Hello!

A little over 9 months ago, I started a journal here on RIO titled "Rebounding from failure to crush life and MTTs". When I started that journal, I was in a rough place. I had just come off a 15 month shot at playing poker professionally. I had quit a good job to play MTTs full time, and failed miserably. I won't go into too much detail here (if interested, you can follow the link and view my last journal). Basically, I was around 15k in debt to my backers and was nearly completely broke IRL. I had to get another job and was just starting out with that at the time.

Shortly after starting that Journal, I binked a 12k WSOP main event package off-stake and took cash instead of the seat to pay off my makeup and get out of my backing arrangement. Since then I have had some pretty good success in online MTTs, but had a lot of issues which caused me to spew some of the winnings off and be in general pretty unhappy with the pace of my Poker success and improvement.

Self-Sabotage

I have many terrible habits and not so many good ones, and I think this is really holding me back from my potential. I hope that a key theme in this journal is me working on and improving those bad habits. I'm addicted to Nicotine gum (been chewing it for over 5 years), which causes random swings in mood and hunger level. Which is -EV both in life and poker. Last year I quit on two different occasions for over a month and then started doing it again. I would like someday to quit for good. I also smoke too much pot. I live in Maine where marijuana is now legal, my whole family smokes, and I live above a medical marijuana dispensary. Weed is all around me and always has been, and I indulge too often. Don't get me wrong- I really enjoy getting high and don't think I will ever quit entirely. However, I would like to relegate use to social events and relaxation time. I would like to stop smoking while studying, grinding, and in general doing anything that requires critical thinking. I also stress eat late at night while playing A LOT. I often end up fasting all day the following day after a binge and not eating until dinner time (7 PM or later) with the help of a bulletproof coffee in the morning. This seems sub optimal and I often wake up with heartburn because that's what happens when you eat a pint of ice cream and 12 jalapeno's and some chips with salsa and an english muffin with peanut butter and a handful of cereal and a banana at 2 AM. In the past I have also not exercised much and have not lived life mindfully. This has gotten better and I am exercising more and meditating somewhat regularly, but there's still room for plenty of improvement here as well.

Fast-forward

Today, as I start this new journal- I am coming upon another phase-shift in my life. I will be quitting my current job in 3 weeks. Starting in May, I will be attending Hack Reactor full time to become a software engineer! This is something I have been thinking about for over a year. I was introduced to the idea of coding boot camps through old-school HU boss Haseeb "DogIsHead" Qureshi. I started reading his blog just before he went to a coding bootcamp, after finding it through his poker book. This was around the time I was going broke in poker. At that time I actually taught myself some front end web development for a few weeks and made around 1k freelancing before I was too broke and had to find a consistent income. I loved working with clients and have always loved coding, so I'm finally going for it as a career. I have barely enough money to survive through the 3 months of class and 1-3 months of job search afterwards, but I'm used to going broke at this point and am beyond certain that this is the right path for me. I'm very excited and can't wait to get started.

About this journal

I hope to use this journal to get some of my thoughts out onto paper throughout the week in an attempt to prevent monkey-mind from running my life so much. I will also write here about my experiences attending an elite coding boot camp, and, of course, about poker. I have been transitioning into Cash more lately and have been really enjoying the Zone games on Ignition. I plan to continue playing those a lot as well as some MTT volume. I'll also post random stuff in here, like trip reports, maybe the occasional HH, etc. I plan to keep it pretty casual and am not sure where it will go.

Grind Setup

Since I'll be basically living at my computer for the next 4+ months, I've recently invested some time & buy-ins into improving my setup. No Sauce-Esque treadmill YET, but I thought it would be fun to show it off a bit here:

In the picture you can see my new Autonomous sitting/standing motorized desk. I also picked up an ErgoStool from them to replace the withered chair in the photo. The Mac Mini is for coding. Not in the photo is my newly build desktop PC which I made with two goals in mind: keeping it cheap and running Pio Sims quickly. I'm an idiot and decided I could build a PC on my own basically without reading any instructions first, so it took me weeks and a few parts replacements to get it up and running. Pro tip: Spend a good amount of time Googling solid state drives before buying one :). Also, connect CPU power before trying to turn on a new PC.

I hope to have some fun posting in here and would love if any of my posts end up helping someone else! Please feel free to PM me or post here if interested in coding/software engineering and how to prep for a boot camp interview!