that as motivation to post a little more often.

Nobody told me this was going to be hard!!!

Okay, the title of this post is a complete lie.  Everyone told me this lifestyle was going to be extremely difficult.  I read articles from pros who had started with nothing and never had a real job.  I read blogs from college graduates who decided to take their degrees straight to the poker tables rather than the corporate grind.  I read stories of the online college grinders who realized they couldn't focus on school because they were so consumed with online poker and ended up dropping out of college.  Most of them said "don't go pro, it's too difficult," but all of them said it was going to be hard; really really hard.

So here I am now, about a month from my last blog post, starting to understand what all of the articles were talking about.  There's a few reasons it's been such a long time since I last posted here.  First, I took a week vacation to go scuba diving in Honduras.  Then I just got super busy, putting in a ton of study hours and playing hours while forcing myself to keep a healthy eating and working out routine.  But the primary reason I haven't been posting is because there is significantly less motivation to post when things aren't going well, and that's where things have stood for the last two months.

When I say things aren't going well, I don't mean that I'm broke or anything drastic like that, so don't worry, I won't be begging anyone for money anytime soon.  So I guess compared to most of the horror stories I've read, things haven't really been THAT bad.  What I do mean is that I've experienced one of, if not the most significant downswings of my poker life, and there's no telling when it will come to an end.  I've gone weeks on end where I haven't shown a profit in more than one or two sessions, and it has been discouraging to say the least.  The worst part of it all hasn't been the financial burden though, because like I said, financially I'm still in great shape.  The hardest part has been the internal voice, which can be pretty damn mean a lot of the time.  I've left the table telling myself that I'm not cut out for this, that I'm too far behind the curve, unprepared, and that I'm terrible at poker a painful amount of times, and that has made it really difficult to motivate myself to let everyone know how things are going.

But, that would defeat the purpose of this blog if I listened to those thoughts.  The point of this is to share the whole journey; the good and the bad, and use it to hold myself accountable.  So with that, my plan is to charge forward, and ignore my negative thoughts.  Luckily, there are a ton of positives that have come out of this experience.  It has motivated me to put in significantly more study time than I otherwise would have.  It lead me to reach out to a poker professional to ask to be a mentor who has been an immense help.  He has reassured me that learning new concepts will have negative impacts on my bottom line until I learn how to apply them correctly.  It has also been a successful test of my resilience which is something that all poker players need to have in order to withstand the inevitable downswings they will experience.

So all in all, I'm excited to keep going.  If there's one thing that I can proudly say I haven't lost, it's my excitement to go to work every day, and try to do the best I can.  That feeling of loving what I'm doing has never died and is a constant reminder that this was the right move.  So with that, I look forward to checking back in with this blog in a few weeks where I hope to have a more positive report or at least some fun stories to tell.