Something has to change – Part 2
I’m considering leaving the TPT.
In part 1, I talked a great deal about what got me to my spot today. Here, I want to focus on the coming days and months in front of me.
I want to begin by saying that I love the Twitter Poker Tour. When I was going through some of my darkest moments during that hell of 12 month period, the TPT was an escape from reality that I could count on every Thursday to simply enjoy a few hours. It was something that I could look forward to each week. Something that I wanted to participate in, and gained enjoyment from the camaraderie among the group. When I joined with Geoff in assisting to run the league with him and host the TPT Live Show, I was having fun, and didn’t mind the hours of work that went into it each week. I enjoyed it, and it kept me busy and distracted, all things that I needed.
A little over a year has passed and there have been a few success stories that I can share with the TPT. I enjoyed the trip to the WSOP. I’m happy with all of the guests that we landed for our show. And I’m grateful for all of the hours on the virtual felt with people whom I consider my friends. But I look back at all of the hours that I’ve invested, and I can’t help but think about why I did it. I did it as an escape from my reality. I did it because I had hoped that it would evolve into something that generates some kind of money. While it accomplished those things, it’s also really swallowed several hours of my week without pay. And I don’t know that I can really justify doing that much longer. Read more…
Something has to change – Part 1
August 28th, 2009. I quit.
I’d never walked away from a job before. I’ve moved onto different opportunities that were better, and I’ve been laid off a couple of times. But I’ve never actually just left a job. I remember the day well, and I remember it being an incredibly difficult and gut wrenching phone call that I needed to make, but just hadn’t really wanted to. But it needed to happen, and so I called my boss and told him that I just couldn’t live like this anymore. And I quit.
I had been working as the sales manager for a company that was running out of money. They had brought me on board to run their sales team, and I was pretty good at it. Our sales picked up considerably, but our receivables went into the dump as the real estate market in Southern California tanked, and deals began falling through right and left. That left a large portion of the sales we made uncollected, and our debt began to rise. But the company had some solid investors that were comfortable dumping money into the concept given the volume of sales that we’d generated. That was until some of the money was found being skimmed off the top to pay for “business expenses” incurred, like our President’s house payment, and his SUV, and the like. You know…”necessary stuff.” The investors turned off the faucets, and the company went into a nosedive. Read more…
How would you select the Top 200 Poker Players?
Twitter blew up today with a raging debate about the selection process of whom should be included in the new Federated Poker League (I call it that because it doesn’t have an official title as of yet) that is going to be run by Annie Duke and Jeffrey Pollack. The intent is to create an exclusive league that features roughly 200’ish live poker tournament players and pit them together in a series of events held at the Palms Casino in Las Vegas. The big topic of debate has been, how do you select the top 200 poker players to participate in the events?
The basic concept of the new FPL (as I’m calling it for this article), would be to have a measurable set of criteria that is a basic mathematic formula that will determine who will get a “card” to play in the events. Think of the Professional Golf Association. The PGA has certain players that have earned a “tour card” based on their performances in Golf Tournaments around the globe. Then, there are open events that have a qualifying process for the players that aren’t Card Carrying members. Finally, each stop has “Sponsors exemptions” where awards a certain number of spots are given away into their marquee events, that is usually some kind of publicity stunt, or given to some player that hasn’t been able to gain entry because of some extenuating circumstance. This is the goal of the FPL, to have it mirror what is done by the PGA. The idea is to get around 200 pro’s together with around 9 qualifiers, making it a very exclusive event, that’s very pro-centric. Read more…