Doomsday / AND SUDDENLY AMERICA IS GONE

Today finally was the day. Some pessimists will say "I saw that coming long time ago", some optimists will just shake their heads and most players will probably not really believe yet what happend about 8 hours ago. But one thing is pretty damn clear. This day will change everything in case of Onlinepoker in it's current form.

So what happend?

Yesterday, friday the 15th I decided instead to go out and get shitfaced to do some work aka Poker instead. Shortly after I began my first session I became aware of the news that the 3 biggest pokersites who still operate in the USA are charged in case of illegal gambling, money laundry and some other stuff. At first I was like whatever but then after some time every american fellow player disappeared from the tables and in this moment I became aware that this might be really serious and in fact it is. Every US based player is from now on banned from playing Online-Poker at Pokerstars, Fulltilt or Ultimate Bet. And from what I read so far I don't expect to see one of these guys back at one of my tables this year.
I know alot of these people who play exclusively for a living like I do and am in contact with some of them via  Facebook and Skype. I would say for 95% of them poker is their only source of income and it's a pretty solid income or better said was a solid income. Some of them even make more money in a month than other people in 2 years of working. All these guys got fired tonight, everyone of them became unemployed from one second to another without any warning. For many of them there will be only one valid possibilty: Move home as soon as possible to a country where poker is still legal. For most of them it will be Canada - some of them I might see in Malta this summer. But there will be also guys who cannot just move and leave everything behind. Guys who are studying at a university, guys who have a family, guys who have kids, etc.
Good luck from my part to each of them whatever they end up doing.

Alot of players paniced today - me included. Is my money safe? What should I do? Will poker stay profitable? Will they ban it in Europe as well?

From my point of view the money should be still safe because for europeans there isn't much changing. I still have a significant 5 digits amount of $ online and am not really worried. Nevertheless I withdraw alot today, just to be safe if I end up being wrong in that case.

For me personally this development is definitely a good development short-term. Tonight the games were amazing and this will definitely stay like this for a while. Longterm it probably will be getting tougher especially at the midstakes because most of the people playing these stakes making over 100k a year and everyone of them will go abroad for sure because there is no other way.
NL200 will stay about the same I think because many of the US guys who are breakeven there will be now looking for alternatives besides poker. NL100 probably even gets softer because these regs are not necessarily going abroad and start working/playing life/shooting themselves instead.

The bad thing is that traffic will decrease significantly anyways for obvious reasons. When I had 60 tables to pick from before this, I will now end up having only 25-40 to choose from. Especially for the guys who playing mainly for rakeback and achieving a high VIP status this will cause problems when they sometimes just cannot find enough tables to play to make enough points. Since I'm not really planning to repeat Supernova Elite for the 3rd year in a row this isn't the worst problem for me. I'm fine when I only have 16 tables to play instead of 24 - no problemo.

Another good thing for me might be that my vampire days are finally counted. When there are no more americans than I don't have to play american time which means for me to play the peak from 9pm until 6 in the morning. So maybe I be able to get a "solid" schedule somehow where I wake noonish and go to bed at 2am. Who knows!

One thing is clear, american or not, nobody will forget this day soon... god bless Europe - continent of the free :)


cliffs:
- 3 biggest Pokersites who operate in US are charged of illegal gambling and money laundry
- american players are from now on not allowed to participate in realmoney games at Stars, FT and UB
- in europe everything stays the same
- traffic will decrease and therefore it will be harder to achieve high VIP goals at Stars
- games will get better short-term but probably end up getting tougher longterm
- our bankrolls should be safe

Running alot beyond EV in case of flat / non-official Worldrecord insinde!

To make a long story short me and my australian roomie managed to get a termination of our tenancy in less than 14 days and we have to go again on the flat hunt.

I'm pretty sad we have to move out after this short time but I can understand the landlord to a certain degree and given the fact it's not even summer it will get alot worse. His main issue seems to be the constant noise of music and friends coming over but another big issue imo is that he thinks we gonna fuck his place completely (which would've been very unlikely though). Furthermore he's living directly downstairs which isn't working in our favour either - otherwise I'm pretty confident we would not have to move out asap.
Alot of people asked me why so the main-points which led to this unsatisfying development are:

- my after birthday flat warming aka warm-up on 28th if March (2days after moving in); we started around 6pm and ended the thing about 11pm and had maybe 20 guests. Really no biggie. But after this one the landlord basically told us one more of this parties and we can pack our bags. So by this point I was quite sure we will not make it too long in this penthouse if we don't change our way of life (not going to happen soon, BIATCH!)

- Adrian's birthday BBQ last sunday the 10th of april; started around 5pm and finished it about 11pm again but we were definitely fewer people compared to the first warmup. With the rest of the crowd we went to Pace for some drinks...

- The grenades aka the irish girls; after 3 hours action in PV we managed to take 3 very attractive irish chicks home. Unfortuntely they were only attractive while disco light and not so much in the limelight of our penthouse. But from what Adrian told me I assume they looked even alot worse in daylight. At least I was so clever to go to bed rather quickly so that I did not have to see them the next morning.
In the end I think this event was the last straw because at 5:15am I received the email to vacate the property as soon as possible.

It definitely sucks because the place is awesome but what can you do with a place who is made for entertainment when you are not allowed to entertain. Not so much fun. And I'm not the guy who will tell people "we can not do the BBQ at our place even though we have massive grill and terrace because it might be to loud" or tell girls "we cannot go to my place because we might wake up the neighbours..." I mean I pay alot of money for that kind of luxury so I want to be able to use it...

So it's better to go now and search for something a little bit more appropriate for us. Best thing would be a nice Villa not too far away from Paceville but it's basically impossible to find something like that even if you want to spent alot of money because in general the pool areas of these are very nice and everything else is shit. It's like your grandparents did the interior design which blows my mind all the time because when the landlords would invest a little bit in modern furniture they would get alot better price. So in the end I see us moving the another penthouse and keeping my fingers crossed that we find a decent one where the landlord isn't living directly downstairs and where you don't hear every noise...

So today I received the final email from my flat in London. Haven't anything better to post atm so I share it. Second part might be funny though.

cliffs:

- you even get ripped off after leaving London - solution: Never move there in the first place!

HOLLA!

> Dear Tim,
> 
>  
> 
> Please see below your landlord deductions from the deposit;
> 
>  
> 
> Door handle to upstairs room ripped off and door damaged - cost to fix
> £50
> 
> Replacement for broken bulbs - £40
> 
> Shoe marks on wall near base of stairs required re-paint - £20
> 
> Dishwasher not working due to build up of food/lack of cleaning breaking a
> pipe - £84
> 
> Fixing office desk upstairs - £50
> 
> Fixing the floor - £100
> 
> Dry cleaning of curtains due to smoking - £50
> 
>  
> 
> Total - £394
> 
>  
> 
> Please can you confirm that these deductions can be released to your
> landlord.
> 
>  
> 
> There is also outstanding rent of £106, £118.80 for the check out
> report, and £330 for the professional clean, meaning the total deductions will
> be £948.80.
> 
>  
> 
> The balance of the deposit will be returned to you via the bank details
> you have given.
> 
>  
> 
> Kind regards,




tha reply:




Yes, that's pretty much the rip-off I expected to see...

Because I know I can't do anything about it I can confirm that you can deduct this from our deposit...

The door-handle fell apart on the day I moved in.

Dishwasher was working until the moment I moved out - pretty strange it is not working now anymore - do you see why?...

Fixing the office desk takes 5 minutes. 5minutes = 50GBP??? So one hour of work is 600GBP?? That's not even what me or my roomies making in one hour... (ok, maybe in a good hour...)

I have no clue why there is rent outstanding? We paid everthing upfront... EVERY, wait for it THING!

The professinal cleaning wasn't needed because our own cleaner took 10 hours for cleaning the place. So I paid twice. I confirmed before that it is fine if we do so. So please next time tell me "we don't care we want 330GBP for cleaning anyways so don't bother to take care of the cleaning yourself" thanks.


From beginng of january the shower upstairs was leaking causing a complete powercut downstairs while showering longer than 5 minutes. I claimed that several times and told the landlord but he did nothing about it (he probably takes the money from the deposit to fix that - well played)...


Thank god I'm out of London now and don't have to go back there soon.

In general I really would claim some of that, excuse my words, bullshit which is listed in that email, but my time is far to important and to valuable to bother about these stuff and in the end I lose anyways because I cannot do anything from here.

Only question I ask myself is how some people can sleep at night but if I explicate that thought it might go a little bit offtopic...


Please don't take this stuff personal because you can probably do nothing about it but I'm quite sure you read similiar mails quite alot.


sunny greetings from Malta where I'm living in a penthouse with a nice pool and seaview, paying less per month and probably getting most of my deposit back, because the stuff in this place is high quality and not broken from the beginning...


Tim Stone